Friendships between Children and Animals - by Jess Butterworth

As a child, like many others, I adored animals. I still do. I’m grateful that I grew up around them: whether it was our family pet dog, Tiny (he came with the name), a dachshund corgi mix with the smallest legs ever; the horses and sheep in the fields around the village; or the goats and cows wandering outside our house when we lived in India.

I remember forming incredibly close bonds with animals, especially during our time in India, where the remoteness of the mountain we lived on meant that there wasn't always other children around. The other profession I dreamed of (along with writer and explorer) was vet.

For some children, animals lead to their first encounters of life and death. When I was six and in India, one of our dogs got taken and eaten by a leopard at dusk. I was devastated and my Grandma tried to explain to me about wild animals and food chains. A few years later in England, I went to feed our chickens in the morning and found only feathers and some orange fur stuck to the wire of the hatch.

I’ll never forget the look of horror on my sister’s face when she got home from school one day to discover one of her hamsters eating the other.

Months later, my other sister thought she’d unearthed alien worms in the rabbit cage. It turned out the rabbit had mated with a wild rabbit on one of her escapes from the garden run, and the wriggling pink things were, in fact, baby rabbits.

This part of my childhood is reflected in my writing and my books are filled with animals and the friendships that can happen between children and animals.  

Here are some of my favourite stories that also explore this friendship.

Northern Lights by Philip Pullman 

In this world, every human has a daemon, an animal companion that is also their soul. A child’s daemon is free to change form, from creature to creature, whereas an adult’s daemon remains the same.

Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne 

Christopher Robin explores the Hundred Acre Wood, going on adventures with its inhabitants, Winnie the Pooh, Eeyore the donkey, Piglet, Kanga and Roo, Tigger, Rabbit and Owl.

The Last Wild by Piers Torday 

This story begins in a sterile world where animals no longer exist, until a cockroach asks Kester for help and he’s flung into an adventure to save the last of the animals and the wild.

James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl 

In a bid to escape his wicked aunts, James befriends oversized insects inside a giant peach.  

The Butterfly Lion by Michael Morpurgo 

Bertie rescues a white lion cub in Africa but when he’s sent to boarding school he’s forced to give the cub away and the lion ends up in a circus. Bertie promises to find the lion one day.  

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling 

Mowgli the boy is raised by wolves in the jungle and has many animal friends including Bagheera the black panther and Baloo the bear.

There are so many wonderful books out there and I’m certain I’ve missed a bunch. What are your favourite books that explore friendships between animals and children?

Jess Butterworth

Monica Edwards - by Ruth Hatfield

In need of some literary Christmas chocolate (tonsillitis having put paid to scoffing much of the real stuff), I’ve been gorging myself on Monica Edwards’ Punchbowl Farm series for the last couple of weeks. It seems a bit mean to write a post about books that aren’t actually in print anymore, and in some cases are quite hard to get hold of, but I remembered loving these as a child, and on rereading they seemed even more worth shouting about. They come under that genre of book which probably gets called nostalgic and cosy these days – and cosy they ultimately are – but I’d probably just call them 1950s Super Fun. 

For anyone not familiar with these books, they’re about the four Thornton children whose parents buy the derelict Punchbowl farm. One of the children, Dion, throws himself into reclaiming the farm and getting it running again, while the sort-of-main character, his sister Lindsey, loves nature more for itself than for what humans can make out of it. Many adventures ensue.

The plots aren’t complex, and although things often don’t go well, disasters are generally mopped up fine. The odd touch of the supernatural doesn’t even raise a sceptical eyebrow – Edwards does it subtly, as if to suggest that spirits may well exist, simply because the history of a land is always alive within it.

Together, the contrasting ideas and mutual affection of Dion and Lindsey give the whole series an extra depth. Monica Edwards also writes beautifully, although I guess it was probably easier to get away with waxing lyrical at a time when rhetorical lace-making was a bit more acceptable to the general reader (and editor). Her characters can be stereotypical, but they’re also strong and credible (even Andrea, the eldest sister, does stray away from being fashionable and moaning about wanting to move to the city for long enough to help fight heath fires and ride horses).

