I dream of ... a library

 

I was recently doing a writing exercise about things I hoped and dreamed about when I was a child and how I felt about those hopes and dreams now. One dream was that I wanted to be a writer. Tick, done that. I dreamed of having a dog. Yup, done that, and I was right – it’s the best. I dreamed of owning a huge gothic house with a morning room and a drawing room and secret passages and servants’ quarters and many bedrooms called things like ‘the rose room’ and ‘the lilac room’. I don’t think that would suit me particularly now – too much cleaning, too many decisions about decorating and I bet the plumbing would be no good. Oh how the practicality of middle age stomps upon the fantasies of childhood!

One dream I held onto longer than most was the dream of having a library. You know, one of those that you see in movies, with books around every wall and a library ladder (I adored the scene in Bednobs and Broomsticks when Miss Price is up the library ladder looking for a particular magic book and the guy – forget his name – is pushing her around and singing). I was entranced by the idea of floor to ceiling bookshelves packed with books, ideally all hardback because if you could, why wouldn’t you? There’d be big comfortable chairs everywhere, the kind you can curl up in, one by a wide light window at one end and another by a grand fireplace. A sofa too, long enough to lie down on, not too firm. There’d be a table or a desk. Nowadays, I’d have to add in good reading lights all over the place, of course. I loved it when I visited grand houses open to the public and went into a library where books with leather covers and gold writing were housed behind glass doors. Yes, I thought. That’s the dream.

And now? I have a lot of books in my house. Being surrounded by books makes me comfortable. When we first moved here, for years some of my books were in boxes and I can honestly say that I never felt more at home than when at last we had enough bookshelves for all my books. There are bookshelves in every room here apart from the bathrooms. Some of the books I have had for a long time. Some are just passing through. When I finish reading a book, sometimes I find a place for it on the shelf, sometimes I put it straight in a bag for charity. It’s not necessarily about whether I’m going to read it again or whether I’m going to lend it to anyone. I keep books because they’re beautiful, because they were given to me by particular people, because I think they have some kind of importance, because they’re part of a set. If the decision’s not clearcut, I keep them. They may go in a cull later on.

A cull? Yes. In an ideal world, my bookshelves would not be packed floor to ceiling. There’d be a little room here and there, a space to welcome more. And to achieve that, not only do I give away the books I’m not going to read again, but I also have to be ruthless about weeding. It’s those ones I wasn’t sure about in the first place that go first, along with the ones my husband hasn’t actually thought about (he wants to keep everything, as though our bookshelves were infinitely expanding). Then I have to think about the rest. Sometimes something I’ve kept for years suddenly becomes dispensable. Occasionally I discover a space where I can fit new bookshelves and then, for a while, all the books can breathe and settle because there’ll be no need to cull for a while.

So would I like to have a library? Yes. I love the idea of a big room – both light and cosy – where I would be surrounded by books. It would be full of books I value for one reason or another and I would know just where to lay my hands on any particular book. But they wouldn’t be packed tight; there would always be space for more. The more I think about it, the more I think that it wouldn’t just be a library, this room. It would have to be my living room because why would you want to go anywhere else? (Do I put a TV in this fantasy library? Depends on how many other rooms I’ve got in the fantasy house.)

---

My new book, Snippets, is available now.

For a taster tale, you can read a Snippets story that's not in the book here.

You can get a copy of Snippets on Amazon or if you’d like a signed copy send me a message on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. 

Go to https://ko-fi.com/clairewatts to read a new Snippets story every month. It’s free, but you can support me with a donation if you like.

You can also find me on my website clairejwatts.com

Thursday's Child by Noel Streatfeild

Thursday’s Child was the first book I wore out. My original copy was a paperback with a photo from a TV series I never saw. I read it until the spine cracked and the pages came out in chunks and then I carried on reading it until it was a collection of small sections and individual pages that had to be handled with extreme caution. 

I suppose that the larger child here is Margaret who was dressed up as a boy to work on the canal boat, but if you picked up the book unknowing, you'd read the image as two boys. Seems an odd choice for the cover to me.

