Also by Lucy Mangan

Hopscotch & Handbags: The Truth about Being a Girl

My Family and Other Disasters

The Reluctant Bride: One Woman’s Journey
(Kicking and Screaming) Down the Aisle

BOOKWORM

A Memoir of Childhood Reading

LUCY MANGAN

title page for Bookworm

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Epub ISBN: 9781448191222

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VINTAGE

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Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

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Text copyright © Lucy Mangan 2018

Cover illustration © Laura Barrett

Lucy Mangan has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Square Peg in 2018

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

For Alexander, whom I love more than books

Contents

Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Lucy Mangan
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
1. The Very Hungry Reader
2. To The Library
3. Now I am Six
4. The Blyton Interregnum
5. Through a Wardrobe
6. Grandmothers & Little Women
7. Wonderlands
8. Happy Golden Years
9. Darkness Rising
10. A Coming of Age
Acknowledgements
Lucy’s Bookshelf
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Introduction

‘People say that life is the thing but I prefer reading.’ (American essayist and entirely correct person Logan Pearsall Smith.)

I STILL HAVE all my childhood books. In fact, I have spent some of my happiest hours in recent months arranging them on the bespoke bookcases I had built under the sloping ceiling of my study for their ease and comfort. I may no longer imagine them, as I did thirty years ago, whispering companionably together at night when I have gone to bed, but I love them still. They made me who I am.

‘Pallid,’ says my sister, peering over my shoulder as I type this. ‘Bespectacled. Friendless.’ Which is also true. And yet, who needed flesh-and-blood friends when I had Jo March, Charlotte, Wilbur and everyone at Malory Towers at my beck and call?

Remember hiding a book on your lap to get yourself through breakfast? Remember getting hit on the head by footballs in the playground because a game had sprung up around you while you were off in Cair Paravel? Remember taking yourself off to the furthest corner of the furthest sofa in the furthest room of the house with a stack of Enid Blytons and praying that everyone would forget about you till bedtime? Come bedtime, do you remember waiting four nanoseconds after the door closed before whipping out your torch and carrying on where parental stricture had required you leave off until tomorrow? Was your first crush on Dickon instead of Johnny Depp? Do you still get the urge to tap the back of a wardrobe if you find yourself alone in a strange bedroom, or keep half an ear out at midnight for the sound of Hatty in the garden?

If so, this is the book for you. But then, most books are. You are, like me, a bookworm. Little more needs to be said, apart from: I hope you enjoy this memoir of my own childhood reading and that it brings back happy memories of your own. It is a look back at the books I loved – needed, depended on – as a child. I’ve tried to contextualise them, give their backgrounds (why, for example, was The Family from One End Street considered shocking by some when it first appeared? Who was the first author to use a first-person narrative in a children’s book?); potted biographies of their authors (which hugely successful female children’s writer whose name was not J. K. Rowling began writing only because she was desperate for money? What did E. B. White’s colleagues at the hallowed New Yorker think of him producing, of all things, a children’s book about a spider and a pig?); and a sense of where they come in the history of children’s literature. But this is a personal account of the classics and not-so-classics that shaped my world and thoughts, and so necessarily incomplete. I read omnivorously but not well and certainly without a thought for posterity. I read because I loved it. I read wherever I could, whenever I could, for as long as I could. At birthday parties – not least my own – I would stealthily retreat as soon as the games began, to the most hidden corner of whatever house I was in, gathering any available volumes on the way and reading furiously through them until a hateful adult found me and demanded my return or, if I was lucky, told me it was home time. In the summer holidays, I could read literally from dawn till dusk, unaware of anything until forcibly recalled to real life.

Those were the days, my friends. Those were the days. Do we ever manage again to commit ourselves as wholeheartedly and unselfconsciously as we do to the books we read when young? I doubt it. I have great hopes for retirement but for the moment, as an adult of working age and a mother of a five-year-old, life is unfortunately too much with me to allow such gorgeous, uninterrupted stretches of immersion in a book.

