Children's Books
You Come Too
BY ELAINE MOSS Mv first teaching assignment, back in 1945, was in a reception centre for children, German, Polish, Dutch, French, from the con- centration camps of Europe. My brief was, simply, to teach then, English; method, any; Speed, quick, for until they could communicate With each other, with English children and with their teachers, this new life without barbed wire and kicks and hunger and death must remain for them a new kind of prison, a dream from Which there was no waking up. After much • thought I chose poetry as my primary means of Communication; poetry about water—wandering brook, rolling stream, mighty river, foaming water- fall, crashing sea; and by listening (as one might listen to Debussy and Smetana on similar themes), by absorbing the sense without knowing the words, these children quickly developed a feeling, not of repugnance for the intricacies of English grammar, but of delight in the English language. We were over the first hurdle together.
'This sense of companionship in a great adven- ture of the spirit is the poet's gift to mankind. Robert Frost expressed it with characteristic sim- Plicity in the title he chose for a selection of his own poems for young readers, You Come Too (Bodley Head, 18s.). Quiet, humble, pene- trating, with gentle touches of humour and Philosophy, these poems are alive with wonder and should bring untold joy to the contempla- tive child.
Many children turn up their noses at poetry, but I have yet to meet the child who will not leap at the opportunity to go rolling along, on tYming couplets, with Robert Graves and pdward Ardizzone, into the land of the im- ;Probable past which they bring so vividly and humorously to life: in Ann at Highwood Hall (Cassell, 13s. 6d.) Robert Graves tells the story inkf. a runaway girl who, by observing the tenet Silence is Best,' becomes, through a sustained - I fr, 0 u ble misunderstanding, the petted protegee of a Stuart Duke and Duchess. A second triumph in the same small volume is the duologue 'Caroline and Charles,' which, with its echoes of folk tale, , its robust comedy and remorseless logic, will surely become the honoured successor to hole-in- MY-bucket Liza and Georgie. For the story-poem addict (with a parent who enjoys reading aloud) there is a rare treat in Richard Coe's very free translation of a Russian classic, Chukovsky's Crocodile (Faber, 18s.). The Metrical variations are almost as challenging, eXciting and funny as the adventures (illustrated io nightmare fashion by Alan Howard) of Alexander Crocodile, Esq. A Boy and his Room (bent, 12s. 6d.) contains two short character studies in verse by Ogden Nash. Lavishly illus- trated by lonicus, the first portrays lightly but deftly the absorptions of boyhood; the second, girlhood's fearless tenacity. From the ridiculous to the sublime : Eleanor Graham's A Thread of "Old (Bodley Head, 21s) is an anthology of lay and religious verse for the very young; the poems e, ht3sen are close to life and to God, and the illus- trations, by Margery Gill, have a suitably solemn beauty. There is nothing solemn about Edward Blishen, .an anthologist who burns to communicate to the young the excitement and happiness which reading prose and verse, or looking at drawings and paintings, can bring. Miscellany One (0.U.P., 25s.) is a pulsating collection of new (apart from one item) material from the pens and brushes of the best modern writers, designers and illus- trators. Tlie fiction ranges from an escape story set in Roman times, Rosemary Sutcliff's pet period, to modern adventure in the Hebrides, Margaret MacPherson's home territory; and there is a touching story on the fallen idol theme by Eric Allen. There are articles about Benjamin Britten, ski-ing, pigeons, drama school, the origin of place names; and interspersed among the prose, for quick delight, there are poems (R. C. Scriven's 'The Thingummyjig' is delicious; Nancy Smith's 'The Black Cat and the Willing Lap' will surely find its way into all future feline collections), line illustrations and some startling colour reproductions. With Miscellany One, un- questionably the season's best buy for over-tens, Edward Blishen establishes himself as the Pied Piper of children's literature.
Myths and legends are retold so often and by so many writers that one wonders whether a new book entitled Myths and Legends (Hamish Hamilton, 25s.) may not be an unnecessary addi- tion to an already overcrowded shelf'—until one looks inside, reads Jacynth Hope-Simpson's scholarly and intriguing introduction and hastens on to the legends themselves. The author has selected myths and legends which are part of the fabric of English civilisation, beginning with Egypt, and the Bible, and continuing through Greece and Rome, the Norse Sagas, the Arthurian legends to old stories from Germany and France. A rich heritage, this, to which the author's lively pen and Raymond Briggs's evocative line drawings do full justice. Dorothy Hosford, re- telling the Norse legends in Thunder of the Gods (Bodley Head, 12s. 6d.), is heavy going by com- parison. Reading the same legend, 'How Thor Lost his Hammer,' in the two versions one ob- serves at once that the teller is all.
In order to bring greater immediacy into the story she is telling, Ruth Manning-Sanders fre- quently changes her tense from past to present : this freak of style pays off well so long as the reader-aloud is prepared for it and understands its purpose. The Red King and the Witch (0.U.P., 17s. 6d.) is a collection of gipsy folk-tales, as timeless and potent as the brew in the iron pot over the camp fire. Life, death, happiness, misery, success, failure—children are helped to understand all these through the folk-tales of old, and when these stories are retold by writers whose prose is as powerful as Miss Manning- Sanders's, the experience is great indeed : Petorkin did not heed: he went to those places. And Regret took hold of him, and Grief cast him down, and he remembered his home, and wept till his eyes were full.
In North of Nowhere (Collins, 18s.)—beauti- fully illustrated in colour and line by Victor Ambrus—Barbara Sleigh tells stories and legends from here, there and everywhere in the clear, compelling manner of a born spell-binder. A choice bedside book for children between the ages of six and nine, this collection, drawn from so many lands whose characteristics are manifest in their folk tales, will probably do more for inter- national understanding than many a continental holiday. In a second edition, which the sales of North of Nowhere should justify, it is to be hoped that Barbara Sleigh's difficulty with com- parison of adjectives (the 'eldest' of her two daughters, etc.) will be dealt with.
African folk-tales tend to have not people but animals or the elements as their heroes. Rena Guillot has collected some of these in Children of the Wind (0.U.P., 13s. 6d.). Gwen Marsh's translation is .unobtrusively excellent , and the title story is one of the most moving folk-tales it has ever been my good fortune to read. Sudhin N. Ghose brings us Folk Tales and Fairy Stories from India (Yoseloff, distributors, W. H. Allen; 18s.) in a dark little volume full of oriental magic, whilst Janusz Grabianski's illustrations, for the most part lacking in depth, are the excuse for a new volume, with a text skilfully adapted from the German by Charlotte Dixon, of The Arabian Nights (Cape, 30s.).
Previous page
