Punch Bowl Farm, under Dion's influence, had been extensively modernised, and although his sister Lindsey mourned for the old ways, when milking had been done by hand and in some of the fields the bracken had been six feet high, there was no doubt that it was now more efficient. It was summer and Roger and Rissa had come from Romney Marsh and were staying at the farm—the chief reasons for their visit being Lindsey and Dion.
When the Romney Marsh people come to stay with the Punchbowl Farm people it makes quite a crowd at the farm. But it means also a great deal of fun for everyone. The Thornton parents have gone to France for a holiday so Andrea is virtually in charge, but Meryon and Dion and Tamzin and Lindsey are excellent at coping in crises. And the main crisis arises when Roger discovers that a wild deer has somehow found its way into the Punchbowl herd. They know they must catch her but it is not easy to capture a wild and very fast moving animal. Help there is in plenty, some of it unwanted, especially from those who offer to shoot the deer for them.
It is a fine yew tree that for many hundreds of years has protected Punchbowl Farm from gales and storms. Lindsey loves it and feels certain that it holds the spirit which guards their home and that to destroy it would be wrong and might cause some dreadful disaster. But Dion, who has taken the many problems of running the farm on his practical young shoulders, knows only that its poisonous branches are a constant menace to his herd and even to their beloved ponies.
With her new story, Monica Edwards returns to Punchbowl Farm and the Thornton Family. As in her previous "Punchbowl" books, Mrs. Edwards writes of the normal, everyday things that happen on a farm, but her skill in describing places and her sympathetic understanding of the problems as well as the excitements that face people who are growing up to-day, set her books in a class by themselves. The chief problem facing Dion, Lindsey and the rest of the Thornton family, is what to do about Chalice, the colt, who is continually breaking out, leading the heifers after him.
In this story we are again at Punchbowl Farm with the Thornton family, sharing their anxieties over a harvest which seems fated from the beginning. Capricious and sometimes violent weather conditions strike down into the little valley, undoing the sweated toil of weeks. And, when the energies of the whole family are being thrown into this one great emergency, Dion's own pet fox Toddy causes fresh anxiety and action in the effort to divert from him the suspicions of local poultry-owners.
