VE DAY and PAPER CUTS by Penny Dolan

Among the moving stories of service and sacrifice shared during the VE Day commemorations, there was much about the rationing of food, often with samples of food ration sizes or made more cheerful by photos of children facing communal cake and sandwiches at local street parties.

Now, the idea of living with officially restricted food provokes strong reactions and memories. However, during WW2, there was one specific category of rationing that affected publishers, authors, librarians and all those involved with books and reading: THE RATIONING OF PAPER.  In 1939, when Norway was invaded, supplies of wood pulp for paper-making were severely curtailed.  

                                     

On the 4th of September, 1942, all paper manufacturing and supply came under the No 48 Paper Control Order, with all use controlled by the Ministry of Production, and directed towards the war effort. All types of paper were rationed; newspapers were limited to 25% of their pre-war consumption, but book production guidelines limited the print size, words per page and the inclusion of blank pages. While paper rationing seems a small thing compared to possible starvation, this was still a matter that affected everyone involved in the printing and publication of newspapers, magazines and books, including the working lives of all kinds of writers.

The paper restrictions affected everyone's general lives, of course. Wrapping paper was prohibited in shops so women were expected to carry bags and baskets. People were urged not to waste paper, or throw paper away or even to burn paper. In contrast to today’s novelty stationery ranges and buzzing office shredders, every piece of paper, then, was for collecting, saving and re-using, although the sheets of paper used to wrap wet fish could be excluded. Personal letters were brief and tightly spaced, with a few words often saying much while in schools, the paper restrictions must have emphasised the need for pupils to have neat handwriting, clean pages and tidy exercise books. Of course, at home,  old newspapers became a valuable asset in people’s privies, and not only for reading.

                                            
Ordinary book publishing very much felt the pinch during these years, as George Orwell pointed out strongly, in an article in Tribune in 1944. 

    A particularly interesting detail is that out of the 100,000 tons (of paper) allotted to the Stationery Office, the War Office gets no less than 25,000 tons, or more than the whole of the book trade put together. ... At the same time paper for books is so short that even the most hackneyed "classic" is liable to be out of print, many schools are short of textbooks, new writers get no chance to start and even established writers have to expect a gap of a year or two years between finishing a book and seeing it published.

Nevertheless, although these allocations placed limits on the publication of children’s books, Penguin managed to gain a paper allowance by publishing a series of picture book titles intended to help evacuated city children adjust to life in the country. One early title ‘War on Land’ proved so successful that several fiction titles followed, including a picture book 'Orlando Buys A  Farm' about the already popular Orlando the Marmalade Cat.

                                                            
Paper rationing continued until 1949, and affected children’s book publishing for several years. Nevertheless, advances in printing and colour techniques, combined with a rising birth-rate and an interest in children’s education, brought children’s books back into prominence and the growth of Puffin and other children’s book imprints. ‘Marketing’ too, had arrived: in 1967, Kaye Webb, the enormously influential children’s editor at Puffin Books, was able to promote the pleasures of reading and the sales of Puffin paperbacks to children, parents and schools through ther popular Puffin Book Club. 

Unsurprisingly, even though food and paper rationing was over, hunger remained a constant and shadowy theme in many children books, such as the insatiable yearning of illustrator Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, or Judith Kerr's The Tiger who Came to Tea consuming all the food and drink in the house, or even, Lewis's The Lion, The Wtch and the Wardrobe, poor Edmund being lured into treachery by a box of Turkish Delight. There are also those constant picnics and quantities of food consumed in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five adventures – the publication of whose titles links back to a paper rationing story that, emotionally, seemed to have parallels with today. 

                                                 

 Recently, I was reading Emma J. Barnes ‘Economical With Fiction’ Substack articles. Her three excellent articles examine some false -  but subsequently repeated - rumours about Alison Uttley, the writer of The Little Grey Rabbit books, such as her wish to live close to Enid Blyton. It's all interesting stuff, with echoes of Miss Marple's gossipy neighbours, but what drew my attention was this:

Apparently, in 1939, Enid Blyton’s children’s books were so popular that her publishers put in an early reservation for 60% of the total paper stock allowed for children’s books.  

And this was during the period of intense rationing described above. Oh heaven! How must that have felt to any of the other children’s authors writing at the time? Suddenly, the pangs of injustice caused by the promotion of celebrity authors seemed to have long been part of the children’s book world.

