The Haunted Wood, page 53
It’s a story that touches on the power of storytelling itself. The mouse is right at the bottom of the food chain, but he tells a story that puts him, effectively, at the top of it – and everybody else believes that story. It is a little millefeuille of dramatic irony. Even the clever mouse is wrong-footed for a moment, knocked off his pedestal as the hermeneutic apex predator, when he discovers that the lie he has been telling describes something that’s real. Did he imagine the gruffalo into existence?
Part of the joy of The Gruffalo – as well, perhaps, as its value as an introduction to the world of adulthood – is that it’s a tale of deception and predation told in language of elaborate courtesy. Fox, owl, and snake seek to lure the mouse with an invitation to eat; the mouse thanks them gratefully for the invitation, or greets them like old pals on their second encounter. Nothing is quite what it seems. Nobody, not even the gruffalo, is sincere. And Axel Scheffler’s illustrations contribute hugely to taming this extraordinary, simple-yet-complex tale. His gruffalo isn’t terrifying: it’s cute. And Scheffler’s visual Easter-eggs help draw the books into a sort of Donaldsonverse – the gruffalo’s child, in the sequel of that name, carries Stick Man about under its arm; in other post-Gruffalo books you can spot gruffalo faces or visual motifs unobtrusively in the background.
Finally, look at the brilliant simplicity with which the final couplet closes the story, with its inverted echo of the opening couplet and with a caesura in the final line to be relished by every readeraloud: “All was quiet in the deep dark wood. / The mouse found a nut, and the nut was good.” The deep dark wood is now a place of calm and comfort rather than fear and threat, and the tissue of dangerous little deceptions gives way to unfalsifiable bodily reality. After all those imaginary meals, a real one. So real, in fact, you can taste it. Sweet as a nut.
Children’s books, I argued in my introduction, are gateways to adult reading. Picture books are gateways to childhood reading. You hear them, first of all. Then you start making the connection between the familiar story and the words on the page. Then you start to read aloud. And in due course you can read them to yourself, before you move on and out, beyond them.
It is in their pages that most children will first encounter poetry – see how words can bounce and chime even without a musical accompaniment. Because they have so few words in them, those words matter. They need, as children know, to be “just so.” They will remain with their readers and listeners for a lifetime.
Children’s picture books are not just read, but reread, sometimes hundreds of times; and the most beloved of them will be returned to decades later: first, when their auditors become readers to their own children; and maybe for a second time, years after that, when, with a grandchild on your knee, you reach down a frayed paperback from a shelf and say: “The night Max wore his wolf suit…”
And there you are, the years falling away: back at the beginning…
* In Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes, Pauline wears a ribbon in her hair to play Alice. Her teacher tells her she looks “ridiculously Tenniel.”
* A hornbook was a tablet, looking a bit like an optician’s paddle, on which letters of the alphabet would be written out for children to learn by heart. They’d been an educational tool since medieval times.
* Quoted in Karen MacPherson, “Hitler banned it; Gandhi loved it: “The Story of Ferdinand,” the book and, now, film,” Washington Post, 12 December 2017.
* Art Buchwald (syndicated column), July 1974.
† Jonathan Cott, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children’s Literature (Random House, 1983), [p].
* There’s a famous story Sendak told of getting a fan letter from a child and writing back with a drawing of a Wild Thing: “Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said: “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
* Fresh Air, National Public Radio, 30 October 2003.
* “That was the one bit that the publishers thought perhaps should come out, because they said, ‘That’s not very realistic, is it?’” – Kerr, interview with author, 2018.
* Such is Browne’s commitment to the largest primate that he was once hospitalized by a gorilla bite during the filming of a Tv programme for kids.
† Lot o’ Fun was an English comic that published from 1906 to 1929. Comics had already become an established part of the mix of childhood reading.
* Or wings it, or bellies it, as the case may be.
EPILOGUE
THIS LOVELY WORLD, THESE PRECIOUS DAYS
IN SEPTEMBER 2023, THE UK’S NATIONAL LITERACY Trust charity released a disheartening report. ‘Children’s writing at “crisis point” as enjoyment among pupils drops,’ said one newspaper headline of its findings. ‘More than half of UK children don’t read in their spare time,’ said another. The charity’s annual survey of attitudes to reading in children aged between eight and eighteen found that 56 per cent of their respondents said that they didn’t enjoy reading recreationally; a change for the worse of more than 15 per cent since 2016. Among boys the figure was lower than among girls. Among children on free school meals, the figure who didn’t enjoy reading was more than 60 per cent. The charity called it ‘an all-time low statistic since we began surveying children in 2005’.
As I reach the end of a survey of the history of storytelling to children, this looks like a bleak capstone. Was Pottermania – with children queuing outside bookshops overnight to get their hands on a hardback book – merely what stock market analysts call a ‘dead cat bounce’? Will childhood reading become what it started out as: a luxury activity for the children of middle-class parents? Are the pages that precede this one not, after all, the celebration of a living artform but the overlong obituary of a soon-to-be-dead one? I hope and believe not.
