I am trying to remember a children's book I got from the library about 20 years ago.?

It is about a young boy, a toddler, and no one in the family can understand what he is saying. The book is beautifully illustrated, there is a dog in it. At the end I think the cook understands the boy, and he has been saying "I love you."I am trying to remember a children's book I got from the library about 20 years ago.?
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Olive Wellwood is a famous writer, interviewed with her children gathered at her knee. For each of them she writes a separate private book, bound in different colours and placed on a shelf. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world 鈥?but their lives, and those of their rich cousins, children of a city stockbroker, and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries their own secrets.

Into their world comes a young stranger, a working-class boy from the potteries, drawn by the beauty of the Museum鈥檚 treasures. And in midsummer a German puppeteer arrives, bringing dark dramas. The world seems full of promise but the calm is already rocked by political differences, by Fabian arguments about class and free love , by the idealism of anarchists from Russia and Germany. The sons rebel against their parents鈥?plans; the girls dream of independent futures, becoming doctors or fighting for the vote.

This vivid, rich and moving saga is played out against the great, rippling tides of the day, taking us from the Kent marshes to Paris and Munich and the trenches of the Somme. Born at the end of the Victorian era, growing up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, a whole generation grew up unaware of the darkness ahead. In their innocence, they were betrayed unintentionally by the adults who loved them. In a profound sense, this novel is indeed the children鈥檚 book.I am trying to remember a children's book I got from the library about 20 years ago.?
This is a long shot as I only have very vague memories of this book - I think it was a second hand book when I had it and could have been written any time before 1985.

The main character is called Toby.

The illustrations are what stick in my mind - they were line drawings - not cartoons. From memory the drawings are darkly coloured - possibly navy blue. Toby goes out at night in his stripy pyjamas (the pyjamas I remember bizarrely!)- I think there was magic involved in getting him out at night but I can't remember the details.

I think there are toys involved that somehow come alive - I definitely remember a teddy bear but this could just be something he took with him

Sorry this is very vague - I think the title may have had the words Toby and/or midnight but I can't be sure - it was over 20 years ago! Hope someone can help - I've been trying to track it down for years!!!
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Jan 16, 2008, 8:36pm (topo)Message 2: Harry_Vincent
Some of the details--pyjamas, out at night, the similarity of the names Toby/Tom, magic--match Tom's Midnight Garden which has a time slip element. No toys coming alive though. In the book, Tom is sent to stay with some relatives for the summer. He leaves the house at midnight and discovers that he's gone back in time to a period when the house had a beautiful garden. Here he meets and becomes friends with a young girl.
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Jan 17, 2008, 4:35pm (topo)Message 3: monkeymagic11
Thanks for posting! It's not that one unfortunately but I agree it is very similar. I've still got a copy of Tom's Midnight Garden - fab children's story.

It's mainly the illustrations I remember....I don't think it was a well known book but I really can't remember. Ah well..
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Jan 17, 2008, 5:49pm (topo)Message 4: Harry_Vincent
I'll try again. This title sounds promising: Toby and the Nighttime by Paul Horgan. I can't find a plot description but did find some pictures of two different covers:

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/FrameBas鈥?/a>

http://cgi.ebay.com/1963-Toby-and-the-Ni鈥?/a>
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Jan 20, 2008, 7:11am (topo)Message 5: monkeymagic11
Yes! That's it! I can't believe you've found it!

I've been looking for this book since I had my daughter 2 years ago so that I could get a copy and read it to her

Thank you so much - you've made my day.I am trying to remember a children's book I got from the library about 20 years ago.?
The revered writers who failed to even make the longlist, let alone the shortlist, of this year's Booker prize need not weep into their Moleskine notebooks or rend their unruly hair. They might have laboured for months, or even years, to produce what James Naughtie, who chaired this year's prize, describes as "a bad book" 鈥?but at least they are in good company.

Sporadic displays of bad writing are the mark of genius. Just look at Shakespeare. The author of the most sublime lines in the English language also wrote Titus Andronicus, a sort of Elizabethan predecessor to the video nasty, which features rape, mutilation and a mother inadvertently eating her children in a pie. It concludes with possibly his dodgiest couplet: "鈥o order well the state/That like events may ne'er it ruinate".

Titus is such a gore-fest that some critics theorise that Shakespeare wrote it simply as a money-spinner; others that he didn't write it at all. But it is nevertheless a recognised part of the oeuvre; the "Bloodgate" of the Bard's reputation. And if Shakespeare can err, it is little wonder that this year's crop of 132 Booker contenders included, as the irrepressibly blunt Mr Naughtie put it, "some awful books". A host of big names 鈥?including Margaret Atwood, Thomas Keneally, Penelope Lively, John Banville, Anita Brookner and Aravind Adiga, last year's winner 鈥?didn't even make it on to the longlist, with Naughtie admonishing writers not to expect a nomination "just because you're a former winner of the prize".

Even winning the Booker of Bookers doesn't prevent a few creative missteps. Since Salman Rushdie's epic novel Midnight's Children was published in 1981, it has been bathed in a Jacuzzi of critical acclaim, including that prize of prizes in 1993. But The Ground Beneath her Feet, written almost two decades later, was noted 鈥?according to the New York Times 鈥?for its "long-winded digressions, tiresome soliloquising about love and death and art, and cliched descriptions of the rock-and-roll business worthy of Jackie Collins".

Some writers encounter this sort of scorn even before getting published. John Carey's new biography of William Golding reminds us that a reader at Faber consigned the manuscript that would become The Lord of the Flies to the slush pile, scrawling on the front that it was an "absurd %26amp; uninteresting fantasy". It took extensive and astute editing to turn the lumbering first draft into the dark, addictive triumph that has sold 20 million copies in the UK alone and enjoys a regular slot on the school syllabus. But its author still had his doubts: re-reading it 20 years after publication, Golding decided that the book was "boring and crude".

That is the nature of literary genius: it is difficult, unpredictable and obstreperous, something that cannot be channelled year after year into page-turners or prize-winners. If you want consistency, look to lesser writers 鈥?the Joanna Trollopes of this world, who will always be good, wise, warm and witty, but never give you that sense of breathlessness and dislocation from the everyday that a masterpiece delivers.