Penny Dolan 

 

ps The illustrator of The Little Grey Rabbit series was Margaret Tempest

 pps. Reference: https://ejbarnes.substack.com/

Dogs versus Cats by Lynne Benton

For some reason there seems to be a general assumption that anyone who loves dogs is a GOOD EGG, whereas anyone who prefers cats must be a bit ODD.  (This includes a certain American politician who refers sarcastically to “cat ladies”, as if they were somehow beyond the pale!)  

I totally refute this!

I have written several books for children in which dogs play an important role, (indeed, one publisher asked for input from children, many of whom said, “I love this book because it’s about dogs, and I love dogs!”)  However, that doesn’t mean I necessarily prefer them to cats.  Indeed, although when I was a child we had a cat, and then, later, a dog, now, as an adult, I do prefer cats – maybe because the one we had was my first love?  When my own children were small we had two cats, both of which were much loved, but now my children have grown up only one of them has any pets at all.  (Two of them would, I think, have a cat if their circumstances were different)  But my eldest daughter now has both a dog and a cat, though I think she is probably more attached to the dog, who can accompany her on the frequent long walks that they both love.  And her three children are equally fond of both cats and dogs.  So maybe it does depend, to a large extent, on the animal/s you were brought up with.

Anyway, it made me think about the books I’ve read that are specifically about either cats or dogs, and I’ve come up with a few favourites.

The first of these is one from my childhood, which I used to hear on Children’s Hour on the radio, as well as read from the library: Orlando the Marmalade Cat, by Kathleen Hale.  This was the story of Orlando and his family, all of whom I got to know, the more I heard or read.  Following the success of her original book, Kathleen Hale wrote many sequels, of which this is one:

However, another favourite – or series of favourites – from my childhood were Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, in which the fifth “person” was the dog, Timmy.  I loved reading the books, though in retrospect Timmy seems to have been remarkably well-behaved, and never barked at inopportune moments (which, in my experience, most dogs do!)

Then there were books I read to various classes when I was teaching younger children: Gobbolino, the Witches Cat, by Ursula Moray Williams.  This was the story of a foundling kitten who had no idea he was really a witch’s cat, and the scrapes he got into before discovering his true identity.  It was always hugely popular.

And of course there's the wonderful One Hundred and One Dalmatians, by Dodie Smith, which was popular as a book but has now become even more popular as an animated film by Disney.  Featuring dalmatians Pongo and Mrs Pongo and their 101 dalmatian puppies, who were desired by the wicked Cruella De Ville for their skins, it's the story of how they managed to escape her clutches.

And another cat book for children which I discovered quite recently, “The Cat Whiskerer”, by Cathy Hopkins, which is a lovely story of Tom, a “Cat Whiskerer”, whose magic whiskers could always sense another cat in trouble, and the cats in the neighbourhood whom he helped.

I’m sure there are many, many more, and people will continue to argue about this question, but it’s good to know that people will always want pets, whether cats or dogs, and will insist that their own choice is better. 

Website: lynnebenton.com

Too Wizard for Words -- My Love Affair with the Girls' School Story

What is it about boarding school stories? I know I would have hated boarding school and yet I’ve had a love affair with their fictional counterparts for fifty years, and I know I’m not alone.

It started with Malory Towers when I was six. From the moment I met Darrell, admiring her brand-new school uniform in the mirror, I was hooked on school stories. 

The girls’ adventures seemed perfectly poised between realism and romance. Their friendships and rivalries, dreams and disappointments, were entirely believable, while the very idea of a remote Cornish boarding school with rocky sea-swimming pool and stables, was, as Darrell and her friends would have said, ‘too wizard for words!’

 

From Malory Towers it was a natural progression to St Clare’s and then – oh joy of joys! – the Chalet School, which had 59 books. They weren’t all available in Belfast in the eighties, and maybe the decades-long quest to collect the whole series is what kept me reading and collecting school stories all through my teenage years, when I knew I was meant to read about boys and discos, and beyond. I even, as a student, wrote a PhD thesis about girls’ school stories – those for grown-ups as well as for children. I’ve never minded what age a story is supposed to be for. Maybe that’s why I write books for children, teenagers and adults.

