Telling stories the Naughty Little Sister way

I am certain that I was already familiar with Dorothy Edwards’ My Naughty Little Sister stories when I came across them as an adult, but I have no concrete memory of them from my childhood. I suppose my mother read them to me. Perhaps she knew them from the radio, not when she was a child as they were first broadcast on the BBC’s Listen with Mother in 1950, but possibly from her younger brother’s childhood. Thinking about it, maybe they were also read on the BFBS (British Forces Broadcasting Service) radio programmes I listened to as a child. These seem to have been modelled on the BBC’s early radio programmes for children like Children’s Hour and Listen with Mother.

I wonder if the Naughty Little Sister stories seemed like something from another age to my mother or if that world was still close enough to hers. In so many ways, they seem like a historical document - the clothes and the milkman’s horse and the extraordinariness of the day when the father is left to childmind. But none of this stopped me reading them to my children. The stories are too alive to seem old-fahsioned.

The narrative voice is one I’m pretty sure you couldn’t get away with today. It’s the voice of an adult talking directly to the child listener about her own childhood and her little sister – unnamed – who was always doing silly things. The adult narrator addresses the listening child with comments to make them see how silly and funny her naughty little sister was – ‘wasn’t she silly?” “wasn’t that naughty?” The narrator also references the listener’s own behaviour – “You would never do anything as silly as that” – to make the listener feel cleverer or to be gently instructive, or maybe just to reinforce how funny it was. Even though the narrator’s focus is absolutely on the little sister, there are occasional comments that reveal the narrator herself as a big sister – she is occasionally embarrassed, sometimes affectionate but mostly superior. You can tell that the adult narrator, looking back at herself sees that she was a harsh judge of her younger sister. I know it’s very old-fashioned for a book to talk down to children in this way, but I have huge affection for this narrator. I think these stories perfectly mimic the way adults tell children stories about things that have happened and people they know . It’s certainly pretty near the way I told stories to my own young children, although it’s possible that I was unconsciously aping My Naughty Little Sister.

Although the stories come from a time far away from ours, they still work because the narrow world of small children has changed relatively little. The stories are all about the little things that happen in children’s lives – losing teeth, playing islands on a newly washed floor, posting bread crusts into a drawer, getting bored when you’re told to sit still and be good, making a mess of your smart clothes.

Cherry on the cake are the gorgeous illustrations by the wonderful Shirley Hughes whose naughty little sister is right out of the world of her own Alfie stories. Plus from my point of view the stories are the perfect length for reading aloud – that probably betrays their origin on radio.

Quiet YA

There were no Young Adult books when I was a child. There were children’s books, some of which were marked ‘for older readers’, there were a few imprints which aimed their titles at these older readers, but these were still ‘children’s books’. It seemed to work OK. You read children’s books, then for a while you read both children’s and adult books and then you mostly read adult books (unless you were me).

When I was sixteen, I found Beverly Cleary’s Fifteen. Published in 1956, it’s a romance of such innocence that it would never make it in today’s YA market. It’s closer to that uncomfortable upper-middle-grade/teen area that has no name but ought to really. Which makes the blurb in my edition all the more ironic – suggesting, as it does that the things that happen to the protagonist Jane at fifteen happen because the setting is America, and that they would be unlikely to happen before a girl was sixteen in Britain. What are these events? Jane babysits, she goes to the movies, she goes out to dinner in a Chinese restaurant with a group of friends. The kids can drive, it’s true, but nothing else. Did someone copy the blurb wholesale from the 1950s edition? Surely no one can have thought fifteen-year-olds led such sheltered lives when I bought my edition in the 1980s? 

Having said that, when I picked this book up, aged sixteen, I found it spoke to me. Jane is ordinary. No superpowers, no great obstacles to overcome. And nothing of any great note happens in Fifteen – Jane meets a boy, there are some setbacks and then… no, I won’t ruin it for you. The thing is though that we see everything from inside Jane’s head, her triumphs, her disasters, embarrassment, irritation, misunderstandings, indecision, every tiny turn of feeling. For me this close inner perspective is the dividing line between most middle grade children’s books and the step up that is YA. Jane’s feelings seemed to me utterly familiar. I had seen a reflection of myself in Holden Caulfield, but how much more did I see myself in Jane Purdy. The tiny dreams, the pushing herself to be brave, sometimes to be rewarded with success but often with disappointment. Comparing herself to people around her, disliking them but also critical of herself. It’s such a very quiet book, I can’t imagine it emerging from the slush pile in today’s market. But it was this book I had in mind when I wrote my first novel What they don’t tell you about love in the movies.

Beverly Cleary wrote a lot of books, but the other ones that I know best are the Ramona series for younger readers, about a girl at first preschool and gradually older as the series progresses, along with her family and friends and the small events and her life. They are funny and rather charming stories of ordinary events in a small child’s life. And they sit very well alongside the charming ordinariness of Fifteen. Of course not all books should be quiet, but there are quiet stories to tell that can be full of character and drama and tension, and sometimes these stories get buried in an avalanche of fantasy and issues and thrills. I’ll take all these things, but give me a character that springs to life off the page and makes me care first and foremost.

Books for free

I recently read this article  by Dawn Finch, an author, a children’s librarian and a campaigner for the rights of authors. It's about how books by celebrity authors are damaging children’s publishing for writers, bookshops and most of all children themselves and every word of it rings true.