Manolito and William by Paul May

This week I met Manolito Gafotas for the first time. Manolito is an 8-year-old boy invented by the writer, Elvira Lindo, for a radio show in Spain in the early 1990s. The first book about Manolito, Manolito Gafotas, was published in 1994 and six more followed. The last of these was published in 2002 and then there was a ten year gap before Mejor Manolo arrived in 2012. In those 20 years Manolito grew from 8 to 12 years old, so he managed to grow considerably faster than William Brown, with whom he shares certain characteristics. William grew not at all in 50 years despite the many birthdays he celebrated. 

Both William Brown and Manolito Gafotas have broken out of the world of children's literature to become part of popular culture. Elvira Lindo says in an interview that 'her creation has escaped her control, and even surpassed her.  . . . Manolito is popular culture. It's something collective. The readers already know him better than I do.' The same could be said of William, who just like Manolito has been translated into more than 20 languages and made into films, TV series and radio broadcasts, most notably, in William's case, those BBC adaptations performed by Martin Jarvis. William lives on, still 11 years old, long after the death of his creator. Happily, Manolito's creator is still very much alive.

William Brown's character was enhanced by the illustrations of Thomas Henry, just as was Manolito's by the illustrations of Emilio Urberuaga. Both characters are instantly recognisable from these illustrations but I'm sure that in both cases it's the writing that has made them so famous. William and Manolito are both well-intentioned boys who inadvertently end up in trouble and both are essentially comic creations, but the books have a sharp underlying vein of social commentary which is best appreciated by adults, and this cross-generational appeal must be a huge part of their success.

There are, however, just as many differences as similarities between the William stories and those about Manolito. William's world was an invention of its author. Richmal Crompton's niece, Richmal Ashbee, says: 'William's house was not like anywhere Richmal Crompton had ever lived . . . The greenhouse, stable, morning-room and all the rest were conjured up to meet the passing needs of the Brown family . . . The host of servants in the house, too, came from outside her own experience.' It may be that in these books Richmal Crompton caught something of the essence of a certain kind of English village life as it was between the two world wars, but she was never interested in precise details, or accuracy. The sense that the world of these books never really existed, together with the fact that William never grows old, makes the books seem timeless. That, along with the way that Crompton manages to catch something in William's character that adults recognise in their children and children recognise in themselves - a universal quality of childhood.

It is precisely this that readers all over the world recognise in Manolito Gafotas. I say all over the world, but it seems that Manolito hasn't been as successful in English. Four of the books have been translated, with Manolito becoming Manolito Four-eyes, but from the sample I've read I'm not sure that the slang of a poor barrio in Madrid translates that well into (American) English. The William books have been translated into Spanish and are very popular in Spain, but were heavily censored in the Franco era. 

Unlike William, Manolito comes from a real place, the barrio of Carabanchel in the south of Madrid. In their depiction of a working-class neighbourhood the books have something in common with Eve Garnett's The Family at One-End Street, though this is a very different world. The scene includes drug-addicts, muggers and fights. The kids do stupid things, they are a little wild, they play on the streets, but when their parents call them in for their sausages every evening they quickly head for home. Some of the reviews of the English-language versions (from the USA) were appalled by the bad example they thought the books set for children. The kids argue with their parents and teachers, they cheat (or try to) on school tests, they fight and play games of chicken. They are in fact real kids. And at the heart of the books is a tender description of family life in a tiny apartment on the third floor. 'We don't have cockroaches in our flat,' says Manolito's mother to a neighbour. 'We'd like some, but there's no room for them.'

Manolito's dad is a truck-driver who arrives home late each night. Manolito has a small brother he calls 'El Imbécil'. His mother doesn't think this is funny, and neither do those US reviewers on Amazon even though 'imbécil' has been softened in translation to 'bozo'. Elvira Lindo has strong views on the rewriting of children's books to conform to modern sensibilities. Of 'El Imbécil' she says: 'What the children tell me is that 'El Imbécil' is 'la bomba.' What for some adults was something inexplicable, for children becomes something absolutely natural; they know how to discern very well. They know that it has nothing to do with the intelligence of the character. They understand that it is an insult that has become something else. They have understood everything very well."

Manolito's mother, Catalina, is sharp-tongued, long-suffering and quick-witted. His grandfather, 79 years old in the first book, has prostate trouble and often gets Manolito out of bother. The words with which Manolito introduces him, 'Mi abuelo mola, mola mucho, mola un pegote.' I suspect would be recognised by most Spaniards. They mean, very roughly, 'My grandfather is cool, very cool, incredibly cool.' All of these characters help to make the books entertaining, but it is the character of Manolito himself that has turned him into a cultural icon.

Manolito is a complex character. He is vulnerable. He gets beaten up but he bounces back. He says that before he got the nickname Manolito Gafotas he used to cry a lot. He'd get bullied in the playground by people calling him 'gafotas' (four-eyes) but once he was Manolito Gafotas insulting him was a waste of time. Manolito talks all the time (luckily for the reader). He talks so much he gets sent to the school psychologist. She tells him he can tell her all his problems. He asks if that means everything, from the day he was born, and she foolishly says yes. He fills three exercise books and is very happy to read what he's written. The psychologist tells his mother he doesn't have any trauma, he just talks a lot. They need to listen to him more at home. 'MORE!!!???' says his mother.

Manolito has some crazy ideas and he is very easily led. When his friends suggest playing chicken with approaching cars on the street Manolito stands in front of a truck and thinks he's making it stop with the force of his mind. One day he suddenly decides it would be a great idea to use some coloured marker pens to draw three parallel lines above the bannisters in his apartment block. I know this boy. Elvira Lindo grew up in this barrio and she knows this place and these kids. I admire the way she understands that it isn't the job of children's literature to provide models of good behaviour in the manner of those books presented as Victorian Sunday School prizes. Anyone who spends time on a primary school playground will soon realise that what children actually do and say is very different from what their teachers and parents might want. It's a kind of parallel world that hasn't changed that much since I was a child myself.

When I was teaching there were several moments when well-meaning teachers attempted to introduce 'playground games' on the grounds that children weren't playing them any more. Children are always playing games, it's just that adults seldom recognise them for what they are. It's the children's world and it's often a private one. In Manolito Gafotas the kids know very well that you don't say 'ni puñetera idea' (no bloody idea) in front of the teachers. They say NPI instead, and there are a million other things that children say and do that are hidden from the adults around them. 

