Little Plum

"I don't think there can be any children," said Belinda as she and her cousin Nona watched the builders and decorators making The House Next Door new again. Marble fireplaces, new floors, spotless paintwork and wallpapers, new paved walks, turf, and flower beds made it the grandest house the children had ever seen. "Just imagine if you left finger marks on that white paint—suppose a ball went into those shrubs. I don't think there can be any children."

But there was a child, Gem Tiffany Jones, just Nona's age—and what is more, she had a Japanese doll like Nona's beautiful Miss Happiness and Miss Flower but smaller and cosier. The three girls should have played happily together, with Nona's wonderful Japanese dolls' house; but they just didn't. Belinda was too rough, said Gem's aunt. Gem was too stuck-up, retorted Belinda. And soon their resentment turned into taunts and taunts into a real feud, with Gem's neglect of her Little Plum as the chief bone of contention.

But in time it was the tiny doll herself who helped resolve the conflict and brought the children into happy friendship in the most satisfying part of this thoroughly captivating story.

—from the dust jacket


 

'If I had a pony like that," said Belinda, 'I would be happy for ever.

Even if you had to be Gem?" said Mother, and when Nona and Belinda thought about it, they could see that the little girl in the House Next Door did lead a queer sort of life, always dressed up, surrounded with expensive toys, never playing with other children in the park or going out of the house by herself.

More and more Gem seemed like a girl in a book, ... and not a very truthful book," said Nona, because nowadays not even princes and princesses were treated like this. 'Princesses have to be friendly and smile and wave,' said Belinda. Gem never smiled, she did not seem to want to know her neighbours.

Belinda of course was longing to make friends. She wasn't going to keep quiet and wait to be noticed. Even if the would-be friendship threatened to turn into a feud, she was going to make Gem take notice of her, and the way she proposed to do it was through Nona's two beautifully behaved Japanese dolls, Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, and Little Plum, the round cosy little doll who sat on Gem's own window-sill.

Rumer Godden understands dolls almost as well as she understands children. Her earlier book about Nona and her Japanese dolls, Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, is also published in Young Puffins, as are The Story of Holly and Fey, The Dolls House and Candy Floss & Impunity Jane.

Rumer Godden was born in 1907 in Sussex and spent the early years of her childhood in India. When she was twelve, she and her three sisters were sent to school in England, but later she returned to India - and has been backward and forward ever since, homesick for one or the other. She has established a reputation as one of the leading writers for children.

—from the book