The books from childhood that stay with you versus the books that don’t

I rushed to volunteer myself for a post this week as…well, I was supposed to do a post last week and then promptly forgot. Which is shameful. So here I am.

I am due to write a rather complicated and in-depth review of Bernard Schlink’s essays on Collective Guilt – which are marvellous things. However, I simply don’t have the brainpower this week, so, instead, I’ve come to this with some disconnected thoughts that I have no idea if I will manage to crowbar together. So, here goes. Fasten seatbelts and let’s hope this post grows into something vaguely coherent by the time I’m whizzing past the 1000 word mark.

I have been having my usual vague and incoherent thoughts recently – this time about children’s versus adults books.

This started when I returned to a couple of old favourites from my youth – Barbara Willard’s Mantlemass novels. If you are unfamiliar with Willard and Mantlemass – these are a series of books set in the forests of Suffolk, concerning the generations of two families –the Mallorys and the Medleys as they try to eek their living from the land and how their quiet idyll is impacted by various dramatic events in English history. Willard won the Carnegie for one of them, The Iron Lily, and was one of the great children’s historical novelists of that time, alongside writers like Henry Treece and Rosemary Sutcliff. Unfortunately her books do not seem to have lasted as well and are less known today. I urge any teenager with a liking for history to check them out.

reprinted by Jane Nissan books

Rereading books from your childhood is always a dangerous thing. Will they stand up? Will they disappoint?

In the case of Willard, I set to thinking about something else. Written with patches of dense description and using the forest dialect of the area with which she was so familiar, what was it, I wondered,  that made the Mantlemass books childrens’ rather than adults’ books? They were meaty, had great characters, chunks of history, used a language that is more sophisticated than many adult genre novels…And yet, I did come to the conclusion they were not adults’ books. But why?

Which brings me onto my second disparate strand (bear with me, I’m hoping that this will add up in the end). A pub conversation. Or more accurately a coffee and cake conversation.

“Which childrens’ books,” a writer friend of mine asked over her slice of lemon drizzle cake, “stay with you as an adult?”.

Interesting question.  In her case, she outlined the ton-load of Enid Blytons she had read but, she admitted shame-facedly, a recent pub quizz with a special round on Blyton’s prodigious output had left her unable to answer a single question. She could not remember one title. And beyond a vague notion of a dog – she was unable to put names to the other members of the Famous Five.

I thought about this.

As a child I read a ton-load of  animal books. You know the kind. Where an otter, a squirrel and a weasel all band together and decide to rebuild their society away from Evil Mankind. I blame Watership Down for the spate of these kind of books. Watership Down is a terrific book. And I still harbour a great fondness for Colin Dahn’s Animals of Farthing Wood (ridiculous though it is in so many ways). But, in addition to them, there were horse books and pet books galore. And I can’t pretend the majority of these were very good. But I loved them. I would head straight for that section in the bookshop and rummage around to my heart’s content. Do I – however – remember any of them now? It has to be admitted – err…no.

Now, I’m not going to argue that these books were not valuable. My own mother talks of devouring Blyton as a child and these fast-paced, easy-to-read, adventures are probably one of the reasons that my mother, myself and countless other early readers – learnt to read so well and read independently from teachers and parents. And I’m not going to argue that some of these books aren’t just plain brilliant either. You have different interests and obsessions as a child – without my pony books, who would I have had to chat to incessantly about ponies? (All members of my family shut up now!)

But why don’t they stay in the mind?

Interestingly, as the drizzle cake diminished before us – we realised that many of the children’s books that had stayed with us were, in fact, picture books. My friend mentioned “What-a-mess” by Frank Muir.  (Remember that one?). Two of us enthused about The Church Mice books by Graham Oakley. (A fierce battle breaking out about whether, indeed, The Church Mice aren’t written just as much with adults in mind. But we don’t have time for that argument in this post.)

Of older childrens’ books – I can’t remember anything at all about Jill’s Gymkhana (devoured greedily at the time) but The Ogre Downstairs lives on in my mind.. All the Joyce Strangers that I adored and read back-to-back merge together and I can’t remember a single name of a character – But Watership Down will stay with me forever and I could tell you the whole story.  Others that made an impression, apart from James and the Giant Peach and The Twits - Dogger, The Duchess Bakes a Cake, Winnie the Pooh and The Elephant and the Bad Baby – are all are written for the under 5s!

Thinking about it in the vague washing machine-like way that I sometimes do – I decided there is something extreme and anarchic about some kids picture books – a quality possessed of the great Dahl. A chaos, darkness, funniness, acceptance of the surreal, of the disgusting…that seems to disappear in many older kids and teenage books.

By the time you get on to being able to tackle Blyton’s Famous Five or Mallory Towers books  – goodies are goodies and baddies are baddies. The moral order is pretty much set and unchallenged. There is no subversion and we pretty well know what way it’s going to play out from the moment the characters are introduced.