But let us relive, for the next few chapters at least, a little of those glorious days when reading was the thing and life was only a minor inconvenience.

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1

The Very Hungry Reader

I SPENT MOST of my early years – aged one to three, say – being trodden on.

‘It was your own fault,’ my mother explains. ‘You were too quiet. You used to stand by my feet, not making a sound while I was washing up or doing the ironing, so I’d forget you were there. What toddler does that? So I’d step back – and step on you. And you still,’ she adds accusingly, ‘didn’t make a sound.’

The same tone of mingled confusion and denunciation attends her telling of another story, of the day she put me in the baby bouncer she had bought (a sort of nappy-shaped harness attached to elastic cords that you hang from a door frame) ‘and you just hung there. You didn’t even TRY to bounce. Just hung there! What kind of baby does THAT?’

I think the explanation lies in the fact that I wasn’t really a baby. I was a bookworm. For the true bookworm, life doesn’t really begin until you get hold of your first book. Until then – well, you’re just waiting, really. You don’t even know for what, at that stage – if you did, you would be making more noise about it and be less covered in court-shoe-shaped bruises. But it’s books.

My parents, I should say now, are northern. And Catholic. They came down south in the late 1960s to look for work. My dad, to the bafflement of his upper-working-class family, had wanted to work in the theatre since he were knee-high to the family whippet. Or ferret. I forget. Once the most pressing of his parents’ many attendant anxieties upon this fact were relieved by his acquisition of a wife, they did all they could to help him realise his dream, eventually waving him, a bottle of dandelion and burdock and a bagful of clean underpants off at Preston station to start a new life as a stage manager at the newly formed National Theatre in That There London. Mum, a recently qualified doctor, went with him. Mainly to make sure he got off at the right stop.

My dad was – and is – a reader. Not great at school – I once unearthed in a boxful of photographs that passed to me as de facto keeper of the family archives (once you get a reputation as bookish, all sorts of admin falls to you) a school report of his full of barely average marks and which read, under his failing grade for Religious Instruction, ‘Neglects to learn his catechism’. Father Paedophile’s thunderous fury was still evident, sixty years later, in every thick black stroke of his pen. But he was a great reader. There wasn’t much money in the family so there weren’t many books in the house, apart from a few precious bound collections of Boy’s Own comics given to Dad and his 800 siblings by a family friend after their own children grew out of them. Whoever had the most life-threatening lung disease at the time got to read them in bed until he or she got better or expired. However. In the centre of Preston sat the Harris Public Library (and museum and art gallery), the result of a £300,000 bequest from local lawyer and beneficiary of family railway investments Edmund Robert Harris in 1877. It’s still there, performing all the functions its founder hoped for, a monument to civic-mindedness and one of the countless buildings and establishments across the country that make you shake your head and wonder how much worse a state we’d be in now if we hadn’t had the Victorians. And it was to the Harris library that Dad took himself every week, working his way gradually through its offerings until he went to the local grammar school and transferred his allegiance to the panelled library room there, where he discovered Shakespeare, Marlowe and loads of other people who had written strangely formatted books called plays.

My mother was not a reader. She was – and is – a doer. For most of my life, until she retired a few years ago, she was a gynaecologist, specialising in gruesome anecdotes and family planning (my mother is the only Catholic in history to have thrown off her upbringing utterly and never looked back). She presided over a dozen different clinics a week, swiftly building a reputation as the fastest, most efficient doctor in south-east London. ‘If they want to have their hands held and chat,’ she used to snarl at anyone who occasionally wondered if she couldn’t afford to take a little more time with patients, ‘they can go somewhere else.’

