The Haunted Wood, page 46
As she goes on to reveal, the second family had fostered her when they had not expected to have any children of their own. When the foster-mother became pregnant, they decided they wouldn’t be able to cope keeping Tracy, and her record counts against her (“When Julie and Ted first fostered you, we did tell them a bit about your background,” her social worker explains, “and the trouble you had in your first foster home. You know, when you shut the baby up in the cupboard–”). Here’s truth to life: older children and “difficult” children are harder to foster, and as their disappointment compounds they become more difficult.
Transience is Tracy’s constant. She describes early on the bond she formed with “a lovely little baby at this other home […] She really liked me, little Camilla. She got fostered quick as a wink. I begged her foster mum and dad to bring her back to see me but they never did.” Her self-reliance is defensive. Her arch-enemy is Justine Littlewood, whom she hates because Justine stole her best friend Louise: “Of course I could always get Louise back again as my best friend, easy peasy. But she’s lost her chance. I don’t want her now.” The needle between Tracy and Justine manifests in real mental cruelty and physical fights; Wilson doesn’t swerve the social viciousness of damaged children.
Her most constant relationship, now, is with her “stupid old social worker Elaine,” and, being an intelligent child, she sees through Elaine – especially Elaine’s ostentatious, by-the-book patience: “she sighed again and her lips moved for a moment or two. That’s her taking a deep breath and counting up to ten. Social workers are supposed to do that when a child is being difficult. Elaine ends up doing an awful lot of counting when she’s with me. When she got to ten she gave me this big false smile.” Of social workers in general, Tracy is contemptuous: “‘I guess you’re feeling really angry and upset today, Tracy,’ they twitter, when I’ve wrecked my bedroom or got into a fight or shouted and sworn at someone, so that it’s obvious I’m angry and upset. They do this to show me that they understand. Only they don’t understand peanuts. They’re not the ones in care. I am.”
There’s a piercing moment when Tracy is, as often, literally misunderstood: “Jenny [a member of staff at the Dumping Ground] caught me happily sniffing nail varnish one day, and do you know what she thought? Only that I was inhaling it, like glue sniffing. Did you ever? I let her think it too. I wasn’t going to tell her I just liked the smell because it reminds me of Mum.”
Ah, Tracy’s mum. Tracy has a photograph of her mother (the one who let her be taken into care rather than give up an abusive boyfriend). Tracy’s mother is pretty and blond (Tracy is ordinarylooking and sometimes spotty and has hair that is “dark and difficult and sticks up in all the wrong places”), and Tracy fantasizes, and boasts to the other children and to her readers, that the only reason she doesn’t come to visit is that she’s in Hollywood being a movie star. Or she rationalizes that her mother has lost her address: “I bet she’s been trying and trying to get hold of me, but she doesn’t know where to look.” Poignantly, the reader knows that she only half believes her own lies.
She badgers a visiting writer, Cam, who befriends her, into taking her out for lunch at McDonald’s – but when the day comes she tries to back out because she’s worried that her mum will come to take her out and she won’t be there. Cam cajoles her into coming, but: “I still felt bothered about my mum, even though I knew it was silly. I knew she almost definitely wouldn’t be coming. I knew deep deep down that Justine was maybe right about her. But I still worried.” Those epithets “almost” and “maybe” are perfectly pitched. Likewise, Tracy’s insistence that she doesn’t ever cry; she suffers from hay fever.
Wilson’s great gift in the Tracy Beaker books is to make Tracy a convincing psychological study – often in ways that are more subtle than her younger readers will quite clock – while also speaking directly to those child readers. Tracy’s bravado leads her into entertaining capers and scrapes; but older readers will see the fragility behind it. Hers is the egotism of the fragile ego; the preemptive “screw you” of the damaged child who’d rather get her retaliation in first than risk disappointment.
