Choosing for children

MARY NORTON

How best to choose books for children? The uestion is: can we? Or rather, should we? hould we not perhaps—for the older hildren—avail ourselves of book tokens? at these make rather dull presents in a you-

get-on-with-it-yourself kind of way—there is

no packaging, no tying-up, no inscription, o sense of trouble taken. The only lternative, alas, as far as new books are oncerned is a harassed leafing-through of e many hundreds displayed to such olourful advantage on the tables of the oksellers.

The choice is both narrow and vast. arrow because, being ardent devotees of

he public library, a great many of the hildren have usually read most of the better ooks written for them today: there is an normous traffic amongst them in word-of- outh recommendation. Very little seems to lip through this net. Enthusiasms vary and riticism abounds, but those who like eading read and read and read. The old avourites, however, stand firm and it is rhaps towards these that the would-be onor should direct his attention. Our local ublic library owns twelve copies of The 'lid in the Willows but (they tell me) there seldom one copy on the shelf. The same pplies to The Jungle Books ('always out' ys the librarian); Winnie the Pooh always out); The Just So Stories (always ut); the E. Nesbit books (always out); lice in Wonderland (always out) and so on rid so on. This makes one think that the ks we should actually buy for older hildren are the ones we have loved and read ourselves at about the same age, books that e know will last them through the years: ewer, smarter copies obtained in later life re never quite so cherished as are the dog- • red, loose-backed originals of childhood. However, for the little children—the ones ho cannot read—the onus is on us: we are to choose. And here, today, we find urselves amid a flowering, a burgeoning, a eritable cascade of line and colour stained in long, thin volumes consisting lmost entirely of pictures. The drawings are uge (presupposing, it seems, on the part of e publishers, that all small children under e age of five are in some degree myopic) rid the text minimal. The latter very often is Ise the work of the artist who nderstandably cannot be blamed for oosing his theme, less for its plot and riginality, than for the opportunities it ends to his particular bent in illustration. me of these books are very charming but Y are also very expensive; at thirty and rty-five shillings far beyond the means of e average working-class mum. And why, e wonders, must they be so large? Have blishers forgotten Beatrix Potter, books e the 'Nutshell Library' of Maurice ndak, and the miniature volumes so loved of the Victorians? Little noses can et very close to a page. All the same, this line is becoming creasingly popular with editors, almost to e neglect of books for the older children. hey sell well. Perhaps because, being read a flash and painlessly assimilated, there is ways room for the next one: a swift lOvv-111) in the same half-simple, half- Phistica4861- genre. There—is (when- -one

thinks of it from a publishing angle) something a little facile, a little too factory- like about this formula: you pick your artist, slip in your text, and Bob (you may rest assured) will be your uncle—or at least for as long as there are 'coffee-tables' in nurseries.

Sometimes one gets a little tired of the phrase 'Writing for Children' and the vast new Commercial world it now encompasses: a writer is a writer: some things he writes are better understood by children and other things he writes are better understood and appreciated by grown-ups. Most of the best stories for children are written by men and women who, disdaining frontiers, move happily about in either country: C. S. Lewis, T. H. White, James Stephens, Kenneth Grahame and, out of the past many more, such as Charles Dickens, Louisa M. Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, W. M. Thackeray, Mark Twain, R. L. Stevenson and so on and so on. None of these, one feels, deliberately `cashed in' on a market: they wrote what they wanted (perhaps, longed) to write and the writing of it gave them joy.

Have you ever listened to children telling stories to each other? The other day I- found myself a not unwilling eavesdropper—in fact, it was impossible not to overhear, so enrapt was the audience and so silent (except for one interminable voice) the room. A small girl was talking and the words went something like this:

And then this man—not the first man but the man who had the dog That was before the dog ran away. No, it was after that but they didn't know it then. Except the first man and he knew because of the soda- water syphon. Well, when the girl went to see this man's mother, the first man's mother—oh. I forgot to say that this was all before the man was standing under the wall, the other one—the one who had shaved off his moustache. And they said they hadn't seen the dog So this man, the one whose uncle owned the bank ...'

An so it went on. And on. And on. It was the story of a play or a film. The listeners, eyes wide and still faces lifted towards the speaker, seemed hardly to be breathing. Another world had caught them up and would hold them rapt and elevated until, by some careless word or movement, a grown- up broke the spell.

What was the story-teller's secret? With what magic did she hold them still? Was it because the teller herself was interested? Because she was living the story as she told it? The loss of the dog was her loss; she shared the apprehension of the man who stood beneath the wall and sensed the mystic aura of an uncle who 'owned a bank'.

Perhaps. All the same I cannot get rid of a sneaking feeling that this is not the whole of the secret. Or rather what secret there is lies in a very simple fact: the child's love of a story—almost any story. An indifferent. bad or even boring story is better than no story at all.

This is a terrifying thought! It turns the whole field of writing for children (`Writing for Children'!) from an enclosed and sheltered pasture into a vast horizonless prairie. 'Quick; we gasp. 'Make rules. Put up fences! This will never dot' So theories come into being and policies are formed. These are communicated to authors by quiet-voiced women across editorial desks: 'Charming. But we find our children like stories about real happenings and real people. Couldn't you . .."Yes, very nice. But some of the words are rather long, if you understand. We find our children like words well within their own vocabularies ...' `Well, we really wanted something for the eight to ten-year-old . . ."Fantasy? Well that's always a bit problematical . . .' and so on. Behind the gentle words are the iron rules, barely indicated but quite inflexible.

Sighing, the author picks up his sts and in a few months time your son can buy a book called 'Armies of Other Lands' and your daughter, perhaps, a charmingly illustrated pamphlet entitled `Katinka: A day in the life of a Ukrainian Village'.

