Sheila McCullagh: The Stepping Stones

The Stepping Stones by Sheila McCullagh was part of the One, Two, Three and Away series, which was a set of illustrated story books that were very popular in British schools as a reading aid from the 1960s to the 1980s. I wanted to post about this particular book as it was part of a smaller series that centred on the trials and tribulations of Roger Red Hat and his other coloured-hat wearing friends in their Edwardian rural English village; the Village with Three Corners.

The stories were deliciously illustrated by Ferelith Eccles Williams. Each page was adorned with ripe summery hues and pastoral washes that could have easily been forged in a H.E Bates novel. The characters were simple and were engineered to gently deliver moral messages of the consequences of good and bad conduct.  Occasionally the odd black and white would pop up – presumably to save cash on printing for tight School budgets during the grubby Tory years of the 1980s.

I instantly recalled this perplexing tale when I bought it.  The story loosely follows a miscreant Roger Red Hat who thinks it’s all fine and well to enter the old man’s house in the woods. He eats  his nice bit of Dundee cake whilst he’s out and of course the old man comes back and (rightly) feels a bit narked by this. He chases Roger but absently mindedly forgets the village rule not to stand on the black stepping stone in the river. Rather unjustly, the old man disappears without explanation. I still experience a mixture of confusion, shock and dismay for the old fellow even now.

I feel blessed that these sunny little books helped me to read when I was a kid and even more so that I can still rejoice in their illustrative merits today. The books are highly collectable and fairly expensive these days – so anyone who’s got a primary teacher Mum may do well to ask about any that might be being thrown out or given away at school. Curiously, some animations for the series were produced in the 1990s (somewhere on Youtube), which are actually a little unnecessary. All the more reason to dig out the books then.