The schools I went to weren’t at all like Malory Towers or the Chalet School. My secondary school, Victoria College, Belfast, had a boarding department, but we daygirls were never allowed inside. The corridors were lined with old photos of hockey teams and prefects from the past – I used to spend breaktimes gazing at them, imagining the lives of those long-ago girls with their tunics and bobbed hair. They looked so like the girls in the stories I still (secretly) loved.

When I became an English teacher I spent a year as a mistress in the girls’ boarding department. That wasn’t much like the school stories either but there were midnight feasts and Matrons (one cosy, one scary) and bedtime cocoa. But a year was enough for me. 

And so to Fernside. I had always wanted to write a girls’ school story, and I sneaked some school-story elements into some of my earlier historical novels – Name upon Name is set partly in a school, and Hope against Hope in a girls’ hostel. And then, in an Irish Times interview about another book, I was asked why I’d never written a girls’ school story, given that I had a such an interest in them. I said I would love to write one! Little did I know that someone at O’Brien Press would read the interview, and think, A school story by Sheena Wilkinson? We might like to publish that…

 

Fernside, a boarding and day school beside the River Lagan, is imaginary, but it’s very like a lot of the girls’ schools that sprang up in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Of course there are dormitories and prefects, lessons and sport, friendships and fallings-out – and a bit of mystery too. I’ve loved writing all my books, but in many ways First Term at Fernside is the book I started dreaming about all those years ago, when I was six, and I first looked into the mirror with Darrell. 

It's out on the 23^rd September and I’m hoping that, for many young readers, it might be their first foray into a lifetime of love for the girls’ school story. And I hope that for many older readers, it will be a nostalgic treat! 

 

As for me, well, all the best school stories are in series, so you'll find me at my desk today, halfway through Fernside Book 2. But that, as Kipling says, is another story. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Talking to the Author by Lynne Benton

 Recently I attended various sessions in the annual two-week Bath Literary Festival.  I always enjoy choosing which sessions to go to, particularly as the festival often includes some of my favourite authors – those whose books I most enjoy reading.

This year I went to hear seven authors talk about their books, which was great.   I was also able to buy copies of their latest books and queue up to talk to them and ask them to sign my copy.  It is always interesting, and in some cases a real joy, to have a chance to actually speak to a favourite author and tell them how much you enjoy their books.  Some of those I met, I found, were very happy to chat to me too, which was even nicer, and I came away on a high.

I hope they were pleased to find so many people keen to buy their latest book.  As a writer myself, I know how good it feels when someone tells me how much they’ve enjoyed one of my books.  Especially if it’s someone I don’t know.

Of course, this is why School visits are so important if you write for children.  When I was a child, way back in the fifties, I don’t remember ever meeting a writer face to face, though as an avid reader I would have been in seventh heaven if one had come to my school.  Maybe it didn’t occur to anyone in those distant days that this might be an option – or that children needed encouragement to read!  (I certainly didn’t!)  I suppose at that time the one writer who would have guaranteed to set all hearts racing would have been Enid Blyton, before the powers-that-be decided her books might corrupt young minds.  (Not that children agreed!  Whenever I went to the library as a child there were always several children waiting by the B section for the Enid Blytons to be returned so they could take them out.)  So I can just imagine the reaction of the entire school if the great lady had actually come to visit our school and talk to us!

And how wonderful it would have been if your parents had been able to afford to buy one of her books!  That would mean you might actually get to speak to her and ask her to sign it for you!  I’m afraid the cost of a new book would have been beyond most of our parents at the time, so I bore this in mind when I did my last school visit a few years ago.  Before going I had a load of bookmarks printed (with pictures of my books on), which I gave out to all the children.  This meant that as well as signing any books they bought, I could also sign bookmarks, so that every child would have a chance to come and speak to me if they wanted to, if only to tell me their name. They all seemed happy to queue for that too, which was lovely.  Clearly there’s nothing like the personal contact!

These days I suppose the only author who would guarantee the sort of hero-worship Blyton received back then would be JK Rowling, though children nowadays are much more used to reading lots of different books by different authors, and to having them visit their school.  Though I suspect that many of us who do, or have done, author visits to schools will probably have been asked if we know JK Rowling.  Children also, of course, accept that we must be very rich: at that same school visit one child asked me in awed tones, “Are you a multi-millionaire?”  Because of course, as everyone knows, all children’s authors are multi-millionaires, aren’t they? 

