Happy Tuesday everyone and I hope that those of you who had a bank holiday yesterday had an excellent day. This week’s pick is a nostalgic trip down memory lane for me, because I read several of the Wombles books when I was at primary school, so when I saw this in the same edition as the school library had at a book sale a few months ago, I snapped it up.
This is the third book in the series of children’s books about the Wombles, furry animals who live in burrows and clean up the mess that humans leave behind them. In The Wombles at Work, they are living in Hyde Park after being forced to move from Wimbledon Common. The overarching framing device for the book is that the Wombles are competing to come up with the best ways to fight pollution. Within that, the different strands of the plot sees the different Wombles trying to solve the various problems that they come across. So for example Tomsk saves a swan from choking to death on a net, a music festival takes place in the park and leaves lots of rubbish behind it, Madame Cholet is struggling with restrictions on how long she can have her stove on every day because the cooking can be smelt above ground and there are mysterious notes being left for the burrow.
When I bough this I wasn’t sure if this was one of the ones that I had already read or not, but in reading it, I realised that I hadn’t and that was also a delightful treat. I went off and had a look at the book summaries and I have definitely read the previous book where the Wombles had to move form Hyde Park, and fifth book the Wombles around the World where some of the burrow are sent around the world to find out more about other countries and other Wombles. I think I’ve read the book where they move back to Wimbledon common, but I’m not 100% sure. And I have the audiobook of the first one too because it’s read by Bernard Cribbins, which I listened to years ago and now want to listen to again! It’s easy to think that the problem of pollution and people wanting to care for the environment is a new thing, but when you go back and read the Wombles books – written in about eight years from the late 1960s through the 1970s, you realise that things really haven’t changed a lot. All of which means I think it would still be a great story to read as a middle grader today, even if the references to the Old Queen are more likely to be read as references to Elizabeth II rather than Victoria!
These were out of print for years and years which may explain that – my school library was the only place I ever remember seeing these and I’ve never come across them anywhere else before, and I suspect they may still be hard to find in the shops but they are at least on Kindle now.
Happy Reading!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 