October, October in October by Paul May

It might say something about Katya Balen's 2022 Carnegie winner October, October that I've spent more time thinking about the parents in the story than about October herself, the protagonist and narrator. Or, more likely, it says something about me. But it occurs to me that the way parents are depicted in the procession of Carnegie winners over more than 80 years is interesting in itself.

Great cover by Angela Harding

Before I get to that though I should say that I did enjoy October, October. The book is written in an intense and often poetic style, especially at the beginning. A kind of stream-of-conciousness pours out of October, and you have to give the author a bit of leeway here, as she's trying to convey the heightened emotional state of the young narrator in language that it's hard to believe an eleven-year-old, even a precocious one, would have at her command. 

Eleven-year-old October lives off-grid in the woods with her father. Her mother wasn't able to handle life in the woods and left when October was about four years old. Here's October talking about her:

"In my head I think I remember the day she left but the memory is like trying to hold water in my cupped hands and it trickles away before my eyes. There are wisps of a woman holding on to my hand and I feel my whole body being pulled along by the tide of another person running and my legs can't keep up. There's crying and I know that I let out a shriek so loud it pierced the sky and the birds scattered."

This is great, but the voice is not like that of any eleven-year-old I've ever met. And the thing is, you do get carried along by it. There's no time to stop and think and, somehow, even though it ought not to, it does work.

October's mother writes to her, but October refuses to read her letters and she visits on October's birthdays, but when she does October runs away and climbs a tree. October always refers to her mother as 'the woman who is my mother.' Then, on her eleventh birthday she does as she always does and climbs a tree to get away from her mother but for some reason her dad climbs after her, falls, and is badly injured.

Now October has to go and live with her mother in London and has to go to school for the first time. There is also a baby barn owl which October is looking after (against her father's better judgement) and which she is forced to take to an owl rescue centre because they won't allow it in the hospital. I particularly liked the sections about school and wasn't surprised to learn that Katya Balen had worked in special schools. Yusuf, who befriends October, is a great character. I've met a few kids like Yusuf, but none quite like October. As for what happens, well, you'll have to read the book. 

But what about the parents? In the early days of the Carnegie parents were just parents. They might be dead, as in The Circus is Coming, or away from home on active service like Captain Walker in the Swallows and Amazons series, or they might just be there, pretty much in the background. They organised the children's lives, told them what to do or not do, cooked their meals and in general kept out of the way of the story. But until 1967 they didn't get divorced, and the relationships between the siblings and parents in merged families were never part of the plots or subject matter of the books. The Owl Service was the book that changed all that, but it was just an outlier, and in 1973 we could still read, in The Ghost of Thomas Kempe:

'Has anyone seen my pipe?' said Mr Harrison.

'On the dresser,' said Mrs Harrison, without looking up from the sink.'

We were still in the world of The Tiger Who Came to Tea. Daddy might come home from work and take us to the cafe. But as we moved into the 1980s families became less happy and settled and the books became more frequently about the relationships between the adults in the stories and the children. I'm thinking here of  books like The Scarecrows, The Changeover and Whispers in the Graveyard. I wouldn't want to suggest that parents and their problems never appeared in earlier Carnegie winners. Indeed the second winner, Constance Garnett's The Family at One End Street is almost as much about the adults as it is about the children, but there was definitely a change in the 1980s, so that when I started writing books for children in the 1990s it seemed completely natural to write about situations where parents were divorcing and finding new partners. I worked in primary schools and there were many, many single parents and many complicated families. Children's fiction, especially realistic children's fiction, does reflect changes in society, even if it does so with a little bit of a time-lag, which I suspect may be to do with the ages of the children's authors.

But in October, October I think we see something different—a book which reflects changing styles of parenting. When I read the book I was at first unable to believe that any parents would allow a five-year-old to dictate their lives in quite the way that October does. Surely if she's four, or five, or six and you think she should spend time with her mother you don't let her climb a tree and scream. No, in my world you would strap her in the car and take her to your house and wait for the tantrum to be over. 

Then I remembered those parent-teacher interviews where parents would tell me they could do nothing with their five-year-old at home. The child would trash the whole house in a fury. They had to lock their most precious possessions away to save them. The parents described their children as if they were a force of nature over which they had absolutely no control. And yet, mysteriously, those same children were often perfectly well-behaved at school. I even sometimes had parents bring their children to me and ask me to tell them off, as their own tellings-off were like water off a duck's back. (I didn't do it!)

It never occurred to me that parents could be so dominated by their children until I got my first teaching job. A five-year-old in my class wasn't eating his school dinners and I asked his mum if there was a problem. 'Oh, he never eats in front of other people,' she told me. 'He takes all his meals into another room to eat them.' That was kind of extreme, but most people of my generation are horrified when parents ask their children what they'd like to eat for tea. When I was a child I ate what was put on the table in front of me or I didn't eat. We didn't have choices. I had to eat things like cod roes on toast and liver and tongue (yuk!). 

And there's another old piece of grandma-style advice: Never ask a child a question to which the answer can be 'no', as in :'Would you like to go to the park?' 'Would you like to put your coat on now?' Mind you, it's the same with dogs. Not one dog in a hundred on the streets of London is properly trained these days. They almost never walk obediently to heel. The other day I saw a miniature dachshund dragging its owner along the pavement . . . grumble . . . grumble . . .

I felt for October's somewhat ineffectual parents, and I was glad (spoiler alert) that they managed to sort things out in the end, but I'm not the only reader to have felt that they had created something of a monster in their daughter. There's a curious parallel here with my own novel, Rain (2003). It's about a girl, about 13 years old, who has spent her whole life living on the road with her mum, Max, in an old bus. Max hates schools, authority, rules etc etc. Max is an artist, a painter. She believes that she and Rain are just fine together, travelling together, meeting up with friends at fairs and festivals. But Rain has started to want a different life. She wants to go to school, and she wants to find out about her father.

I never really liked this cover.
I'd rather have seen Rain working
 on a car engine
or punching someone.

I knew people like Max and I had a lot of sympathy with them, but I'd seen how idealism can get worn away by the realities of life and I'd met what used to be called New Age Travellers who'd given in and sent their children to school. But what I was most interested in was what it was like for those children, and for Rain, when they moved from one kind of life into another, and that's exactly what October, October is concerned with. It's about October, and the changes she goes through. But then I gave my book to a friend who was a therapist and she hated Max. She thought Max was selfish and really not a great parent. But I thought that Max was Max. At least I'd made her seem real enough for my friend to dislike her, so that was good. And the story was about Rain. Without Max being Max there was no story.

And that's how I feel in the end about the parents in October, October. If they're not the way they are, there's no story, and the story is a great one. In any case, I doubt very much if children are at all bothered about whether October's parents are doing a good job or not.

You can still buy Rain on Amazon as a paperback or a Kindle edition. I'm not sure the publishers really knew how to market it, but I think it stands up pretty well. If only it had been given a cover like October, October's by Angela Harding, a cover which was able, on its own, to persuade many Amazon reviewers to buy it. And while I'm on the self-promotion I also wrote a book about a boy looking after an injured bird, a bit like October does with her owl. It's called Cat Patrol is still available here.

The publishers spent months
getting this cover right. Peter Bailey did the 
black and white illustrations but they 
didn't like his cover. Guy Parker-Rees did this one.
I have the reject covers somewhere but I can't find them!

If you like stories about fathers and daughters living off-grid in the woods I recommend Debra Granik's 2018 movie Leave No Trace. It's very different from October, October but makes an interesting comparison.

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