BOOKS FOR OLDER CHILDREN

Tales in School. Jacynth Hope-Simpson (Hamish Hamilton £1.60) School is a madeleine word, its flavour comes suddenly out of the past, bitter or delicious or both, unforgettable at any rate. The first time I collected my (day boy) son after some late-afternoon doings and saw the tables laid for the boarder's supper, smelt the approaching meal, I felt dizzy, almost sick. A German friend with me thought me deranged. The smell of wax Polish, wet wool, gumboots and certain amazing sorts of food eaten nowhere else these days, the sight of iron bedsteads and inky, grainy, ancient desks (let no one say they have vanished, because they haven't), the briskness and bustle and infallibility and the special relationships between you and them (analyst and patient? confessor and penitent? oracle and questioner? — not quite, not exactly, something of each and then some more as well), the uneasiness, the gratitude, the ingratitude, the social tensions (school people are now the only ones you meet socially without quickly getting on to first-name terms), the almost unbearable tenderness aroused by things ritualistically absurd like sports days (still straight out of Decline and Fall), or parties, With singsongs and jellies, or prizegivings, With hats and in-jokes and the most' deli cate oneupmanship . . You could go on and on, or I could.

Its friends are not like the friends you make as an adult, or even as a child outside school. They are more like relations, Who know you too well, who have seen You peeled of your social presence and remember you (as you do them) in times of humiliation, stress, rapture or despair. Like people who were once in prison together, and survived its comradeship and its hardships, its curious joys made up of What (rationally) seems so little, you look at one another with special eyes, special hatred or affection. "I can remember with horrid clarity the names, faces and habits Of all the notable bullies of that day," Nicholas Monsarrat wrote about Winchester, forty years on or more. ". . . But it is good to think that they are beginning to die off. Such news always gives me a nice warm feeling . . . The only reason I would like to believe in hell is that these selected candidates may fry in it, balls and all. I still dwell on the theme of rePrisal, from time to time, even now; then, I thought of nothing else. Thus is hatred bred, and lives on, and is too long a-dying." Affection can be as lasting, as strong. The old-boy network isn't a bad term because a net is just what these relationships form — across time and space and subsequent action, knotted by love and hatred, nostalgia and resentment, invisible but unbreakable. Time after time, indeed in almost all except the luckiest or the least intelligent, you find in people's memories of school this mixture of feelings. Alec Waugh called his Loom of Youth, often cited as the first of the anti-public-school novels, "a love letter to Sherborne," which he likened to "the mistress whom [a man] still adores, but nonetheless holds largely responsible for the rupture."

Aha, you think, I wouldn't be so silly. And then you go back (not necessarily to your own school, any similar one will do) and find yourself drowning in it all again — the unhomely cosiness, the ridiculous clothes (twenty years out of date, as ours were in their day), the loud, uncarpeted noises, the cheerfulness, the smiles, the spirit. They were mad on spirit, at my school: good spirit, bad spirit. If you had good, you were well away, however naughty; if you had bad you weren't, however good. As in 1984, you were judged on your thoughts (Orwell's long scream of rage, Those, those were the joys, about his prep-school years, is the direct ancestor of that political school story).

I am talking, as I have to, of schools outside the state system; of boarding schools, on the whole. Jacynth Hope-Simpson's anthology of school writings confesses to the same thing. School writing mostly means boarding-school writing, because only boarding distils the essence of school, and it involves the special relationships that only a private set-up can generate. In a state system you are a citizen, a taxpayer, impersonal and non-social, with rights and a voice to raise; in a private system you are something between petitioner, friend, captive and colleague, expected to love what you are paying for. Graham Greene said you shouldn't feel any more loyalty to your school than you do to your butcher: you simply pay them both. But nothing is simple at school.

You can't, of course, do much with such a subject in a brief book of extracts. As well try to compress childhood or family life into 188 pages. Tales in School is superficial in its choice of extracts and in its treatment of an enormously rich subject, the compost of so many lives, on which acres of English print have been spent and a degree of soul-searching that makes foreigners blench. And it is all spread much too thinly, because as well as Churchill on his Harrow entrance exam, Dickens on Squeers, Jane Eyre on Lowood, Hugh Walpole on Jeremy, Plashman and Tom Brown, The Hill, Jennings the modern prep-school boy, Becky and Amelia in Vanity Fair, Mike and Psmith, Stalky and William Mayne, we have school songs and school uniforms, an English girl at a present-day French school and convent schooling in Canada during the war; in other words fact and fiction here, there and everywhere, without much noticeable plan and certainly no philosophical scheme to it. Four introductory pages scamper through that sociological saga "The rise and fall of the school story" and twenty-three lines answer the almost unanswerable question "What is a 'Public School '? ". But n. molesworth the curse of at. custard's which is the skool I am at's •imagined day in a headmaster's life is worth its two pages: "1800 Tea bred and scrape 1830 Eat second tea meringues eclairs honey and sossages. Flog boys

to bed. Chase matron round dorm. Lock masters in cells. 1930 BEER!" Oho, such Freudian vengeance.

