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…

I dream of Alice

My first copy of Alice in Wonderland was a paperback that you got by collecting cereal tokens – Sugar Puffs, I think. I got it from my brother for my birthday, I’m not sure exactly when, but around eight I think. As I’m sure you know, on the very first page of the book, Alice remarks, “What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations,” which was ironic, as this copy had no pictures. It also had teeny, tiny writing, so small that I might have set it aside and never read it, but for a couple of things. Firstly, this was a gift from my big brother. Now it’s entirely possible that he had nothing whatever to do with cutting out the cereal tokens or taping the coins to cover the post and packing to the card form. It’s possible he didn’t choose this book for me out of the selection available. But it didn’t matter to me. I adored my brother and if he gave me a book, I was going to give it a go, no matter how boring it looked.

The second thing that hooked me was the mouse’s tail. I must have flicked through the pages, hoping for pictures, and my eye was caught by this:

Obviously, I had to find out what that was all about.

Did I already know these characters? I’m not sure. In those days if you hadn’t seen a Disney cartoon at the cinema the only way to come across it was in the short extracts they showed in ‘Disney Time’ that aired on Bank Holidays and in Disney books. All I know is that I fell completely in love with Alice and with all the cross creatures she came across in Wonderland. The Duchess was my favourite. I loved the way when she met Alice at the croquet match, she greeted her like a long lost friend, and leaned her chin uncomfortably on Alice’s shoulder as they walked.

I read Alice in Wonderland over and over, but that only took me to the middle of the book. Beyond was Through the Looking Glass. I flicked through this.

I held ‘Jabberwocky’ up to the mirror to read it, I found the chapter where the queen turns into the kitten (remember, no pictures, so I was just struck by the idea of it being possible to write a chapter that contained just the fragment of a sentence).

But it took me a long, long time to read it. By the time I did I certainly must have seen the Disney version, because I found I was already familiar with characters who are in the Disney Alice in Wonderland but who are actually from Looking Glass rather than Wonderland. It didn’t take long for me to realise that I preferred Looking Glass to Wonderland. I love the chess game structure and the framing images of climbing into the mirror and picking up the kitten; I think the characters are stronger.

You could argue that both of these books consist of a series of barely connected scenes that add up to nothing in particular. That Alice does not grow or learn on her journeys. That ‘it was all a dream’ (twice!) is the worst kind of cop-out. But I think that here the dream is absolutely the point. To me, there is nothing more dreamlike than this accumulation of nonsensical scenes where characters warn and boss and confuse Alice just like the adults who control her everyday life. I came back to Alice over and over, I read about Lewis Carroll, I read other things he had written. For a long time, if asked my favourite book, my only doubt would be which of these two books to choose.

I don’t have the cereal packet Alice anymore. When I was sixteen I bought myself Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass in beautiful hardback editions with the original Tenniel illustrations. I think that must have been the moment I knew that I was never going to grow out of children’s books.

The Blyton in my suitcase

When I first went to boarding school I took one of my favourite books with me, packed in my overnight case. It was one of Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers books, or it could have been St Clare’s. It’s been a long time since I was devoted to them and they all blend into one in my mind. I suspect it was the one about the French girl who polished an older girl’s shoes with anchovy paste. Claudine she was called. In fact, yes, Claudine at St Clare’s seems very likely.

This is not my original copy - all my Blytons went to a secondhand bookshop when I needed money to buy more books.

By the time I was in bed that night, the book was firmly hidden at the bottom one of the two drawers I’d been assigned. It would not emerge until I sneaked it out to take it home at half-term. I lay on my thin horsehair mattress on my iron bedstead between cotton sheets and woollen blankets (bear in mind this was 1975 and we used duvets and polycotton fitted sheets at home). My deep love of Enid Blyton was over. At my new boarding school, they did not approve of Enid Blyton.

It was another girl who told me that Claudine at St Clare’s wouldn’t do. My whole idea of boarding school came from those pages. Those books were why I’d been so keen to go. I suspect by the time the nameless girl told me this, I’d already realised my picture was wrong and felt that to have the book would be to demonstrate my ignorance. 

But it was true that there was not a single Enid Blyton book in the library. No teacher ever explicitly told me that they had something against her. Not that I would have given them a chance. That book and my previous devotion stayed firmly in the past when I was at school. Didn’t stop me Blyton-cramming the moment I got home, of course. There were lots of home things that you simply didn’t mention at school. Blyton was one of them.

I do wonder how Enid Blyton became such a one-woman story production line. There have been many authors who produce many books in a series or two, but Blyton was so prolific in so many areas. I have no great affection for the Famous Five or Secret Seven, but I loved the Five Find-outers of the ‘The Mystery of…’ books, and the kids in the ‘… of Adventure’ series. The Wishing Chair passed me by, which is odd because magical fantasy was much more up my street as a child than anything realistic. When I’ve reread Enid Blyton in recent years I find that they are so mind-bogglingly racist, sexist and classist it makes my head and heart ache. That’s not why my school didn’t approve of Blyton of course. She was right at the heart of the mainstream in the 1970s. They had judged her on the quality of her prose and found her wanting. I have no argument with this. What I would say though is that it was probably Enid Blyton who made me a reader. I knew every time I picked up one of her books and I would find a story that would easily move from words on the page to action in my mind. I have to think this is a valuable quality in a writer for children.

