Frances - the most real small child I've ever read

I remember almost no picture books from my childhood. I suppose this may be because they would have been library books for the most part. At home, I had a handful of Beatrix Potters which I valued more for their satisfying size than for their stories.

The one story I could remember as an adult was Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban. Why this particular book stuck with me more than all the others I must have had read to me I have no idea. Of course, it is a very fine book, so perhaps my pre-reading self had some literary discrimination. All I know is that this was a book that if I saw it on the library shelves, I would immediately add it to my pile. That copy must have spent more time in our house than it did at the library.

This was the book that I sought out when I had my children. I bought Bread and Jam when my eldest daughter was two and eventually we had most of the Frances books, though the only other one that was familiar to me was A Baby Sister for Frances. We also had a rather delightful tape of Glynis Johns reading the stories. Oh I wish I had that tape still. She was odd and real and just perfect.

Why did Frances appeal so much? What was it about these stories that caught me? Frances, though she is, of course, a badger, is very much an ordinary child. Nothing much happens. In Bread and Jam Frances is fussy about her food so Mother gives her bread and jam for every meal until Frances realises that that’s dull and there are other foods she likes. Put so plainly is sounds almost Victorian – Frances acts up and learns a lesson. But it’s not like that at all. All the characters bounce off the page with life. We know exactly how Frances feels – and she feels so much and so strongly – and we understand it. She is one of the most real small children I’ve ever read. And you can’t help but love her rhymes:

The language of these books has seeped into our family vocabulary. We know what we’re referring to when we talk about things ‘coming out even’. When ever opportunity arises, I will say ‘You can be sure there will always be plenty of chocolate cake around here.’

It’s the detail I love. When Frances watches her friend Albert eat his extensive packed lunch, we get every detail of his ritual as he cracks his hard-boiled egg, peels it, salts it, bites it, then moves on to take a bite of his sandwich and his pickle and a drink of milk. You can feel Frances's envy at every bite. And at the end, her own joy in doing the same with her new non-bread-and-jam lunch, made even more special by the inclusion of a doily and a tiny vase of violets. 

This is very wordy compare to most modern picture books, and I know there are versions out there where the text has been cut, but I believe every word of this is necessary and every word is a great pleasure. For someone who loves children’s books so, I found reading to my kids something of a chore and in particular I disliked wordy picture books. Maybe I could feel the children getting restive and wanting to see the picture on the next page. I never found that with Frances though. I would willingly start again the moment I’d reached the end. Pure quality? Or because it was so embedded in my memory that the book felt like all the very best things about books and childhood and reading aloud.

Again! Again! or How to avoid burning your child’s books

I’ve always loved children’s books. When I was first pregnant, one of the things I was looking forward to was reading picture books with my child. But I discovered that small children have dubious taste and that they love repetition. Really love it. ‘Let’s read a book!’ I would say, cheerily, to my small daughter. And before I had a chance to lay my hand on something fabulous by the Ahlbergs or Lauren Child or Julia Donaldson, or any of the marvellous, clever, beautiful picture books that exist, she would produce Tinky Winky’s Bag from somewhere or other. (This was some years ago. I suppose it is possible that you may have missed out on Tinky Winky. He was one of the Teletubbies and featured in a TV programme for pre-schoolers).

‘What about Each Peach Pear Plum?’ I would say, weakly. ‘Or Where the Wild Things Are?’

‘I want this one,’ she’d say, settling herself on my lap.

There was no persuading her. Every time we sat down we had to read Tinky Winky’s Bag. I might get away with reading one or two other books as well. But sometimes I had to read Tinky Winky’s Bag twice.

I hated that book. I hated every word of it. I hated the expressionless faces of the characters, the repetitive text, the sheer dullness of it. The funny thing was, I quite liked the TV programme. There was a charming randomness about what happened in it; it seemed to me to reflect the experiences of little kids in a completely engaging way. We never missed it, even the repeats.