The Beethoven Medal K. M. Peyton (OUP, 90p) A Long way from Verona Jane Gardam. (Hamish Hamilton £1.40)

We tend to think of Victorian and Edwardian children, middle-class children at least, as sheltered. But their fiction shows they were not. In it they faced death, illness,poverty, abandonment, above all everyday life„ and with it all kinds of reality. It was in the 'twenties and 'thirties, with a hangover into the 'orties and fifties, that fictional life in children's books became a round of holidays and artificially induced adventure. Anything close to reality (normal life, ordinary relationships) was so carefully avoided that children tended to leap straight from their own fiction into adult books as soon as they tired of their own. Today, there are bridges between the child and his adult world, and one of them is fiction. Yet how many adults unconnected with children (who aren't parents, librarians, teachers, publishers, aunts-and-godmothers, that is) realise its present high standard, know that some of the best fiction is being written for children?

Like adult fiction, it is now about more or less anything. It has sympathy for a particular age-group, young characters with whom to identify, but apart from that little to distinguish it from adult fiction; nothing, at any rate, in kind. Today, I

think that much of Rosamund Lehmann and Elizabeth Bowen, if published for the first time, would come into the category of teenage fiction; Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love, with its conjuring of a childhood world never quite grown out of, a cupboard of memories and affections always miraculously refilled, drawn upon for strength and comfort in adult life, would seem a splendid teenage book. The present standard is high enough to stand comparison with these, but who knows it?

To children and their appendages (parents, librarians, etc), K. M. Peyton is a name to conjure with. What got the Carnegie Medal in '62, '64, '65, '67 and '69? Cloud. The Guardian Award in '70? The Flambards trilogy. What was commended by the Library Association in '66? Thunder in the Sky. What was runner-up for the Carnegie Medal in '69? The Edge of the Windfall, The Maplin Bird, The Plan for Bird,smarsh, Fiambards and Flambards in Summer. What kept my son up till two (or was it four) in the morning a year ago, reading the whole book at a stretch ? Pennington's Seventeenth Summer. What kept my Italian nieces quiet and good throughout last summer ? The Flambards trilogy. What kept me up till two (or was it four) only last week, reading the whole book through at a stretch ? The Beethoven Medal. And who knows about all these? Not a lot of people who aren't children or their appendages.

Prizes aren't guarantees of readability, a fair number of unreadables being favourites with adult readers. But Mrs Peyton, you simply have to take my word for it, is

what stumped reviewers call "compulsively readable." You have to turn the page, hear the next conversation, see the next bit of action. The Beethoven Medal, from anguished (but funny) first page to anguished (but satisfactory) last, is a lover story. Ruth, the heroine of Fly-by-Night (to me, the only readable horse book since Black Beauty and At the Back of the North Wind) meets Patrick, the hero of Pennington's Seventeenth Summer (have two novels been mixed like this before, incidentally?) and falls instantly, ferociously in love. One sees it from inside and outside, from Ruth's point of view and her mother's. The respectable, lowermiddle-class family becomes inextricably tangled with the wild musical genius Pennington. Take the plot and it sounds like nothing in particular; in places like romantic moonshine. Pennington is to play in the Albert Hall, and spend nine months in gaol for hitting a policeman. It doesn't matter. Mrs Peyton's plots, if you look closely at them, sometimes sound unlikely, but it's the method that counts — the exactness, the psychological accuracy, the grace and humour and cool, flowing ease of it all.

Jane Gardam's A Long Way from Verona is another book to be judged by the highest standards, a fiercely funny, eccentric and personal novel. Jessica Vye is twelve in 1940, a daygirl at a dull school; her father has given up being housemaster somewhere to become a curate rather late in life, and socially they have dropped, or so Mrs Vye feels. There's a weekend with some grander friends — or rather nonfriends, because Jessica hates them; an outing with a beautiful boy who turns out to be much less beautiful next time she sees him; an air raid, a whispered compliment from an Italian prisoner of war. Life moves along, adolescence advancing, the war grinds forward. Here is a brilliant talent that, if it appeared in adult fiction, would he noisily greeted and deserve to be.

