For me, also, her story is as much about coming of age as a writer as it is about growing up, helped along by Tom. She weathers hopeless, abusive parenting without losing her capacity to love, or to fight for those she loves. In fact, she is enjoyably ordinary in many ways but she is tenacious and thoughtful and brave, stubborn, bad-tempered and splendidly single-minded.
Although tomboyish, Polly isn’t “kick-ass”, or a tediously Strong Female Character. Wynne Jones, who died in 2011 aged 76, wrote the book explicitly to create a female hero, after a childhood immersed in books of mythology and legend convinced her that there were vanishingly few already written. Reading Fire and Hemlock has given me a perennial, powerful sense of hope, in great part because of Polly and her development. Can she save him – or must he be tithed to hell? But now the adult Polly has remembered all that went before, just as Tom’s life is due to be given up. Later, when teenage Polly works an ill-judged charm to track Tom down, Laurel is finally able to act against her, excising her memories of him at a stroke. When Tom and Polly invent heroic tales together, therefore, their imaginings come menacingly to life and to keep Laurel and the Leroys at bay, they must use tricks and aliases when they correspond or occasionally meet. In addition, just as the queen did with the original Thomas the Rhymer, she has given Tom Lynn a backhanded gift: everything he imagines or writes will come true, but will also inevitably injure him in some way. His ex-wife, Laurel Leroy, is a fairy queen who takes human husbands, sacrificing them every nine years to prolong the life of her king. It is dangerous for Polly to befriend Tom, however. Afterwards, when Polly returns to her mother’s home, she and Tom remain friends they write to each other and invent stories together and, every so often, he sends her parcels of battered, transformative books. She strikes up a friendship with him, unwittingly interfering in his destiny by helping him choose for his inheritance several valuable pictures to which he is not entitled. Dressed up as a high priestess in black, she unwittingly gatecrashes a funeral at the sinister Hunsdon House, where she encounters both Tom Lynn and the Leroy family to whom he is mysteriously bound.
The 10-year-old Polly is staying with her grandmother to escape her warring parents when she first meets Mr Lynn.
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