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Wednesday 26 June 2019

Windows on the world


I don’t remember ever recognising myself in a book as a child. I suspect that’s a symptom of my privilege. I was white, middle-class and able-bodied; I suppose I saw myself so much that I was blind to it. I don’t remember that moment of feeling ‘seen’ by a book until I read The Catcher in the Rye which is ironic really, as it’s about a boy living a couple of decades before I was in another country. If you’d asked me, I think I’d have told you that I wasn’t interested in reading about children like myself anyway. Who would want to do that when you could have magical adventures or get yourself into and out of danger or travel to other lands? I was looking for windows out of my world. 

Which brings me to The Saucepan Journey by Edith Unnerstad. 

I was a prolific reader as a child. My mother took us to the library each week and each week I took out four books and I’m fairly sure at the end of the week I returned them to the library having read them. The various libraries we went to in my childhood were always well stocked, so I never had to reread anything if I didn’t choose to, though often I did choose to. Because all these books were available to me for free, I tried every sort of book that was going. This is the joy of libraries. It doesn’t matter if you get a dud and you can take a punt on something that may just turn out to be your favourite book ever.

Anyway, because my mother was a great believer in libraries, we did not actually own very many books. Those I did own were much loved and much read and even then I felt they were very important. So when an old university friend of my mother's came to visit when I was about seven or eight and handing me and my brother a pile of six or seven paperback each I was staggered. She worked on a magazine that reviewed children’s books, I discovered later, so I suppose she always had plenty of children’s books to give away. Anyway, I could not have been more amazed or delighted if you told me I’d won the lottery. All I wanted to do was go to my room and start reading. (Unfortunately the friend had brought her three children with her and they were staying, so reading had to wait.)

One of the books she bought me was The Saucepan Journey by Edith Unnerstad (who for many years I thought of as Edith Understand). It’s the story of a family who is so large there isn’t room for them in their Stockholm flat so their inventor father designs them a caravan and they tour Sweden selling the amazing saucepans he’s invented. It’s a funny adventure with well-drawn characters (who appear in later adventures, though as they didn’t have any of Edith Unnerstad’s books in the library, I didn’t discover these until I was an adult trawler of secondhand bookshops) but more than this, for me, the appeal was the setting. 

The family squashed into their flat before they set out on the journey - our narrator sleeps on the ironing board across three chairs. Illustrations by Iben Clante.

In my wide reading, I must have read books in translation before, but I don’t ever remember being so fascinated by the different foods, the customs, the names, the scenery. I wonder if perhaps I noticed all this more since I owned the book and read it over and over. In my fast library reads, I may have devoured plot and been largely oblivious of setting. Certainly it was not until after The Saucepan Journey that I fell for the worlds of Erich Kรคstner’s Lottie and Lisa and Emil and the Detectives and the America of the Melendy family books by Elizabeth Enright.

Windows on the world.



Wednesday 12 June 2019

Phoenixes, railways and families



When I was a child there were programmes on TV that were specifically for children between around four and six pm (times varied over the years) on weekdays on two channels. There was a long Saturday morning show on each of the channels, which was mostly stuff I found very dull like children playing games on their teachers and people swapping things and pop music, but also featured cartoons. Holiday mornings were filled with programmes that had been bought in from other countries, which I vaguely remember as weird and fascinating. On Sunday afternoons, the BBC did a serialisation of some classic book – Dickens or Thackeray or Jane Austen (stuff they now put on in the evening when they’re sure of getting a bigger audience for the money they’ve lavished on it) or else one of those Victorian or Edwardian children’s classics.

So there was not much TV for kids. Even less, when I went to boarding school and all we watched was the Sunday afternoon serial. And, of course, there were no videos.

No wonder then that I read, that everyone read.

And no wonder that I threw myself into those classic children’s books that were serialised on Sunday afternoons. All those that spring immediately to mind – Anne of Green Gables, What Katy Did, A Little Princess, The Phoenix and the Carpet – I saw on TV first. Being shown that there was a story there that I would enjoy was my way into these books. I’ve thrust them at my daughters time and again over the years to no avail. They can’t see past the solid blocks of text to get to the gorgeousness within. Actually I’d say that all the books I’ve mentioned are pretty modern in the way they’re written. There’s a little floweriness in Anne of course, and Katy is rather saccharine in places (What Katy Did at School is much more fun!) and the authorial voice of A Little Princess can be tiresome. But The Phoenix and the Carpet? In fact anything E. Nesbit wrote? Pure fun from beginning to end.

Pure indulgence - bought myself these beautiful Folio editions a few years ago.
I am a HUGE fan of Edith Nesbit. It took me a while because I first came to her through the Bastables (The Story of the Treasure Seekers, The Wouldbegoods, The New Treasure Seekers). I struggled with these because it seemed to me that not enough happened and I failed to get the humour first time round. Coming back to the Bastables after watching The Phoenix and the Carpet on TV and then devouring the book and its sequels, I fell for them all. And when I discovered that E Nesbit was also responsible for my then favourite film The Railway Children that was it – I would read and love anything she wrote.

The time-travel mechanics are a little clunky, but otherwise, vintage Nesbit

Here are the reasons I love her:

1. Her families. She draws the bonds and squabbles and ambitions of families of children so well and makes them so appealing. Wouldn’t you just love to be a Bastable? Or one of the children who find the phoenix and the Psammead?
One of my favourites - a stand-alone with plenty of magic going wrong

2. Emotion. Mostly the books are funny and exciting. But when emotional depth is needed, it’s right there. That moment in The Railway Children when Bobbie sees her father through the steam from the train – “Daddy! My Daddy!” – I thought it might be just the crack in Jenny Agutter’s voice in the film, but it’s not, it’s right there on the page and you know it’s coming as the tension builds. Phew! Pure brilliance.


3. Contemporary fantasy. I love the way she brings magic into the world of her very ordinary families (OK, so very privileged white Edwardian families). They don’t step into a fantasy world – the magic is right there along with the coal scuttles and having to work out what to do with the baby. This kind of fantasy was very present in my seventies childhood and I think of it as the very heart of children’s literature. And this is what I’m aspiring to write myself…