The good old days
Selina Hastings
It is no longer enough that children should be taught the difference between good and bad, and that to be good is the alternative preferred. The world has changed, and general moral instruction must now be joined to instruction in a new morality that has less to do with Personal conscience than with global responsibility. Protection of the world and its life has become a matter of urgency. An ecological conscience must now, it seems, be instilled at the age of earliest literacy, replacing in storybook propaganda the cultivation of such out-dated virtues as patriotism, honesty and duty towards one's parents. For it is, of course, through literature that such ideas can best be imparted to the very young, however hard for the modern child that that world of clear-running streams and cosily domesticated hedgerows will soon no longer exist; however sad that the chief menace facing his fictional heroes will no longer be dragon or giant or foxy-whiskered gentleman but oil slicks, detergents and atmospheric pollution.
But propaganda to be effective must be Palatable. Children are quickly revolted by the smug and the pious, which is why the spirit of resolute complacency, the air of gay banality With which the subject is generally tackled reduces me at least to exasperation. A typically irritating example is Nirn and his World (Macdonald 75p) by Andre Joanny and Arnaud Laval, which concerns itself with the opinions of a jaunty little character of unspecified genetic origin (purple and green head and body, yellow arms and legs) and his friend Tiddlepush (green hair, arms and legs, pink head, yellow torso, black shoes) who, contorting themselves distressingly the while, make a series of unmemorable statements against pollution With an air of smirking self-satisfaction: "There are special ships that carry oil. When they have unloaded their oil they wash what remains into the sea. Tiddlepush says, Something ought to be done.".
Equally ineffective is the over-sophisticated approach. Preservation of the environment has become an immensely fashionable Cause, combining all the most satisfying ingredients of aestheticism and noble sentiment — saving the world for the next generation — with a chance to attack, from the safety of one's conversation pit in Kennington or Canonbury, the familiar old bogies of industry, technology and "over-consumerisation," But when it comes to indoctrinating the young, what the trendy Parent finds divinely amusing frequently leaves his offspring indifferent to the point of ataraxy. Sheila Burnford's Mr Noah and the Second Flood (Gollancz, £1.00) is tailor-made for the trendy parent. Unfairly presented as for eightor nine-year-olds, it is a witty, ingenious and highly sophisticated fable of devastation which to a child would be wholly bewildering.
It tells the story of a present-day Noah building an ark in preparation for the inundation of the world caused by the melting of polar ice-caps by the heat of jet-trails. The rest of mankind are' taking off for the moon, leaving behind the few animal species not yet extinct, and, on the rising flood waters, a sea of oil slick, plastic detritus and detergent scum. The book ends, to my mind irresponsibly, with a vision of nauseating despair, leaving no constructive prospect or hope. There is many a clever reference to credit cards and bank managers, many an arch innuendo, but what would even a precocious child understand by a "swirling paraphernalia of colourful artefacts," by "whistlestop campaigns" or by a Lunar Government "administered jointly by the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, and the International Union of Teamsters"?
Perhaps because the real world, dirty and disfigured, has little that is reassuring about it, the feefing is that the imaginary world should be made compensatingly tame and safe. Books nowadays seem to be filled with cuddly dragons, cute little-girl witches and pathetically orphaned ogres. Recently I came across a revamped version of Jack and the Beanstalk in which the gallant lad climbs the beanstalk to find a lonely old man in search of nothing more than a pair of spectacles and a new set of dentures. A far cry from "Fee, Fi, Fo Fum."
Even more dismal is the trend current in some West Berlin nursery schools in which the reading of fairy-tales is forbidden altogether as it is held to be immoral to bring children up to believe that, if presented like the young man in the story with three bags of gold, silver, and sand, they should be so stupid as to choose, as he did, the bag of sand, prosperity and success in love would consequently follow. And the pictures. Do children really prefer those relentlessly cheerful scribbles in hard, bright colours that look as if they had been drawn by a six-year-old on the garden fence? In my experience, the intricate, spell-binding detail of Dore and Dulac is infinitely more real.
All this cossetting is, I am convinced, a mistake. The 'Little-Goody-Two-Shoes' syndrome is no good at all. What happens to the bad is always more interesting than the rewards of the good, as the glorious immortality of Struwel peter goes to show. No teacher succeeds with a pupil by boring him to death. A child's imagination must be fed and stimulated, not put to sleep. After all, some of our earliest fictional memories come from no less a moral source than the Old Testament, and there's nothing cosy about Jehovah: Lambs and doves and Baby Jesus don't stand a chance against plagues of Egypt and pillars of salt.
None of the really memorable children's books stint on excitement, beauty, even bloodshed. Children are blood-thirsty, they like to be frightened. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, as any American psychiatrist will eagerly extrapolate, is pretty disturbing if one thinks about it. Even E. Nesbit, with her well-ordered Edwardian world of sharp-tongued housemaids and clean pinafores, had a remarkable talent for sheer, heart-stopping horror. And take Beatrix Potter: there is something marvellously unsettling about the works of what Graham Greene only half jokingly referred to as her "dark Period." What could be more delightfully sinister than that evil-smelling hovel in The Tale of Mr Tod — "something between a cave, a prison, and a tumble-down pig-sty" — to which Mr Tod brings his sackful of rabbit babies? How deliciously chilling the sight which meets the eyes of Benjamin Bunny as he peers through the dirty window-pane: "There were preparations upon the kitchen table which made him shudder. There was an immense empty pie-dish of blue willow pattern, and a large carving knife and fork, and a chopper . . ."
This is the stuff with which to influence small minds, not the bland nourishment favoured nowadays by long-grown-up publishers. Does it not, after all, stand to reason that if the world is to be saved, it must be by a generation reared not on bread and milk but on strong, red meat?
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