I tried various ways to avoid reading The Book.

‘Daddy loves this book,’ I would say. ‘He’ll read it when he comes home.’

‘OK,’ she’d say. ‘He can read it to me then. You read it now.’

‘How about you read it to me?’ I’d say. ‘You know all the words.’

‘Don’t be silly, Mummy,’ she’d laugh. ‘I can’t read.’

So what happened was this. First The Book fell apart. She picked it up one day and the cover fell off. It was pretty ratty-looking by this stage. You should have seen her: a picture of misery. So, of course, I mended it. And then I read it to her.

Then it fell apart again. When I was tidying up. After she was in bed. And the fire was lit. And so… You know what I did, don’t you? I threw it in the fire.

To this day, my husband guilt-trips me about this. He says this was Wrong (with a capital W). He says it was a mean thing to do to a child. He went on quite a bit about Burning Books.

But you know what? She never even looked for it. It wasn’t there and she wasn’t bothered. Suddenly we were reading the Ahlbergs and the Julia Donaldsons and the Quentin Blakes and all the other glorious, riotous, silly, funny, clever, imaginative stories. There never was another one that stuck the way Tinky Winky’s Bag had though. But I think maybe it was a stage that she had to go through, like all those other reading stages that you’d like to hurry your children through, the one when they have to read every single book in the Beast Quest or the Rainbow Fairies series, the one when they seem to be unable to see the value in anything that makes them read slowly enough to stop and think.

I managed to avoid another Tinky Winky’s Bag with my two other daughters. I’d like to think that this was judicious book management on my part, but I suspect it was simply that my older daughter was listening in and wouldn’t put up with anything as boring as that.

My advice? If your child loves a book that you hate, try hiding it for a day or two in the first instance. If they’re not bothered, get rid of it. If they are, ‘find’ it again and try to make sure someone else gets the job of reading it to them.

If there are older children around, get them to read. Either they won’t mind the boring book or they’ll tell the younger child that it’s rubbish. Chances are the younger child will be happy to accept their opinion.

You could also try not buying any picture books at all, but going to the library instead. That way you have to take all the books back every week or so, so nothing’s ever going to get the chance to turn into a Tinky Winky’s Bag.

That’s not that realistic though, is it? Who can resist a picture book? Just make sure you buy the best you can find – it’s not that hard, there are so many out there.

Ten of my family’s favourite picture books
(i.e. those that sprang to the minds of my daughters and me immediately the question was posed – we didn’t ask Dad, who’d probably have added Tinky Winky’s Bag)

Each Peach Pear Plum                        Janet and Allan Ahlberg

The Gruffalo                                       Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler

Pants                                                   Giles Andrae and Nick Sharratt

Bread and Jam for Frances                 Russell and Lilian Hoban

Guess How Much I Love You           Sam McBratney and Anita Jeram

Cowboy Baby                                     Sue Heap

Queenie the Bantam                           Bob Graham

Mrs Armitage, Queen of the Road     Quentin Blake

The Enormous Crocodile                    Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake

Dear Zoo                                             Rod Campbell

Why kids SHOULD read Enid Blyton

When I was ten I went to boarding school. Tucked into the side of my overnight case was my favourite book: Claudine at St Clares by Enid Blyton. But by bedtime, the book was hidden at the back of my drawer ready to be surreptitiously returned home at half-term. Within hours of my arrival, I had discovered that Enid Blyton was banned at my new school. I do not remember ever having this explained to me, and at the time I would certainly not have been able to distinguish between the books which were on offer in the school library and the Enid Blyton books I loved. I simply accepted the ban and carried on reading her books at home with an added frisson of guilty pleasure.

The trouble is, of course, that parents and teachers feel they need to quality-control their children’s reading. Enid Blyton does use dull, repetitive language, and the pervading tone is of talking down to the reader. Blyton’s books are peppered with sexual and racial stereotypes considered unacceptable today (although in modern reprints the publishers have done their best to remove these). And that’s before you get to the whole middle-class thing...

