Time at the Top was excellent when I was small too, though not quite as excellent.  A budding actress called Susan does a good deed for an old lady, and she gets rewarded with three trips backward in time, by going up the elevator in her building.  When she goes back in time, she meets Victoria and Robert, whose widowed mother is on the verge of giving in to the advances of an ungentlemanly bloke called Sweeney.  There is treasure, and a bad-tempered cat.

If you had asked me, I would have said that Travel Far, Pay No Fare was ten thousand bazillion times better than Time at the Top.  But actually, Time at the Top still delights me just as much, whereas Travel Far, Pay No Fare doesn’t have quite the punch that it used to have.  It’s sad.  When I was eight, Travel Far, Pay No Fare was the most magical book I could ever have imagined.  I would check it out from my school library and read it over and over and over.

This growing up business.  It’s tricky.

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