Blueprint
ELAINE MOSS
Many people believe that background in children's books is a divisive element (out-with- pony-club, in-with-'pop') and so it can be if it is merely a sterile backcloth to a superficial plot. But an impassioned writer capable of using background as an organic force which is working in her characters, a writer who has a sound understanding of children and their relationships, can set her story in Burma or Bermondsey, have as her hero a prince or a pedlar and still command a broad audience. For emotion, sensitively explored, is a vast and unifying common ground.
Rumer Godden's The Kitt-hen Madonna is set in the immaculately planned home of an architect couple in a London square, yet the feelings which flood through Gregory, their shy, clever nine year old son, when he arrives home from school to a dark, empty house- mother on a building site, the latest au pair still at classes—will strike familiar chords in a dockland latch-key child or in the son of a globe-trotting millionaire.
When Marta, a middle-aged Ukrainian, comes to the Thomas family as mother's help, Gregory feels a kinship for this sad, uprooted homely woman who brings him the security he so badly needs. (—I'm afraid Marta's not very tidy," said Mother, but Gregory and Janet, especially Gregory, liked the kitchen far better now.') Secretly, in his loft, Gregory makes a Ukrainian-style Kitchen Madonna for Marta, from millinery scraps, a Times photograph, beads, doll's hair, toffee papers. The boy and the Kitchen Madonna, which grows under his loving hands, emerge in silent unison.
Rumer Godden's sure, light touch, her deep respect for children (she is as good on Gregory's extrovert little sister as she is on the withdrawn hero), her consummate literary craftsmanship and her underlying theme—that modern children need warmth, love and a measure of disarray to counteract the cold
efficiency of the planned society which threatens to engulf them—make The Kitchen Madonna a masterpiece of our time. Carol Barker, illus- trating brilliantly in line and colour, has adapted the author's technique to her own medium.
The reader is shown the background and trimmings to the story but he is left to visualise the characters which grow from these for himself. A book for under-tens—and for their parents, too.
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