Talented brats
ISABEL QUIGLY Thursday's Child Noel Streatfeild (Collins 25s) ,
Some writers deal with a fantasy world in terms of realism, and get labelled realists forever, no matter how farfetched their dreams may become. Moravia is an obvious example. Another is, I think, Noel Streatfeild. When I was a child, her Ballet Shoes, Tennis Shoes and The Circus is Corning seemed the height of realism because they talked about money, admitting it as something that conditioned your life and your place in the world. Few other children's writers of the time did anything of the sort: money was the invisible cushion of the middle class world they dealt with and no Swallow or Amazon or Pony Club queen actually had to worry about the price of boots or bits for adventur- ing in or with. And then Noel Streatfeild also dealt with something that must have been totally new to most of her readers: the 'professional' child, the performer, with adult responsibilities and earnings at an early age, and total dedication of a particular skill; with a childhood geared, not to school and suchlike like the rest of us, but to some highpowered competitive game that allowed no slacking and no sidelines and somehow took childhood, in its cosy, protected, depen- dent sense, rather severely away.
That was realism, if you like, but ir was more a top coating of it than a solidly 'real' world underneath. Under the exact observa- tion of everyday life, the street names and bus numbers and recognisable everything, was a clreamworld of children with supra- childish ability to concentrate and specialise and keep their noses to a grindstone of slog and practice; the dream world, too, of suc- cess and acclaim in which quite ordinary little girls in South Kensington or Tulse Hill became film or ballet or tennis stars. Innum- erable little girls like them had the thrill without the slog and heard the applause in the big top without having to sweat for it. Talented children in . the public eye have turned up in a number of Miss Streatfeild's books since, though in Apple Bough all they want is to get away from the glamour to the snug house where 'real life' goes on undis- turbed.
What keeps her books so green years after you read them, years after you grew out of them? Their style is not memorable, the awful simplicity of childhood is not stirred about. very deeply. I think it is personality, most of it: the author's, and her characters'. Both have so much of it you remember, as you remember special strongminded people in real life. There is 'Miss Streatfeild's own -storytelling gift to make you listen, the sheer rattling fun of her taletelling (in both senses: always a slight feeling of cats, or at least kittens, being let out of bags, with a certain sense Of social outrage). Then there are her characters, dominant creatures who are splendid company on paper at least, particu- larly the self-confident brats who nourish a Gift and are squashed (unsuccessfully) by their families. Artists, she seems to say, start as brats, and the latest is Margaret Thursday, a ferociously cool and competent young act- ress who looks likely to grow into a combin- ation of Mrs Pankhurst and Mrs Pat.
Cuckoos these may all be in the normal nest, but Miss Streatfeild is remarkably good on nests as well. At her best, indeed, she almost recalls Nancy Mitford in the Hons Cupboard—that feeling of familiarity so intense you can positively (though quite agreeably) smell it; the 'sense of connivance and complicity that is more than mere dull old loyalty, a sort of root-level compost of everything that happens, which will nourish the rest of life and provide imagery for all adult experience. Perhaps this makes rather large claims—the Mitford compost is a lot richer—but Noel Streatfeild's families, whom you may not actually like all that much, do stand four-square and solid as gumboots, do find adventure in everyday life instead of manufacturing it on holiday, do stick in your mind like nextdoor neighbours and have the kind of rituals you recognise as authentic.
Thursday's Child has most of the familiar ingredients and quite a few new ones, stirred round with plenty of verve. Verve in fact is the book's main asset: it isn't the best Streat- feiki but it shows (more creakily than the better books) how the magic works, what the old personality-trick is up to. Hers, that is, and Margaret's. If you write down the plot it sounds pretty preposterous, but there again it is so credibly iced that you swallow the unlikely pudding underneath. It is set in a past when orphanage matrons may be cruel and orphans under-nourished, and class is a rigid social corset donned at birth by all but the lucky perilous few with that mysterious Streatfeild something called talent: in other words, the artists, the professionals, the out- siders. Peggy Fortnum, whose fluid Padding- ton drawings whisk that rather stolid young bear into a more fanciful element, has, illus- trated it with her best careful-casual air of lyricism and tongue-in-cheek. And Margaret, the star, ends the book and starts her career playing Little Lord Fauntleroy in a tent.
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