Children's Spring Books

The stuff of dreams

Gillian Freeman

Fortunately for the publishers of children's books their readers have widely divergent tastes—a point made pictorially and predictably in Inger and Lasse Sandberg's Let's Be Friends( Methuen £1.50): If you want to know what I look like (runs the text beneath eleven identical faces), it's a bit like the face second from the left in the middle row; quite ordinary really, and much like everyone else. But of course everyone isn't exactly the same; it would be very dull if we were.

There is, however, a common denominator.

All children, it seems, relish bad behaviour. From the demonic doings of Lucifer himself to the bitching of Cinderella's ugly sisters, a sample selection of current juvenile literature compounds the thesis—naughtiness is nice.

At the beginning of Let's Be Friends the word 'hullo' is written in twenty-eight languages, and although they do not total twenty-eight, the writers and illustrators of these books do add up to a nursery of nations: French (that's Cinderella, Puffin 50p, by Charles Perrault, not exactly a newcomer); American ; Swiss ; Belgian ;

German ; Swedish (that's Let's Be Friends) and Japanese. A few are English, one of them, Gillian Avery's Freddie's Feet (Antelope Books 95p), extremely good, and one positively outstanding.

The latter, The Fantastic Creatures of Edward Julius Detmold (Pan £2.50), is only partially a book for children because the drawings are illustrations for children's fables by Detmold, the surviving twin of a precociously talented pair who, at the age of twelve, won gold medals in adult art competitions. They were born in November 1883 in Putney and began to draw when they were five years old. They each had a drawing hung in the Royal Academy at thirteen, and were still in their teens when J. M. Dent commissioned them to complete a book of coloured illustrations. Mac millans issued their illustrations of The Jungle Book as a loose-leaf portfolio and their genius was widely acknowledged but suddenly, on 19th April 1908, Maurice Detmold (the elder twin) committed suicide by inhaling chloroform. Edward, bereft of the close partnership, worked with a feverish intensity and produced in quick succession a number of books which established his reputation. It is from these that the present volume of illustrations is compiled. Biology and fantasy combine in the strange landscapes created by Detmold for Fahre's Book of Insects; the colours are extraordinarily delicate and the insects microscopically exact. In the drawings of the Arabian Nights and Aesop's Fables the same impeccable detail is an integral part of beautiful, brilliantly coloured and bizarre evocations of stories that balance on the borderline between innocence and experience.

The quality of books for the young is high; care, talent and expertise proportionately greater than in adult entertainment fiction. The cost, of course, keeps an inflationary pace, but the lovely drawings by Satomi Ichikawa in A Child's Book of Seasons (Heinemann £2.60) will give repeated pleasure. An evening scene of children watching starlings as they flock over a cropped hayfield, another of two small boys in a snowy forest, brought back the sensations of childhood to this jaded reviewer, and the gentle jog to the memory is worth every penny of the £2.60 it costs. For those small enough to be making the memorybank, it is the stuff of which they are made.

Not all Eric Le Cain's illustrations for the Picture Puffin Cinderella are in colour, and not all are completely satisfying—to romantics, that is; the fairy godmother is plump and comic—but like all things Harmondsworth it gives real value. A strongly bound paperback makes much more sense than a hard-cover, and puts it in the pocket-money range. Luis Murscheta's 'Hamster's Journey (Methuen £2.50) is unlikely to be a child's purchase. It is a delightful story, but at £2.50 it works out at ten pence a page. They are, however, beautifully decorated pages and complement the simple tale of the badly behaved chemist— careless of the hamster's feelings and greedy for custom—who sets in motion the Great Hamster Escape from the city cages. Protected by their playwheels, the hamsters bowl along the spaghetti junctions and freeways until they reach the countryside. The end pages are a hamster's-eye-view of golden cornfields.

Gommaar Timmerman's two books, The Little White Hen and The Great Balloon Race (Methuen £1.75) are printed like comic strips, five drawings to a page. The pictures are crude (of the commercial cartoon variety) but the stories are inventive, and deserve a finer illustrative talent than their inventor's. The vocabulary, unlike the pictures, is not naive.

Jon Chalon's Thi, Dustmen's HolidaY

(Heinemann £2.90) is naïve, and that ls meant as a compliment. Billy, who hides in a dustbin, is a working-class boy. His

extraordinary adventures take him up in a

helicopter and down into a safari park. where the ducal owner dons a chauffeur s uniform and drives him home in a Rolls. Not exactly Cinderella in reverse—but Jo the tradition.

Billy plays pirates on the rubbish tip; there is no question of 'let's pretend' about Pirates, the second in the admirable series of Topic Books (Macdonald £1.45). There are secret codes to master, models to make and puzzles to confound; there is historical fact and fictional verse—perfect for a wet Sunday or a grizzly convalescence. From tales of Captain Kidd to naughty Freddie Grant, hero of G ill ian Avery's Freddie's Feet. Gillian Avery is among the very best of writers for children today; her work is

always impeccably researched, unobtrusively informative and first-rate entertain

ment. History is never 'grafted on' but is an

integral part of the narrative. She has a range of age-levels for which she writes,

and this is for the six-to-nines who will sympathise (and identify) with Freddie who managed to be good until 1853. This was the year that Queen Victoria took over the family house while Balmoral was being rebuilt. His 'dresses' (customary for little boys of the period) are mocked by tough Sandy and James Blair, and Freddie is defended by his doting sister Louise:

Freddie's only little. But here you see men wearing skirts. You can see their knees. I think it's rude and disgustingand I think you are too. Freddie acquires his own kilts in due course. They are sent especially from Aberdeen in time for him to wear them to visit the Queen; a treat, thinks his mother, but Freddie has opinions of his own. He resents not only the kilt (he had wanted knickerbockers) but the Queen herself who was responsible for his present sojourn in 3 farmhouse. When presented, he turns a handstand revealing his tartan drawers• Taken back to say he is sorry, Freddie responds by doing it again. All the domestic detail is right and the Blair boys swallow their words; a good book. It is not out of place here to comrnerld Antelope Books generally (another exce,1lent one in the series is John Escott S Oddments Corner, 95p) with their large, clear print, simple but effective illustrations —I only object to the speech 'balloons' in Freddie's Feet—and their lively contents. They cost under a pound and for children who are beginning to read for themselves they provide a stimulating incentive to continue.

.Freddie's behaviour might be classed as minor devilry, but the real devil is the central character in a curious collection of Short stories called (predictably) The Devil's Storybook (Methuen £1.50). The author, Natalie Babbitt, is American, and the dust Jacket bears glowing reviews from across the Atlantic of this and her other work, The Search for the Delicious, which I have n.ot read. Her prose is not especially inventive and the stories have an old amorality. Perhaps I want my devils wicked. This one makes excursions from hell to heaven and earth, but he is malicious rather than evil, and not adept at controlling those in his Power. He is more like an Enid Blyton elf than the master of perdition, and% these feeble little tales are nothing to relish.