Legends lie under history, making patterns of arbitrary facts and unconnected events; sometimes unnoticed for ages, their shape too broad to make close-up sense but visible and eloquent from a distance, like prehistoric remains shown up in a field if they happen to be photographed from the air. It isn't, of course, coincidence that the same legends occur here, there and everywhere, in civilisations that could never have communicated or spread their stories in the ordinary physical sense. If there are common patterns of human behaviour there are clearly patterns of human feeling and thought, beliefs and ideas expressed at their most primitive in fantasy — worm casts, if you like, frail, oozy relics that gradually harden into fossils, matrices, symbols, signs. All this,

okay, is obvious enough, the underlying metaphor of life itself. How it applies to children's books, to publishing policies, is a bit less obvious, a case of compression, dilution, shorthand, uglification and the soft sell; just occasionally of inspiration and splendour.

Whichever it is, publishers continue to turn out, parents presumably to buy, children to get, if not read, all kinds of collections, rehashings and retellings of much-told stories. Like bible stories, they are even supermarket fodder, presumed to be the staple diet of childhood, its porridge and pulses, thick, necessary, absorbent and (though no one will admit it) dull. Like folksongs used in pop music, like patterns revamped in textiles, they become familiar Without being studied, subliminally absorbed by the bookish child, at least, who generally can't escape them. ' Collections ' make suitable aunt-and-godmother books, safe, handsome presents for a distant child Who may not be thrilled at the time with another volume of Outer Mongolian folk tales but may, one bored wet afternoon after measles, linger over them and discover something — perhaps, most fruitfully, some similarity to, some connection or hint of relationship with, a similarly neglected book of stories from Java or Nigeria or the Aran Islands.

It is a pity, of course, that they seem dull. Like folk-songs, they are quite often dull individually, yet their origins and connections, their underlying metaphors, fascinate even quite small children. That is Why good telling, good presentation, really Matters. ' Folk ' anything (songs, stories, costume, customs) can be parodied more easily than most, yet its patterns matter. A folksy household may raise smiles, but a non-folk childhood is dead and deprived, a mostly from classical, teutonic and celtic sources, on mermaids, sea monsters, superstitious, albatrosses and cormorants, seals, stories and legends of all sorts connected with the sea, a ballad or two and, of course, Atlantis.

Not a theme embroidered but a subject illustrated in A Book of Lions and Tigers (Nelson, £1.95), edited by Elizabeth Teague, illustrated by Peter Rice, with poems and stories from Blake and Belloc to Talkien and Elizabeth Bowen, from Tigger in the Forest to Narnia, Dr Dolittle and lots of lesser-known 'stories about catlike creatures. An attractive book, a luxury, rather like a large iced cake.

If you want to give a child an attractive introduction to the mainstream stories of Perrault, Grimm, Andersen and Anon, then European Fairy Tales (Brockhampton Press, £1.25), compiled by Dagmar Sekorova, illustrated by Mirko Hanak, is readable, reasonably priced and pleasant to Red Desert world cut off at the roots, unnourished by the aching persistent past, with all its flavours, its imagery, its magic shapes and numbers.

An often successful idea is to bring together stories and information on a single theme, making a horizontal collection from everywhere rather than a narrow vertical one from this place or that. Hamish Hamilton have a handsome series of aunt-and-godmother books at their very best, giving plenty of scope to illustrators and designers as well as choosers of material. Alan Garner has suitably dealt with goblins, William Mayne with giants and heroes, Roger Lancelyn Green with dragons. Now comes The Hanish Hamilton Books of Sea Legends (£1.90), edited by Michael Brown, and illustrated by Krystyna Turska, with plenty of interest, look at; the illustrations having a beautiful soft glow to their colours and the right kind of imperious wildness.

Robin Hood is a thin hero compared with Arthur, that source of so much — magical, mystical, even religious; but his adventures are made much livelier than ever I saw them in Antonia Fraser's telling of them, Robin Hood (Sidgwick and Jackson, £1.75), with bright, energetic pictures by her thirteen-year-old daughter Rebecca. It is strongly gothick: "Oh terrible sight! For out of the white wimple stared not the meek features of a holy nun, but the burning eyes, the diabolical features, stamped with hatred and vengeful joy, of Black Barbara herself! Black Barbara grown old, her beauty withered, her tresses scraped back behind her coif, but still clearly recognisable for who she was. 'Murderess!' cried Robin."

Don't be put off by being told in the blurb that "one cannot write about trolls unless one believes in them " (folksy at its worst, that), which demands a fair amount of philosophical prodding to decide the nature of the word belief in the first place. Margaret Sperry's Scandinavian Stories (Dent £2) with jolly (perhaps over-jolly) modern pictures by Jenny Williams, has good stories from Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and (horizontally) Lapland, some of them showing what C. S. Lewis meant by " Northernness," a spirit that haunted his childhood. Perhaps haunting is really what one hopes all these books will achieve; not all at once — a multiple enchantment — but one or other of them, quite suddenly.

Isabel Quigly