Here, in a way, are the standard tropes of so many children’s books – a child being adventurous and naughty, a child exercising independent agency in the world, adults proving incompetent or malign – but with an extra emotional torque on them: the sense that these things aren’t the fulfillment of a fantasy but the painful realization of a truth. But the book isn’t without fantasy: Tracy fantasizes constantly and lies constantly.
The book’s antagonistic relation to the oldest children’s form, the fairy story, is explicit: “Once upon a time there was a little girl called Tracy Beaker. That sounds a bit stupid, like the start of a soppy fairy story. I can’t stand fairy stories,” writes Tracy. “They’re all the same. If you’re very good and very beautiful with long golden curls then, after sweeping up a few cinders or having a long kip in a cobwebby palace, this prince comes along and you live happily ever after. Which is fine if you happen to be a goodie-goodie and look gorgeous. But if you’re bad and ugly then you’ve got no chance whatsoever.” Here, then, is an anti-fairy story.
Tracy’s defiant last words in that book are: “This started like a fairy story. And it’s going to finish like one too. Happily Ever After.” But it’s given ironic distance by the fact that the fairytale ending is one she’s predicting rather than one she has already achieved: “Next Saturday. When I see her. When she tells me that she’s thought it all over and she wants to be my foster mum.”
What Tracy predicts – in part thanks to the strength of her will – comes true. Cam does foster her, and, as The Dare Game (2000) opens, Tracy is living in her flat. But the happy after isn’t a happy ever after, and the fantasy collides with reality. The shine has come off her kind, unglamorous new foster-mother. Cam, for her part, is weepy and depressed: Tracy is unmanageable, ignores boundaries, steals from her purse and bunks off school.
Tracy resents that Cam earns peanuts as a writer, that her box bedroom is smaller than the one she had in the Dumping Ground, and that life is not the never-ending succession of goodies to which she believes she’s now entitled. “Cam wouldn’t always take me out for treats and buy me stuff: stuff I seriously need, like designer clothes, else I get picked on by poisonous girls like [schoolmate] Roxanne.” She “can be a boring old meanie when it comes to money.”
Why can’t Cam write books that make money, where “all the women are beautiful with heaps of money and designer outfits and all the men have dynamic jobs and are very powerful”? “Cam just laughs at me and says she can’t stick those sort of books. She says she doesn’t mind not being a successful writer. I mind. I want a foster mum I can show off about. I can’t show off about Cam because nobody’s ever heard of her. And she’s not pretty or sexy or glamorous. She doesn’t wear any make-up and her hair’s too short to style so it just sticks straight up and her clothes are awful – T-shirts and jeans all the time and they’re certainly not designer.”
Wilson uses the books to cast a skeptical light, then, on the messages that television and the wider culture send children. The furniture of Tracy Beaker’s world is of real brands (DKNY, KFC), real celebrities (Sharon Stone, Alan Shearer, Barney Harwood) and real Tv shows (Basil’s Swap Shop). The last decades of the twentieth century had seen consumer culture mushroom: Tracy Beaker lives in the backwash of the era of “Loadsamoney,” Dallas and Dynasty, Thatcherism and their literary cheerleaders in the high days of the so-called “sex and shopping” novel. Tracy is devoutly materialistic. As were her real-world contemporaries; a staple of tabloid newspaper stories from the early 1990s onward has been that of children being bullied at school for wearing off-brand clothes. (One of the totemic must-have accessories for schoolchildren, Nike’s Air Jordan trainers, launched in the US in 1984.)
Unfortunately for Tracy, she is surrounded by well-meaning, knit-your-own-yoghurt liberals whom Wilson (though she of course takes their part) doesn’t mind sending up: when Tracy visits her social worker Elaine’s house for the first time she reports a toe-curling valentine’s card from “this ultra-weedy guy with thick glasses,” “several framed mottoes […] like ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps’ and a poem about an old woman wearing purple and some long drivelly meditation about Listening to your Inner Child.” Cam’s friends are Jane (“you should see the size of her bum!”) and Liz (“I was worried at first because she’s a teacher”), the latter of whom delivers “this boring old lecture about Caring not being the same as Spending Money and it was almost as if she’d morphed into Mrs vomit Bagley [Tracy’s teacher].”