At home she was an equally efficient plumber, electrician, cleaner, laundrywoman, gardener (actually more of an operator of a scorched-earth policy across the little patch of lawn and potentially herbaceous border behind our three-bed terrace, but no matter – neatness was the goal, not beauty), cook (burgers, Findus Crispy Pancakes, whaddyawantchipsormash, and gravy) and chauffeur as needed, in ceaseless, indefatigable rotation, singing, talking to herself or shouting orders to others all the while. My sister in later years dubbed her the Noisemaker 2000. My own theory is that if she ever has an unexpressed thought, she’ll die.

She was – and is – a marvel, not least because there was no martyrdom at all in any of this. Firstly, she did it because it suited her temperament, not because it fed some deep-seated complex. She is seventy-four at the time of writing and still cannot be quiet or sit still for more than twenty seconds unless she’s eating her tea and Coronation Street’s on. Second, it was the only way she could get things done exactly to her specifications (in their utility room is a nine-volume laminated set of instructions solely about towel folding for Dad to follow if she ever goes away or he disobeys his own instructions and outlives her). And third, everyone else was required to pitch in as much as they could too. I put my toys away. And Dad … Dad just helped with everything. Buffered everything. Calmed everything. Mediated everything. Made sure Mum got a run out in the park every now and again to burn some energy off. Theirs was – and is – a marriage of true opposites. He will die if he ever has an expressed thought. It all works very well.

When I was tiny I didn’t see him much because stage managing at the National Theatre takes you way past toddler bedtime. But at the weekends, once lesser activities such as eating, having baths and playing with visiting infants were out of the way, we would have a splendid time together. I am assured there was colouring, Play-Doh moulding and endless games of riding horses to Banbury Cross, but my first real memory is of Dad tucking me in beside him on the long, brown floral sofa that sat on a rug dyed three increasingly violent shades of orange that sat on top of an orange carpet (oh, the 1970s. May you never, never return) and opening a book almost as colourful as our sitting room. It was The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle’s paint ’n’ tissue-paper collaged account of the larval lepidoptera’s metamorphosis, fuelled by choice morsels of American culinary classics, into butterfly.

And yet although this is the first book I remember there must have been other books before it, because what entranced me, and millions of other readers since it was published in 1969, was the fact that it was so different from them. The caterpillar had eaten little holes through all the pages for a start. And the pages were all different sizes. Some were narrow enough to make turning them a fiddly business, some large enough to make them flappily unwieldy in tiny hands, and some were just right.

They had all been a fiddly business for the publisher. The Hungry Caterpillar’s life began when Carle was using a hole punch on a stack of papers at his home. The little circles made him think of a bookworm and he created a story, using different-sized pages – a familiar device in Germany, where his family had moved when he was six – called A Week with Willi the Worm. His editor Ann Beneduce suggested that a caterpillar might be more likeable than a worm. Carle shouted ‘Butterfly!’ and got cracking on a rewrite that took narrative advantage of his new hero’s transformative properties. Beneduce then had to scour the globe searching for a printer that could cope with producing variously sized pages AND put holes in them without bankrupting themselves or her. She eventually found one in Japan, the book emerged and has been beating its wings all over the world ever since.

My father read it to me so many times that he swears when he dies we will find ‘one slice of cake, etc., etc.’ engraved on his heart. You will find it written all the way through mine, like a stick of rock. Not only did I absorb it when young, I have read it many times since – many, many, many times, enough times to begin to appreciate at last the fathomless depths of my father’s patience – to my son.

With no conscious effort on my part, The Very Hungry Caterpillar was his first book too – at least if you discount the cloth and crackly things he gummed on as a baby. His Caterpillar was a fancy-dan edition, though. It had a finger puppet attached which can be pushed through the holes. I was not at all sure I approved of such interactive frivolity, but he was two, it was a christening present I’d put in the cupboard until he was older, and I was still too unsure of my authority as a parent to question anything too closely. It was fun, though. If you got your fingertip in there just right, you could make the puppet look almost as impudent as the real thing. I tucked my son in beside me on the sofa and we cocooned ourselves, the ghost of my toddler self and the spirit of my thirtysomething dad in a shared delight.

