At the start of The Wind on the Moon, Dinah and Dorinda are watching their father, Major Palfrey, pack his trunk: he’s getting ready to go to war. He tells them to be good while he’s gone, but no one’s very sure the girls will be able to: Major Palfrey says the ring of mist around the moon outside the window is a dangerous sign:
‘There is a wind on the moon,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the look of it at all. When there is wind on the moon, you must be very careful how you behave. Because if it is an ill wind, and you behave badly, it will blow straight into your heart, and then you will behave badly for a long time to come.’ (7)
Dinah and Dorinda don’t necessarily mean to misbehave, but they don’t get off to a very good start: that very night, in the course of “helping” their father pack, they wrinkle his uniforms and dirty his shirts; they also give both their parents a fright by tying bells to the apple tree outside, thinking the music they make will be pleasing. Some of their misbehavior, though, is definitely intentional: they gorge themselves on food, becoming so round their mother and governess have to roll them down the street, and then, later, they decide to change themselves into kangaroos (with the help of a magic potion from a woman who lives in the forest) to give the townspeople in their village a fright, as revenge for having stuck pins into them when they were as round as balloons. As kangaroos, though, the girls are caught and end up in the local zoo, where they make friends with various animals and stage an escape (the experience of which proves useful later, when they go off to rescue their father, who’s a prisoner of war being held in a dungeon).
There’s lots of humor and fun and silliness in the book, sometimes so much silliness that it verges on becoming tedious: the village has a judge who’s “so fond of judging that he used to wear his wig even at the breakfast-table” (14), and a vicar who leads everyone in song at every chance he gets, resulting in a scene in which the sound “of John Peel being sung by a hundred and eleven people, as loudly as they could, and of twenty-five dogs all beating the ground with their tails in perfect time” draws the entire population of the village to the town square (29). Some bits are just great, though: there’s a lawyer named Hobson and another named Jobson, who advertise their services via hilarious handbills they hand out (“Does Prison Stare You in the Face? Don’t be Downhearted!” is the start of one; the other includes this: “Hence That Most Beautiful of All English Words—LITIGATION! Do You Do Enough Of It?”) (199, 202).
And there’s seriousness, too: Dinah and Dorinda are brave and resourceful and learn about friendship and loyalty; they learn, too, about ways of living: making plans and taking action, but also just being and watching and listening and seeing the world. There is much in the book about freedom and its value, from the zoo escapes to the war Major Palfrey is fighting against a foreign tyrant to the insistence of a group of jurors, much to the judge’s dismay, that they won’t change their minds just because he wants them to be in agreement on a verdict. There are also pleasing bits of description, like this:
The sun rose as he crossed the Square, and the windows of the houses blinked in the morning light, and the bowl of the sky was like a Chinese tea-cup that you can almost see through, and a flock of little clouds stood perfectly still, like sheep when a strange dog first appears. (223)
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