RogerBW's Blog

Brother Dusty-Feet, Rosemary Sutcliff 04 September 2025

1952 historical fiction for young people. Hugh Copplestone is orphaned and living with his aunt and uncle; one of his few joys is his dog Argos. When his nasty aunt plans to have the dog killed, he sees no option but to get on the road, heading for Oxford, where his father studied as a servant to a richer boy.

To me the weakest part of this is the beginning, and specifically Aunt Alison: she is simply nasty, and while I accept that some people just are nasty (especially from a child's viewpoint), I find her portrayal simplistic compared with… well, everyone else in the book. Her job in the story is to get Hugh on the road, and she does it, but it's rare in my experience of Sutcliff to see someone so blatantly there only in service of plot.

Also, like The Armourer's House from the previous year, this is clearly a book for children written the style of books for children that prevailed at the time, with occasional explanatory or didactic asides from the narrator. (And, less obviously, the majority of the names are ones that would have been familiar to an English child of the 1950s, though they're appropriate to the period too.) I didn't find them as distracting as in that book, though, perhaps because we're not getting even a hint of Great Events here: Hugh falls in with a band of travelling players, and the majority of the book is spent exploring their life by showing it.

It's not just the setting up at inns, bringing in an audience, putting on the play and passing the hat; it's the people they meet on the road, and the awkwardnesses of local constables and such in an era when most people still simply do not travel, and the rootless stranger is regarded with grave suspicion because they're a stranger more than because they're rootless.

It's a fine picaresque, trudging across the landscape of southern England; not much action, perhaps, but a great deal of loving description. And while this may be an era of rationality, there's still room for something outside the normal way of things, especially on a road as darkness falls.

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