There’s a lovely moment near the end of John Masefield’s book The Box of Delights. Young Kay Harker and Cole Hawlings – a wizened puppeteer, several hundred years old, who owns a box that can travel through time – have just rescued the staff of Tatchester Cathedral from the dungeons beneath the Bishop’s Palace where they’ve been imprisoned by a band of local ne’er-do-wells. As the boat carrying Kay and Cole drifts down an underground river through a “wide cavern,” Kay sees ancient paintings depicting “a procession of men leading bulls and horses” to their deaths.

Cole says to the boy, “That was our old religion, Master Harker. It was nothing like so good as the new, of course, but it was good fun in its day, though, because it ended in a feast.”

The scene is emblematic of what Masefield does best in his children’s fiction – gee-whiz wonder and hairsbreadth escapes, at the back of which the reader glimpses, on occasion, hints of an older and more mysterious world creeping in at the edges. Like his beloved Thomas Malory, he builds dream worlds with echoes of a pagan past that operate according to their own, never fully explained logic. And in the Harker novels – The Midnight Folk (1927) and The Box of Delights (1935) – he gave us a feast.

Born in the spring of 1878, Masefield – “Jack,” as he was known to his friends – lived a mostly idyllic existence in Ledbury, near the Welsh border, until the age of six and a half when his mother died. Following the deaths of his grandparents he was sent to live at the Priory, “a very, very old house, full of passages, corridors, strange rooms, strange noises,” as he described it, “a strange, dark, uncanny place, with rooms never opened, and cupboards and secret chambers.” The house exerted a considerable hold on his imagination, as did the stories of Hans Christian Andersen and Lewis Carroll and, as he grew older, the adventure novels of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

His life to this point bears some similarities with that of the other great Jack of twentieth-century children’s literature, his near-contemporary C. S. Lewis – the long rambling corridors, the early death of a mother, the growing passion for myths, sagas, and tales of the fantastic. Masefield’s devotion to literature placed him at odds with his Aunt Kate, who helped raise him after the death of his father in 1890 following a mental breakdown. Kate was a stern, forbidding woman who disapproved of art and fiction for religious reasons. Eager to escape her home, and encouraged by a holiday governess who spoke movingly of the sea, Jack joined a “school-ship” docked in the Mersey, where he studied the fundamentals of naval life (without yet setting sail) and assisted in organizing the ship’s library.

Masefield proved a poor student – “he doesn’t even know the tucks of an eye-splice,” his fo'c's'le captains are said to have complained. After a nasty row with Kate over his decision to become an author, he was coerced into joining a ship’s crew, but deserted in New York City “with one pound in cash and a chestful of clothes,” according to Constance Babington-Smith in her 1978 book John Masefield: A Life. There, in a local bookstore, he discovered Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485), a near-endless repository of myth and adventure and one of the treasures of the language. It was as though a door opened into another realm. “All the storytelling instinct in me was thrilled as I read,” he would later say. “It was pure joy, a British tradition that had passed into the imagination of the world.” For many weeks thereafter he would work until two or three in the morning, then clamber upstairs to his garret room and read the first volume of Malory (“my only book”) until he fell asleep.

His love of Arthuriana infuses what are today his two best-known works. Like the later Narnia books – C. S. Lewis was an avowed fan, citing The Box of Delights especially as “exquisite and quite unlike anything I have seen elsewhere” – the Harker books are a glorious hodge-podge of seemingly everything that had ever struck the fancy of their author: boat voyages, witch covens, flying cars, gun battles with gangsters, talking cats, time travel, the English landscape in winter, and a fox with the excellent name of Rollicum Bitem Lightfoot. There is a rat who says things like, “What I says is, a fellow is a fellow.” There’s a “wicked old lady” who smokes cigarettes and drinks champagne whilst reading in bed, and who sings spritely songs about her advanced age (“Deuce take me!” she cries, “I’d have been a pirate myself if I’d had the chance”). There are paintings that expand to engulf and transport Kay, the good-natured, game-for-anything protagonist of both books. There are plates with “neat little legs” that rise and bow, and midnight jaunts with Herne the Hunter and the Lady of the Oak, figures out of British folklore. King Arthur and Lancelot make an appearance. One of the baddies is revealed to have indentured a fairy servant, Prospero-like. Lewis often gets credit for being the first writer of “kitchen-sink fantasy” – Father Christmas rubbing shoulders with minotaurs and dryads – but Masefield was doing it twenty years before him. What keeps the books, with their disparate elements, hanging together is their author’s vision of an enchanted world, a vision that had been vouchsafed to him as a child when, as he put it, “All that I looked upon was beautiful, and known by me to be beautiful, but also … only the shadow of something much more beautiful, very, very near, and almost to be reached.”