However, although that is, unsurprisingly, far from the case, I appreciate that these days when I go to a Literary Festival I can buy a book from a favourite author, and meet her (or him) face to face.  And talk to them.  It is still a great joy.

website: lynnebenton.com

Oh no, not more about Dahl? Not exactly... Anne Rooney

"Times were tough. It hadn't rained for years. There was nothing in the garden except one small cabbage and a stick of celery. Little Else and her grandmother were so poor they only had dinner once a week. They were so thin they had to walk over the same ground twice to throw a shadow."
Little Else, Trick Rider, Julie Hunt, 2010

This isn't funny any more. Was it funny in 2010? With distance from the kind of poverty that now surrounds us, perhaps it was — except for the poor children. (It's not as though there weren't any poor children in 2010.) A third of children in the UK now live in poverty. A third of children might find this making fun of their plight uncomfortable.

How do we read children's books from the past, even the very recent past? Should we change them to match modern lives and sensibilities? If we choose to change them, which things should we change? It seems the recent Dahl edits, and the slightly more distant Blyton edits, tinker at the edges but don't seem to have any recognisable parameters within which change is effected. In 2010, Hodder changed some of Blyton's books, often in rather pointless ways. Few children couldn't understand 'mother and father' — and it wasn't changed to the gender neutral 'parents', but to 'mum and dad' — the preferred terms of middle-class southerners replacing the old-fashioned but generic terms. The change of 'dirty tinker' to 'traveller' was more sensible. Travellers and their children have a hard enough time without children's books condoning and contributing to casual abuse. 

Removing directly offensive terms targeted at groups who haven't chosen the characteristic being mocked or derided is not at all the same as pandering to a kind ahistorical insensibility about language. I'm reading The Little White Horse (Elizabeth Goudge, 1946) with MB at the moment. I often have to stop to explain a word, or a concept. Yesterday's session led to a discussion of how children's lives have changed over the last 50 years. Children need to learn that times change, language changes, behaviour and ideas change. Some behaviour and ideas in the past would now be considered inappropriate. But some ideas and behaviour now are inappropriate, and condoned. We've just had a Prime Minister who referred to Muslim women as 'letter boxes'. Women peacefully holding a vigil after the murder of another woman by a police officer were ill-treated and prosecuted. The current government wants to send people fleeing war zones to Rwanda. I don't think sanitising the past is a priority. (Though of course it might serve the right-wing nostalgia for a little England where everything was rosy.) We aren't preparing children for life in the present by refusing to keep words like 'plump' in books from the past. The issue of whether to use the word in a new book is, to my mind, separate. 

If we are going to change books from the past, I would propose that we set clear parameters (and say 'modernized' on the cover, quite clearly). Those parameters should be about directly caricaturing, ridiculing or bullying characters on the basis of characteristics they can't help. That ridiculing or bullying should be on the part of the narrator/author, not a character in the book who might be being shown in a bad light through their treatment of others. So if character A calls character B a fat slob, that's not the same as the narrative introducing character B as a fat slob. The second endorses criticism of being overweight and inactive. The first sets up character A for a downfall, discovery, revenge, or whatever. 

We need nuance and parameters. And then we need to discuss whether it impinges on the moral rights of a dead author to make changes they would not have wanted. We might need a test case. Moral rights continue for the duration of copyright and, most importantly, can't be assigned to someone else. So although Netflix have the copyright in Dahl's work, can they violate his moral rights?

A pocket full of caterpillars

Yesterday, as the small person in the house (MB) was reading, I remarked to her that it always snows at Christmas in picture books. 'Yes,' she said, 'but never at actual Christmas'. On the other hand, summer holidays in children's books are traditionally long, hot weeks of frolicking in meadows and on beaches and rivers. When I was a child in the 1960s and 70s, it occasionally snowed at Christmas. And even though I spent some summer days dangerously exploring the water meadows with other children now considered too young to be out alone, many more were spent racing raindrops down the windowpanes or looking for an extra cardi. This year, MB is getting an Enid-Blyton summer of sand, water and gritty sandwicches (well, brioche and cheese straws). Yesterday we picnicked in the garden while she and her baby brother played with sand and water and the deer in the field stared resentfully through the fence at us. 