As I’ve attempted to show, the human impulse to consume stories is ineradicable. The stories that children’s writers have given us over the years have proved accordingly resilient, and endlessly available to reinvention. Media that were once seen as potential threats to childhood reading – television having been the previous great panic in that direction – have, when used imaginatively, rubbed along with and even helped support it; not least because selling screen rights is a good way of keeping a writer solvent enough to keep writing. There’s always room in the ecosystem for one more species.
I don’t, though, brush off the idea that new media might be something to be concerned about; that they might present a threat to the habit of recreational reading. Social media, videogames and other products of the digital age are super-sticky and sometimes more than just figuratively addictive. Many of them are engineered to game the brain’s rewards circuits in a way that even the most exciting television show cannot. Given a choice between another game of Fortnite and half an hour in a quiet chair reading The Secret Garden, it’s futile to pretend that the average eleven-year-old isn’t going to plump for Fortnite.*
So Fortnite and its successors are here to stay. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t and won’t coexist with The Secret Garden. It seems to me important that they do. For all their many vir- tues – and I write as an unashamed lover of videogames – these digital forms are weak in many areas in which ink-on-paper storytelling is strongest. The defining feature of videogames is their interactivity. Even in the sort-of-storytelling ones, the story and world-building are secondary to the gameplay. That crate is there for a player to take cover behind in a shoot-out; this plot twist is there to set up a boss fight. The best can be narratively engrossing and even, sometimes, moving, but letting the player do stuff comes first. They can create thrillingly atmospheric worlds for players to explore, but they are worlds of surfaces, of pre- dictable mechanics.
A videogame will always struggle to do what fiction does, which is to allow yourself to envision what it might be like to be somebody else. Videogames can’t match fiction in terms of emotional engagement, and they can’t match fiction in terms of moral engagement. There’s a different sort of interactivity involved in reading: the imaginative interactivity of taking black marks on a white page and creating a world from them in your own head. If you and I both play through a videogame, we will have experienced the same world on screen. If you and I both read The Wind in the Willows, we will have experienced different worlds: we will have visualized them differently, directed our attention and remembered them differently, and allocated our sympathies differently according to our own needs and predilections.
What’s more, if we reread the same book years later, when we have ourselves changed, the books will have changed with us. That’s why it’s not just children who benefit from reading and rereading children’s books. In Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise (2019), Katherine Rundell makes the case well, arguing that if we ignore children’s books as adults we discard ‘a casket of wonders which, read with an adult eye, have a different kind of alchemy in them’: ‘Read a children’s book to remember what it was to long for impossible and perhaps-not-impossible things. Go to children’s fiction to see the world with double eyes: your own, and those of your childhood self.’
Prose narratives invite and reward the sort of continuous atten-tion that is ever more valuable in the distraction economy of the digital age. The tech writer Cory Doctorow has aptly called the internet ‘an ecosystem of interruption technologies’, and so it is. More than that, its communal spaces on social media are remorse-lessly competitive. Validation comes in the stark metrics of likes and reposts, and their implicit promise – especially seductive to anxious children trying to figure out who they are – is that if you act a certain way, think a certain way, consume a certain way, you’ll look and feel happier. The paradox of social media is that it places you in a crowd of millions and makes you feel alone. Storybooks are paradoxical in the opposite way: you consume them alone, but the act of consuming them makes you feel less alone.
So children of all backgrounds can get pleasure and consolation out of reading; they just need to know that that pleasure is available, and how to access it. That requires a will. It won’t just happen. It means that adults, who are themselves all too easily distracted by the constant bleating and pinging of their smartphones, need to do more than just command our children to read before we go back to Instagram or Twitter or the school WhatsApp group. We need to slow down, turn off, and enter the worlds of these books with our children during that foundational time when reading is a shared experience. It begins with putting your arm around a small shoulder at bedtime and starting: ‘Now, O Best Beloved…’
For the other thing that the National Literacy Trust discovered in that report was that ‘nearly three times as many children and young people who perceived their reading environment to be supportive said they enjoyed reading’. It’s not that they read because they had parents or teachers who encouraged them to: it’s that when their parents and teachers encouraged them to read, they enjoyed it. And at three times the rate of those whose parents and teachers did not.
God knows, the good material is all out there, and it’s coming thicker and faster than ever. The years since the turn of the millennium have seen the flourishing of a new generation of talents in children’s writing in every genre. To name but a few: Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, Katherine Rundell’s The Wolf Wilder and Impossible Creatures, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Cressida Cowell’s How To Train Your Dragon, Piers Torday’s Last Wild series, S.F. Said’s Varjak Paw, Louis Sachar’s Holes, Michelle Paver’s Wolf Brother books, Francesca Simon’s Horrid Henry, Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines trilogy, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the indefatigable Michael Morpurgo, Charlie Higson’s Young Bond and Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider books, Percy Jackson and Artemis Fowl, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder… Here are fantasy, science fiction, humor and adventure – and, thanks to the revived interest in children’s writing, they are being published more ingeniously and confidently than at any time in the history of the industry. I can’t claim to be extremely excited about David Walliams’s work, but lots of kids – especially those who are reluctant to read at all – love him.