The Harker books invite superlatives. Writing in the Guardian, Piers Torday calls Masefield “the unrecognised founding father of our current golden age of children’s literature,” citing his influence on Mary Norton, J. K. Rowling, and Philip Pullman. Dr. Rob Maselin thinks The Midnight Folk “the finest children’s book in the English language” – a category with stiff competition from the likes of Edith Nesbit, George MacDonald, and Katherine Rundell. While both books have a cracking plot – an attempt to recover buried treasure, in the first book; a battle of wits with the diabolical Abner Brown, who has kidnapped the bishop in the hopes of preventing the thousandth annual Christmas midnight service, in the second – for their legions of readers the plots are secondary to the specific magic that Masefield conjures, a magic that is bound up in nostalgia for “Deep England,” Camelot, and memories of a Christmas long past, a Christmas that may only exist in the imagination. Early in The Box of Delights, there is a description of a village street that rivals the descriptions in Dickens:

As they entered the little street, it was so dark with the promise of snow that the shops were being lighted. They were all decked out with holly, mistletoe, tinsel, crackers, toys, oranges, model Christmas trees with tapers and glass balls, apples, sweets, sucking pigs, sides of beef, turkeys, geese, Christmas cakes, and big plum puddings.

Masefield’s vision encompasses England in all eras of its history, from the pagan past suggested by Herne to the grand cathedral which stands at the center of the story (on which, more below).

The inevitable screen adaptation was also well received. Dr. Francis Young notes that the 1984 BBC television production of The Box of Delights is “widely and justly regarded as the finest children’s television drama of all time.” There is a kind of double nostalgia at work now in watching the TV series. For many who came of age with the program – and others who did not, but who have a keen passion for all things old and English – the series represents a vanished age of English culture, that of the 1970s and 1980s, when the public took an interest in fantasy and folklore, the age of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper, of obscure folk-psychedelic music with recorder and a smattering of harpsichord, when a child could switch on the television seemingly at random and witness something – Penda’s Fen, Children of the Stones, one of the early Doctor Who serials – that would haunt her till the end of her days. In recent years the word hauntology has been coined to describe the feeling of wanting a return to this era, only now recognized in hindsight as a kind of golden age for certain things whose absence we keenly feel. There is a sense that the world is now less enchanted, that the fauns and naiads have been driven out of Narnia and the Telmarines have taken over.

And The Box of Delights – with its synth-heavy score by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, with its once breathtaking, now enjoyably quaint special effects, with its train journeys and bells ringing and blank landscapes of untrodden snow – embodies all these longings. It was, at the time, one of the most expensive programs ever aired on television. There are those who maintain it has never been equaled. The phrases it coined or revived – “the ghost of ninepence,” “haven’t a tosser to my kick,” “the purple pim” – have become a kind of secret handshake among devotees. Its success led almost immediately to the commissioning of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and two other Narnia volumes – still, for my money, the best on-screen portrayals of Narnia. Alice Spencer, in an essay comparing the Harker books with Narnia, writes that their “country house settings … emphasis on ancient festive traditions and frequent recourse to medievalism, must have felt like a welcome glimpse back into another, distant world.” All the more so, perhaps, for a child sitting down to watch the program for the first time – whether during its first airing or today.

The Box of Delights’ celebrated final sequence depicts the cathedral like the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven, “its windows unlit, its tower transfigured with floodlight, its ledges, mouldings, and carvings all trapped with snow,” in a scene that prefigures the mystical thrillers of Charles Williams. “There is evidence,” Smith writes, “that when he was in his mid-forties, with youth behind him, he was in fact groping, probably often unconsciously, towards Christian belief.” No one who has read or seen that midnight procession into the cathedral can doubt that the story is suffused with Christian sentiment, a kind of longing for an earlier age of belief. Despite Masefield’s professed discomfort with religion, he almost seems to want the Christmas story to be true.

Shortly after his stint aboard the Mersey school-ship, Masefield undertook an ill-advised apprenticeship aboard the Gilcruix, a four-masted barque belonging to the White Star Line. There he rounded Cape Horn in extreme weather, suffered severe illness, and began to accept that he wasn’t cut out for the life of a sailor. His journal of the voyage, however, records several glimpses of “natural phenomena of strange beauty.” One incident stands out: in the midst of a blizzard at sea he heard the song of a sailor, unseen, like one of those bodiless voices that sang Caliban to sleep in The Tempest.

The moment continued to haunt him long after he returned to England, and there may be an echo of it in the words Cole Hawlings says to Kay near the end of their adventure, just before the lights are lit in the cathedral and the midnight bells ring out over the frozen landscape:

There’s nothing stamps a Christian town more than its bells…. And a wandering man gives heed to bells, for often in the dark night they would ring him home, who would otherwise be ate by wolves and that.

Out of the darkness of a century bedeviled by wolves, against the black night of modernity, Masefield’s books continue to ring us home.