This E-B summer is, of course, blighted. An Enid-Blight-on summer. It's hot because the world is burning, because we burnt it. Some days it's too hot, and I hang sheets over the climbing plants not to dry them but to protect the plants from scorching. Perhaps for a few years the kids can live in the storybook summers. The picture book Christmases, I fear are gone. (Though if climate change rots the Gulf  Stream, we might have more snowy Christmasses than we want.) 

Those favourite summer
activities of dog lynching...

My happiest summer days were spent running around the meadows collecting cinnabar moth caterpillars. Usually I put them in my pockets and took them home to transfer to a shoebox and try to feed them up to chrysallis stage. Sometimes I left them in my pockets and got an almighty fuss from my mother when they ended up as caterpillar mush in the washing machine. We went off, each armed with a packet of crisps with its blue paper twist of salt and sometimes a sandwich — possibly Dairylea or fishpaste — wrapped in tin foil. The sandwich usually got lost en route, but the crisps were eaten immediately. But it wasn't as hot as it was cracked up to be, even though I remember it as hot. We had no sun-hats or suncream but rarely got burned. We got rashes from the tall grass and cuts from the razor-edged grass, soggy feet from sinking in the boggy bits (it was a water meadow, remember), bites from flies, torn clothing and skin from the brambles, countless stinging nettle stings, sometimes poisoning from eating random berries, and we were attacked by leeches in the river. We were scared of foxes and adders, but still crawled into fox and badger holes and poked at snakes with a stick if they didn't immediately slither away. Sometimes we found wild strawberries and raspberries (escaped from a garden, I suspect — I'm not aware or Britain having wild raspberries), and always blackberries. But the blackberries weren't ripe in August, and this year the cinnabar moth caterpillars are already pupating when the holidays have only just started. 

... and testing your eyesight at Barnard Castle

How will today's children remember these summers? MB and her cohort have had two summers of covid. No play time with others, closed playgrounds the first year, no trips to swimming pools or beaches. A summer of semi-freedom isn't quite as useful if you've had little practice at being free with other kids. You don't have expectations of how you can spend it. 

Though she wouldn't be romping through meadows. All this concern with keeping your children alive and intact makes life very hard for today's children's writers. It's easy to fabricate an adventure when you can drop four or five kids in a meadow or forest or beach, or push them down the river in a boat or even on a home-made raft, stick them up trees and send them hunting for badgers or rolling down grassy slopes. It's not that easy when their mum or au pair or granddad or their friend's dad is sitting on a bench nearby, or their boat is on a boating lake and only rented for 30 minutes. I think I'd cope with caterpillar mush in the washing machine if they could have a bit more freedom and we could all write about it.

Anne Rooney

Out now from Oxford Univeristy Press:
Baby Koala and Little Tiger, July 2022

The power of landscape - by Lu Hersey

In some ways it's obvious. You can't write a selkie story set in the Nevada desert - not easily, anyway. You need sea. Not only that, you need sea where there are grey seals, which limits you further. And somewhere the folklore allows for the possibility of selkies - and that really narrows it down. Perhaps most importantly, it has to be a landscape you can visualise clearly. Or it does for me. 

A defined landscape can hold the shape of a story. It's why Deep Water is set in North Cornwall, specifically between Port Isaac and Boscastle - an ancient and varied terrain which encompasses dramatic cliffs, a castle, high seas, caves, a witchcraft museum - and grey seals. Half my youth was spent there, backed up by year on year of visiting the area since. 

Maybe a clear idea of the setting is essential for all writers to carry a story along, but for me the importance is on another level. The landscape is a living, breathing thing from which the magic and folklore of the region has grown. Almost a character in its own right, as important as the other characters in the story. 

I want to know how any landscape I set a story in changes through the seasons and what I'll find there - whether it's when the basking sharks arrive in Cornwall, bitterns start booming on the Avalon marshes, or barley is harvested on the Marlborough hills. Any amount of detail to add to a store of background knowledge. A lot of it never gets used, but then neither does stuff you know about your characters either - like what their favourite colour would be, what their grandfather did for a living, or where they buy their shoes. Somehow it feels useful to know about it when you're writing. But is it essential to the reader? 

No. Of course not. But it does make a difference to the writing.