The Manolito books are not currently available in English, though you can get second-hand copies and you can read the first book on the Internet Archive if you sign up. But unfortunately the translation is so Americanised that I find it almost impossible to read. Using slang in a children's book is always going to run the risk of making the text sound dated in the future. It seems as if Elvira Lindo avoids this by using a kind of generalised slang rather than the 'slang of the moment' and by adding in very idiosyncratic  'Manolito-isms'. Certainly the books have remained in print in Spain and have been incredibly popular for more than 30 years. The US translation just doesn't really work, and that's a shame. That line about Manolito's grandfather, 'Mi abuelo mola . . .' is translated: 'My grandpa's cool; he's so cool, he's a whole lotta cool.' Manolito often refers to men and women as 'tío' or 'tía', words which, although they really mean 'uncle' and 'aunt' are used extremely commonly in Spain, maybe a bit like we use 'guy', but there is no direct equivalent in English. What certainly doesn't work is to replace them with 'dude' and 'broad'. This all just shows how tricky translation is. But I suspect that the real reason there haven't been further attempts to translate Manolito is just that difficulty of coping with the sensitive issues of the kind that led to the rewriting of Roald Dahl and the Enid Blyton.

Although there is one William story, William and the Nasties, that hasn't been included in collections since 1986, and about which Crompton herself was said to have been uncomfortable, in general the William stories don't seem to have been subject to pressure to rewrite for a modern audience. The censorship of the stories during Franco's rule is interesting though, and I shall find out more about that. Otherwise, publishers here don't seem too bothered about, for instance, William and his mates kidnapping babies and their prams from outside shops. But perhaps that's because babies don't get left outside shops in their prams any more.

The interview with Elvira Lindo is from La Marea 20/11/2024

Richmal Ashbee wrote the introduction to Mary Cadogan's Just William Through the Ages

Frogs and Toads by Paul May

On my allotment in Friern Barnet I have an old cast-iron bath. When Friern Hospital closed in 1993 an Italian named Mario laid claim to the bath, and transported it a few hundred metres to the allotment site. The hospital was originally known as Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum and at one time had more than 2000 inmates and hundreds of staff.

There are many Italians who have allotment plots near mine. Many of them arrived after WW2 when the British government was recruiting staff for places like Friern Hospital. Others, like Mario, followed family members or friends who were already here. Mario came from Naples in the early 1960s to work on the hospital's farm. Yes, a farm! On its 75 acres the hospital had extensive workshops, kitchens, recreation grounds, a gasworks and a brewery. It had its own water supply, chapel and cemetery, and even its own railway station. Where once there was farmland, now there is a huge retail park stretching down to the North Circular Road. The hospital also had the longest corridor in Britain and quite a few cast-iron baths, one of which ended up on my allotment.

Source: Wellcome Collection

I took on the allotment in 2016. Half of it was then planted with grapevines which I quickly discovered had been planted by Mario. Apparently at one time the whole plot had been covered with vines. Mario had taken cuttings from a vine belonging to a neighbour of his with the intention of using the grapes to make wine, only to discover that these particular grapes were useless for winemaking. At one time he had cultivated three adjacent plots but now he only had the one next to mine, from which he dispensed horticultural advice to anyone who'd listen, and where he kept a vast collection of stuff that he'd salvaged from skips because it might come in handy one day. He had also salvaged the bath, which was now partly a water store and partly a seat. Mario sat down often because he was really very ill, but he continued coming to the allotment, digging and grumbling and dispensing unasked-for advice despite the efforts of his family to stop him. Looking at his plot, which, despite all the junk he'd collected, was very picturesque, a friend said to me that it could have been anywhere in rural Europe. 

Mario

It was to try to preserve something of that atmosphere that I took over Mario's plot, in addition to my own, after he died in 2019. I cleared all the junk and turned the bath into a pond. I'd already moved the bath once, from my plot to Mario's, but now I had it back again. I moved it to a new location and planted yellow flag iris and marsh marigold. I made a mound so that wildlife could get to the water, but recently I decided that it would be better if the bath was sunk into the ground, so I started clearing it out in order to move it. That was when I found the frogs. They keep themselves to themselves, those frogs. I never see them out and about, but there were at least four in the bath. Hopefully they've all survived their move to a new location.

I like to think that the frogs are like Arnold Lobel's famous Frog. I love the Frog and Toad books and I was delighted to discover, in a children's bookshop in Bologna, that they have been translated into Italian. It's very good fun reading a book like this, one that I could almost recite with my eyes closed, in another language. Toad sounds great in Italian: "Questa casa è un distastro. Ho un sacco di lavore di fare." It's almost better than the English.

And there's a great story for gardeners where Toad's seeds don't seem to be growing and he shouts at them so loudly that Frog tells him he's scaring them and he needs to leave them alone. Mario didn't need to be told how to grow things and he would no doubt have offered slightly scornful advice to Toad. Like most of my allotment neighbours who come from Kurdistan and Italy, Macedonia and Albania, for Mario growing his own food was just something you did, not a lifestyle choice. Perhaps that was why Mario was so keen to offer advice to those he thought were bungling part-timers. The trouble was, there was only one proper way to do things, and that was HIS way. He also ordered me not to cut the grassy path where the oregano was growing. He'd brought it all the way from the hills above Naples, but he really didn't need to worry about losing it because it has seeded itself everywhere. I also have a very fine white-flowered variety of oregano that was brought by another elderly Italian, Giacomo, from his home in Sicily. Giacomo has also since died. 

Most of the Italians are now in their 80s. Half a dozen have died in the ten years since I came to the allotments. But for at least two of them their memory is preserved in the plants that they brought with them from their childhood homes, and that are now flourishing in North London. And the memory of London's most famous lunatic asylum is preserved in a pond in a bath. The asylum was once a byword or perhaps a synonym for lunacy, and even gets a mention in a children's book. "Three cheers for the Hempress of Colney 'atch," jeer the Londoners in The Magician's Nephew when Jadis, escaped from Narnia, proclaims herself Empress.

Oregano from Naples

Oregano from Sicily

The bath in its new location

* There is a famous philosophical article inspired by the Frog and Toad story Cookies entitled Frog and Toad Lose Control by Jeanette Kennett and Michael Smith which is only available via subscription to JSTOR, but there are also numerous discussions of the story online, and if you search hard enough you might even be able to find the mentioned article republished somewhere. I know I did manage to read it once.

The Story of Cat Patrol by Paul May

Books sometimes need input from many different people as they make the journey from idea to reality. I am tempted to begin this piece with the words Once upon a time . . . 