Another delight was shared even more literally. Sugarpink Rose was so large a hardback that it had to rest on both our laps at once. Its huge soft pink and soft grey pictures of girl elephants, boy elephants, anemones and peonies filled my entire field of vision. Written by Adela Turin and Nella Bosnia and published by a 1970s feminist collective, Sugarpink Rose told the story of a baby girl elephant called Annabelle who simply wouldn’t turn pink like all the other baby girl elephants, no matter how many anemones and peonies she dutifully ate. (These, the reader was informed, tasted disgusting. I found this hard to fathom because both the words and the pictures were so beautiful.) And instead of being happy to be shut safely in a pen and wearing a pink bonnet and pink booties like all the other girl elephants, she would look longingly at the boy elephants, who were ‘a lovely elephant grey’ as they got to eat whatever they wanted, play wherever they wanted and to roll about in mud to their hearts’ content. Annabelle tries her best to turn pink and not long for freedom, but eventually can stand it no more and bursts out of her pen, casting booties and bonnet to the wind, to join the boys. Gradually, the other girl elephants follow suit and soon everyone is covered in mud, their tummies are full of sweet green grass and they have turned the lovely grey elephant colour that nature intended.

Looking back, it’s just possible someone was trying to make a point. Unfortunately, it was slightly lost on me because a) I wouldn’t get allegory until many years later, when I read The Last Battle and suddenly realised that C. S. Lewis had been plotting Christian shenanigans all along, and b) though I shared her dislike of pink, I did not understand Annabelle’s desire to leave the pen or to roll around in mud like her brothers. I liked things clean, and I liked things safe.

But I loved Sugarpink Rose even if the finer points of the story eluded me and, four decades on, I love my dad for buying his three-year-old a feminist tract. He bought my mum The Female Eunuch at about the same time. I found it on a shelf many years later and took it to university with me. On the flyleaf he had written ‘You can read this while I’m giving birth to the twins.’ She never did, of course. Who has time or inclination to read about the theory of feminism when you’re busy putting it into practice every day? You might as well hold someone’s hand and chat.

A little later Dad brought me another classic – or at least a classic in embryo. Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea (1968) was probably only about ten or twelve years old by the time I got my hands on it – too young yet to qualify fully as canonical. It was Kerr’s first book – she had trained as an artist and was then working as a television screenwriter – and a massive, instant success. It had begun life as a bedtime story invented for her two-year-old daughter Tacy. ‘I told it to her again and again and again, and she used to say “Talk the tiger”’, Kerr remembers in her autobiography. She wrote it down and a friend recommended that she illustrate it in bright indelible inks rather than her customary watercolours. The tiger sprang vividly to life and rapidly into homes up and down the land.

I liked Tiger very much, but my enjoyment – as you might perhaps expect from a child who read Sugarpink Rose and basically thought ‘Stay in the pen, little girl! Stay in the pen!’ – was tinged with disquiet. A tiger who just turns up, without any explanation or invitation, and stays for tea? BOUNDARIES, PEOPLE. My sense of propriety was offended and the promise of domestic sanctity, upon which my childhood tranquillity largely depended had been breached. There are two types of people in this world – those who long for the arrival of a tiger at the door and those whose profoundest wish is that nothing so unexpected happens, ever. Ever, ever, ever. I have all my life been firmly in the latter. I blame temperament and my mother, who created such an overwhelmingly safe environment at home that the idea of venturing out even into normal life has ever seemed fraught with untenable amounts of risk.

