The Secret World of Polly Flint, by Helen Cresswell, for Timeslip Tuesday

Cutting it close to the wire this week, but I managed to get a timeslip story read-The Secret World of Polly Flint, by Helen Cresswell (middle grade, 1982, Puffin).  It's one that's been on my tbr heap for ages, too, which is Progress!

Polly is an imaginative only child of a coal miner father who's sympathetic to her sense of magic in the world (he is a great father, playing rhyming games with her, and with a keen awareness of the importance of a mind that can fly free).  Her mother is also a good mother, but much more practical.  They are happy...till the accident down in the mines that leaves her dad unable to walk.  The family must move to their aunt's house when he gets out of the hospital...and her aunt, stiff and set in her ways, is not fun to live with.

But her house is near a large park land with a beautiful lake.  And Polly learns that there was once an older village, that slipped down and away through the net of time and was lost.  As she explores the park and the margins of the lake, Polly hears children she cannot see, and on Sundays she can here the sound of the church bells rising up from the lost village below.

Finally, she meets some of the lost villagers ("time gypsies" as they call themselves)--a raggedy old woman, a man, a baby, and a boy about her own age (though centuries older, of course).  The villagers out of time can visit, unseen to everyone one but Polly, and return through a tunnel across the lake to their own place.  But something goes wrong, and the little group gets stuck in real world time.  Polly has to help figure out how to getting home...without coming unstuck in time herself.

The book started just lovely, with its sensitive heroine attuned to wonder, and the haunting story of the lost village.  (I also liked the quotidian moving to unsympathetic aunt's house too).  But somehow as things progressed it lost its touch of numinous magic (possibly because "time gypsies" made me feel uncomfortable, possibly because there was a whole group of them and the old woman was unpleasant).  Still, it was enjoyable reading all in all even if it's not a new favorite timeslip story.