It was 1974, and I was a student at UEA in Norwich, but living in a shared house in the town of Hingham, about 12 miles from the city. More than 100 Puritans emigrated from Hingham in 1638, among them one Samuel Lincoln, the ancestor of Abraham Lincoln. This has nothing to do with the story I'm about to tell, though it did mean that we'd quite often meet people from the USA wandering around looking lost. Hingham was once a market town and has a marketplace surrounded by fine Georgian houses, but now feels more like a village.

One summer afternoon we returned home to find a small bird fluttering in the bushes of our small and unkempt back garden (it was a student house, remember). I managed to catch hold of the bird, took it into an open area and let it go. It flew across the garden, crashed into the bushes, and tried to flap its way over the grass. We put it in a box with a bowl of water and wondered what to do with it. We couldn't think of an answer, so we went to the pub. We told the landlord about the bird and he laughed. 'That's a swift,' he said. 'You take that up on the roof and let it go. That'll fly, you'll see.'

So that's what we did. Back home, I took the bird out of its box and climbed out of an upstairs window onto the flat roof of the kitchen extension. I threw the bird into the air and it was gone. We all felt a little stupid, because one of our favourite activities that summer had been lying on the roof in the early evenings watching the aerobatic displays of the swifts as they fed on insects above the rooftops of the town. We didn't know then that swifts almost never land on the ground and that they feed and sleep on the wing.

Fast forward 20 years or so and I was sitting thinking about stories that might make a good picture book when I remembered the incident of the swift. I very quickly scribbled down a couple of paragraphs describing a small boy sitting in a garden as a bird crashes into bushes, the boy picking up the bird and his mum (I think) telling him to throw it into the air. There were some very quiet picture books around at the time, and I thought that with the right illustrations it might work, so I sent it off to my agent. She got some positive feedback (ie polite rejections) from editors, along with the suggestion that it might be a bit slight for a picture book, but could maybe be expanded into a short chapter book.

Some things stayed the same from beginning
to end. Apart from the first two lines the rest
of the page is unchanged from the first hastily written text.

Some time later there was a lunch with editors and my agent and we got to talking about this. I can't now remember whose idea the cat was, but I do know that without that lunch, without the collaboration, Cat Patrol would never have existed. The 'something else' that was needed to make the story work had its origin in that meeting, in the idea that the boy wanted to protect the birds from the new neighbours' cat, but there was still a very long way to go before we had a complete text. There are about 2,000 words in the book's five chapters and those 2,000 words took me as long to write as a full-length novel.

Peter Bailey did the lovely black-and-white illustrations which fit the story perfectly, but the publishers weren't happy with his cover and asked another illustrator to have a go. There was some back and forth about the next version but in the end that was rejected too, and the final cover was drawn by a third illustrator, Guy Parker-Rees. The funny thing about it is that Guy Parker-Rees's cover depicts a cat and a bird who seem to be in a kind of 'Tom and Jerry' relationship rather than the life-and-death one which appears between the covers. As Ben says in the book, 'Cats kill birds. You know they do.'

Ben was right. Cats kill up to 55 million birds a year in the UK. The cat is, in fact, the villain of this story. The new neighbours introduce Ben to their pedigree Siamese, Samuel Pennyfeather Lexington Star the Third, or Sammy for short:

'Ben was horrified. Sammy was a cat - the most enormous cat he had ever seen. It stared at him through the wire of its basket. Its eyes were cold and blue. It yawned, and its teeth were like razors.' 

It's a lovely cover, but it has nothing much to do with the story.

Robin collecting food for young.
Maybe male . . . maybe not.

One of the difficult things about writing this book was the pronouns. Ben calls the cat 'it', though his sister, who doesn't believe the cat is dangerous, calls it 'he'. But then there was the bird. From the moment he sees it, Ben calls the bird 'he', and everyone else in the story takes their cue from him. I considered using 'it' for the bird but 'he' seemed the most natural thing for an 8-year-old boy to say. And, in case you're wondering, male and female swifts look exactly the same as each other. And, as I'm handing out information here, male and female robins also look identical. I say that because I've met many people who just assume that the male robin is the only one they ever see. The adolescent Robin is a very different thing!

Young Robin

 

Anyway, I'm telling this story just to indicate that books don't just appear out of nowhere and that often the input of an editor is crucial. I would add that when an editor or an agent tells you, 'this needs work', they don't mean, 'you're a terrible writer and it would be best to give up.' A friend of mine who wrote plays sent some work to a Radio 3 producer a lot of years ago and they INVITED HIM TO LUNCH! Then they told him they liked the play but IT NEEDED WORK. Being who he is, he took this to mean that he was wasting his time and his play was rubbish.

If my agent hadn't seen the potential in those early paragraphs and sent them out they'd probably still be sitting in my drawer today.

  

The Map That Came to Life by Paul May

I've always loved maps. W G Hoskins, who wrote a wonderful book entitled The Making of the English Landscape, sums it up very well:

'There are certain sheets of the one-inch Ordnance Survey maps which one can sit down and read like a book for an hour on end, with growing pleasure and imaginative excitement.'

Hoskins writes in some detail about one particular OS map that shows the area around the Wash. I have a 1934 edition of that map, so here's a small part of it. One of the notable features is a complete lack of contour lines. This part of England really is very flat. 

When I was still at school I travelled all over the UK by hitch-hiking. Just imagine! My mother dropped me off at the beginning of the summer holidays at Junction 6 of the M1. I was with my mate, Chris, and we thought we'd go and look at Wales. This was 1968 and our parents were quite happy for us to be travelling around the country in this way, with no particular destination in mind. We just had a Youth Hostel handbook and a road map. And it was the road map (without contour lines) that gave us the idea in the first place.

One of the things I love about maps is that they tell you enough, but not too much. Nowadays you can use Google maps and street view to see just about anywhere you want to go before you go there, which, for me, takes away half the fun of travelling. A road map tells you almost nothing about the countryside and the towns and cities you're about to see. You know there is a town, you can see rivers and the sea, but only a certain scarcity of roads indicates the presence of open moorland or mountains. For cycling, my favourite maps always used to be the Bartholomew's Half Inch series. The older versions of these were revised with the assistance of the Cyclists' Touring Club and they remained in production almost throughout the twentieth century, although from 1975 onwards they were rebranded and published at a scale of 1:100,000. Maps of the most popular areas were still in production until 1999.

