Homage to Ardizzone

Nicholas and the Fast Moving Diesel. By Edward Ardizzone. (0.U.P., 10s. 6d.)

Tim unerring good taste of the young reader is a popular legend with those whose own memories of childhood reading have undergone careful roman- tic reconstruction. The truth is that children will often latch on to the most humdrum books, read- ing them over and over as a sort of private incan- tation in which familiarity only breeds content. In reminiscence such books achieve spurious literary value by becoming, quite by chance, mnemonics of a forgotten childhood. I still remem- ber with affection a punchy little pamphlet, spar- ingly illustrated with mournful sepia snapshots entitled Who Burnt Cork City? The Truth. I remember the photographs best, and in fact it is often the illustrations more than the text which exert this nostalgic effect.

The wispy Daumier-like drawings of Edward Ardizzone, with their mystery and wit, always

stand out in any text which they illustrate. It is very nice that someone who is such a power in children's books and book illustration in general should turn out every time to be so expert and so evocative. The children are appealingly weedy figures with large heads and minnowy bodies and the scenery is always observed with great charm. In Nicholas and the Fast Moving Diesel he has himself written and illustrated an attractive, school-atlas-sized story book, filled with large whimsical cartoons, some in colour. Nicholas and his friend, riding on the footplate of an engine, deftly assume the controls and avert disaster when the driver and his mate go down with an almost lethal attack of the colly-wobbles after drinking tainted tea. The incidental detail in the pictures is pleasant, from the curl of fly-paper in the kitchen of Nicholas's home to the locomotive, green with gold bands like a Ruritanian admiral (what a relief from engines with faces!).

With the same light touch he has also illustrated one of Eleanor Estes's two books. These are both remarkable pieces of writing which delicately evoke the most subtle nuances of childhood experience. I very much doubt if either of these works will get much acceptance with the bowsprit, jibsails and jodhpurs gang, but as ever these get more than their fair share elsewhere. In fact; it is

From 'Pinky Pye.'

hard to know at whom exactly these books, especially the better one, Pinky Pye, are aimed, for whilst they are full of incident and excitement there is a great deal of subjective detail of the sort which would vividly recall childhood in retrospect, but which might prove too oblique for many younger readers. This, however, is true of all the best children's books, for Alice, Pooh and Peter Rabbit appeal in incident to a child and much later reveal a subtler dimension to the adult. In Miss Estes's two books there is a lot of simple adventure arising naturally from the sophisticated background of sensitive, humorous detail, but it is the detail which lifts her work from the category of competent yarn-spinning and allows the more thoughtful child to find echoes of his own inner life. Both of the books are centred on family life and the author displays obvious fond- ness for intimate domestic quaintnesses, like no one being allowed to bathe before the Fourth of July, and Mama never being beyond page 39 of War and Peace. In Pinky Pyc, the family of a bland, absent-minded ornithologist are holidaying on a small island near New York. Mysterious rustlings and the baffling disappearance'of some pet grasshoppers turn out to be due to a long-lost tame owl. It is a measure of Miss Estes's great talent that she needs nothing more dramatic with which to capture her audience. She writes with

enormous finesse, paying careful attention to all the sights, sounds, tastes and smells.of childhood. She is clearly a firm devotee of the dipped madeleine, from way back. The individual child- ren are observed with startling insight and affec- tion.

Every night he tried not to suck his thumb, but every night there was a reason for him to suck his thumb-robbers of kittens, broken ankles, wind, something. He had managed to give up pulling at Bubbah, his piece of old blanket that he liked to tickle his nose with while he was sucking . . . but he decided one thing at a time and he still sucked his thumb.

The Moffals, her other book, rather more anecdotal than Pinky Pye, is also delightful and has nice lumpy drawings by Louis Slobodkin.

Foxy-Boy, by David Severn, is a pleasant, rather far-fetched story of a little girl, hard up for play- fellows, who explores the local woods and stumbles on a wild brown boy who has been brought up by foxes. Her attempts to establish an emotional relationship with this beat-generation Mowgli are only partly successful until, when she rescues him from a pack of hounds, he shows signs of wishing to reintegrate himself into society. There is some nice byplay with a battle-axe god- mother and pretty descriptions of the countryside. The imaginative pictures are by Lynton Lamb.

The action school are catered for by Joan Ballan- tyne and by Roger Pilkington. No Proustian

lapses here. In Holiday Trench, two families of

robust children drive a deep moat across the sand, thereby blockading motorists who menace the

safety of the beach by driving down to the sea's

edge (rocket-site demonstrators please note). This essay in civil disobedience is briskly described and

well illustrated, once again, by Edward Ardizzone. The Dahlia's Cargo, by Roger Pilkington, is a competent detective sailing story set in the lakes and canals of Sweden. It is an adequately racy piece, but done pretty much by formula. I await the day when the rather comfy criminals of these books turn round in sudden exasperation and napalm the priggish little sleuths who are on their tail. Finally, for the very young, Noel Streatfeild's Bertram is a good dogs and daddies story, and Anita Hewett has a nice collection of jolly jungle tales called A Hat for Rhinoceros, which should make good bedtime reading. Erskine Caldwell, in Hayes Office-placating mood, breaks context with a rather drab book, Molly Cottontail.

JONATHAN MILLER From ' &mum.'