Kerr herself, you sense from reading interviews with her, or her autobiographical novels or her account (mostly) of her career in a book published a few years ago to celebrate her ninetieth birthday, is one of the former. She is joyful, outward-looking, generous-spirited and optimistic, despite – or perhaps because of – a very unsafe childhood, spent in exile after her family fled Germany in 1933. Her father spoke out against the Nazi regime and was in imminent danger of being arrested and killed. The family received a tip-off that his passport was about to be seized and he escaped to Switzerland just in time. Judith and her mother and brother followed, catching the milk train to Zurich, on the eve of the election that brought Hitler to power. The nine-year-old Judith was only allowed to take one toy with her and had to decide between her pink rabbit comforter and a more recent acquisition, a woolly dog. She chose the dog. Her first book for older children was published in 1971, entitled When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. It was a remark from her second child, her son Matthew, that had prompted it. When he was eight he was watching The Sound of Music and said, ‘Now we know what it was like when Mummy was a little girl.’ Unwilling to let this misapprehension persist, she wrote the story of nine-year-old Anna and her family watching the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany who has to choose between her toy dog and rabbit before they flee the country just in time. Though it doesn’t gloss over the truth, it is infused with Kerr’s innate optimism and by her own experience, shaped as it was by her truly heroic parents, who made the whole thing feel like such an adventure that she once exclaimed in excitement as they looked out over Paris from their tiny, squalid digs, ‘Isn’t it wonderful being a refugee!’ It is this as much as the careful tempering of the subject matter for the audience that makes it palatable – is that the word? Accessible, maybe. Copeable with – for the young reader.

But to read it again as an adult – especially bombarded with today’s headlines and proliferating horrors – is to be almost undone. You bring too much to it and long for a child’s innocence to protect you once more.

Mog the Forgetful Cat, Kerr’s second-most famous creation after the tea-guzzling tiger, was and remains a much simpler, safer proposition than the tiger or the pink rabbit. The first of what would become a long and lovely series of books based on the Kerrs’ own cat was written with a simple vocabulary of about 250 words because as it was coming together, Matthew was learning to read from the Janet and John books and looked up at her one day and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mummy, but these books are too boring. I’m not reading them any more.’ So she adapted it for him. This is parenting of the highest order. I try not to feel bad.

I embraced Mog unreservedly when Dad added her to our repertoire. I was Mog. She liked to be at home, with her family, with her supper (despite being a picky eater) or curled up in bed. And in Mog’s Christmas, she learned to love Christmas. It was like looking in a mirror.

By the time I had my child thirty years later, Kerr had very kindly written fifteen more sequels, including the distinctly hallucinatory Mog in the Garden, in which she falls asleep and ends up flying through the air on a mousedogbird, pursued by giant birds with teeth, which – aided by the repetitive yet elliptical text that uses just fifty words, to encourage children to read the book themselves – induces a feeling somewhere between ‘Have I missed a memo?’ and ‘Have I accidentally smoked a spliff?’ Quite nice at the end of a long day.

It is a measure of how deeply we revere our childhood books and the characters within them that when in 2002 Kerr published the final book, Goodbye Mog, in which Mog dies, there was a stricken outcry. And an only slightly tongue-in-cheek and really rather touching obituary in the Guardian. ‘She was nice but not intelligent,’ it read. ‘A conservative of whom it was said “she didn’t like things to be exciting. She liked them to be the same.”’

I told you – like looking in a mirror.

I was three and life so far was excellent. Me, Mum, Dad and an ever-increasing number of books. This perfect harmony was violently disrupted when the powers that be decided that I had had literally got under her feet for long enough and that it was time for me to go to nursery school.

Nursery And Clinic

This was still the 1970s, so going to nursery simply meant being thrown into the local church hall for a three-hour stretch every morning to be semi-supervised by a handful of disaffected local women looking for somewhere to smoke in peace. It was miserable, but it could have been worse. At least children that age aren’t keen on playing together and our overseers didn’t care enough to try and make us, so I was left largely alone. I wandered around for a few days and eventually discovered nursery’s one redeeming feature – the book bin, whose contents an adult could occasionally be prevailed upon to read. It contained about twenty dog-eared paperbacks, most of which have been lost to memory. But two remain vivid: Frank Muir’s What-a-Mess books and Jean de Brunhoff’s Babar the Elephant.

I didn’t like either of them much.

