10
May 2012
Derided for her poor writing, banned by the BBC, parodied on comedy shows, accused of racism, sexism, snobbery and a dislike of children … poor old Enid Blyton. Or rather stupendously rich, meteorically successful and eternally beloved Enid Blyton. Never does the gulf between adult and child seem wider than when appraising her books. Every time I ask 7 to 10 year olds who their favourite authors are, she’s up there with Jacqueline Wilson and Roald Dahl. And what a testimony that 44 years after her death bookshops and libraries are still devoting shelves, if not bookcases, to her work.
So it was brilliant to thumb through Five Go to Smuggler’s Top – which my daughter is reading for the numptieth time (albeit a little sheepishly as she cottons on that it’s not really cool) – and feel a flicker of the flame that used to light my Sunday afternoons. It was kindled by two simple words. Secret tunnel.
Even in my 40s my heart misses a beat at the thought of loose wall panels, holes behind picture frames and removable floorboards. And if that doesn’t do it for you, how about gold ingots, adventure islands and weirdly named uncles?
Last week The Guardian published a list of 50 things to do before you’re 11 ¾. Make a grass trumpet. Find frogspawn. Balance on a wobbly log … oh give us a break. Who wants to net butterflies when there are burglars to be foiled, caves to get lost in and millionaires to rescue – all from under the duvet?
So what if her vocabulary was small and her world view over-yummy? With 800 books and as many fans as ever, Enid Blyton must be laughing into her heavenly ginger beer.
01
May 2012
It seems to enthral and appal in equal measure. The Hunger Games is currently the top selling book series in Ireland. Last year it was also the third most complained about book in the US, according to the American Library Association. From the plot summary it’s not hard to see why: teenagers kill each other then wage war against the government. There have been accusations of anti-family feeling, bad language and violence.
Shocking. Just like Romeo and Juliet and large chunks of Chaucer, not to mention The Iliad, War and Peace and Great Expectations. Aren’t they all guilty, to some degree, of such offences? But they don’t count, of course, because they’re classics, whatever that means, and therefore exempt from such judgement.
Grief, cruelty, power games are part of life and therefore literature. Surely it’s not their portrayal that needs challenging, but how and why they’re portrayed. And on those two counts The Hunger Games is a triumph. Yes, there’s brutality but it’s never gratuitous, and its purpose is clear: to highlight the emptiness of celebrity, the voyeurism encouraged by reality TV and horrors of war. All worthy rants in our Big-Brothered, X-Factored, military interventionist age.
Beyond that is the quality of writing. If any well-fed westerner wants to know how it feels to starve, or how to make a lose-lose choice, or what powerlessness feels like in the face of evil, The Hunger Games says it all.
Imaginatively and morally, the story is up there. It might be attacked today, but I bet we’ll find it on recommended reading lists soon enough – alongside another writer whose work once provoked similar outrage for its
… ‘obsession with brute violence and the dark wickedness of the human mind, [which] remains so overriding that what there is of beauty and understanding is subordinated and almost extinguished.’
That review of East of Eden was published in 1952. The book is now considered one of the masterpieces of Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck.
28
Mar 2012
It’s a great feeling to sign the contract for the sequel to Dead Hairy. After nearly a year of writing Jungle Tangle, it’s a relief and delight to know that Squashy Grandma,
- copyright Stella McDonald
Fernando the shrunken head,
- Copyright Stella McDonald
And vasto-villain Hubris Klench
- Copyright Stella McDonald
will be heading for the bookshelves again, this time via the Amazon jungle.
Three things I’m learning from the world of publishing. First the art of waiting; it’s six years since I first had the idea for a hairy story. Then the number of wings and prayers involved. And best of all, the huge privilege of writing for children, the loveliest audience ever.
21
Mar 2012
The Phantom Tolbooth is one of my favourite books, which naturally makes its author one of my greatest heroes. Norton Juster can spend the rest of his time smuggling heroin or kneecapping grandmas for all I care – writing a book like that sets him automatically among the stars.
So The Annotated Phantom Tolbooth was the best birthday present I could wish for last week. Perhaps I’d discover the secret of the book’s brilliance, the ideas that inspired such a breathtakingly original story. And perhaps I could nick a few.
