I dream of Alice

My first copy of Alice in Wonderland was a paperback that you got by collecting cereal tokens – Sugar Puffs, I think. I got it from my brother for my birthday, I’m not sure exactly when, but around eight I think. As I’m sure you know, on the very first page of the book, Alice remarks, “What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations,” which was ironic, as this copy had no pictures. It also had teeny, tiny writing, so small that I might have set it aside and never read it, but for a couple of things. Firstly, this was a gift from my big brother. Now it’s entirely possible that he had nothing whatever to do with cutting out the cereal tokens or taping the coins to cover the post and packing to the card form. It’s possible he didn’t choose this book for me out of the selection available. But it didn’t matter to me. I adored my brother and if he gave me a book, I was going to give it a go, no matter how boring it looked.

The second thing that hooked me was the mouse’s tail. I must have flicked through the pages, hoping for pictures, and my eye was caught by this:

Obviously, I had to find out what that was all about.

Did I already know these characters? I’m not sure. In those days if you hadn’t seen a Disney cartoon at the cinema the only way to come across it was in the short extracts they showed in ‘Disney Time’ that aired on Bank Holidays and in Disney books. All I know is that I fell completely in love with Alice and with all the cross creatures she came across in Wonderland. The Duchess was my favourite. I loved the way when she met Alice at the croquet match, she greeted her like a long lost friend, and leaned her chin uncomfortably on Alice’s shoulder as they walked.

I read Alice in Wonderland over and over, but that only took me to the middle of the book. Beyond was Through the Looking Glass. I flicked through this.

I held ‘Jabberwocky’ up to the mirror to read it, I found the chapter where the queen turns into the kitten (remember, no pictures, so I was just struck by the idea of it being possible to write a chapter that contained just the fragment of a sentence).

But it took me a long, long time to read it. By the time I did I certainly must have seen the Disney version, because I found I was already familiar with characters who are in the Disney Alice in Wonderland but who are actually from Looking Glass rather than Wonderland. It didn’t take long for me to realise that I preferred Looking Glass to Wonderland. I love the chess game structure and the framing images of climbing into the mirror and picking up the kitten; I think the characters are stronger.

You could argue that both of these books consist of a series of barely connected scenes that add up to nothing in particular. That Alice does not grow or learn on her journeys. That ‘it was all a dream’ (twice!) is the worst kind of cop-out. But I think that here the dream is absolutely the point. To me, there is nothing more dreamlike than this accumulation of nonsensical scenes where characters warn and boss and confuse Alice just like the adults who control her everyday life. I came back to Alice over and over, I read about Lewis Carroll, I read other things he had written. For a long time, if asked my favourite book, my only doubt would be which of these two books to choose.

I don’t have the cereal packet Alice anymore. When I was sixteen I bought myself Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass in beautiful hardback editions with the original Tenniel illustrations. I think that must have been the moment I knew that I was never going to grow out of children’s books.

The Blyton in my suitcase

When I first went to boarding school I took one of my favourite books with me, packed in my overnight case. It was one of Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers books, or it could have been St Clare’s. It’s been a long time since I was devoted to them and they all blend into one in my mind. I suspect it was the one about the French girl who polished an older girl’s shoes with anchovy paste. Claudine she was called. In fact, yes, Claudine at St Clare’s seems very likely.

This is not my original copy - all my Blytons went to a secondhand bookshop when I needed money to buy more books.

By the time I was in bed that night, the book was firmly hidden at the bottom one of the two drawers I’d been assigned. It would not emerge until I sneaked it out to take it home at half-term. I lay on my thin horsehair mattress on my iron bedstead between cotton sheets and woollen blankets (bear in mind this was 1975 and we used duvets and polycotton fitted sheets at home). My deep love of Enid Blyton was over. At my new boarding school, they did not approve of Enid Blyton.