It is indeed true that stories about Real Children from Other Lands (or other Climes, or Other Times) will always find a sale. How `real' they are depends entirely on the skill and imagination with which they are written. Strange pieces of general knowledge do come your way as you watch little Yosh build his Eskimo hut, share with little Masha her Christmas on a farm in Czechoslovakia, hear how little Abdul tends his camels in El Cantara, or pursue little Ivan across the Russian steppes. Yet there is something slightly unfair about it all. Such books combine a double function and are seldom the true narrative which children love. They resemble in some subtle way those London greengrocers, during the war, who would only sell you oranges if you bought cabbages as well: 'Half a pound of what we've got for quarter of a pound of what you want. Besides', he might add, `greenstuff is good for you.'

`Yes, yes,' says the juvenile editor kindly. `But I still think some of the words are a little grown-up, don't you know . . .' She waves her pencil over the Ms. You look at it too although you are much too short-sighted to see what is written there. `Oh,' you say rather lamely, `Do you think so?'

'Yes,' she replies with an even kinder smile. 'Children apart, I think anything we have to say is better said in quite simple language, don't you? Now, I'd like you to take this home and rewrite the whole thing in words intelligible to the eight to ten-year- olds. Do you think you can do that? You see, we must ...'

Must we? Must we really? With all the richness of the English language to choose from must we only select those words which are completely intelligible to a specified age? Do not stories compounded entirely of such words often resemble those light, digestible dishes, the invalid diet of childhood, which are too quickly assimilated and leave one's hunger vaguely unsatisfied? Could we not give the child, within sensible limits, the right word in the right place? How else can we lead him towards his heritage?

Words have colour and feeling, as well as sense. The child's imagination can catch the former without perhaps his conscious understanding of the latter. And yet more often than we think the meaning too is conveyed to him by the context.

In The Just So Stories Kipling went out of his way to find ponderous and mystifying words with which to spice his magic : 'Said the Ethiopian to the Bavarian, "Can you tell me the present habitat of the aboriginal fauna?"' and we can none of us forget so often have we been reminded that the Shipwrecked Mariner was 'a man of infinite resource and sagacity'. My mother loved and

read Uncle Tom's Cabin at the age of eig Do children of that age read it still? He the description of Mrs Selby: `To that natural magnaminity of mt which one often marks as characteristic the women of Kentucky, she added moral and religious sensibility and principl carried out with great energy and ability in practical results.'

Robinson Crusoe, we can assume, ss1 not primarily written for children and yet was the younger generation who adopted t story for their own. Here he speaks of father's counsel : `He bade me . . . observe I should alwa find that the calamities of life were sha among the upper and lower part of manki but that the middle station had the feu disasters and was not exposed to so ma vicissitudes as the higher and lower part mankind, nay, they were not subjected to many distempers and uneasinesses either body or mind as those who, by vicious livi luxury and extravagance on the one hand by hard labour, want of necessaries on other, and mean or insufficient diet on other hand, bring distempers u themselves by the natural consequences their way of living . . . that tempera moderation, quietness, health, society. agreeable diversions and all desire pleasures were the blessings attending middle station of life.'

Is it that the children of earlier generati were more intelligent than those of today? very much doubt it. I think they, like own children, passionately loved 'a s and would hunt through no matter how a welter of words to find it. Even the intelligible of these would be taken in stride as they rode hell for leather on scent of the plot. As the chapters slipped repetition and context would give such w their meaning, the child a vocabulary the book its true perspective.

`Maybe,' the juvenile editor will politely. Then suddenly, perhaps, she s frown, tapping the Pis sharply with pencil. 'I don't like this bit where the lit dog gets run over.'

`Oh ... you don't?'

No.'

`Dogs do get run over ..

`Children's books shouldn't be sad. `But the rest of the book is quite gay.' 'I think books for children should be all through, don't you?' `Yes, I mean—no. Did you ever read book called Froggie's Little Bo Bennie?

No, I can't say I have.' (Has the tI smile become a• little bit derisive?) `Well, it was a terribly sad book. A two London waifs. They were cold hungry and often homeless. One died• adored it as a child and wept quarts 05 it.'

`Oh?' Her gaze seems more puzzled critical. 'But life is sad soon enough. you think? Children should be happy " they are children.'

'Perhaps you are right.'

All the same it comforted me as a child read that other children had troll too—graver ones, so often than mY ° Books about children who had nothing fun were oddly irritating and faintly boon so I alone in the world had trou Obviously I was a peculiar child if sad however fleeting, was alien to no childhood.

Children will not be denied knowledge of life as it is (or as they fear it may be) and if the better class literature of their day lacks virility, where do they seek it? In the comics, of course.

We bowdlerise Grimm because 'some of it, my dear, is too ghastly' but, in closing a window, we inadvertently open a door: it is a trapdoor, creaking open on to blood, screams and . terror. Is it not better for children to read in Grimm of 'the Man who could not Shiver' or of the maiden who had no hands than of the Ape Men, the Green Monsters, the Blind Killers, the grimacing Vampires of the penny dreadfuls—products of minds uneducated and opportunist, swift to exploit a child's love of savagery?

Yes, it takes more than little Abdul to counteract the comics. Only vigorous and arresting (or truly humorous) writing can do it—stories which break through the shibboleths on their own momentum. And this, I am glad to say—on the wave of a vast new interest in writing for children—is beginning to happen. Tolkien, perhaps, was one of the first contemporaries to break through the invisible barriers, but there are many other writers who—far from just exploring this field—are setting up lasting edifices against the wind and weather of succeeding generations.