As a child I read two kinds of books. The ones my mother thought were awful and should be banned (she meant Enid Blyton) and the others. Children don't discriminate in the way you'd expect. For years, Enid Blyton won. It didn't matter to me (or not that much) that the background detail was highly inaccurate, the stories incredibly sexist and filled with the worst kind of bullies imaginable, because the main thing was the kids were busy catching gangs of criminals without any adults around (apart from unnamed servants who made picnics) and everything was tasting so much nicer out of doors. (I even tried ginger beer thanks to Enid. Hated it.)

But do I remember a single storyline from an Enid Blyton book? No, except one. An ancient copy of Enid Blyton's Nature Lover's Book I once came across, where the children's uncle took them on nature rambles each month to point out what you might find out in the countryside through the seasons. That knowledge stuck. Her most nerdy, possibly boring book, but the only one I could tell you anything about. 

So what about the other writers, the not Enids? Once I started reading more widely, I ended up enjoying many of them far more (though I would never admit it to my mother). My world expanded hugely through these books, way beyond catching crims and eating picnics outdoors. And unlike Enid's books, I still remember them. Philippa Pearce, Susan Cooper, Ursula Le Guin and Alan Garner (to name a few) presented whole new worlds, very real, rich with detail. Firmly fixed in landscapes you could really visualise, as integral as the characters were to the story. (Even fantasy landscapes like Earthsea - once read, you can never forget those islands and can only wish they were real so you could go there...)

In many ways, all writers could benefit from being more like Enid. Not caring particularly about content but sticking to a well trodden formula that spells success. Writing a rich landscape into your story doesn't often translate into financial gain. And these days, big publishing advances are usually reserved for TV celebrities (or people married into royalty) to write whatever they like. They are today's Enids.

Of course there are lots of very successful, non-celebrity writers whose books are filled with glorious landscapes ( I won't provide a list for fear of missing people out and offending writer friends) - but most of them have day jobs too. Depth and richness of story isn't as valued nearly as much as being a big name on TV.

A very kind reviewer once compared my writing to Susan Cooper's Greenwitch or Alan Garner's early novels. Landscape is integral to those books too. But would Alan Garner or Susan Cooper get published today? In times when everyone, including children, travel widely, does anyone care any more about the ground they're walking on - or the way magic and folklore is tied to that land? I really hope so. But on gloomy days I can't help wondering. 

Maybe landscape nerds are a dying breed and we face extinction. 

By Lu Hersey

PS. But in case that isn't happening just yet, if anyone's interested, a new edition of Deep Water is now available from lovely indie publisher Tangent Books (bookshops can order via Central Books too). It has an AMAZING cover, thanks to a fellow folklore enthusiast and talented artist, Rhi Wynter. And if I say so myself, the setting makes it perfect for a summer holiday read (especially somewhere by the sea). 

Alternatively you could buy another book written by one of the popular celebrity children's writers. There are lots of them, they're available everywhere - and probably not a landscape in sight.☺ 

A Book by its Cover by Paul May

I’m not sure whether ‘You can’t judge a book by its cover’ is a proverb or a metaphor or a piece of advice. If it’s a piece of advice, I’ve always ignored it. And if it’s true than I wonder why publishers spend so much time trying to get the cover right and why it caused such a kerfuffle when Waterstone’s recently turned all the books round to show the blurb on the back.

My kind of cover. This was published in 1944,
not long after Visitors from London.

Last month I wrote about the book which won the Carnegie in 1940, and Penny Dolan wondered ‘how the book worked with the readership rather than the library judging panel’. That’s a question that’s hard to answer after all this time, but it made me think about how I chose books when I was a child, and about the books I read and enjoyed myself. 

It's a book with children in it. I expect they're visiting
 from London. I would not have taken this off the
 library shelf, which is a shame because I might have enjoyed it.

My period of peak children’s book reading came between 1960 and 1966. I read a lot of books in that time, but I never owned any of them. They all came from the library. I don’t know if I’m unique, but in my family, back in the 1950s and early 1960s we all read a lot but we didn’t own or buy books. Penny mentioned that most children’s books these days are bought by parents and grandparents. I’m sure this was true back then of those children who owned books, the ones who had the latest Arthur Ransome or Noel Streatfeild delivered to the end of their bed each Christmas. But my reading was completely unmediated by my parents, or by any adult other than the children’s librarian at my local library who chose which books to buy, if such a person existed. 