Reading the book (annotated by Leonard Marcus and published last year by Knopf to celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Phantom Tolbooth) I recognise some of those inspirations. Juster recalls, for example, a world in which ‘there were no inanimate objects. Shoes, chairs, silverware, vegetables, dishes, toothpaste tubes – everything had a life and a personality of its own and each thing had to be dealt with in its own special way.’ I remember that from my own childhood. The fork was a lady in love with the manly knife. Fan heaters were aliens and curtains watched for me to pick my nose so they could report me back to HQ.
Fantastic – does that mean my imagination was up there with young Nortie’s, far above the common child’s? Alas no. Jean Piaget noted years before that all little children go through a phase of ‘animistic thinking’ in which objects are alive and wilful. But in Norton’s case that belief blossomed into characters like the Gelatinous Giant, a mountain of a monster (or vice versa).
copyright Jules Feiffer
Then there were numbers. Who hasn’t thought that 8s are cuddly and 17s snooty? But for young Norton, characterisation – or colourisation – wasn’t a choice. Suffering from the now-recognised condition of synaesthesia, he could only add and subtract by giving each of the numbers from 0 to 9 a different colour. Not much fun in school, perhaps, but look where it led – to the Number Mine, the Mathemagician and subtraction stew, the more of which you eat the hungrier you feel.
copyright Jules Feiffer
The word images form places and characters: there’s jumping to Conclusions, a desolate island where you end up every time you decide something without having a good reason; the Whether Man who tells you whether there’ll be any weather, and Faintly Macabre, the not-so-wicked Which. Best of all, the Triple Demons of Compromise: one tall and thin, one short and fat and the third exactly like the other two (created by Juster to challenge his illustrator and friend Jules Feiffer).
But more important than the dazzling wordplay are the warmth of the writing and the brilliant, joyful illustrations, which make me want to cuddle the book like the dear old friend it is after 35 years of reading and rereading.
And that’s the secret of The Phantom Tolbooth: its beautiful heart, which no annotations can ever demystify – thank goodness.
08
Mar 2012
Forget actress or whale rider. When I was 7 there were 2 careers that knocked spots off the rest. For glamour, excitement and jaw-dropping dudiness you couldn’t beat cowboy or librarian. Cowboys swaggered round with wide hats and low belts, shooting each other where the sun don’t shine. And librarians lurked behind their bifocals, scowling at sneezers and – joy of joys – stamping books.
The cowboy plan soon fizzled on gender grounds – cowgirls just don’t come close. And while I never ended up stamping books, libraries remain magical places. Where else can you hitch a free ride to Russia with love or a passage to India? How else can you visit 19th century London or Middle Earth? And which chocolate sinks more sweetly into your brain than Wonka’s Fudgemallow delight?
Libraries are the flying carpets of the community. And now that librarians have moved on from steel-eyed scowlers to lovely smiley staff, who all but serve you dinner, they’re havens of warmth and friendliness too. At least, that goes for every one of the thirty or so I’ve visited in Ireland. What a fantastic service – especially in a recession.
Of course the priorities are education, jobs and health care. But before dismissing libraries as ‘extras’, it’s worth remembering just how they support those essentials.
Education and jobs: libraries promote reading and offer internet access.
Health: reading and social connection through clubs and workshops provide company, culture and entertainment, all beneficial to health.
And if that isn’t exciting, I’ll eat my cowboy hat. Please governments, national and local, no more cuts to our wonderful libraries.
29
Feb 2012
Talk about surreal. Last night, while my kids discussed which characters they’d dress up as for World Book Day on Thursday, Channel 4 News was reporting on children in Afghanistan. The first part showed a father selling his son for £800 so that the rest of his family could survive winter. The man was clutching the money and sobbing while the boy clung to his mother. Next came two brothers who had to leave school when their mother died. Every day they rise at dawn to lead sheep to ‘pasture’, a huge rubbish tip in Kabul. While the sheep graze, the boys sort the rubbish for 12 hours without food. At dusk they collect a daily wage of £1, buy a single naan bread from the bakery and head home to share a pot of stew with the other 5 members of their family.
You can’t quite imagine them celebrating World Book Day. And after the horror of that report, it was tempting to dismiss the dressing up and the book tokens as trivial, indulgent. Wouldn’t the publishers, National Book Tokens Ltd and all those booksellers do better spending their money on aid – food, housing, schools in the developing world?
But while World Book Day may make no direct difference to children struggling to survive, it still provides an incalculable service. What better way to enter lives a million miles from our own, and to care about the people who live them, than by sharing their thoughts and feelings, loves and longings? And what better medium to do that than a book?