Charlotte Sometimes - practically perfect

If anyone ever asks me what my favourite book is, I have an answer for them straight away. It’s Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer. No question. That’s my desert island book, the one I’d keep if you took all other books away from me. It’s a children’s book, ‘middle grade’ they’d call it if it was published now, but to me it’s just what I think of as sitting on the shelves with all the other children’s books, thick enough and with small enough writing that you know you’re going to get a story you can really lose yourself in, but with pictures here and there just to help you along a bit.

When I walked into my new boarding school dorms for the first time in 1975, it looked exactly like this.               (Illustration by Chris Clark)

Charlotte Sometimes is the story of Charlotte who is sent to boarding school and finds that overnight she had slipped back through time and taken the place of Clare, a pupil at the same school fifty years before in the midst of the First World War. No one notices that Charlotte is there rather than Clare (although Clare’s sister has her suspicions), and no one notices that Clare has replaced Charlotte in the 1960s. Night after night, the girls swap places and eventually they work out how to leave messages for one another.

I read this book first when I was about twelve, but it didn’t go straight to the top of my list. Certainly I enjoyed it and the story stayed with me, but I read so much in those days, it was hard to have a favourite. For a long time Alice in Wonderland was the book I would claim as my favourite if anyone asked. I did love Alice, but I think I was choosing this above anything else as a way of being superior to all the people who didn’t think that much about books and would just pick the last book they’d read or the one before that. I knew better, I’d considered all the books I’d read.

But though Charlotte Sometimes didn’t immediately leap to the top of my list, it ticked all the right boxes for me. I loved school books and historical novels, I loved time-slips and magic and inexplicable things. Oh, and I loved melancholy. Charlotte Sometimes made me cry. 

And then, when I’d just about forgotten about Charlotte Sometimes, when I’d begun to read more adult books than children’s ones because I didn’t yet realise that children’s books were my vocation, someone played me The Cure’s haunting song Charlotte Sometimes and that beautiful sadness that is so well-earned by the story came back to me. 

Jacket illustration by Emma Chichester-Clark

I found I was desperate to find a copy of the book. I read it again, nervous that my memory might have mis-served me. But no. It’s every bit as good as I remembered. Haunting, yes, but also exciting and realistic. Charlotte is a very human heroine, full of flaws and worries. I would go so far as to say that Charlotte Sometimes is very nearly a perfect children’s book. It deserves to be up there on the shelves with the classics.

Writing resolution 2019

I like a challenge, as you know. I like to start something new in the new year and keep it up. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t. Mostly when it doesn’t, it’s because it’s too vague or too hard. The single most successful challenge I have ever set myself is to write 500 words a day every day for a year, which I did in 2016. I found that for me 500 words a day is absolutely doable in any circumstances. On a good day, it’s thirty minutes of writing; on a slow day it might take about an hour. I included every type of writing in my 500 words – words that were part of whatever my work-in-progress was, blog words, reviews, writing exercises. Each day I added my words to a spreadsheet and found, by the end of the year, that I’d written over 200,000 words. Every single day felt like a successful writing day when I added my daily total to the spreadsheet. That is a feeling worth having.

I learned two main things the last time around. Number one is that, for me, first thing in the morning, before I get out of bed is the optimum time for writing fast because the critical self-editor who normally sits on my shoulder appears to be still asleep at this time. Any later and it’s likely to take me twice as long. And the point is to get the words on the paper. They don’t have to be readable – they just have to be there. Knocking them into shape is an entirely separate thing.

The second thing I learned is that I need to spend more time on detailed plotting and planning ahead so that I always know exactly what I’m going to be writing each day. I had some moments in 2016 when I had finished everything I had planned and so I began writing random parts of things that I had had vague thoughts about, all of which are still sitting in files waiting for me to get to them some day. On the other hand, there is definitely room for spontaneity. In 2016, I began writing little pieces of fairy tale as writing exercises and these stories grew wings and have become my Snippets project which continues to be an absolute delight to work on.

So I am beginning the year writing a short piece which will become the beginning of a new novel I hope. At the moment I know how the story begins but the rest is sketchy. I need to find a way into it before I start doing serious planning. I think this will be around 3,000 words and so will fill about a week. I’m not yet sure what my subsequent 500 words a day will be about because my first big project of the year isn’t writing something new but reworking something I originally wrote back in 2016. I need to read it first to decide if I’d be better off starting from scratch or if there is something that can be salvaged. That probably sounds like a disheartening task to be undertaking but it’s not. I love the idea of this book and I think I’ve come up with a much better way to tell the story. I imagine I’m going to need a good bit of planning before I’m ready to write some more on either of these projects. Seems to me like this might be a chance to write some new Snippets stories – oh yes!