When I moved from the Punchbowl Farm books to reading a biography of Monica Edwards by Brian Parks, I understood more how she made her books so consistently vivid – she actually lived on Punchbowl Farm (though it was called Punch Bowl Farm), having bought it as derelict and done it up, together with her husband and children (though not four of them). Many of the happenings in the books are real life ones, and almost all the animals were real.

In Monica Edwards’ other books – most notably the Romney Marsh series – she does similar things: They’re set in a re-named Rye Harbour, where she once lived, and they’re about the vicar’s daughter, which she was, although the vicar’s daughter’s character is actually based on her own daughter Shelley, not herself (Monica Edwards as a girl was pretty wild, by all accounts). Tons of the other characters are explicitly based on real people, too. I find this idea terrific but terrifying at the same time – what on earth did all those people say when they found themselves written undisguised in bestselling books? I guess it does explain why there’s a lot of laughter and humour about the books, and very few characters who are depicted negatively…

These books are high on my list of Books I Wish I’d Written, but I do wonder if they would be published now. Obviously I think they stand tall on their own merits, but do publishers still put out these sorts of poetically-written but ultimately cosy books? Or do we have enough of them already, and children’s books have moved on? At a gathering recently, somebody asked which modern children’s books were just pleasure to read, and I could only think of the Harry Potter books. Does anyone know of any more out there? I’d love to read some modern equivalents to the Punchbowl Farm books – rhetorical lace-making and all. Any recommendations?

“Winter Is Coming”: Favourite Books for Long, Dark Nights by Emma Barnes

Not for children!

The days are dark; night creeps in early; there is frost in the air. 

I'm not a fan of winter. (I always get that frisson of dread whenever the Starks declare “Winter is Coming” in George RR Martin's Game of Thrones.  And I don't live anywhere near any Wildings.) Partly that's because British winters are grey and damp, rather than snowy and crisp. But while the reality of crawling out of bed on a dreary, dismal morning doesn't grab me, winter in children's fiction is a different thing.

Snow. Woods. Wolves. A crackling fire. Stark leafless trees. Shadows everywhere. This I enjoy.

Real life adventure

Laura Ingalls Wilder's childhood, in a log cabin in the deep forest of Wisconsin, always gave me the same winter glow. There really is no better winter read than The Little House in the Big Woods. (Ma, bundled up against the cold, whacking a bear that she thinks is a cow. Pa playing the violin during the long nights. Christmas, when Laura receives her beloved rag doll, Charlotte.)

Unless, that is, you prefer The Long Winter, where the township is trapped by blizzards, the train lines closed, the Ingalls family are using a coffee mill to grind out their last handfuls of wheat and slowly everyone begins to starve...

Classic Fantasy

That sense of threat is also there in The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. Ostensibly it's the fantasy “Dark” that is the danger, but much of the menace comes from the weather itself: the snow that falls and falls, the numbing cold, the village community that is slowly being cut off so that finally everyone has to take refuge in the old manor house.

I've always felt that Susan Cooper must have read another winter classic, The Box of Delights, as a child – for there are all kinds of echoes, most of all in the particular blend of English landscape and history, magical threat and snowy weather. Who can help a shudder of anticipation on reading that cryptic warning “The wolves are running...”

Urban snowscapes

Yet winter doesn't have to be about deep woods and rural landscapes. As a very small child, I was transfixed by Ezra Jack Keat's The Snowy Day, which uses an urban setting to explore the feelings of fascination and wonder of a small child confronting something as amazing as SNOW. It's something about the simplicity and immediacy of this book that makes it so effective.

It brings home the fact that children's books still, often, ignore the urban landscape. The Snowy Day was, apparently, inspired by Keat's childhood neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York. (It also has the distinction of being one of the first American children's books to feature a black lead character. That was in 1964. Decades later, diversity, or lack of it, is still a hot issue.)