Map owned by Mary Yellowlees CTC 1909

My very favourite Bartholomew's maps, of the ones that I own, were once the property of one Mary Yellowlees of the Cyclists Touring Club. The earliest of these is dated 1909 and shows the Fort William district. On these early maps the high ground was coloured in shades of brown, the darker the brown, the higher the mountain. Maps with brown bits on were always exciting to me, and the more brown the better. This map of Fort William is almost entirely brown, where it isn't blue for the lochs and the sea. I hope that Mary Yellowlees found all that brown as exciting as I did, and still do. Back in 1909 roads were not like they are today. The road through Glen Coe for example was graded in places 'indifferent' but 'passable'. And bicycles were still in their infancy. They had only settled into their modern form with a diamond frame and pneumatic tyres in the final decade of the previous century. Mary would probably have been riding a heavy bike (compared to modern ones) with no gears, or at most two or three. 

In the 1970s and 1980s I always used the Bartholomew National Series, the half-inch maps reprinted at the 1:100,000 scale. I have one here of Skye and Loch Torridon which has just about survived repeated soakings on the handlebars of my bike. The one problem with these maps was that the contours were at 50 metre intervals, so you could hit a fairly substantial hill without realising it was coming.  And of course maps never warn you about the weather. 

My much-soaked map of Skye and Torridon. The updated maps have
land over 900m coloured a kind of blue/grey. I prefer the old style.

I learnt about contour lines in geography lessons at school, but I could equally well have learnt about them from The Map That Came to Life. It's possible to view a PDF of this remarkable book online. When I first saw it a few years ago the thing that most struck me was how cleverly it integrated the drawings of landscape and the features on the map. The illustrator, Ronald Lampitt, had worked in RAF Intelligence during WW2, creating drawings for pilots and navigators from aerial photographs, and he put this skill to brilliant use in this book. The story, 'described by H J Deverson',  is straightforward: two children are staying with their uncle and aunt on their farm and after their uncle teaches them about the One Inch Ordnance Survey map and its symbols, they set off to walk into the nearby town. Each double-page spread contains text, a small section of map, and a detailed illustration of the area shown on the map. This may not be quite as good as taking a map and going out into the real world but it does a great job of, for example, showing how a small section of map represents a large area on the ground. We learn about many map symbols, and about contour lines, about footpaths and roads, canals and rivers. But there's another way in which this isn't the real world.

This book was published in 1948, just three years after the end of the war in Europe. As I was growing up in the 1950s there were still plenty of bomb sites in London and I can remember seeing barrage balloons flying. I doubted myself about this, but on checking I discovered that they were still used for training purposes until the end of the decade. The world of The Map That Came to Life shows no trace of war and, as others have noticed, this is an English landscape that probably never really existed. The roads in the book are beautifully signposted, so you'd never know that tens of thousands of signposts were removed during the war to avoid helping potential invaders, and many weren't put back for years, if at all. 

Very many children's books of this era were set in a world that never actually existed. Think of Enid Blyton or Richmal Crompton or even Arthur Ransome. William Brown's rambles through the woods and fields around Hadleigh could easily have happened in the world of The Map That Came to Life. It's a world where friendly farmers provide cake and glasses of milk, and friendly vergers show you round the parish church. But although it is an idealised and unreal world it has real similarities to the world I grew up in. I grew up just down the road from where Enid Blyton and Alison Uttley lived, and after all this time I find it hard to distinguish between my real memories and the memories of places and events I read about in books. I must have been very young when I read Alison Uttley's Sam Pig stories, but they remain incredibly vivid in my mind, perhaps because they are set in a countryside that was so familiar to me.

Fourteen years after they wrote The Map That Came to Life, in 1962, Deverson and Lampitt wrote a kind of follow-up called The Open Road. This book is a paean to the motor car, praising its ability to transport everyone through the open countryside. In the book, the same Uncle George  transports the same children on an adventure in a Hillman Minx convertible. They even travel in style up the brand-new M1 Motorway, the same bit of road where me and my friend, Chris, started our own adventure a few years later. It really was a different world.

If you want a copy of Reading the Carnegie, my illustrated compilation of posts about Carnegie winners, I have copies available. You can order them via my web page here. A PDF of the book is free.

Teaching and Learning by Paul May

I've been dreaming a lot lately about teaching. I don't know why, because It's more than ten years since I was last in a classroom, and the children I dreamed about last night were in a class way back in the 1980s. I taught in primary schools for about 30 years in the end, despite the fact that I never enjoyed school myself as a child. And, probably because I didn't enjoy school, I've spent most of the rest of my life teaching myself to do various things. 

When I started making jewellery, a friend showed me how to solder silver, and after that I was on my own. I bought a book the friend recommended, Metalwork and Enamelling by Herbert Maryon, and that book became my bible. I taught myself to make chains and rings, to set stones and forge shapes and eventually made a precarious kind of living from doing it. I can see now that I would probably have been a far better silversmith if I'd signed up for a course and learned in a more systematic way. Who knows? I might have become rich and successful and never become a teacher or a writer.

I taught myself to play the guitar and the banjo, too. That was the way most people did it with those instruments back then. It was kind of a rebellion against the kind of music you were taught at school and against the way most people learnt to play the piano. I still kind of hate the idea that schools today often teach rock music. Half the fun was doing something teachers hated. So, as with the jewellery making, a friend showed me how to play a chord on the guitar (A minor, probably) and then we'd just strum the chords and make stuff up. I've had the odd lesson along the way since then, but if I want to learn new stuff I mainly learn it from books or people I'm playing with or, these days, from YouTube.

What else have I taught myself to do? Well, there's plumbing, car maintenance, carpentry, house painting, gardening, bicycle maintenance and, oh yes, writing books for children. Of course, my education extended beyond school. I spent three years studying English Literature, which may or may not have helped with the children's writing. I used to say that spending years reading long and often difficult novels gave me a taste for fast-paced thrillers and children's books, but the truth is that I went to university to get away from home and studying was a very minor part of my time there. 

After university I spent a couple of years travelling around the UK on a bicycle, and then working on farms before I decided to do a PGCE in primary education. Back then the PGCE included courses in the sociology, psychology and history of education. Among other things, we were expected to read Rousseau, Freud and Ivan Illich. Illich's book, Deschooling Society, was published in 1971 and was highly critical of institutionalised state education. It wasn't just critical, though. Illich proposed solutions. He suggested that networks might be developed whereby individuals might use the telephone to find teachers, and that they'd be able to seek out teachers who could teach them just what they needed to know, and with whom they were in sympathy. In those days, before the Internet existed, Ivan Illich was imagining YouTube.