It was another girl who told me that Claudine at St Clare’s wouldn’t do. My whole idea of boarding school came from those pages. Those books were why I’d been so keen to go. I suspect by the time the nameless girl told me this, I’d already realised my picture was wrong and felt that to have the book would be to demonstrate my ignorance. 

But it was true that there was not a single Enid Blyton book in the library. No teacher ever explicitly told me that they had something against her. Not that I would have given them a chance. That book and my previous devotion stayed firmly in the past when I was at school. Didn’t stop me Blyton-cramming the moment I got home, of course. There were lots of home things that you simply didn’t mention at school. Blyton was one of them.

I do wonder how Enid Blyton became such a one-woman story production line. There have been many authors who produce many books in a series or two, but Blyton was so prolific in so many areas. I have no great affection for the Famous Five or Secret Seven, but I loved the Five Find-outers of the ‘The Mystery of…’ books, and the kids in the ‘… of Adventure’ series. The Wishing Chair passed me by, which is odd because magical fantasy was much more up my street as a child than anything realistic. When I’ve reread Enid Blyton in recent years I find that they are so mind-bogglingly racist, sexist and classist it makes my head and heart ache. That’s not why my school didn’t approve of Blyton of course. She was right at the heart of the mainstream in the 1970s. They had judged her on the quality of her prose and found her wanting. I have no argument with this. What I would say though is that it was probably Enid Blyton who made me a reader. I knew every time I picked up one of her books and I would find a story that would easily move from words on the page to action in my mind. I have to think this is a valuable quality in a writer for children.

Charlotte Sometimes - practically perfect

If anyone ever asks me what my favourite book is, I have an answer for them straight away. It’s Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer. No question. That’s my desert island book, the one I’d keep if you took all other books away from me. It’s a children’s book, ‘middle grade’ they’d call it if it was published now, but to me it’s just what I think of as sitting on the shelves with all the other children’s books, thick enough and with small enough writing that you know you’re going to get a story you can really lose yourself in, but with pictures here and there just to help you along a bit.

When I walked into my new boarding school dorms for the first time in 1975, it looked exactly like this.               (Illustration by Chris Clark)

Charlotte Sometimes is the story of Charlotte who is sent to boarding school and finds that overnight she had slipped back through time and taken the place of Clare, a pupil at the same school fifty years before in the midst of the First World War. No one notices that Charlotte is there rather than Clare (although Clare’s sister has her suspicions), and no one notices that Clare has replaced Charlotte in the 1960s. Night after night, the girls swap places and eventually they work out how to leave messages for one another.

I read this book first when I was about twelve, but it didn’t go straight to the top of my list. Certainly I enjoyed it and the story stayed with me, but I read so much in those days, it was hard to have a favourite. For a long time Alice in Wonderland was the book I would claim as my favourite if anyone asked. I did love Alice, but I think I was choosing this above anything else as a way of being superior to all the people who didn’t think that much about books and would just pick the last book they’d read or the one before that. I knew better, I’d considered all the books I’d read.

But though Charlotte Sometimes didn’t immediately leap to the top of my list, it ticked all the right boxes for me. I loved school books and historical novels, I loved time-slips and magic and inexplicable things. Oh, and I loved melancholy. Charlotte Sometimes made me cry. 

And then, when I’d just about forgotten about Charlotte Sometimes, when I’d begun to read more adult books than children’s ones because I didn’t yet realise that children’s books were my vocation, someone played me The Cure’s haunting song Charlotte Sometimes and that beautiful sadness that is so well-earned by the story came back to me. 

Jacket illustration by Emma Chichester-Clark

I found I was desperate to find a copy of the book. I read it again, nervous that my memory might have mis-served me. But no. It’s every bit as good as I remembered. Haunting, yes, but also exciting and realistic. Charlotte is a very human heroine, full of flaws and worries. I would go so far as to say that Charlotte Sometimes is very nearly a perfect children’s book. It deserves to be up there on the shelves with the classics.