Narnia

In general though, winter seems to be about magic, rather than real life, for children's authors. Maybe it's because it reasserts the power of nature – of snow, storms, the biting cold – in a way that makes us feel less sure of our human technology, more aware of the power of our natural surroundings. In the depths of winter, it is easier to believe in supernatural forces. Perhaps we feel less in control, more in touch with the past, more in need of help?

The excitement, magic and danger of winter is perhaps nowhere better expressed than in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. When spring comes, it marks the beginning of hope and the end of the dark magic. And yet CS Lewis draws every drop of excitement from his winter setting: the fun of sledges, the terror of wolves, the wonderful warmth of hot chocolate or of snuggling in a fur coat. (Even if you don't approve of fur coats, you can still enter into the Pevensies' enjoyment of them.)

 Fairytales

This link between winter and magic seems so strong that it even percolates into adult literature. Most mainstream adult fiction keeps its distance from the magical, but the bestselling The Snow Child combines the setting of Alaska and a pioneering couple determined to make a life there (almost Laura Ingalls Wilder in its way) with a traditional fairytale fable, when they meet a child who seems strangely at home in the icy landscape, and surely possessed of magical powers.

A Russian folk tale is the inspiration for the story, and is just one of those included in the classic collection Old Peter's Book of Tales by Swallows and Amazons author Arthur Ransome.

The Snow Queen, the most wintery of fairytales, is still going strong of course.

 And in case anybody doubted the combined power of fairytales, princesses and snow, Frozen is a recent reminder of their continuing appeal to the child's imagination. (Visiting schools for World Book Day, I've met  dozens of little “Elsas” and “Anas”.)

My Winter Tale

illustration by Emma Chichester Clark

Wolves, forests and fairytales were all at the back of my mind when I wrote my book Wolfie. Even though it is a contemporary story (with a helping of fantasy), about a girl called Lucie, and her adventures at home and school, as winter closes in the atmosphere becomes mysterious and magical.

The feeling I aimed to create is brilliantly evoked in this illustration by Emma Chichester Clark.

New Titles

Its fascinating to see that even in these days of central heating and cars chauffeured by mum and dad, where bad weather might seem just a passing annoyance to children glued to screens, winter has maintained its magic charm. The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell and Frost Hollow Hall  by Emma Carroll are two recent books which use winter – and its motifs of snow, woods, magic and wolves - to work their magic.


 I'm planning to curl up with one or other of them when the long, dark nights draw in.

What is your favourite winter read?








------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Emma's Website
Emma’s Facebook Fanpage
Emma on Twitter - @EmmaBarnesWrite

Emma's Wild Thing series for 8+ about the naughtiest little sister ever. (Cover - Jamie Littler)
"Hilarious and heart-warming" The Scotsman

 Wolfie is a story of wolves, magic and snowy woods...
(Cover: Emma Chichester Clark)
"Funny, clever and satisfying..." Books for Keeps

Is There More Science in Fantasy than Real Life? Thinking About Science in Children's Books - by Emma Barnes

This week is British Science Week, when events up and down the country will be celebrating maths, science, technology and engineering. Many of these events will be directed at children and happening in schools. It's one of only many initiatives aimed at interesting children and teenagers in science. But while there may be plenty of workshops and demonstrations, what about the role of children's fiction?

Fiction, after all, is where children see themselves reflected.  It is also where they explore possibilities.  When I longed to be a ballet dancer, if was because I had read Ballet Shoes.  If I thought about becoming a vet it was because I was neck deep in James Herriot.  When I decided to study history, my interest had first been fired by Jean Plaidy's Young Elizabeth and Barbara Willard's Mantlemass books.

Where are the stories that excite children about science?

As I said in this post, scientists, when they do appear in children's books at all, are often of a type – bad, mad and dangerous to know. If you are trying to interest a young person in science, or maybe find fiction books that a science-mad kid might adore, you're likely to have a tough time.  Children's books in which science plays any role in the plot, or is portrayed realistically, are few and far between.

(This is true of adult fiction, too.  In fact this site, Lablit, is an attempt to address the problem.)