I thought Illich was right about the pernicious effects of state education but, at the same time, it seemed as if English primary education at least was doing a decent job. My friend, Derek, who was a GP, told me he'd become a GP because general practice was said to be 'the last refuge of the English eccentric.' I felt a bit that way about the world of primary education. I even thought we'd be able to survive the National Curriculum when it arrived in the late 1980s, but I was wrong. Luckily, YouTube and the Internet arrived just at the right time, especially for confirmed self-educators like me.

Now, before I proceed to give instances of the wonders of online education I'd better tell you what my local bike shop owner said about YouTube. 'It's been great for business,' he told me. 'People watch a video and think, I can do that. So they take the thing to bits and then can't get it back together again. That's when they come to me' What this tells you is that it's essential, if you're going to teach yourself to do something, whether with the help of the Internet or with the help of books, that you learn to follow instructions carefully. Actually, that's true of any situation where someone's trying to teach you something. But, having said that, I use YouTube to do all kinds of jobs on my bike, to learn new things on the guitar, to solve plumbing problems, to fix a variety of different broken household items, to sew neat seams, to grow new crops on the allotment, to cook . . .

Nowadays I could even use YouTube to find valuable advice on how to write books for children. I just checked and there's plenty there. But I never asked anyone's advice about writing children's books. It was another one of those things that I taught myself to do. The only writing experience I had was writing essays at school and university, and keeping a sporadic diary. As I was thinking about this I remembered that when I was at university I used to ignore the essay titles I was given and make up my own. Unfortunately, this gave me some problems when I came to do my Finals, but it does indicate that I was always determined to do things my own way.

I figured that I'd read a lot of children's books and I knew what I liked, so therefore I should be able to write one myself. It was a slow process. Maybe here too I could have cut some corners, and saved a lot of paper, by doing some kind of a course, but I don't think so.  I think the years of writing and throwing away were a crucial part of the learning process. And I also know that in everything I do I'm an improvising, trial-and-error kind of a person. (I don't like the modern version - trial-and-experience. The errors are essential.) My approach wouldn't work for everyone, but it worked for me. I might have gone on a course and not got on with the teacher, after all. It might have been like my swimming lessons.

When I was 40 I decided I ought to learn to swim, so I signed up for adult classes at the local pool. The instructor walked up and down the side of the pool calling out things like 'two widths of front crawl leg kick.' Then, while we did it, he called out, 'Well done, well done!' There was nothing more to his teaching than that. The experience peaked when he decided one week that we should all get in the deep end and tread water. I said I hadn't done that before, but he ignored me. He looked on, calling out, 'Well done! Well done!' as I slowly sank.

After that I bought a book of swim tickets, found a time when there weren't many people in the pool, and taught myself to swim.

There are good teachers in the world, of course. I was taught to drive by Lawrence 'Max' Bygraves, my next-door-neighbour's cousin. He had long, straggly hair and glasses, drove school buses morning and evening, and spent the days teaching people like me to drive. He was very calm, very patient, and very surprised when I passed my test first time. 

25 Years Later by Paul May

I got an email from my cousin in Australia a couple of weeks ago. Her 9-year-old granddaughter had started playing football and was becoming a little obsessed. My cousin remembered that I'd written books about football and she'd looked for them in Australia but been unable to find them. I had to tell her that those books were published about 25 years ago and she wouldn't find them in this country either. Not new ones anyway.

But then I remembered that one of the things on my 'to do' list is republishing the books myself, now that I have the rights back. I took a quick look at Troublemakers, the first book I wrote, and decided that there were too many things about it that I wasn't completely happy with. Many of my original intentions to do with challenging racism and sexism in the world of football had been diluted in the process of publishing, so that now it seems a little lightweight to me, though it is an entertaining read. Nice One, Smithy! is a shorter chapter book aimed at younger children, but it's heavily illustrated and thus presents a much bigger challenge to a self-publisher. And then there was Defenders.

Defenders is the book I wrote immediately after Troublemakers at a time when the publishers were still optimistic about developing a football-based section within their Corgi Yearling imprint. I like this book very much. It was inspired by watching my (then) eight-year-old son's Sunday League football team where the role of striker was always the glamorous one. I thought there ought to be a book for the un-glamorous defenders and so I wrote one.

It's an interesting book because, although it has a central character, Chris, for whom pretty much the only good thing in his life is scoring goals for the school football team, and who definitely does not want to be the defender his coach asks him to be, the character who really makes the book for me is Ian Rawson. Ian is an ex-Premier League defender who's been forced to retire through injury and who's helping out with the local team, who are on a miraculous run in the FA Cup. Ian will try to get on the pitch at any opportunity, even though he knows that another injury to his knee could put him in serious trouble. Luckily for me I knew an ex-First Division footballer, Phil Hoadley, who had retired after a knee injury, and then ran my local pub and coached my son at Norwich City holiday sessions. Definitely worth re-publishing. 

There's one little problem, though. This was written on an electric typewriter, saved on floppy discs that I threw away long ago (mistake!), printed out and sent to the publishers. I once had a couple of large boxes of typescripts and proofs and stuff like that, but I chucked all that away too. Then it occurred to me that my scanner software has Optical Character Recognition (OCR) built in. It's not unusual to find cheap editions of books on Amazon that have been scanned in this way. They are almost always full of errors and weird misprints, and that's how it was with the sample text that I scanned. I quickly realised that if I wanted clean, error-free text I was going to have to type it all out again. While it might be possible to produce a print-ready PDF from the scanned text it would be much harder to make sure it was clean enough for conversion to an ebook and it would be mad to have to do all this work twice.

There was a considerable amount to learn here, and if you're already an expert on this self-publishing stuff you might want to look away. The first necessity was to get to grips with MS Word. I've used Word for a long time, and used to be able to find my way around quite well, but each new update brings subtle changes and added complexity and I haven't really kept up. Most of the time I just want to start typing. Anyway, there's plenty of help on the Internet and I've figured out what I need to know and it may seem like a lot of work (and expense) in order to supply a book to my cousin's grandchild, but luckily I quite enjoy this kind of thing. Well, up to a point. Software never seems to do quite what you expect and it can take a stupid amount of time to make it do what you want!

