Reading children’s books and childhood reading

 

Of the twenty-seven books I’ve read so far this year, fifteen were children’s books. I read a lot of children’s books, mostly because I find them satisfying, but partly, of course, because I’m interested in how and what other children’s writers write. Do all children’s writers feel this way? I would be surprised to learn of any writer who didn’t read a good deal in their own area of work, suspicious too of their reasons for writing for a particular market if books of that ilk didn’t interest them. I suppose some maverick genius might manage to write a perfect book for children or a perfect romance or a perfect thriller without ever looking at an example of the type of book they were writing. It just doesn’t seem very likely.

Three of those twenty-seven were books about children’s books – there’s a whole world of writing around children’s books once you start looking: writing craft, criticism, history, memoir – plus articles and reviews. And when you can’t summon up the energy for an actual book there’s kidlit Twitter. I follow a lot of people who are engaged with children’s books and to be honest I would have given up on the shouting match and sales pitch that makes up most of Twitter long ago if it weren’t for this entirely wholesome and knowledgeable community.

I fell upon another rather fascinating thread on Twitter when Sophie Anderson (@sophieinspace) mentioned that she would not recommend the majority of the books she read when she was a child to children of today because there are so many brilliant more relevant texts available and many of the ‘classics’ pushed on children are racist and sexist. I understand where she’s coming from, but as ever it’s a matter of who is introducing reading matter to children. Most adults are not particularly interested in children’s books. They can’t be expected to know what is current and relevant. What they know about children’s books is based on books they knew and loved as a child and what the supermarket and the display tables in bookshops are shoving at them. Most primary school teachers can scarcely keep up with all the demands of their jobs, let alone manage to become well-read in the latest children’s books. For all these reasons, of course people keep sharing ‘classic’ children’s books with children. I think there’s probably also a tendency to think that these books have stood the test of time so they must be good and that, since they are classics, they must be ‘safe’. None of which is necessarily true. Reading possibly problematic old books with a child and sharing problems in them is one way forward, but I think really the best thing is to give children lots of opportunities to choose for themselves. Learning to look at book covers and blurbs to help you decide if a book will suit you is a skill. So is choosing to read something new and then deciding that it doesn’t suit you. This is, of course, where a well-stocked library comes in. *sigh*

All this led me to think about my own reading choices as a child and who and what influenced them. 

What there was in the library mostly dictated what I read. I didn’t own a lot of books but my mother took us to the library every week. Occasionally she’d point out something there she’s enjoyed as a child (that’s how I came to Elizabeth Gouge) but mostly it was just me and the shelves.

I read all the classics, What Katy Did, The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables, every Nesbit I could get my hands on, influenced largely by BBC serialisations, I think. There was modern stuff too, Helen Cresswell’s Lizzie Dripping, I think Tom’s Midnight Garden and The Borrowers. From the cinema, I came to all the Mary Poppins books, so much stranger and more mysterious on the page.

One very strong memory is of a serialisation of Elidor on the children’s radio programme which was all we had by way of English language media when my father was based in Germany. It was mind-blowing and led me to the rest of Alan Garner.

When I was about eight, a friend of my mother’s who reviewed children’s books came to stay, bringing me a stack of new paperbacks, eight or ten new books all at once. It was glorious. The only one I have left is the rather wonderful The Saucepan Journey by Edith Unnerstad. I think this is the moment I started wanting to own books. After birthdays and Christmas I would head straight for a bookshop. And oh, the joy when I discovered a local second hand bookshop – a big pile of books for scarcely any outlay, lots more classics because they’d be in hardback which, to my mind, meant they must be superior.

The only influences I remember from teachers was when we listened to a recording of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe which led me to the rest of Narnia and another teacher lent me a book called Well Met By Witchlight by Nina Beachcroft when I missed her reading the end (I tracked this book down a year or so ago and it wasn’t nearly as good as I remembered, but it was a huge influence on the direction of my childhood writing).

Then there was my friend Miranda. Her mother knew a lot about children’s books somehow. Through her I found K M Peyton and Barbara Willard at just the moment that I was tiptoeing around the edge of adult novels, because British publishing was still only toying with YA back then. 

So back to the question of whether I would share classic children’s books with children. Personally, no. I take great pleasure in buying books for all the children in my present-buying sphere. I like to share new and interesting books they may not have come across. I wouldn’t stop a child from reading classics, but I’d let them arrive at them for themselves. Direction is great and if there are knowledgeable teachers, librarians and family who can direct a child to their next favourite book, fantastic. But failing that guiding hand, what they need is plenty of choice.

 

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Miniature World Building

When we talk about world-building in fiction, it sounds like something huge. We think Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones with their great historical backstories, myriad characters and entire languages. Or we think of the intricacies of science fiction – creating believable alternate realities or different scientific laws. Then there are books like Watership Down, where Richard Adams spins a mythology and history around real rabbit behaviour. Where books that take the reader into other worlds work, they’re deep and involving, they never for a moment give you cause to stop and question their plausibility.

But world-building works on a small scale too.

One of my favourite childhood books was Five Dolls in a House by Helen Clare. I can’t tell you where it came from or who gave it to me. It seems like a book I always had.

My well-read copy of Five Dolls in a House by Helen Clare, illustrated by Cecil Leslie

You can tell right from the start that some serious world building is going on here. Many – perhaps most – books that take their world-building seriously will provide readers with a map. There’s no map in Five Dolls in a House. Instead, there’s a section of the house. Oh yes! It’s like a signpost to say, ‘Here’s the world you’re in right now. Focus on this.’ And how many times I flicked back through the pages to work out who was where at various points of the story, how often I simply examined the picture and wished I owned this house myself.

Section of dolls' house from Five Dolls in a House by Helen Clare, illustrated by Cecil Leslie

The premise of the story is that Elizabeth wonders what the dolls in her dolls’ house do when she’s finished playing with them and closed the front of the house. She peeks in the window but of course the dolls are just lying where she left them. Then all at once Elizabeth finds herself walking up to the front door of the house. This strange magic isn’t referred to at all; Elizabeth just accepts it without question and I, as a reader, went along with her. When Elizabeth meets the dolls she tries to explain who she is, and the dolls take her explanation that she owns the house and the fact that she already knows all their names to mean that she is their landlady.

Every detail of the dolls’ world is considered. They moan about how dreadful it is to live in a house where the whole of the front comes off sometimes. They have to pretend to have dinner because all the food in the house is made of plaster (Elizabeth remedies this with a chocolate biscuit and jellies). Some pet mice take up residence in the house and the dolls use them as horses to pull a little carriage (with disastrous results!).

It’s a joy! The characters are gorgeous – Vanessa, the eldest who is a terrible snob, Jane, the beauty, Amanda, clever and naughty, Jacqueline, the French paying guest, Lupin, who always goes about in her vest much to Vanessa’s disapproval, and the monkey who lives on the roof and is always making cheeky comments and causing mischief.

So much is packed into this short book. As with many chapter books for younger readers, each chapter is a complete story but the whole has a narrative that reaches a satisfying conclusion. Long after I was grown up, I did discover that there were sequels to the story, but I can’t bear to read them. For me Five Dolls in a House is a completely perfect miniature world and I don’t want to know any more.

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.

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.

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.