Dickens did it on our doorstep 150 years ago. And, whether it’s in London or Lagos, I so admire those writers who are doing it today, especially for children, with books such as:
Jane Mitchell’s story of a schoolboy ripped from his home by Kashmiri freedom fighters.
by Sally Grindlay, which follows Indian brothers Suresh and Sandeep as they run away from their violent father and learn to survive by collecting broken glass.
Deborah Ellis recounts Parvana’s struggle to provide for her family on the streets of Taliban-controlled Kabul.
by Tom Avery, tells the story of illegal immigrants Emmanuel and Prince who end up in a gang on the streets of London.
Without a hint of finger-wagging piety or sentimentality, such books are the fruit of brilliant, imaginative empathy and the seeds of compassion.
Hate was just a failure of imagination.
Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
15
Feb 2012
I know it’s meant to be all chicks and lambikins, but I find springtime sad. I’ve never quite worked out why.
Part of it stems from disappointment. Every year, expectations of sunshine and warmth are dampened by the dripping dregs of winter.
And while Ireland offers plenty of bad weather all year round, it’s somehow less upsetting in other seasons. Autumn cold is exciting, rich and orange. Winter lives up, or down, to expectations. And summer rain just makes me cross.
Part of it is tiredness. After months of dim light, I feel as squishy and pale as dough.
But it’s more than that. Even sunny spring days trigger a loneliness I’ve never been able to put into words.
So it’s wonderfully comforting to know that Philip Larkin could. Like all great writing, his poem The Trees is beautiful, recognisable and true.
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
03
Feb 2012
Why is it that every year gets shorter? I swear January started 10 days ago. In my childhood it lasted at least 12 weeks. Saturdays were endless, especially at my grandparents’ house where their lunchtime nap took about a month. Now Saturdays shoot past in a blur of Hoovering and Aldi.
Growing up brings independence skipping down the path with her pigtails flying. But clumping behind comes her grumpy uncle responsibility. We may have more choice as adults. But we also have more livings to earn, dinners to cook and windscreens to defrost. And with a lengthening list of to-dos, the present can easily become a fixation on the future.
Or the past. As experiences pile up, there’s always something to jog the memory, to recall the day the fridge exploded or Aunt Gardenia rode her camel into Tesco. And while we’re busy remembering yesterday, today sneaks off for a smoke behind the bike shed.
The present and I were good pals when I was 10. We’d amble along, hand in hand, sharing popcorn and twisting our heels in mud. Now mud’s the enemy: wellies to clean, trousers to wash, more work, less time.
But less time for what? For planning next Tuesday’s dinner, or recalling the mild Christmas of 1987? If the purpose of having more time is to cram more tomorrows and yesterdays into today, then forget it: we might as well jump straight to August. But if it’s to take a breath, boil the kettle and uncurl into the shimmering present, then what are we waiting for?
This is the day the Lord has made;
let us rejoice and be glad in it.
Ps 118 v 24
21
Jan 2012
It’s official. With my daughter turning 13 this week, I’m a Meenie.
Things could be worse. I’ve done my homework – read the manuals, talked to friends, watched the soaps – and feel pretty well armed for the Mother-of-Teen years. The secret is anticipation. I’ve already set the ground rules for those inevitable pressure points:
Spots: Some call them liver, but I’ll insist on ‘sun dapples’ or dignity dots’.
Clothes: A battle not worth fighting. So when she says, ‘You can’t go out in that. You look like a duvet,’ I’ll bite my lip and head for the door.
Weird hair: Tricky one. Can you really tell someone what to do with their personal property? That’s what I’ll tell her, anyway, when she begs me not to let it go grey.
Late nights: It’s my bedroom. I can watch the Antiques Roadshow box set if I want to.
Lock-outs: My bathroom too. I’ll be another half hour wrinkle-hydrating.
Music: ‘It’s not mediaeval plumbing. It’s Bob Dylan.’
Language: I’ve really worked on this one. Parental greetings can be toe-curling so best keep it low-key. ‘Hey boys and boyellas, how’s it hangin’?’
And of course sulking: ‘Why can’t I go to Club Cooliebabes?’ ‘Because it’s for under 40s, Mum.’
Teenagers get all the bad press. Isn’t it time we turned the tables, put the Knee-high Converse on the other foot and paused to imagine what they have to put up with? Next time my eyes threaten to roll at the T-word, I’ll take a deep breath and spare a thought for my poor long-suffering Chortie (Child-of-woman-in-forties).
