NO Harm Done

When I was a Little Boy. By Erich Kiistner. (Cape, 16s.)

Emil and the Detectives. By Erich Kiistner. (Puffin Books, 2s. 6d.) Line of Attack. By Michel Bourguignon. Translated by John Buchanan-Brown. Illustrated by Geraldine Spence. (The Bodley Head, 10s. 6d.) The Secret Dog. By Diana Pullein-Thompson. (Collins, 10s. 6d.) Noah's Ark River. By Andrew Wood. (Max Parrish, 9s. 6d.)

'IN this book I want to tell children something of my own childhood—something, not every- thing. . . . I thought it might interest you to know how a little boy lived half a century ago.' It is hard to think offhand of any other autobio- graphies aimed so specifically at children and it seems altogether appropriate that such an experi- ment should have been made by the author of that pioneer, Emil and the Detectives. The pleasant truth of the matter, as Herr Kastner well knows, is that these rambling memories of his boyhood in Dresden will give great satisfaction to adults, too. He has obliquities of manner that permit him to work, when he wishes, on two levels. When I was a Little Boy is in many respects a hymn of praise to his extraordinary mother, a woman of fantastic energy, enterprise and will, a sketch of whom already exists in Emil. But he is never mawkish: the scene in which he describes his agonies every Christmas Eve as he stood be- tween the rivalries of his parents, the elaborate toys made for him by his mild father and the mound of gifts from his mother, is cleverly done; there is shade as well as light. He gives amusing details of his family tree, but not too many; there is a fierce portrait of his rich bullying Uncle Franz, surrounded by terrorised women, and a sad account of a rock-climbing expedition with a chilly schoolmaster struggling to be amiable. Only here and there are there traces of the Vein Avuncular : "No!" cries memory, shaking her curly locks,' etc. The illustrations by Horst Lemke have been artfully set into the text and are quite exceptionally good.

'Something, not everything . . . not everything that children experience is suitable for other children to read about' Re-reading Emil and reading the other adventure stories under review, it occurred to me that Herr Ktistner in the fore- word to his new book had unwittingly signalled to something that has been worrying me about children's fiction for some time past. How des- perately escapist most of it is, almost as sapping in the opportunities it offers for false identifica- tion as the most blatant of harem romances to those emerged from puberty. It is true of all these titles, which are all in their different ways rather well done. A basic feature of the `adventure' plot seems to be a ganging-up against adults, an attempt to persuade children that they can defeat people twice their size either because of superior intelligence (Noah's Ark River), superior moral fibre (Line of Attack) or sheer weight of numbers (Eniil and the Detectives). Since these arguments are for all normal purposes unfounded, one

wonders, while understanding a child's pleasure in such fictions, quite what sort of misconceptions they are likely to set up in his mind. The problem

of violence has its place here. Hue and Cry was a delightful film, a well-thought-out development of Herr Kiistner's classic, but the truth is that real life would have found criminals more disposed to brutality, there would have been broken limbs, possible murder and—dare one say it?—a likely rout of the children. But to the books.

M. Bourguignon has some excellent true touches in his Line of Attack. It's about two gangs of

fourteen-year-olds from rival Breton villages. One group sally forth to regain their captured HQ, the .Lone Tower, in an abandoned diesel train they

have managed to recondition. The doing-making- improvising details of their preparations for war are splendidly gone into; they manufacture their own ('harmless') explosives; a tape-recorder plays its part; and there is an ingenious reconciliation of the warring villages at the end, involving their shamefaced elders and a very rare blood group. There is no writing-down and excitement is well sustained; but it is thanks only to the un- written conventions of this kind of fiction that no one suffers anything worse than a bloodied nose. The writing becomes evasive for the first time when combat is actually joined. Diana Pullein- Thompson seems to be aware of the difficulties into which her strenuous action has led her in The Secret Dog. Mark and Darkie, a Jamaican boy (having been bold enough to cross the colour bar,. she might have thought a bit more about names), keep a mongrel they have saved from the river in a disused shed. April, a little country girl, joins up with them, the mongrel litters and the children try to find homes for the puppies while the rough jealous boys April has deserted for her new friends start making trouble. There is a lunatic chase over roof-tops that somehow includes a game Curate. Suddenly Mark finds himself alone in a deserted house with the razor-spiv, Major. The home backgrounds of the children have been convincingly established, but now reality fades :

. . . Mark only felt cold and tired, divorced from the threats which seemed too ludicrous to be real. Such things only happened in films, he couldn't imagine himself blinded by acid; he wasn't a gangster, but just a boy who wanted to save a dog and some puppies. You had to be really wicked before acid and evilness came into your life, he thought.

Comforting, but nonsense. Anyway, all ends happily—as you may have guessed.

Noah's Ark River is the best-humoured and wildest of all. Bunch and Alexander, sons of dead Sergeant Thomson of the River Police, lind

themselves adopted by Sergeant Cracknell. Sally Ann and her sister Buckets (ugh!) have been left

to float about on the Thames in the Queen Anne, old Dan Izzard in charge, while their VIP parents make important travels. The boys and girls join

forces again (last time was in Mystery Cruise) and tangle with atom scientists and the most ineffec- tual agents ever dispatched from behind the Iron Curtain. This one will fall to pieces in your hands if you pick it up, but there are so many engaging gimmicks—a donkey's ear is used as a post-box— and such lively reporting of the awful Nogginses and even more awful retired gentry of the river- side that most children will devour it in a couple of stunned sittings, I imagine. The keen-brained brothers and sisters face harrowing dangers ab- solutely unscathed, of course, unthreatened almost. What the answer is, in our sensitive age, to all this cushioned adventuring Heaven knows. An adult answer is obviously a book like Lord of the Flies where the penalties of violence are swift and sure. The answer for children's books might be a truce to all the large talk of, fights and fists and bravery in face of the enemy, a general shift of focus by the 'new realists' towards adven- tures that don't entail children running so per- sistently foul of evil adults.

JOHN COLEMAN