The What-a-Mess series is about an Afghan puppy, Prince Amir of Kinjan, who is always on the brink of, or absolutely in the middle of, disaster. He tries to eat trees and dig holes in puddles and, unlike his endlessly elegant and self-possessed mother, is always covered in something sticky. People’s first words to him have so often been ‘What a mess!’ that he thinks that is his name. I found the kinetic energy of his stories quite stressful.

With Babar, I had the opposite problem. He was lumberingly dull. Jean de Brunhoff’s pachyderm – an orphan elephant whose adventures were first invented by de Brunhoff’s wife Cecile to keep their two little boys amused when they were ill – was first printed in 1933 in, relatively unusually for the time, bright flat colours and a child-friendly font that looked like handwriting. I loved that font. I hated Babar. I’d like to claim that my juvenile self took some kind of instinctive issue with the many arguments that have been made against him since the book was first published. The playwright Ariel Dorfman speaks for many critics (‘official’ and parental) when he claims that the Babar books are ‘none other than the fulfilment of the dominant countries’ colonial dream’. Babar escapes his native jungle and is generously embraced and civilised by the (rich, idle, if ya wanna see it) old lady in town. He becomes a product and ally of the very society that killed his mother in the opening pages. Green-suited and booted he returns to his home where, in recognition of his now greater sophistication than the rest, he is made king of the elephants and he begins to civilise them too. Houses, clothes, the accumulation of stuff, uncritical emulation of the old lady (and by extension – again, if ya wanna see it – the ruling class) are shown as the way to accomplish all of this. It’s hard – very, very hard – not to become uncomfortable as you read it now. My son Alexander was given the collected Babar as a present. I read the opening one to him and then – especially after noting the ‘savage cannibals’ in the later Babar’s Travels – quietly put it aside. The critic Adam Gopnik once argued in an essay that accompanied an exhibition of the Brunhoffs’ artwork (Jean’s son Laurent continued the saga after his father’s early death in 1937) that Babar is not ‘an unconscious instance of the French colonial imagination’ but ‘a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination’. Which, I thought as I pushed it a little more firmly to the back of Alexander’s bookcase, may be totally, objectively true. But not to a four-year-old.

As I say, I would like to claim that I instinctively grasped and recoiled from the whole ‘four legs good; four legs clothed, driven everywhere and returning to the homeland in triumph better’ vibe, but in truth it was just his dullness. If What-a-Mess was Too Much, Babar was Too Little. He is a very boring hero – patient, industrious and, for all his eventual willingness to hand off responsibility to Cornelius while he goes on balloon rides, basically an adult soul in a child-elephant’s body. Honestly – whose first thought when they pitch up in an unimagined, unexplored city is to buy a suit of clothes? And events just happen, one after the other. Nobody explains anything, has feelings about or motives for anything. It is a book that depends on charm to sweep you along. I found it cold. And now that it’s become colonially suspect for me too, I suspect the Gallic elephant and I will stay forever at a distance.

Why, then, do they stick in my mind? It is because they were the ones that revealed to me the bookworm’s prime directive: any book is better than no book. Always. You don’t necessarily have to enjoy the book – though obviously that’s the ideal, and most books ARE enjoyable – as long as the space inside you that can only be filled by reading is receiving the steady stream of words for which it constantly hungers. So What-a-Mess, Babar and I were bound.

They and their companions in the book bins alleviated some of the drudgery of nursery school – I largely had them to myself and both staff and children happily left me to my own devices until my mother arrived at the end of the morning like a miniature tornado, to gather me up and sweep me off with her to her afternoon clinics.

