Man and boy
Benny Green Each time a pile of new children's books accumulates on the shelf, I wonder if any of the items among them will stir long-buried recollections of something lovingly digested forty years ago and forgotten ever since. I was a voracious but unselfconscious reader when I was in single figures or, to put it another way, I was totally, brutally honest in my reactions to the printed words which fell into my hands, as all children are. The items which stayed with me never seem to be mentioned in the anthologies and histories, but that does not lessen the affection with which I think of them. Last week 1 happened to take a walk round the school library of my six-year-old, and noticed high on the shelves, dog-eared and inkstained, a copy of one of John Finnemore's Teddy Lester books. I could not resist taking it down and opening it, inestimably reassured by the assurance that Slapton School is still as ever was. As I put the book back in its place, heroically resisting the temptation to abscond with it, I thought of the ten items awaiting me at home, and wondered if they contained the same sort of messages for me.
1 know that this kind of subjective reaction to books is lamentable, but as no other kind has ever been known, there is nothing for me to do about it except to say that this has been a good week because, of those ten items, there were actually two which touched a nerve of recollection. This is not to say that the other eight may be dismissed, only that they are new to me and, for that reason, impossible for my adult brain to judge. E. W. Hildick's The Case of the Nervous Newsboy (Hodder £2.40), one of the McGurk mysteries, is a pleasant enough tale of the genre which occasionally finds its way on to teatime television, the story of a suburban gang of friendly kids who enjoy playing at detective. The deductive reasoning will probably look attractive to ten-yearolds, but there is not much evidence of that relish in language which children of all ages desire.
But at least The Case of the Nervous Newsboy is not pietistic. Joan.Aiken's translation from the French of The Angel Inn (Cape £3.50) worries me because it looks like the kind of thing adults of fifty years ago thought children ought to like. It is the story of two waifs who find the adult world composed entirely of gallic Mr Brownlows, and where a person's ethical bona fides are impeccably established by the presence on his bookshelves of the New Testament and the Imitation of Christ. Under such circumstances it is inevitable that the six-year-old should talk as though indoctrinated with scenes from Eric or Little by Little. A pity, because the craggy characterisations are rather well done.
Talking of real as distinct from cardboard six-year-olds, there are two items from Andre Deutsch which are beautifully illustrated and are recounted in a friendly. chatty way. If I had to choose, which I don't, 1 would say that Hedy Stapel-Valk's The Pancake King (£2.25), a variation on The King's Breakfast, was just in front of Steve Avgarde's Pig (£1.95), a happy barnyard tale. Jan Loof's Junk Jimmy's African Trip (Black £1.75) might edge both of them out in juvenile circles because of the attractive Heath Robinsonish drawings of junkyards and ramshackle wheelhouses which all boys will delight in. Tamasin Cole's Fourteen Rats and a Rat-Catcher (Black £1.95) might belong to a slightly lower age-group, perhaps the fives, and it is interesting as an attempt to rehabilitate the rat as a sympathetic character. Another year down the scale and there is Achim Broger's The Caterpillar's Story (Puffin 50p), where the illustrations cleverly tell the story while hinting at the pleasures of abstract design.
That leaves the two books which reminded me of the boy 1 left behind me. John Goodall's Paddy Pork's Holiday (Macmillan £1.50) is a small, beautifully printed book without ,text, a tale told in coloured illustrations. To a four or five year old, the attraction will lie in the piquant novelty of the design, which consists of pages separated by half-pages serving a dual relationship to what has gone and what is coming. But it was not that which attracted me. There is something about the rustic England through which the pig-hero moves which recalls picture books I first dived into at Clipstone Junior Mixed, more than forty years ago. The steam train and the motor cars place the action somewhere around 1910, and adults will find that the absence of text, allied to the directness with which the pictures tell their own story, will give them a rare opportunity of making up their own prose each night as they go along.
The tenth item reminded me that, when was ten or eleven, I came across several books dealing with adventurous young lads of around ten or eleven who did things like searching for German spies at respectable watering places, or joining the Boy Scouts and finding plans for the invasion of Britain. Well, Dennis Hamley's Very Far From Here (Andre Deutsch £2.50) is in the same category. Now that the Great War is two crises ago instead of one, and has acquired the patina of antiquity, I'm not sure that schoolboys will thrill as my own generation did to this sort of stuff. I can only report that I thrilled to it greatly. The text assumes a fairly sophisticated grasp of the world as it then was. For instance, we get mention of 'HMS Pinafore', Woolwich Arsenal Football Club, and the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, all of which ought to stir junior curiosities about the way the world around us has changed and why. I found the book one of the firmest bridges for months along which the schoolchild's sensibility can stride towards mature fiction. •
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