Tracy’s cynicism banishes any potential piety from Wilson’s narrative: she’s constantly second-guessing and seeing through the forms of adult goodness. When Elaine warns that Tracy meeting her mother (who does reappear in The Dare Game), will be hard for Cam, Tracy sneers: “Well. That’s what being a foster mum is all about, isn’t it? Taking a back seat when necessary. Encouraging all contact with natural families. I’ve read the leaflets.” These are knowing books about a knowing child; but self-knowledge eludes her. “I don’t know why I’m going on about this sad stuff when I’m HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY.”
That word again. Wilson doesn’t let the Tracy Beakers in her work off the hook – nor the adults who are, falteringly, responsible for them. But she gives them something. If her endings are seldom conventionally happy, as she said in a 2020 interview, “I suppose I’m trying to show that there are different ways of being a happy family.”* Like Malorie Blackman, Wilson is a writer who turns otherness – the quality that for so long excluded writers and characters from the charmed circle of children’s writings – into exactly the thing that makes them belong.
* Wilson, Jacky Daydream.
* James Gant, “Jacqueline Wilson admits Enid Blyton ‘wouldn’t be that thrilled’ about her woke rewrite of The Magic Faraway Tree as author’s society says it’s a ‘pity’ new ‘gender equality’ version has been commissioned,” MailOnline, 12 January 2022.
* Ibid., [p].
* Ibid., [p].
* Ibid., [p].
* Lisa Allardice, “Jacqueline Wilson: I’ve never really been in any kind of closet,” Guardian, 4 April 2020.
XI
BACK TO THE FUTURE
J.K. Rowling · Philip Pullman
OLD POTIONS IN NEW BOTTLES
THE PRESENT, FOR LITERARY HISTORIANS, IS A MOVING target: the twenty-first-century canon has yet to take shape. Since I took issue with Martin Amis in my introduction, it seems only fair to quote him again here, this time approvingly: “There is only one value-judgement in literature: time.”* I don’t propose, thereby, to close this book by scampering through the new arrivals section of my local children’s bookshop making guesses at who will last.
But I would like to address two writers from just before the turn of the millennium who have already had an unignorable effect on the children’s writing that was to follow: J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman. The success of their work transformed the market yet again. Both wrote books that were as eagerly consumed by adults as by children and teenagers; and between them they heralded another swerve toward high fantasy after a period in which realism had quietly dominated.
As the millennium approached, the world of childhood underwent a change no less drastic than the one two centuries before that paved the way for modern children’s writing in the first place. The last generation of children to have been born before the internet existed have grown up. Their successors are the so-called digital natives.
Children’s writing, as I’ve argued, has always existed in a continuum with other forms of entertainment and media – sometimes competitive, sometimes collaborative. The digital age has seen a positive explosion of those other media. There’s more entertainment, and more entertaining entertainment, available to children than at any other time in history.
It is everywhere, all at once: games, music, film, television, social media, and hybrid forms of all these things. But it doesn’t just supersede what came before. It also encompasses it. We all now carry the digital equivalent of the Great Library of Alexandria in our trouser pockets. So it isn’t necessarily so strange that, in pointing the way to the future, these two writers dig as deeply as any recent children’s writers have into the past.
* Mira Sethi, “The Weekend Interview: Martin Amis: Islam and the Limits of Permissible Thought,” Wall Street Journal, 28 December 2012.
