Walking Home from School—Then and Now—by Paul May

A dozen Carnegie winners.
Look Both Ways by Jason Reynolds won in 2021

On his website Jason Reynolds has a film, Dear Dreamer, (there's a link lower down) which was produced 'in collaboration with the hardworking students, educators and dreamers of Atlanta.' In the film he says 'I think I just want to create work which makes young people feel cared for.' This reminded me of Elizabeth Acevedo's statement that 'I hold young people more tenderly,' (than adult readers). She was suggesting, I think, that in her adult work she is more honest—things are less likely to turn out well there. She allows more hope to younger readers. 

Jason Reynolds means something different, or maybe something extra, because he does show great tenderness towards his characters. Bad things happen but people make it through by caring for each other. The extra thing he's saying is that by writing about the lives of people just like his readers he is caring for them. 'I want people to read it and think . . . yo, this feels real.'

You might expect that characters who feel real to readers in the inner city somewhere in the USA in 2021 wouldn't feel the same to a reader who grew up in a leafy dormitory village on the outskirts of London in the 1950s and yet in many ways they do. Look Both Ways is a collection of stories about things that happen during the journey from school to home. It's a great idea, and a far more straightforward way of freeing children from the tyranny of adult supervision than bumping off their parents in the first paragraph or two, as has been known to happen in children's fiction. And as soon as I'd finished reading, memories started bubbling up from my own childhood. Some of those events even echoed those in Look Both Ways.

Jason Reynolds says in Dear Dreamer: 'You knew who had the mean dogs and whose dog was always off the leash . . . You knew who had the rottweiler, who had the pitbull.' Well, we knew where the corgis lived. They were halfway up School Lane in a bungalow with a gate that was sometimes left open, and if it was open half a dozen corgis would race out, yapping and snapping at your ankles. You had to run fast. Not far beyond that bungalow there was a haunted house and then, after the abandoned orchard, was the main road where I once scared a driver into terrifying anger by (according to her) running in front of her car. I failed to look both ways. And then there was the conker tree incident, which gave me an early experience of betrayal and injustice.

I was walking home with my mate Chris (AKA Bubbles), exploring an alleyway we'd never taken before, when we looked over a gate and saw a conker tree on the opposite side of a field. As we were wondering whether it was OK to run across and grab some, a boy from the top class arrived and told us it was fine. So we went and fetched some high-class conkers and when we got back to the gate he was gone. 

The next morning in assembly the headteacher announced that he'd been watching from his office and seen two boys trespassing on the field behind the school. He demanded that the boys owned up, so of course we kept quiet. We'd heard that one before. But then that big boy who'd encouraged us put his hand up and said he knew who did it. What a creep! We both got the strap for that.

Later, we took a look at that conker tree and couldn't understand how we'd failed to notice that it was really just on the edge of the school field, and the evil headteacher would have had a great view. It was almost as if, on leaving the school gates and turning right instead of left we'd entered a different universe, disconnected from the one we normally lived in. And that's kind of what happens in Look Both Ways. You think things are separate but it turns out they're all connected.

That space between home and school is fascinating. It's a boundary zone, a no-man's-land, where all kinds of things can happen. It can be a time and space to make or cement friendships, or a time to learn to be independent. Walking home on your own for the first time is a big deal, as Fatima discovers in Look Both Ways. The first time she does it, Fatima falls and scrapes her knees and meets a crazy woman with pink trousers, but she doesn't tell her mother because 'that would be an end to the babysitterless life . . . and she didn't want that because even though that first walk was rough, anything was worth trying again if it meant she could come home and be alone in her house . . .'

Her mother says, when she hears about the knees, 'I keep telling you, you have to pay attention, sweetheart . . . You have to look both ways and all ways. That even includes, despite what your dad says, down.'

You need to pay attention when you read this book. There are ten linked stories about kids on their way home from school and the stories delve deep into the lives of those children and their families, but they do this with a very light touch. They observe something very important about school life, something I don't recall seeing explored before in this kind of detail, and something that it's very easy to forget about if you're an adult, and especially if you're a teacher. It's the fact that any given child only really knows a handful of the others in the class.

The different groups of kids and individuals intersect with each other throughout the book, so characters in one story appear in other stories but you see how those groups and kids are known to others only tangentially, by their reputations or by rumour. So, for example, in the book's second story there's a gang called the 'Low Cuts.' 

"All I can tell you is if you ever see John John Watson, Francy Baskin, Trista Smith, or especially Britton "Bit" Burns—the Low Cuts—better watch your pockets. These four, they'll steal anything that jingles." 

The Low Cuts steal small change wherever they can find it. No one but the Low Cuts knows why they do it. Nor does the reader until they reach the last page of the story. 

I started thinking about my own time at school. It’s true. I knew only my own small group of friends. Sure, there were others I played football with or had classes with, but they were like work colleagues, not friends. I knew their names because I heard the register in the mornings and I'd work with them if I had to, but there's an invisible barrier between association and friendship and I don't think it's just me being unsociable. From each class I was in I can only remember a handful of people, and that goes for university too.

I value this book for the exceptional acuteness of its observation of children and the way they interact, for its humour and humanity, for the sharpness of its dialogue and for its delight in language—there's a wonderful stream-of-consciousness improvisation at the end on the theme of school buses which makes a great climax and pulls the whole thing together. Look Both Ways has qualities which I believe mean it will continue to be read for a long time, but that's not the intention of Jason Reynolds. Here's what he says at the end of Dear Dreamer: 

'I always say if my books are still being read forty years from now—in schools—they're still being taught—that the books that are introducing young people to literacy in schools—I've failed. Forty years from now we ain't figured out new books yet? Language is living, it's growing, it's expanding, it's changing, it's evolving. People are living and growing and changing and expanding and evolving. Books have to continue to do the exact same thing in order for me to see eye to eye with the young people.' 

(My transcription. Apologies for any errors. You can watch the video here.)

Reynolds's wariness about what happens to his books in schools is understandable, and his publishers, Simon and Schuster, clearly want to establish Look Both Ways as a feature of the curriculum. You might want to take a look at their comprehensive 'Reading Group Guide'. But the thing is, as an editor once said to me, books stick around for a long time. And although all that stuff about growing and changing and evolving is true, one thing I took from this book is that children don't change that much; human relations don't change that much. It's why we still read Shakespeare and Chaucer and Arthur Ransome and Noel Streatfeild. (There's a new production of Ballet Shoes at the National Theatre.) 

Sixty-odd years after I started walking home from school alone in an English village, kids are doing very similar things thousands of miles away on the other side of an ocean. And that's why I think this particular book will stick around to be read by the grandchildren of the kids who read it today.