When my paperback Thursday's Child was finally impossible to read, my mother bought me a hardback copy, the very first hardback I had ever owned apart from a handful of Beatrix Potters. So now I had not only a book I adored for its story, but the first book I fell in love with as an object. Imagine the thrill of owning such a treasure! 

Look how much I loved this book - I covered the dust jacket with stickyback plastic when it started to disintegrate. And stop to appreciate the image of Margaret drawn by Peggy Fortnum who's responsible for the original Paddington Bear illustrations.

A number of books have held top spot for me over the years, but Thursday's Child probably held it for longest and has never been out of my personal top ten. What is it about this particular story? I think, for me, it’s the epitome of what I think of when I think ‘children’s books’. Feisty hero, no parents, thrown into situations where she has to fend for herself, protect others, form a team, while preserving her own identity with determination. Though most of my favourites have elements of fantasy or magic in them, historical novels like this tick the world-building boxes that suit me. And honestly, the things that Noel Streatfeild throws at Margaret Thursday barely give the reader pause for breath: an orphan with a mysterious background, a cruel orphanage, an escape to a canal boat, joining a travelling theatre, the discovery of long-lost aristocrats. And as the author speeds her characters through triumph and disaster, she takes the time to give even the minor players and the baddies real depth. 

I have loved almost every Noel Streatfeild book I’ve ever read – I can even forgive her for the much inferior sequel to this book because of course you have to write a book called Far to Go if you’ve written one called Thursday’s Child. I have a soft spot for Ballet Shoes and my copies of the Gemma stories show evidence of much rereading, but for me, if you could only read one of her books Thursday’s Child should be the one. 

This post is part of a collection of seven about children's books that I love. You can see the original post here, with links to all the books I've written about.

The seven books I'm not posting covers of

I keep being tagged in those social media posts where you're supposed to put up a number of books you love or books that have changed you or just books. With no comment or explanation, they usually say. I suppose this is so that it doesn't seem like a hard thing to do. Maybe so that it provokes other people to comment. I've done this before, I always want to shout about books I love, but the tags are coming so thick and fast in the current situation - what else have people got to do but look back at books, movies, music, paintings that they love - that I can't bring myself to join in. And besides, I find I want to comment. I have things to say about books. I want people to hear them.

So I was lying in bed, thinking about what I might choose if I was posting seven books that mean a lot to me/changed my life/I want to share. I thought I'd need to browse through my bookshelves but actually seven books appeared in my head straight away. Of course, as a children's book nerd, all seven are children's books. I do read other things. I love many, many books aimed at adults, but I don't feel nearly as passionate about them as I do about the children's books I love. Why would that be? Is it because the books I loved as a child stood out more because the pool of all the books I had read was smaller when I read them? Is it because I wasn't consciously looking for books that were like books I'd already enjoyed, so that finding these was a joyful happenstance?

I'd be interested to know if adults who don't read children's books have stand-out books from their childhoods that they would consider including in a list of favourites. As us children's writers know, many adults see children's books as less worthy than books aimed at adults. I think if anyone who had been a reader since childhood gave it some thought, they would easily put their finger on a few stand-out books from their childhood.

So here are the seven books that sprang into my mind.

What can I say about them? They seem distinctly 'girly' to me, but that could be to do with the era in which I was a child. There's a clear progression in when I took up each as 'my favourite book'. But somehow even when I championed a new one, all the others still remained 'my favourite'. The order is:

Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban

Five Dolls in a House by Helen Clare

Thursday's Child by Noel Streatfeild

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Henrietta's House by Elizabeth Gouge

Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer

Fifteen by Beverley Cleary

So I thought, instead of just showing you covers, I'd tell you why I love these books. I've already written about most of them on this blog. You can click on the titles above to see what I had to say.  The rest I'll write over the course of the next few weeks. There isn't after all anything much pressing to do at the moment.

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.

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 Kästner’s Lottie and Lisa and Emil and the Detectives and the America of the Melendy family books by Elizabeth Enright.

Windows on the world.

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…