A Sorting-Hat World
J.K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone;
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets;
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban;
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire;
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix;
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; Harry Potter
and the Half-Blood Prince; Fantastic Beasts
and Where to Find Them; Quidditch Through
the Ages; The Tales of Beedle the Bard
THE CLOSING YEARS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY bring this story round in a neat circle, back to that enchanted summer afternoon in Oxford nearly a century and a half ago. The story of the writing of the first Harry Potter novel has become no less of a fairytale than the origins of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Part “Cinderella”; part “Bluebeard.” The story is a myth within a myth. We see Joanne Rowling, a young single mother in desperate poverty, settling at a corner table in Nicolson’s café in Edinburgh, rocking her baby daughter to sleep with one hand while, eking a single cup of coffee out for hours, she writes the story of a boy wizard, longhand, with the other.
It’s an irresistible image, and it played to advantage in early publicity for the books. It is grounded in fact. At the time she wrote Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, though it had been seven years or more in gestation, Joanne Rowling really was a penniless single mother. She had flown to Scotland from Portugal just months after the birth of her daughter Jessica and the breakdown of her relationship with Jessica’s father.
She was twenty-seven, living on £70 a week in a tatty rented flat in Edinburgh of which she later said: “The best you could say about the place was that it had a roof. If I concentrated hard enough maybe I’d be able to block out the sounds of mice behind the skirting board.” She wrote in cafés while her daughter was asleep – Nicolson’s, now a fixture on the Potter tourist trail, was part-owned by her brother-in-law – though the story was embroidered over the years. It has passed into legend that she wrote in cafés because she couldn’t afford to heat her flat. “I wasn’t in search of warmth,” she later said. “I was just in search of good coffee.”
The semi-fictional Harry Potter origin story, though, had two resonances. One was mythological – rags to riches; Cinderella among the embers; the nameless peasant girl in “Rumpelstiltskin” in her dungeon spinning straw into gold. The other was contemporary: to do with how families, and childhood itself, were conceived. In 1993 John Major’s Conservative government had launched the so-called Back to Basics campaign, a Dursley-pleasing affirmation of cultural conservatism in which “respect for the family” had a central role.
Major’s frontbench colleagues gave speeches attacking “young women [who] have babies with no apparent intention of even trying marriage or a stable relationship with the father of the child” and “benefit-driven” single parents.* The killing of a toddler, James Bulger, by two scarcely older boys that year – both the killers were children of single mothers – gave this rhetoric a darker edge. In the Britain of the mid-1990s, the Enid Blyton vision of childhood was a long way away. Rowling remembers shuffling to the counter to collect her weekly benefits, ashamed that others in the queue would see and judge her.
That low was not what her beginnings would have predicted. Born in 1965, Joanne Rowling grew up in a happy, just-aboutmanaging middle-class family, the oldest of two children, in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. Her parents were young when they married – both just twenty; they had met the year before on a train heading north from King’s Cross station. Pete Rowling was on his way to a posting with the Royal Navy and Anne was in the Wrens. Anne was pregnant with Joanne when they went to the altar. The couple both left the navy and settled in Gloucestershire, and Pete apprenticed on a factory production line. In 1974 they scraped together enough to move to a stone cottage in the pretty village of Tutshill.
E. Nesbit said, “Only by remembering how you felt and thought when you yourself were a child can you arrive at any understanding of the thoughts and feelings of children.”* Affirming her kinship with Nesbit, Rowling has said: “I remember vividly what it felt like to be eleven and every age up to twenty and I think you could make a good case […] for preventing anybody who doesn’t remember what it felt like to be a child from writing a children’s book.”
As has often been assumed, Rowling put a lot of her child self into the bookish, eager-to-please, sometimes priggish Hermione Granger. “Hermione was very easy to create because she is based almost entirely on myself at the age of eleven. She is really a caricature of me. Like Hermione I was obsessed with achieving academically, but this masked a huge insecurity. I think it is very common for plain young girls to feel this way.” She has described herself as “the epitome of a bookish child – short and squat, thick National Health glasses, living in a world of complete daydreams, wrote stories endlessly and occasionally came out of the fog to bully my poor sister and force her to listen to my stories and play the games I’d just invented.”*
