This is the last part of the Smiler trilogy of books for children. The setting is near Barnstaple in North Devon, close to where Victor Canning was living at the time. The village of Eggesford exists, but Bullaybrook Farm and Highford House are fictional, though possibly based on real places. The same area features in another of his books of this period, The Mask of Memory.
Samuel Miles, known as "Smiler", aged 15, has been falsely convicted of stealing an old lady's handbag, and is on the run from an approved school (young offenders' prison). He is determined to stay free until his father, a ship's cook, returns from his current voyage and can help to clear him of the theft charge, but his father has missed his ship in South America and nobody knows where he is. Smiler hitches a ride with Jimmy Jago, son of "The Duchess", a former fairground fortune-teller who now runs a farm on which circus animals are housed in winter.
Smiler is allowed to stay at the farm, and takes care of the animals. The Duchess encourages him to study so that he can eventually train as a vet, and sends him to Mr. Samkin, a retired schoolmaster who also tutors a local girl called Sandra Parsons who flirts with Smiler. Sandra's jealous boyfriend Trevor Green releases some of the animals from their cages, hoping to get Smiler into trouble. As a result a peregrine falcon called Fria escapes and perches in a recess in a barn. It cannot be recaptured, but it needs help to get food since it has no hunting skills.
There is a derelict manor house nearby called Highford House where the peregrine eventually nests. Smiler finds her there and often goes to see her. Unknown to him, the cellar at the house is being prepared by Jimmy Jago as a refuge for his half-brother, Maxie Martin, whose escape from Dartmoor Prison he is planning.
Laura Mackay, the Scots girl that Smiler fell for in the previous book, visits and persuades Smiler to give himself up to the police. The falcon finds a mate and hatches eggs. Maxie Martin escapes and hides in Highford House. Trevor Green, still jealous, tries to shoot the falcons. There is a confrontation in which Smiler falls and is injured. Maxie Martin brings help, and then goes on the run again. Meanwhile Johnny Pickering, the boy for whose crime Smiler was wrongly convicted, has been prodded to confess by menacing letters sent by Jimmy Jago, so Smiler will not have to return to the approved school.
The names in this book have interesting echoes of earlier books. Jago is the surname of one of the families in The Wooden Angel, possibly the family which is closest to Canning's own. The escaped convict Maxie Martin echoes the master criminal Maxy Martingale who features in the Minerva Club stories, especially The Trojan Crate.
This book is a welcome return to the detailed and practical focus on wildlife that was such a feature of The Runaways. As in the first book, one of the main plot strands concerns the return to the wild of a caged creature, in this case the falcon, and the re-learning of survival skills involved. One learns a great deal about falcons from the book, and it ends with one of Victor Canning's ecological blasts:
"Death had come to [the tiercel], as it does to so many of his kind, through the slow poisons of man, spread over and leached out of the land, moving along the long chain of change in the bodies of insects, vermin, and birds, finally to reach and destroy the fierce heart and proud strength of the prince of birds." (Chapter 12)
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Index of characters, locations and themes in the Smiler books Now published as "A Smiler Companion" and available for purchase from Lulu.com at £8.96 as a book or £2.50 as a download. |