Take the first Harry Potter book: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone… When I was about 8, I started to write my first “novel” – I wrote 11 chapters in the end (a side of A4 each). It involved a girl acquiring endless ponies, as I remember.  I uncovered it the other day. In one chapter there are a pair of twins. One twin is lovely, humble and kind. One twin is horrid, nasty and selfish. The horrid twin is her parents’ favourite. She receives a diamond necklace and an Arabian stallion for her birthday. (Hmmm). The nice twin gets a crayon and a crust of bread….I think you’re getting the picture. (Obviously I had a great career as a misery lit author ahead of me – how on earth did I manage to miss my way?)

When I read the first Harry Potter,  I was stunned at a similar cut ‘n’ dried divide between good and bad. Not only are all the “good brave” characters pretty clearly good and brave from the get-go and the sneery snide snakey ones pretty clear also, but they then go through a completely unnecessary sorting hat ceremony in order to ascertain that everyone is exactly what you thought they were in the first place. The clearly good characters get put into the house for good characters. The sneery snidey ones go…you’ve guessed it…into the sneery snidey house. Absolutely no surprises whatsoever.

Everything adds up to point to the same, simple conclusion. Good is good and bad is bad. We know who is good because the book will tell you and bang on about it incessantly and the bad characters we will know because they will be undiverted from the path of arsehole-y-ness from the very first moment we ncounter them.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticising Rowling for this –( it IS a kids’ book, so why people criticise it as though written for adults I simply don’t understand). And I am also talking about The Philosopher’s Stone only. I have read only three of the series and the third struck me as  starting to mix things up a bit. So, maybe this aspect changes later in the series… (in fact, it would be wonderful if people could tell me whether that is indeed the case or not)

But Harry Potter The Philosophers Stone strikes me as having the simple straightforward morality we love and devour as young children at that age – that we don’t as under 5s where the world is more mysterious, where everything is as mad as everything else and where chaos and surreality reign. And that we don’t – or at least some of us don’t – as adults.

But, even if this is what we want as slightly older children – a clear division between right and wrong, knowing where we are, unambiguous characters we can immediately understand – it is often the books that challenge all this that stay in our minds. Why? Perhaps, because fundamentally they have more to say to us as adults so we remember them as adults.

And that’s the question I have in my mind when I return to books I have loved in the past. Do Willard’s books (which, I should add, are probably written for older children/early teens) – on the surface so sophisticated, well-written, historically interesting – have anything to say to me when I reread them as an adult? Well, apart from my going off and Wikipedia-ing “Farcy” (finding out nothing much of interest) – the answer is no, not really. The plots and issues in Willards’ novels are morally clear. The love stories are all big all-or-nothing romances beloved of teenagers (I mean, do we all find the love of our lives at 15? I hope not) and the historical stuff – although interesting – is quite romantic in a way I loved when an early teen, but does not really resonate with me as an adult reader.  (They also, frankly, do not have much humour – something that strikes me about a lot of the stuff I liked to read at that age). What I loved as an early teen was some of the sagalike elements – the sense of continuity, of family. That so-and-so has such-and-such’s eyes but more of the fire and personality of whose-its-name. The sense of continuity between generations. The echoes between past and present. It is quite a romantic and comforting view of the world, even whilst Willard’s characters suffer great personal hardships and loss. But, I have to admit, that this aspect that I liked so much then – irritates me now. Which is not to criticise Willard. They are great books. Absorbing. Exciting. Interesting. Pacy. And good reads. But  – for me – they are not books that speak to me as an adult.

Yet, Watership Down, another book for older children and early teens, perhaps, and a book ostensibly about rabbits on an expedition (I mean – come on!) still returns to my mind to this day. There is an episode in the book where Hazel and his group temporarily join another warren. The rabbits are gorgeous lush and healthy. They are sophisticated. They live in an amazing place and never seem to have to hunt for food…but there is a sinister mysterious air and they are elusive about certain subjects and if asked particular questions. Occasionally, one of their number vanishes, never to be seen again. The gorgeous lush rabbits have an agreement never to speak of it. And when Hazel and his companions try to get help for one of their number caught in a snare, they are shunned and silenced as their apparently civilised hosts turn their backs on them.

This sinister image affected me deeply as a child and stayed with me. As an adult it will occasionally come to my mind again in relation to the world and in relation to how people may a pact with knowledge  – the idea of those rabbits with their pact with man. The choice they have made – the sacrifice of freedom,  of integrity, of loyalty – for their “gilded cage”. I did not know, as a child, why the idea was so very powerful or what it was saying. But I know now. And the image and  sinister horror of that warren returns to me sometimes, as powerful as any horror film.

This is a childrens’ book that speaks to me as an adult and that has stayed with me. But perhaps this is just because it’s a great book, rather than anything to do with the adult/children divide. I don’t know.

And perhaps this post is a pile of bunkum after all.

You tell me.

—-

Question: What books did you devour and what books have stayed with you and are they the same ones? Would love to hear your thoughts, questions or musings – however unformed or vague -  in the comments.