But in spite of all this, and even getting on for half a century since her death, there are plenty of kids who still love Enid Blyton. The language we adults see as uninspiring gives many children their first taste of fluent reading. Because they don’t have to think too hard about what the words mean or how the sentences are structured, they may for the first time experience that feeling of running their eyes over the black squiggles on the page and having them transform into a story in their heads. Allowing kids to discover that they have this amazing, magical skill, is, I think, key to turning them into readers. And there’s a wealth of Blyton to read. With some series fiction, children may be left not knowing what to read next when they’ve finished the series. They may have discovered the fluent reading trick, but their focus has been narrowed. But Blyton’s prolific output means that once a child has discovered her books, he or she may read their way through all manner of stories: adventure, fantasy, family, detective.

So, let them read their fill of Blyton. Chances are they will one day turn round and tell you the books are boring. And you can always speed the process up a bit. Do they read and re-read the Malory Towers and St Clare’s books? So provide them with some other school stories. What about What Katy Did at School (Susan Coolidge) or Charlotte Sometimes (Penelope Farmer). Move Famous Five fans onto the Young Bond books by Anthony Horowitz or Robin Stevens fabulous Murder Most Unladylike books. You could introduce Faraway Tree and Wishing Chair fans to E Nesbit.

One word of warning though. Don’t ever, ever read Blyton out loud if there is any way you can possibly avoid it. Aloud, all the banality of the language comes plodding out, and you’ll find no matter what a skilled reader-aloud you are, you just can’t help sounding like a comedian doing an imitation of Enid Blyton.

Oh my, jolly hockey sticks and lashings of ginger beer!

Blyton to relish
The …of Adventure series
Kids go off on adventures in far-flung places. Remember Willard Price’s adventure stories? These are like that with a little less of the shrunken heads and shooting.

Naughty Amelia Jane series
Because everyone wants to believe that their toys get up and mess around when they go out of the room…

Children’s Books – categorizing by age group

This is an information sheet about children’s books which I wrote for the writing group I belong to, intended as an overview for the non-specialist. However, someone else asked me for this information, so here it is, for public consumption.

These categories are of necessity overlapping. Children have very different experiences of learning to read. Their ‘reading age’ may be far above or below their emotional maturity. I’ve divided them up the way you’d be most likely to see them divided in a bookshop or library. Publishers would break these categories into lots of subcategories.

Picture Books

• Some are suitable for children to read alone

• Most designed for an adult and child to share

• Importance of illustration and design; most of the best picture books are co-authored by a writer and illustrator who work closely together

• Many have rhyming texts with plenty of repetition

• There is often a playful use of language which might seem difficult for children to comprehend word for word

• The pictures can usually tell the story by themselves – or expand on the text

• Generally only a few sentences per page; some are wordless

• May contain difficult ideas which adults need to discuss or present to young children, e.g. death, new sibling, potty-training, bullying

• Not necessarily a ‘story’; could be a nonsense rhyme, descriptive or simply words.

Early Readers

• Approx 6 up

• Designed for children beginning to read on their own

• Sentences are very simple, with just one idea per sentence

• In these books the text carries the story rather than the pictures

• Many books in this range form part of a series

• At the younger end, these books have 100 to 2,500 words and each page will have a picture.