Whichever one it was, the procedure was the same. I would sit in a corner behind the reception desk, trotting to and fro between my little chair and the books that had been provided by the council or donors in the futile hope of keeping children occupied while doctors took their mothers into their rooms to work out with them the best way of preventing more. As pills were issued, injections given and diaphragms checked for seaworthiness, I was benignly supervised by Joy or Gwen, who ran the place. (And by ‘the place’ I mean the clinic, the health centre it was in, the NHS and possibly most of south-east London.) Over the years they became firm family friends and from the earliest days they were my protectors. My mother would emerge from her room to call another patient in and roar at me – a three-year-old sitting so quietly in the corner that I should have been the occasion of medical concern rather than fury – to behave myself. Joy or Gwen would roar back that I was an angel, under their jurisdiction and she should get back in her room forthwith. It was most gratifying.

Even more gratifying were the books on offer. There were not many per clinic, but there were many clinics. During those early tours of Lewisham and north Southwark’s gynaecology and family-planning departments, I made many friends beside Joy, Gwen and assorted kindly nurses. Spot the Dog. Hairy Maclary. Elmer the elephant. And, above all, Miffy, who said the most by saying nothing. A design classic, 85 million copies of the thirty-odd books by Dick Bruna starring the world’s most featureless yet boundlessly expressive rabbit have been sold since she first appeared in 1955. Forget yer Titians and yer Michaelangelos. To look into Miffy’s face – two dots for eyes and a cross for a mouth comprising a face that somehow looked back at me with happiness, sadness, anticipation, bewilderment, surprise and all points in between even if I didn’t have a name for them yet – is to appreciate the infinite power of art. I loved Miffy. I still love Miffy, even if these days she seems to gaze back at me with just one expression, which hovers somewhere between eternal reproach and sad resignation. But I think we’re both hoping for better times to come.

Best of all were the clinics that had Shirley Hughes. I couldn’t read the words to Lucy’s and Tom’s adventures yet, or Dogger’s (or those of the many other books she illustrated but were written by someone else), but I didn’t need to. I fell into her warm, untidy drawings wherever I found them with a sigh of satisfaction, responding instantly to the evocative gifts of a brilliant draughtswoman who, as she once said of her hero Edward Ardizzone, ‘with just a few lines of pencil could open up this astonishing depth in illustration’. Hughes’ pictures were a riot of autumnal colours rather than monochromatic like hisfn1, but her books and her world was full to overflowing and endlessly appealing.

I got general delight from almost every book I came across, but hers were perhaps the first time I felt the sense of a specific need being met. I disliked, profoundly, being away from home. Nursery was the worst, of course, but even at the clinic, with Mum in her office and kindly protectors all round I was always unsettled and fretting inwardly until we were in the car going home. Then the small, gnawing worries, sometimes at the pit of my stomach, sometimes deep in my brain, sometimes both (at nursery they talked to each other up and down my oesophagus), as nameless as they were insistent, would start to lessen as the car ate up the miles between me and safety and finally cease completely once I set foot over my own threshold again.

But until that true safety could be gained, Hughes provided a fine proxy. I wanted to press my face on the pictures, but generally managed to refrain. Her interiors were Everyhome, not chaotic but comfortably messy, well appointed but not luxurious, recognisably contemporary but not aggressively modern. Hughes is a specialist in making the domestic and quotidian attractive. They contain something elemental – an intimation of what we all mean by ‘home’. I could live here temporarily, without too much fretting and anxiety. My mother would know where to find me. The notion that books could provide succour as well as entertainment was born. My adoration and my need for them grew accordingly.

I did eventually start to read as well as simply gaze adoringly at most of Hughes’ stories a few years later but somehow I either overlooked Dogger or simply failed to appreciate then the masterpiece it is. The book won the 1977 Kate Greenaway Medal and made Hughes’ name as an author–illustrator. I didn’t remedy my lack until I bought it a couple of years ago for Alexander.

A word of warning: do not read Dogger as an adult unless you are in peak mental and physical condition. It will break you. The story of Dave and his lost toy dog, accidentally sold to another child at the school fair, turns on a selfless act of kindness by his big sister Bella. If you are a grown-up reading this for the first time you will be caught unawares and soon your bewildered three-year-old will have to let himself out of the bedroom and go looking for his father to ‘come and help Mummy. She crying. Tears AND snot.’