That points to the lesson we have to learn and learn all over again in each generation. To keep children reading – or at least to start them reading with enjoyment – you must go to where they are. My own younger son, the one who came with me to meet Judith Kerr, read reluctantly. He tended to find what they now call ‘chapter books’, i.e. the sort with blocks of text, boring. But when he came across Jeff Kinney’s witty and humane illustrated series Diary of a Wimpy Kid, he was hooked. He pesters me, months ahead of launch, to know when the next one is coming out. In due course he developed the same relationship with Jamie Smart’s Bunny vs Monkey series, and Louie Stowell’s Loki books.
These books are halfway to being comics (he also adores Calvin and Hobbes). But rather than tut-tut at them for not being proper books, let’s thank heaven for gateway drugs. It only takes one or two encounters with a book that you really, really enjoy for the hook to be set. For one generation, that meant Enid Blyton. For another, Roald Dahl. For another, J.K. Rowling. Often these were books of which their parents disapproved for reasons of style, or content, or both: but no matter. These were the books that enticed those children, for the first time, into the haunted wood.
I started this book by talking about my father. I’d like to end it by telling a story about my daughter. She’s now fourteen years old. She was about eight when what I think of the inciting incident took place for her. It was early evening, not long before bedtime. She was upstairs in her room, and I was downstairs in the kitchen, making supper.
I heard, suddenly, a yelp of distress from the house above – the sort of howl of pure pain that makes you drop a knife and bolt upstairs three steps at a time before you’re even aware you’re doing it. I thought – or would have, if I’d had time to think – that my accident-prone child had done herself another injury. I expected to find her bleeding, contused, black-eyed or bloody-nosed, and to spend the rest of the evening in the A & E department of north London’s Whittington Hospital.
I slammed her bedroom door open. And there she was, sitting on the edge of her bed, crying as if she’d never stop. In her hand was a copy of Charlotte’s Web. She’d just got to that bit. The bit that I cried at when I was a child, and that I would cry at again if I allowed myself to reread it. She couldn’t understand why – in fact, she recovered enough to be nearly affronted – I was so happy. But I was – because, in that moment, I knew that she’d got it. She had been brought to tears of real anguish by a series of words on a page, written by a timid man who’d lived and died on another continent years before she was even born, describing a series of events that never happened to a character who never existed. That’s the power of children’s writing, and it goes generation to generation, and it never goes away.
* If you don’t know what this is, count yourself lucky – or ask an eleven-year-old. It’s a hectic videogame in which everyone’s trying to shoot everyone else.
Further Reading
Ahlberg, Allan, The Boyhood of Burglar Bill (Puffin, 2006).
Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood, trans. Robert Baldrick (Jonathan Cape, 1962).
Blackman, Malorie, Just Sayin’: My Life in Words (Merky Books, 2022).
Blyton, Enid, The Story of My Life (Pitkin, 1952).
Brayfield, Celia, Writing Black Beauty: Anna Sewell and the Story of Animal Rights (History Press, 2023).
Briggs, Julia, A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858–1924 (Hutchinson, 1987).
Burnett, Frances Hodgson, The One I Knew the Best of All (Frederick Warne & Co, 1893).
Burnett, vivian, The Romantick Lady (Frances Hodgson Burnett): The Life Story of an Imagination (Scribner, 1927).
Byatt, A.S., The Children’s Book (Chatto & Windus, 2009).
Cadogan, Mary, Just William Through the Ages (Macmillan, 1994).
Carpenter, Humphrey, Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (Allen & Unwin, 1985).
Chambers, Roland, The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome (Faber, 2009).
Coren, Michael, C.S. Lewis: The Man Who Created Narnia (Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1996).
Coveney, Peter, The Image of Childhood (Penguin, 1967).
Cunningham, Hugh, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 (Routledge, 3rd edn, 2021).
Dahl, Roald, Boy: Tales of Childhood (Jonathan Cape, 1984).
Dahl, Roald, Going Solo (Jonathan Cape, 1986).
Darton, F.J. Harvey, Children’s Books in England: Nine Centuries of Social Life (Cambridge University Press, 1932).
Dennison, Matthew, Eternal Boy: The Life of Kenneth Grahame (Head of Zeus, 2018).
Dennison, Matthew, Teller of the Unexpected: The Life of Roald Dahl, An Unofficial Biography (Head of Zeus, 2022).
Dennison, Matthew, ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’: The Life of Beatrix Potter (Head of Zeus, 2016).
Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert, The Story of Alice: The Secret History of Wonderland (Harvill Secker, 2015).
Fisk, Nicholas, Pig Ignorant (Walker Books, 1992).
Fitzsimons, Eleanor, The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit (Duckworth, 2019).
