Wildlord

Wildlord by Philip Womack

Book of the Week: 2 January 2022

Cover by Karen Vaughan

Tom is not looking forward to spending a lonely summer holiday at his private school. His distant guardian is busy in Hong Kong and he will be one of only a few pupils drifting around the buildings and grounds of Downshire College. As he is reflecting on the upcoming eight weeks, following a raucous evening celebrating the end of Year 12,  a strange boy hands him a letter from an uncle he didn’t know he had, inviting him to spend the summer at Mundham Farm in Suffolk. After being refused permission to leave school by his tutor, he is walking in the grounds one evening when a tall, thin man with a tattooed face tells him to stay where he is and ‘not wake the past’. The man delivers a slash to Tom’s arm with a blade and disappears. Perversely, this makes Tom determined to discover what is going on, so he skips school and catches the train to Suffolk where he is met at the station by a silent, silver-eyed boy who transports him to Mundham Farm in a horse and cart.

At first, Tom is enthralled by the ancient farmhouse enclosed within a moat and is welcomed warmly by his charismatic Uncle Jack and the thin, pale Zita who speaks like a ‘bright young thing’ from the 1920s. Gradually, however, he realises that all is not what it seems and that an atmosphere of unease and distrust prevails. Why does his uncle tell him to watch Zita and the silver-eyed Kit? Who are ‘The Folk’ who must be kept out at all cost? Why is he assailed by incapacitating pain when he tries to catch a bus to a nearby town?

Philip Womack knows how to create a deeply magical story with an undercurrent of dread. The vividly evoked Mundham farmhouse reminded me of Thackers in Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time and the ancient magic would have not been out of place in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising. As in The Call by Peadar O’Guilin, this is a faerie world of menace and danger rather than of cosy wonder.