There a lot of companies out there nowadays who will print your book for you without even turning to Amazon (who, sadly, are the cheapest). 50 copies of this book would cost me about £250 with subsequent copies coming in at just over £3. This is not a huge amount of money, and I'd be quite prepared to spend it just in order to see if I can do it, and without a view to selling the books. I reckon I could easily give them away to the grandchildren of friends and relations.

I mentioned that Amazon is cheap. In fact, it's free to publish your book there, but there are many reasons, too many to go into here, why you might not want to do that. There are many other options available. The one I just mentioned involves considerable economies of scale, as in printing just one copy would cost £100 and 25 copies about £180. The company I use for photo books, Blurb, produce very high quality books, but they are expensive and if you lay out your book using their free (and very good) software, you are stuck with a limited number of formats. (They print trade books too). On the other hand if like me you think you're only likely to really need a few copies you can do that with Blurb for around £10 each, and as you get a high quality PDF when you order you could always use that to print in bulk from another source if you were suddenly deluged with orders. This will probably be the route I take in the end.

But back to Defenders.  Before I upload it, first I have to type it out. And that in itself is an interesting experience, examining every word and sentence that I wrote 25 years ago. The kids don't have their own phones! Do I need to update it? No, best to leave it alone. Best to just type the whole thing out exactly as it is in the original edition. It's been edited after all, by professionals. It also seems to have been written by a professional! It's very strange, at times like reading something written by someone else, someone who actually knew what they were doing, which is not how it felt 25 years ago.

So it's back to the keyboard, and there is one thing I learnt to do back then that is one of my top pieces of advice to new writers. I learnt to touch type using all my fingers. It didn't take long and it wasn't hard to do and I've been reaping the benefit ever since.

Sadly, Phil Hoadley, who I mentioned earlier, died last year at the age of 72. He was, as he would have said, a lovely geezer. 

Jenny Wagner's Book About Writing by Paul May

You most likely know Jenny Wagner for her picture books with illustrator Ron Brooks— The Bunyip of Berkeley's Creek and John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat, for example, or for her novel The Nimbin. But Jenny Wagner also wrote one of the most useful, practical and entertaining books I've come across on writing books for children. It's called On Writing Books For Children and it was published in 1992 but it's not that hard to find a copy today online.

One of the things I particularly like about this book is that it contains both detailed advice about matters of style which would be helpful to someone who had never written a book of any kind before as well as more general outlines of, for example, the different ways in which you might choose to tell a story. There's a chapter entitled A Matter of Style which deals with the following: 'clumsiness, clichés, redundancies, inappropriate grandeur, archaic expressions, inappropriate imagery and accidental music to name just a few.'  In the section on Clumsiness she says this, which is both informative and encouraging: 

'Beginning writers often overlook clumsiness, which usually takes the form of a lot of little faults rather than a few dramatically big ones. But like all writing faults, they are cumulative; you can get away with one or two, but several can cast a veil over the writing, eventually making it unreadable. Fortunately it works the other way too: the removal of many small roughnesses can make a startling improvement to clarity and vividness.'

This is a short and entertaining book but contains lots of helpful information. Over the years I've enjoyed dipping into it from time to time but I think it would be most useful to those who think they'd like to write a children's book but have never really given much thought to what might be involved in doing so. There's a very succinct discussion of narrative points-of-view and a terrific chapter on dialogue which begins with some very basic stuff, but it's stuff you wouldn't know if you'd never written dialogue before— among other things, where you need a comma and where a full stop. 

Then there's quite a lot about speech attributions, a subject I find endlessly interesting. Wagner suggests that if you're writing for older children and are trying to avoid attributions you can 'drop in a name here and there', as in "I'll fix that, Julian!", but goes on to say: 'Only don't overdo it, unless you want your character to sound like a used car salesman. In real life people don't use other people's names a great deal, and we become suspicious when they do; we suspect they are trying to sell us something—a car, a time-share unit, or even a religion.'

Wagner describes what she's trying to do in her introduction. Having said there are no rules (the obligatory preface to a book about writing) she says:

'This book is not a collection of handy hints that will bring you fame and fortune; instead I am giving you a toolbox. I explain what the tools are, what job they do and how they do it; I show you the best ways I know of using them, and how not to hurt your fingers on them. I even suggest some things you might like to make. But I don't claim for one moment that these are the only tools available, or that there is only one way to use them.'

And here to end is a warning to all writers:

'Sometimes the faults in your writing hide from you. The desire to write something excellent is overshadowed by the even greater desire to have already written it.'

On Writing Books for Children by Jenny Wagner, Allen and Unwin 1992

Oats by Paul May

Some time during last winter I had an idea. I have an allotment in North London where I grow vegetables and fruit and flowers. There's a wild flower meadow and a pond in an old bath that was once in the former mental hospital in Friern Barnet, but the bath is a story for another day. I say I had an idea, but it was almost a vision. I had a bit of space and I pictured it in my head as a field of oats.

Why oats? I don't know, but once the idea was there I had to run with it. I would buy some seed, plant it and watch it grow. How hard could it be?

Well . . . the first thing I discovered was that there were two main varieties I could grow, Avena Sativa, the normal, everyday oat, and Avena Nuda, also known as naked oats and mainly found in health food shops. The difference is this: Avena Sativa has an outer husk, and then a hard inner husk which surrounds the grain and is not that easy to remove. More of this later. Avena Nuda doesn't have this inner husk, making it much easier to process. So, naturally, I set out to find some Avena Nuda seed.

Avena Nuda is not widely grown in the UK. I found a seed merchant who had it. The minimum order was 500 kilos. I needed about 500 grams. I found people who could supply the seed, but they were in Ireland and couldn't supply the seed to the UK. So I bought a pack from a health food shop and tried sprouting those seeds to see if they would be useable. The germination rate was very poor. I tried several times with different conditions but in the end I gave up and went looking for seed of Avena Sativa. Lots of places sold small amounts of this for sprouting and making oat grass, to juice or put in salads, but I checked with the suppliers and it was suitable for sowing outside.

Oats are a cold weather cereal, which is why they're grown in the north, so I wasn't sure how they'd do in London where summer temperatures are high and getting higher. I planted them on March 5th, having first made a tool of which I was quite proud to enable me to space the seeds in rows three inches apart. They germinated quickly and I was soon fielding regular enquiries about what I was growing. I'd discovered during my initial research that oats are supposed to secrete something from their roots that suppresses weed growth. According to the books this effect is so strong that you shouldn't plant anything else where the oats have been until three weeks have passed. 