Same colour but a world of difference.

And so I had two main ways to choose a book. The first was to look for anything by Enid Blyton and the second, deployed when I couldn’t find a Blyton I hadn’t read, was to look for something with a cover that looked equally exciting. If it was good, I’d then read everything by that author. Once I’d exhausted those possibilities (and there wasn’t an unlimited supply of my kind of book) I’d select books almost at random and read a bit. If the first page was good, I’d read the rest. I’ve never been a reader of blurbs.

The promise of excitement

Even more excitement

My lockdown reading of Carnegie winners has now taken me as far as 1950. Based on their covers there is only one of those winners that I would definitely have read back then, and it’s the only one I did read—Pigeon Post. The Arthur Ransome covers are an inspired piece of branding that makes them stand out, even today, from everything else around them. I might have read The Circus is Coming too, but it would have been in the third category, a browsed book where the first page hooked me in.

No chance. Even a bit scary!

 I would definitely not even have opened The Radium Woman or Visitors from London. Sea Change by Richard Armstrong looks like the sort of book they’d give you to read at school and Agnes Allen’s The Story of Your Home is a book I would have been terribly disappointed to receive for Christmas, even though, as I’ve said already, books were not given at Christmas, or any other time, in my family. I wouldn’t have been interested in gnomes, either, or ponies, and the opening pages of We Couldn’t leave Dinah are way too ponyish for me, or rather, for the boy I was then.

A pony and a stable? I don't think so.
Why no evil Nazis on the cover?

Back in the early sixties most, if not all of those early Carnegie winners would have still been on the library shelves for me to take home. I’m sitting here trying to figure out what I would have made of them back then if I had been made to read them, or if they had been read to me. (As far as I can remember we never had a daily story time at my primary school, and I didn’t have bedtime stories at home after the age of about five, but I had three younger sisters so you can see why!) 

The main problem with many of these books for the me-back-then is that there is too much in them about adults. That would have stopped me for sure, so Eve Garnett, Eleanor Doorly, Kitty Barne and Eric Linklater all fail that test. It would have put me off the Noel Streatfeild too, but there’s enough fun and action to have made it work for me. The gnomes in The Little Grey Men are very old and the whole thing is a bit weird and Walter de la Mare is very weird and there are adults there too. Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse is a special case because it is very much, or would have seemed to me then, a girls’ book, not so much because it’s about a girl as because it goes on about loveliness most of the time, and even when people aren’t lovely you just know it’s going to turn out fine in the end. It’s a terrific book which I’ll write more about later, but ten-year-old me would never have read it. A girl and a unicorn on the cover! No way! (Oh, and quite a spoiler that as well.)

Anyway, by the time I was eleven or twelve the covers of the thrillers and detective stories my mother brought home from the library were more enticing than anything I could find in the children’s section and that was me done with children’s books pretty much for the next ten years. I don’t think I was so very different from many other children, then or now. I read what I wanted to read, and mostly the books I read were by writers who never won the Carnegie Medal—Enid Blyton, John Pudney, M Pardoe, Richmal Crompton, Laura Lee Hope (yes, I read The Bobbsey Twins)!

More modern readers, too, like to go their own way. Roald Dahl, Jaqueline Wilson, JK Rowling, none has won the Carnegie Medal, which I think tells you that if you really want to know about the history and pattern of children’s reading over the past 80 years, the list of winners of the Carnegie is probably not the best, and certainly not the only place to look.

Now that's what I call a cover!

And finally I have to admit that, although my taste has broadened a little since I was ten years old, if I want a book I can't put down I turn to the likes of Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, John Harvey, Ian Rankin, Sara Paretsky or, lately, Adrian McKinty. First the name, then the cover. And I love Dick Francis from his golden period in the 1960s and 1970s—another find from my mother's piles of library books.

If I'm browsing in the library or bookshop I still choose books the same way. First by the author, then by the cover. If it looks like my kind of thing I read a few paragraphs and that's enough for me to tell if I'll want to finish it. So, best keep those covers turned to the front, Waterstone's, at least as far as I'm concerned.

Paul May's website is here.

