Fiction for the very young
Edward Blishen
A weekend guest, I slept in the bed of someone's absent son — he being away at the university. To an insomniac eye, his bookshelves offered an almost perfect account of their owner, from cot to college. Camus stood between Rosemary Sutcliff and Mary Norton: Kafka and Franz Fanon leaned on Anthony Buckeridge. And here and there, tattered, grubby — in one case, reduced to a heap of separate pages held together with an elastic band — were picture books.
I thought of these on the arrival of review copies of some of the latest books for the youngest. Not just because there's something misleading about a children's picture book in mint condition. (A reviewer ought perhaps to throw it about for a while, jump up and down on it, subject its pages to random tearing). But because those about to buy such books might well wish they could foresee which of them would end up like those in my unwitting young host's bookshelves: their near-destroyed condition being matched, as a mark of their success, only by their being hung on to by an owner now so very sternly mature .. .
It's all guesswork, thank goodness. The reviewer can at best display a dignified ignorance. But things are left to be said. For instance — to start at the simplest end, a pound of picture to an ounce of story — that Pat Hutchins, who produced a classic of the
nursery with Rosie's Walk, has done a little less memorably, but still pleasantly, with The Wind Blew (Bodley Head £1.20). Here's pure cumulativeness at work: a wind blowing into the air, page by coloured page, umbrellas, balloons, hats and wigs and kites and flags, and being pursued by an anxious thickening crowd. On the last page but one, everything comes down again with beautiful unsuitability: top-hat on child, gay scarf on glum postman, and so on. In Squirrels (Oxford £1.60), Brian Wildsmith doesn't tell a story at all: but inserts into some corner of each gorgeous page a fact of squirrel life. So the information that the nest is called a drey exists on the edge of a superb ball of colour. Some people say Mr Wildsmith's brilliance is more to adult than to childish taste. Who knows? I can only say that my own view of human nature would take a denting if it were proved that fewer than, say, 75 per cent of children loved these pages that burst upon a browser like fireworks. Mr W's squirrels, by the way, are red, and his birds distinctly unEnglish. A very simple, special, warm book is Susan Lapsley's I am Adopted (Bodley Head 90p). Imagine the brief: "Write a book, one hundred and thirty five words long, that might be given as part of a general policy of reassurance to an adopted child." It's very tactfully done. "Do you know what adopted means?" asks Charles, confidently breasting his tricycle. "I do. It means we were given to Mummy and Daddy when we were little." Michael Charlton's illustrations have an unforced cheerfulness that supports the unsentimental text. Rather less simple: Benjy and the Barking Bird, by Margaret Bloy Graham (Picture Puffin 30p), is a charming tale about a dog whose nose is put out of joint when Aunt Sarah arrives with her damned parrot, Tilly, expert at upstaging all other pets. Benjy behaves rather badly, and then rather nobly, and has an earthy soulfulness that only children of a naturally coldhearted disposition could resist. For a sort of zany matter-of-factness, I liked two imports from Sweden: Jan Loot's My Grandpa is a Pirate and The Story of the Red Apple (A. & C. Black £1.35 each). Grandpa is a pirate, as it happens, only at hasty intervals in his existence as a mild and respectable old gentleman, retired from the Post Office. His grandson joins him for a rapid adventure involving remorseless Arabs; they arrive home, after squeaks of appropriate narrowness, before Grandma wakes from her afternoon nap. The illustrations are full of grinning detail, as they are in the second story, in which the apple, left to ripen on a windowsill, plays a leading part in a brief tangle of crime and general calamity before returning to its starting point.
The right sort of irrevelant, faulty, inexplicable detail in illustration is surely important, when one considers that few drawings of any kind are subjected to such scrutiny as those in a child's picture book. In The Story of the Red Apple there's a Charles Addams-type haunted man, nothing to do with anything, crouching in the belfry of the parish church. In Herbert Eisner's The Monster Plant (Methuen 75p), a bust of Beethoven exhibits a deepening glare as Miss Elram's monstera deliciosa strangles the piano after being too well-cared for by her young neighbours. A nice story, though it could have done with one more twist at the end.
From America, Jack Jouette's Ride, by Gail E. Haley (Bodley Head £1.35) and Julius Lester's The Knee-High Man and other tales (Kestrel Books £1.25). The first celebrates an event during the American Revolution, when a young horseman, riding through the night, saved Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and other Patriots from capture by British troops. The author's illustrations gallop headlong through the book, in a storm of moonlit leaves: very impressive. Mr Lester compiled that remarkable book, To be a Slave, and has drawn his six stories from black oral literature. He heard them first from his father, a Methodist minister: "one characteristic of black ministers," he tells us, being "a gift for telling stories." The test of the quality of a tale was his mother's laughter, for she was no lover of story-telling. The original force of his halfdozen, as he points out, lay in their being imaginative retorts to the power of the white man: lumbering, slow-witted Mr Bear was no match for nimble Mr Rabbit. What is left Is the triumph of any small creature with quick tongue (and feet) over any bully. There's also a mordant little story about a fa,mer who feels sorry for a snake and warms it inside his jacket, having wrung from it a promise not to bite him. The snake breaks its promise, saying calmly: "I'm a snake. You knew that when you picked me up. And you knew that snakes bite. It's a part of their nature." Attractive pictures by Ralph Pinto.
Ian Serraillier is one of the very small band who can write poetry for children that's not soft or silly or unduly comfortable. Some of his best have the benefit of Fritz Wegner's bright, quirky illustrations in The Robin and the Wren (Kestrel Books £1.75). His tall tales, and taller rhyming, stem from Browning's Pied Piper: of a lion, for example, collapsing with what is clearly narcolepsy in the High Street: There was only the pop and a pane of glass 'twixt
me and him,
and he looked terrible grim
and greedy and gory-ous, the Lion Sertorius.
There's a cool little poem about a gardener Who sent his head to be repaired ("he thought, as nothing much was wrong, he wouldn't be Without it long"), and has been weeding path and plot ("God wot") for ten years with nothing on his shoulders. "Don't pity him", is the Pay-off couplet, "for his distress — he never sent Up his address." Fifteen poems, and not a duff one.
Last, a very fine piece of book production: two volumes of tales from Grimm, under the
general title The Juniper Tree, selected by Lore Segal and Maurice Sendak, translated by Lore Segal (all but four, which are the work of Randall Jarrell) and illustrated by Sendak. Everything's handsome about them: the box they come in, their wrappers, the print — the very margins. They came out last year in America, a celebration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the first English collection from Grimm. I'm not sure that I'd recommend them for the nursery shelves. It's not only that they're so beautiful as objects — they also dip deep into the darkness of these tales, bringing to the surface such little-known Shivering marvels as The Story of one who set out to study fear': or the title story itself, "a Masterpiece", as the jacket flap comments, that modern anxieties seem to have suppressed" — it's a haunting, terrible tale of stePmotherly murderousness. But I do recommend these volumes for the family, to be carefully released or read aloud in conditions of suitable security. I can't read the originals: but I'vecompared these versions with Josef Scharl's authoritative edition: and though that reads Well, this reads better — catching a swing, a pace, a strong simplicity of language that ,sounds very close to the manner of a spoken 'ale. Sendak's drawings — huge-eyed men and Women, scenes frozen in moonlight, haunted distances — are marvellous.
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