I am not convinced. Maybe the weeds grew less fast than they would have done, and they didn't grow as fast as the oats, but grow they did. And I'm glad about that because the poppies grew too and for a week or two looked fantastic. And the field of oats looked just as I'd imagined it, first green, then golden.

I started to worry about when to harvest. The tops of the plants seemed ripe, but there were greenish heads lower down. I cut a small amount before going away on holiday in July and left them to dry in the greenhouse. Then, when I got back, I tried to process them. It's not that hard to separate the outer husks and the straw from the grains, but those inner husks are really tricky. I tried various things, including putting the grain in a plastic bag and hitting it with a lump hammer, using a rolling pin, and grinding them in a blender. I managed to extract a small amount of oatmeal but it hardly seemed with the effort, except . . .

When I tried separating the grain in the oats that I hadn't yet harvested I noticed that they  popped out of their husks far more easily. And I had another thought. People were growing and harvesting oats for centuries before they ever had mills and modern machinery. I wondered how they did it and discovered via an interesting website that oats used to be widely grown by small farmers in Wales where they were processed in small local mills that have almost all now vanished. 

Anyway, I persisted, and arrived at the following process—I've done it with a small batch and I'll see how it goes with the rest. 

First I separated the chaff. On this small scale I simply removed the grain from the stalks, then rubbed it hard then blew off the husks. This left me with the grain with the inner husk attached. I put this in the blender and ground it for about 30 seconds, then put it into a tray and picked the individual grains out by hand. I can imagine that this process might have been carried out by children in the past. I think light grinding between stones would separate the grains in a similar way, but at this stage if you blow on the mixture to try to get rid of the husks you risk blowing the lot away, as the grains themselves are not heavy, so you really need to pick them out carefully.

I rolled the grains with a rolling pin, made some porridge, and ate it. It tasted just like porridge.

Whether all this has anything to do with writing children's books, I leave you to decide.

Sad news that Alan Ahlberg has died. When I was teaching 6 year olds we made a joke book for the Ahlbergs and sent it to them. Alan wrote a lovely letter back, saying he'd keep the book on a shelf and take it down to read a joke or two if he needed cheering up. I hope it worked.

Rights Reversion by Paul May

About six months ago I decided that it was time I did something about getting back the rights to the books I published back in the early years of this century. Most of them remained technically 'in print', though in practice they were 'print on demand' and available as ebooks, and as I hadn't received any cash for any of them for at least ten years there seemed little point in their presence on the colourful Penguin Books website.  

I asked the Society of Authors how to go about getting the rights back and they told me to write to the publishers. I thought I'd ask the agency which did the deals for those books who to contact, and they were happy to do the job themselves, so now I have the rights to my work back, and I'm wondering what to do with the books. Of course, they shouldn't really still be there on the Penguin website. Another job to do.

I'm not interested in making them into ebooks, so that simplifies things a little, and it looks to me as if, for a relatively small investment, I could produce paperback books for a reasonable price. I wouldn't need to sell very many books to make more from them than I have done in the last ten years from the traditionally published versions.

I'd got that far in my thinking when it occurred to me that I don't have any digital files of those books. Well, only of one of them, and that is the book I somehow managed not to put on the list for rights reversion. So if I want to publish them I'll have to type them all out again. That's not the end of the world. I could do that, and fix a few things at the same time. But then there's the question of the illustrations. Four of the books are heavily illustrated, if that's the right phrase, and I suspect it wouldn't be straightforward to use the illustrations. But I can look into that, contact the illustrators, and if necessary the books could be re-illustrated. I have a candidate in mind!

There's a lot to think about. Being me, I'd want to do as much of the design and layout as possible myself. I'd need the right software and I'd need to learn how to use it. A quick look around on the internet suggests that this is one of those situations where, even though you only want to do a relatively simple task, you need to have a vast and powerful piece of software like Indesign in order to output a print-ready document of a quality you're happy with. Let's hope I'm wrong about that. 

However, none of these things really matter if I don't think the books are worth re-publishing, and about two of them I have serious doubts. My first book, Troublemakers, went through a lot of changes that I've written about before and it certainly isn't the book I originally set out to write. It was meant to be a tough but funny story about racism and misogyny and contained some splendidly vile baddies, but in the editing process everything got toned down. I understood why, but although racism and misogyny have not yet been banished from football I don't think I'd want to republish this one.

I also think it's interesting that I've seen very little discussion lately of something that was central to my original conception of the book. Having seen that the fittest pupil in the school where I was working was a girl (AND she had Type1Diabetes, AND she was great at football) I wondered how good a female footballer would have to be before a top football club like, say, Barcelona or Liverpool, would want to challenge the structure of world football and sign her on. I still wonder that. And, by a strange piece of serendipity, I was looking through some old photos yesterday and noticed this picture which I must include, especially after Penny Dolan's post about notebooks the other day. This is the very moment I had the idea for what became that first book. The dream noted underneath has something to do with being a school governor at the time!

The other book I have doubts about is called Nice One, Smithy!, and the trouble with this book is that it has dated because of the contemporary football references. The class guinea pig called Ronaldo I might just about still get away with, but the references to the  Brazilian style of football are probably at least 40 years out of date, and as for Michael Owen . . . On the other hand, I can easily update those references, and if I'm publishing it myself I guess I can update them as often as necessary. So that one goes on the 'possible' list.

I wrote a second football novel, Defenders, which still seems fresh to me. Again, a few footballers' names need changing and I think some of the characters will need mobile phones. The landline phone in the hallway was on its way to being a thing of the past even back when I wrote the book. Luckily 'The Magic of the FA Cup,' is still a thing. And, as a small sidetrack, How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won The FA Cup by JL Carr is a hugely entertaining read.

Then I have two Norfolk novels which I definitely want to republish. Green Fingers has lovely illustrations by Sîan Bailey, but as three of them are on my wall, specially altered for me by Sîan I think it's unlikely I'll be able to use them. In any case, as the book contains a character based on my daughter, and is dedicated to her, it might be fun to get her to illustrate it. 

The other Norfolk book is Rain, and I'd love to have a new edition of this if only to change the cover, which I've always disliked (sorry, designers). Both Rain and Green Fingers may need a little adjustment to the phone/tech aspects, but luckily Rain's mother, Max, is a New Age Traveller who wants nothing to do with tech.

Then there are two more books, both of which, it seems to me, work as well today as they did when I wrote them. Cat Patrol is very short, about 2000 words, and was illustrated by Peter Bailey. Again, I have some of these illustrations on my wall, and I think it may well be too complicated to use them. The original cover by Guy Parker-Rees was, I think, the publishers' third attempt to find something they were happy with. I guess there will now be a fourth. 

