For several years, my post-college roommate and I were obsessed with the Brambly Hedge books and my shelves hold quite a few of them.

In Brambly Hedge, the animals live in trees and holes in the wood, as you would expect, but they also wear clothes and their homes resemble Edwardian cottages tucked away behind the bark or under the leaves. Often told through the eyes of a mouse-pup, they involve cozy little adventures of exploration that make these perfect bedtime stories. Everyone’s safe, everyone’s happy, there’s often a little surprise at the end. Filled with nostalgia for a time when we weren’t bombarded with TV and the internet and talking heads yapping at each other and everyone being an expert, they’re simple and quiet and sweet.

In this book, young Wilfred Apple and Primrose Woodmouse have been selected to recite a poem in costume at the midwinter celebrations at the Old Oak Palace. The Palace is huge, as one can see in the cutaway map that illustrates one page, but Wilfred and Primrose can’t find a quiet place to rehearse and are constantly interrupted by adults who need the pups to move so they can put up decorations or carrying in food for that night’s celebration. Primrose’s mother, busily baking biscuits¹, suggests that they’ll be out of the way in the old attics, so they dutifully make their way up there.

The attics are quiet but crowded and full of distracting items. Poking about, Primrose discovers a small key that has slid down the side of a drawer, and then Wilfred finds a locked door tucked behind a long green curtain.² They unlock the door, proceed down a dark, paneled hall and find themselves in an abandoned throne room, rich decorations slightly tarnished and carpets worn and dusty. Tucked away in a corner of the room, another door leads to an old nursery, full of well-loved toys from another era and antique clothes just their size. They pick some out to use as costumes and practice over and over, staying so long that they barely have time to get cleaned up and join the opening of the festivities.

Spoiler Alert: their poem is so successfully delivered that they are asked to repeat it again and again, and the book ends with them falling asleep by firelight and dreaming of spring.

The story is simple and the characters don’t have much more weight than the story, but the point of the Brambly Hedge books is the illustrations. Richly-detailed, in faded jewel tones, you can stare at each picture for minutes and still not take it all in. My favorites are the cutaways showing every room, hallway, and stair in the entire palace, which was apparently designed by a woodmouse architect because the space planning appears to have developed organically over the years. Otherwise, why would the hidden throne room open off the attics and a nursery off the throne room and is that a swimming pool up there on the left? Primrose’s family really does live like royalty! These illustrations would make wonderful jigsaw puzzles.³

These books were very popular when they first came out in the 1980s, I think because they are safe little books, full of nostalgia and whimsey, and because the illustrations are so much fun. They take place in an unspecified past, where the characters are in touch with the seasons and live quiet lives without distraction from the outside world. There are no foxes hunting these mice, no cats, no rat-bait, no threats. Nothing scary happens, aside from – perhaps if I am remembering correctly – a mouse-pup in one of the stories who gets lost for a few pages, and meets an adult who helps them find their way back and then becomes a new friend for the whole family⁴.

I’m going to quote the back of the dustjacket because I think it perfectly captures the magic that these books promise: “Brambly Hedge is on the other side of the stream, across the field. If you can find it, and if you look very hard amongst the tangled roots and stems, you may even see a wisp of smoke from a small chimney, or through an open door, a steep flights of stairs deep within the trunk of a tree.”

Brambly Hedge is like the Hundred Acre wood or Neverland, just out of reach, just something you catch out of the corner of your eye, a place of enchantment, a place invisible to adult eyes which are busy with work and computer screens and boring news stories about strangers being rude to each other, but which maybe a child can see, if they are very still – and yet can never reach, for although still a small child, they are too large to fit into the dollhouse-sized mouse palaces tucked away inside trees, and Brambly Hedge is just out of reach beyond a stream or a field, tucked away under tightly-woven ground cover.

But it’s a nice place to spend a rainy afternoon or to poke about by nightlight, while drifting off to sleep…

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1. Wait! Lady Woodmouse is baking biscuits? ↩︎
2. Echoes of The Secret Garden, where the main character is always finding hidden hallways and rooms that have been abandoned and locked away. ↩︎
3. And probably did. ↩︎
4. It’s been a while so maybe I have this wrong. It’s not that I am too lazy to get up and go in the other room to look; it’s that I know if I do, I’ll make myself a cup of tea and crawl under a fuzzy blanket and curl up with these books and fall asleep and then wake up all of a sudden and find that I’m late to brunch. ↩︎