Even where science seems to be to the forefront, it often isn't.  In the classic A Wrinkle In Time, heroine Meg's parents are scientists.  But it is the power of love that enables Meg to save her brother, not scientific discovery.  It's really a spiritual message that L'Engle is interested in, more than the scientific principles of time travel.  In another classic, Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, the scientists have created the immensely intelligent rats, but are too stupid to understand their own creation, while the rats' task is to escape and try and create a better way of life.  

In fact the theme of both books - scientists messing up, and more humane types dealing with the consequences - is probably a perennial in children's books.

Even the recent emergence of geek cool, epitomised by those nerdy, scientific genii of the Big Bang Theory, while making it easier for any kid that likes to hang out in a physic lab, or spend his or her time coding, hasn't done much to alter the content of children's fiction.  At least, not on the shelves of the bookshops I know.

I have no science background, but twice I have used science in my books, and in a positive way.  Even more unusually, I've done so within the form of funny, middle grade fiction.  In Jessica Haggerthwaite, Witch Dispatcher Jessica (who wants to be a Famous Scientist one day) designs her own experiment to test and evaluate the results of her mother's magical potions on the tomato plants. The result is surprising for everyone – but as a good scientist Jessica soon works out all the implications. It is actually the only piece of children's fiction I know in which a child conducts a serious scientific experiment.

In Wolfie, the heroine, Lucie, is given a pet dog – which just happens to be a talking wolf. At the climax of the story it becomes very important indeed whether Wolfie is a dog or a wolf, and luckily it so happens that Lucie's neighbour is a distinguished Professor of Zoology and expert on Canid and Lupine Studies. (I say luckily - in fact, this is something that Lucie has to uncover with some difficulty.) The Professor's judgement is rigorously scientific – but there's a twist...

These are the only two of my books with a scientific element, and the interesting thing is that they both feature a strong magical element. Jessica Haggerthwaite is not actually a fantasy, but her mother, Mrs Haggerthwaite, is of the firm opinion that she is a professional witch and acts accordingly. Wolfie – complete with wolves that talk and fly – is definitely fantasy.  And yet, science and fantasy are opposites - aren't they?

Or perhaps not.  If science rarely crops up among "real life" children's books, then maybe there is a reason.  For science is an activity sealed off from the everyday lives of children - and indeed, of most non-scientists. Amateur scientists rarely ascend the rooftops these days to observe the stars through their telescopes, or gather fossils for museums to display.  Science goes on in dedicated laboratories barred to children, and wrapped around with Health and Safety regulations.  Its practitioners are almost always paid, professional experts.

So perhaps the practice of science, the devising of theorems, the following of formula, the investigations of nature and the attempts to understand and control it, are better represented in fantasy, than everyday life? Professor Snape with his Potions laboratory, and Professor Sprout with her careful Herbology experiments at Hogwarts may be the best representations of a scientific laboratory (minus the Health and Safety regulations) available to children. Diana Wynne Jones's Ogre Downstairs, with the chemistry set that goes drastically wrong, or her  Charmed Life with the dangerous, illicit dragonsblood, conveys the perilous nature of certain substances better than any real life scenario. (Charmed Life also features linked worlds – an idea taken from modern physics.)  And then there is Philip Pullman's Northern Lights with its mysterious Dust...

A recent report into What Kids Are Reading suggests that children's choices of books tends to be evenly divided between funny real-life stories, and fantasy. Is it actually in the fantasy section of their bookshelves that children get the greatest chance to think about what is such an important part of real life -  science?

 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Emma's series for 8+ Wild Thing about the naughtiest little sister ever is published by Scholastic. 
"Hilarious and heart-warming" The Scotsman

 Wolfie is published by Strident.  It is a story of wolves, magic and snowy woods...
"A real cracker of a book" Armadillo 
"Funny, clever and satisfying...thoroughly recommended" Books for Keeps

Emma's Website
Emma’s Facebook Fanpage
Emma on Twitter - @EmmaBarnesWrite