Finally there's the book I wrote about a few months ago, Billy and the Seagulls. This had the same illustrator, Kate Sheppard, as Nice One, Smithy, and it would be fun to have new editions of these with the same pics, but who knows? 

In all this I take heart from the example of the above-mentioned JL Carr who made a habit of buying back the rights to his books, along with as many copies as remained in warehouses, and published his two final novels himself. The Quince Tree Press, which he founded, is still going, and publishes its own very fine editions of all Carr's novels.

Bred and Born in a Briar Patch by Paul May

Blackberries have played a big part in my life. Every autumn when I was a child my mother would head up to the golf course with me and my three younger sisters in tow. We were all sent off with containers to pick blackberries but I know that my mother picked ten times more than we did. As I remember it, we didn't mind. I enjoyed figuring out which clumps of fruit offered the best chance of reasonable picking with the least scratches. I expect there was an element of competition with my sisters, although now I think about it I remember there was a pushchair involved, so at least one sister was too young to be helping. A hillside in South Bucks on a sunny autumn afternoon wasn't a bad place to be, even if you ended up with badly-scratched, sticky, purple-stained hands.

Then we'd all go home and it was bramble-jelly time. This was a mysterious process that involved a lot of straining blackberry juice through muslin into a preserving pan. Eventually there was a lot of boiling and jar filling, and finally, if the jelly set properly, there was this slippery purple stuff to spread on toast. I was never that keen on it, and it always seemed like such a complicated procedure that I've never been tempted to try it myself. But the blackberry-picking talent might be inherited because, many years later, my two-year-old son was an enthusiastic picker of hedgerow blackberries.

I have no idea when I first heard or read the story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, but I must have been very young. It was probably a retelling by Enid Blyton. I had most likely just started to read and I remember that I didn't know what a 'briar patch' was. I think the tar-baby was also a mysterious object, and the combination of slight weirdness and humour meant that the story has been stuck in my mind ever since. In case you don't know, Brer Fox sets out to catch the annoying Brer Rabbit by placing a figure painted with tar in the middle of the road. This tells you that Brer Fox knows Brer Rabbit all too well. When Brer Rabbit tries to start a conversation the Tar Baby naturally doesn't reply, and eventually Brer Rabbit gets so annoyed that he punches it, first with one hand, then the other, then he kicks it until he's well and truly stuck.

Brer Fox is waiting of course. He threatens Brer Rabbit with various dire fates but Brer Rabbit just keeps telling him to do whatever he likes as long as he doesn't throw him in the briar patch. Which is what Brer Fox finally does, only for Brer Rabbit to use the thorns to pry himself free and laugh at Brer Fox with those immortal words: 'Bred and born in a briar patch, Brer Fox. Bred and born in a briar patch.' 

By the time of the 1946 Disney movie, Song of the South, those words had been reversed to 'Born and bred.' The film, like just about everything to do with Uncle Remus, fell victim to controversy. It was a mix of live action and animation and was set during the reconstruction period after the end of the Civil War, but following accusations of racism (much disputed) Disney have never released the film to home video or Disney+. You can, however, watch the very fine animated sequences on Youtube. The film also won an Academy Award for Best Original Song, the song being Zip-a-dee-doo-dah. There was also an Academy Honorary Award for James Baskett who played Uncle Remus. This was his final film.

This is from the British edition of around 1883.
The illustrations were by Frederick S Church and 
James Henry Moser. I think this is one of Moser's.

The Brer Rabbit stories are Trickster tales, and the version I knew as I grew up first found its way into print at the hands of Joel Chandler Harris, a nineteenth century journalist and writer from Georgia in the USA. As a young man, Harris went to work on a newspaper that was produced on the Turnwold Plantation and distributed widely throughout the Confederacy during the Civil War. When Harris wasn't working he spent his spare time listening to the stories and conversation of the slaves on the plantation. It was these stories and conversations that he later used as the basis for Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, first published in 1880, which was where the Brer Rabbit stories appeared. Brer Rabbit sounded like this:

"'Skin me, Brer Fox,' says Brer Rabbit, sezee, 'snatch out my eyeballs, tear out my years by the roots, en cut off my legs,' sezee, 'but do please, Brer Fox, don't fling me in dat briar-patch,' sezee."

This was the first time that an attempt had been made to record the speech of African-Americans in the South. The book sold in huge numbers and was influential in many ways. Those speech patterns were used by Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn. Twain admired Harris and his work, and even tried to persuade him to accompany him on speaking tours, but Harris had a stutter and didn't enjoy public speaking. Instead, Twain included readings from Harris's work in his performances. Kipling and his friends at school were obsessed with Uncle Remus. Beatrix Potter grew up with the stories and produced illustrations for them, even as she was working on Peter Rabbit. AA Milne, too, used elements of Harris's work, and I've already mentioned Enid Blyton's retellings. Adult writers were also influenced—William Faulkner, T S Eliot, James Joyce, for example. And, more generally, that whole genre of children's fiction which is concerned with talking animals, from Sam Pig to Farthing Wood and Watership Down, owes a debt to Joel Chandler Harris, and through him to those stories told by slaves that were, in their turn, derived from Trickster tales from Africa.

Harris's retellings were controversial. There was general agreement that his transcriptions were an accurate record of the way people spoke. The problem of course is that Harris was a red-haired white man of Irish extraction who made a lot of money from the stories. Alice Walker accused Harris of 'stealing a good part of my heritage,' and you can read plenty of discussion of these matters online. The arguments about cultural appropriation continue, but Harris's influence on the development of children's literature in the twentieth century is indisputable.

That quote from Alice Walker reminds me of an incident that occurred a few years ago in Bekonscot model village, where I'd gone with my grandson. We were looking at an area that had been recently remodelled when a nine-year-old boy approached with his mother. He was expecting to see whatever had been there before, and was appalled at what he saw now. 'But . . . they've stolen my childhood!' he cried.

But to return to blackberries and briar patches. The thornless blackberry I planted on my allotment would have been useless to Brer Rabbit, but it has unbelievable quantities of blackberries on it every year and they couldn't be easier to pick. What's more, the first of them ripen at the start of July here in London. I'm fairly sure it's a variety called 'Merton', in case you want one. But bear in mind that when the description says 'vigorous' it means what it says! The nurseries seem to want to sell these things in sets of three, but you would need a LOT of space for three of them.

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July 2021