A Grown-Up's Christmas in Wales by Susie Day

Do you have an obligatory festive read? A book that you read every winter, or that the family share together?

When I was small, my mother would read us the ten daily stories leading to the 25th from Enid Blyton’s  A Christmas Book (since republished, along with other seasonal offerings, as Christmas Stories). I was especially fond of the Yule Log (if disappointed year after year that it was not the chocolate kind), and mistletoe-victim Balder the Beautiful, which gave my small self angsty pangs and a bit of a crush.

More recently, I’ve tried to reread Susan Cooper’s magnificent The Dark Is Rising - a classic I only read after my sister took me to an amazing theatre production when I was a teen - on Christmas Eve, usually leaving it far too late to get past the first few chapters. Then there’s a slight cheat: The Children of Green Knowe is a book I find hard going (despite loving others in the series as a child) but the BBC 1980s adaptation is the annual soundtrack to putting up the tree, wobbly soundtrack and all.

I write for children; it’s not unusual for me to read - and reread - children’s fiction. But my nostalgic urge come December to recreate something - an atmosphere, a feeling - from that time of my small angst-pang self feels like something more akin to homesickness, or its Welsh cousin, hiraeth: a longing for a past place, perhaps one that has never been. I feel it whenever Greg Lake’s I Believe in Father Christmas twiddles along and revives my strange kidlike adoration for ‘eyes full of twinkles and smiles,’ and complete obliviousness to the ENTIRE REST OF THE SONG.

I am reminded of my niece who, on her first Christmas of ‘knowing’ (perhaps a year younger than might have been ideal), declared mournfully, ‘It’s not the same.’ I think I want it to be the same.

And of course it’s not the same. Our families grow and shrink and grow around us; the places we call home shift. New traditions come and moss the gaps. Not the same, but good, and ours, and before long beloved.

So this year - when I feel as human beings we’ve all done quite a lot of ‘knowing,’ maybe a bit more than we’d have liked - I think I’ll read something new.


Susie Day - books for kids about families, feelings, friendship and funny stuff
https://susieday.com/
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Thank you, Enid Blyton

Something a little different this month. I'm often asked about the issue of books for young people and responsibility -- the possibility of triggering, etc. This is the true story of how seriously I took books as a child in 1970s Belfast. 

Thank You, Enid Blyton

Enid Blyton barely mentioned bedrooms.

Why should she when there were so many

More exciting places to fall into adventure:

Secret passages, ruined castles, treasure islands?

Bedrooms were for sneaking out of at exactly midnight.

The Cregagh Estate in the 1970s, where even the rooves were flat,

Couldn’t compete with the Five Find Outers spying

On suspects from behind the windows of village teashops;

Or Barney the circus boy who tramped the kingdom

With a monkey on his shoulder, sleeping under hedges.

Barney was tall and noble with strange blue eyes,

A secret sorrow, and a long-lost father,

And if I couldn’t join midnight feasts at Malory Towers

I wouldn’t have minded snuggling up under a hedge with him.

Enid had spoilt me for the front bedroom at number 33,

For brown flowery wallpaper and brushed-nylon sheets.

Enid knew I should be opening my window onto Mistletoe Farm  

With a pony in the stable, and hens in the yard.

At the very least there should be a secret passage.

My life was horribly devoid of secret passages.

I thought it must be something to do with Belfast.

The Famous Five never fell into adventure round here.

I rode my bike round the estate looking for lost dogs to love

And empty houses which would turn out to be

The headquarters of midnight-signalling smugglers.

The old lady next door rustled in long black skirts

And didn’t like children. Clearly a smuggler’s accomplice.

So one July in 1976, I crept out of bed and outside

To spy. From my vantage point on the front steps

Number 31 looked innocent enough, its windows dark

And blank. But I was too well-read to be fooled by the ordinary.

I had my torch, my notebook to record Suspicious Movements,

And a stolen packet of custard creams to stave off starvation

Should the watch prove lengthy. Enid had taught me well.

Daddy, pulling open the front door at ten past midnight,

In blue Y-fronts and a rage worthy of Uncle Quentin,

Didn’t know which to be more shocked at: the spying or the fact

That, tucked into my brushed-nylon dressing gown pocket,

Was the front door key, ready to let me back in when my task was

Done. I wasn’t stupid enough to lock myself out.