• Progresses to books of 3,000 to 15,000 words, divided into short chapters with a picture on most spreads

Middle Grade

• Age 8 to 12

• Word count generally no more than 45,000 words, though fantasy titles may be much longer

• These are the books that are most likely to spring to mind when you think of children’s books

• Generally plot- rather than character-led

• Unusual to have a first-person narrator

• The language varies more than in books for younger readers, but is likely to be simpler in structure and vocabulary than a young adult book

• Feature adventures, comedy, fun

• Unlikely to contain romance, swearing, drugs

• Many of these books feature a child protagonist, but you also find books about adults or animals

• Parents are often absent in these books

• Endings are usually happy

• May feature a series of adventures of a character, so that each chapter is a short story in itself and the book has no overall narrative arc

Young Adult

• Age 12 and up

• Word count generally no more than 70,000 words, but some genres can be much longer

• Tend to focus more on characters and their problems

• Tend to have deeper points of view (often first person) and be more emotional

• May contain material which is considered unsuitable for younger children (drugs, sex) or wouldn’t interest them (romance) or is upsetting

• The language in these books will be as complex as that of an adult novel

• These novels almost exclusively feature a teenage protagonist

Narrative gluttony

I badly want to like reading aloud. I like the idea of it. I think I should like it. I'm pretty good at it: clear, expressive, entertaining, not too given to doing funny voices (though I'm a sucker for a roars and cracks and whispers and shouts). My children are beyond the picture book stage now, but I never really had a problem with those, apart from the really bad ones that for some reason they insisted I read again and again... and again. Tinky Winky's Bag was one such, and how I rejoiced when it fell apart. Other books have been lovingly taped together, but Tinky Winky's Bag went straight in the fire (an act Robert will not allow me to forget: 'You BURNT a book!'). Clearly, picture books are short, so one does not have to invest much time in reading them, and they have pictures, so there's something to look at other than the words, and something to talk about too. It doesn't feel like an interuption of the story to discuss what is happening in the pictures, it feels like you're adding to it. I don't think it's about the shortness though. I've sat and read piles of picture books, one after another, and not found it arduous.

I think the problem with reading a longer book aloud must be the reading speed. Aloud, each word and each space has to take up a its own moment, whereas in your head the black marks on the page translate themselves into a single stream of thought. I'm anxious for my fix of story and it doesn't come quick enough aloud. Of course if I'm reading aloud, I'm not reading for myself, and I'm not hurrying throught it, I'm knocking myself out to please my audience with dramatic pauses and varying tone, but in the back of my head there's this thrumming 'what happens next?' even though I've probably read it before. Remember how at school when you read a book round the class, and it was so slow, the book seemed to plod, even something gripping like Lord of the Rings or To Kill a Mockingbird. I longed for my turn to read so I could put my all into it, showing off wildly, showing up the other girls, forcing praise from the teacher, but even then the words dragged their feet on the page, so I had to sneakily read on by myself just to get the joy of the story, and oh, how much more plodding it was in class once I didn't even have the anticipation to keep me going.

So now Robert does most of the reading aloud, although I usually suggest the books. It does give me a pang to see them curled up, sharing the book, but I know if it were me reading I'd be thinking 'how many pages to the end of the chapter' and I'd never give in to the demands to read the first paragraph of the next chapter before I stop, as he does. When I do read aloud, it's for practical reasons: to pass time when we're stuck somewhere and everyone's bored; to help someone get back into a book that they've lost the plot of (Watership Down last week, and I'm not surprised she'd lost it, the language is so complex I was having to explain a word or two in every sentence); and often I read to smallest daughter when she's doing her chores to stop her complaining about them, because I can't actually help her or the others would break into a chorus of 'it's not fair'.

I don't think the reading aloud is going to stop any time soon in our hose. All the girls can read and yet they love to listen to stories, any sort of story. Perhaps you don't have to grow out of listening. Maybe the thing that puts you off is the school experience and that's because you're trying to read at the same time as listening. Maybe what you need is just to allow your ears to do the transfering of the story to your brain instead dechiphering those little black marks. Perhaps I should try listening to stories again. I do it sometimes, in the car on Radio 4, but never on purpose, only if the story happens to be there when I'm listening. Do I enjoy it? I don't know; mostly I don't hear a whole story, or I'm thinking about something else, or talking to someone in the car. Maybe if I learn to listen I can slow down my narrative gluttony and relish reading aloud.