Mr Sims is furious, and offers more money, but Mr MacDonald refuses.ĭonald returns home, making the ‘clan’ complete, and the children manage to get permission to camp on the Island of Seals, but before this the MacDonalds move down to their new house, Alltbeg, with two of their servants, an elderly pair of sisters.

Thankfully another tenant is found, a Mr Mansfield from London, who wants to live there with his family. This seems all too likely when the only answer to Mr MacDonald’s advertisement is from a Mr Sims of Lancashire, who is looking for a Scottish island to turn into a holiday resort, and thinks that his daughter, Mavis Elsie, a ‘real, romantic kid’, will enjoy living there. They go in Frankie’s boat, the Frances MacDonald, and later visit another island, Milvanaig, which is owned by an Englishman who refuses to allow people to land without permission – Frankie goes ashore but is seen by Mr Parks, and is convinced that the new tenant of Alvanaig House will be similar. The next day Frankie, Ailie and her brother Keith go across to the neighbouring small island, Eilean nan Roin (the Island of Seals) where they are making the old croft house habitable so they can camp on the island. Her friend Ailie tries to comfort her, and wishes that she could go away to school.

She is horrified by this idea, although her friend Donald has gone away the previous term. In More About Being an Author, MEA writes, “ Museum Press did well for the first three books, then produced a ghastly jacket and frontispiece for Everyday Island, with some of the characters looking years too old.”įrances MacDonald lives with her father in Alvanaig House, the big house on the Isle of Alvanaig in the Hebrides, which has been in the family for four hundred years, but at the beginning of the book we find that they are very short of money, and her father intends to let the big house, live in a smaller house on the island, and send Frances to school on the mainland.

Everyday Island was published by the Museum Press in 1950, there is a colour frontispiece with the same illustration as the front cover, but the artist is not credited.

Everyday island by Mabel Esther Allan