It’s a book you long to become your child’s favourite so you can read it night after night, despite the pivotal scene in which Bella nobly trades the giant bear she has won in her three-legged race with the little girl who bought Dave’s dog tearing a new layer off your heart every time, because you want him to absorb the lessons it offers – like all the best books, as adjunct and never as didactic driver of the plot – into the very marrow of his bones. Of course, my own child has never fulfilled this longing – he likes Dogger now and again, but it doesn’t own him as I would like it to – but we have nevertheless read it many, many times over the last couple of years and it is still all I can do not to lie prostrate on the ground with grief, crying ‘Look! Look what we are capable of if only we would try! Oh, the humanity! What is wrong with us? What is wrong with the world?’

Motherhood is very difficult.

Back in 1977, an indisputably Good Thing was at last about to emerge from the nursery situation. One lunchtime, the woman my mother occasionally asked to pick me up forgot to do so, so one of the supervisors walked me home. No-one, of course, was in. So, with the robust approach to child safety that characterised the era, she left me next door with a neighbour I had never met. Her name was Jenni and her house contained a lovely smell of baking – a large slice of cake with blue icing was soon pushed into my hand – and a tiny two-year-old child, also called Lucy. I loved her immediately and have not stopped yet. Jenni still lives next door to my parents and Lucy and I live ten minutes from each other and them.

We are very alike. We both like to stay in, wear three jumpers at all times, watch telly, not talk and sleep a lot. Our only real difference is that I also like to read and she prefers to put on a fourth jumper and another DVD instead.

At this point in history, however, Lucy’s antipathy to reading was not yet apparent and so she had a bookshelf above her dresser that groaned with such delights as a full set of Jan Pienkowski’s Meg and Mog books and Roger Hargreaves’ Mr Men. Over the next few years it would become a rich resource for me. Lucy gave me free rein and I went round there a lot to borrow and exchange various volumes and take them home to Dad so we could marvel anew at the length of Mr Tickle’s arms (he was the first in the series – Hargreaves made him up as a bedtime story for his son Adam and then thought – ‘Hey – I might have something here’), the number of eggs Mr Strong could eat, and the heart-rending ceaseless clumsiness of Mr Bump.

Re-reading the Mr Men now with my son – and it was Lucy Donovan who bought him the full, boxed set for his third birthday – is a discombobulating experience. The stories that once wholly enraptured me stand revealed, usually, as miserably flawed, broken-backed things. Maybe one in five comprises something that actually qualifies as a plot. The rest leave you hanging in mid-air, wondering what kind of blackmail material Hargreaves had on his editors that they allowed this to pass muster.

At the same time, the drawings remain as thoroughly and elementally satisfying as ever. Hargreaves drew, as far as both my three- and forty-three-year-old selves are concerned, the Platonic ideals of fried eggs, of shoes, of houses, trees, washerwomen and wizards. And his colours are right. Of course uppitiness is plum-purple. Of course happiness is yellow. And of course, of course, of course ticklishness is orange. I just wonder, 612 rereads into fifty books, what colour Mr Satisfactory Narrative Resolution would have been.

The Birth of Illustrated Children’s Books

Life, even including nursery school, had settled down nicely again. And then came Der Struwwelpeter, or Shockheaded Peter.

Dad just brought home this book full of bloody thumb-stumps, deaths by drowning and carbonised children who played with matches, all in saturated colour and heavy black ink one day as if it was nothing. When in fact Heinrich Hoffmann’s 1845 creation, which he wrote for his three-year-old son one Christmas when he had not been able to find any book in the shops that he wanted to buy, was a hellscape from which parts of my wounded psyche are still struggling to emerge. The ear could no more refuse to hear the burrowing insistent rhymes (oh, the awful, insinuating cat chorus in ‘The Dreadful Story of Harriet and the Matches’! ‘“Me-ow!” they said, “me-ow, me-o, / You’ll burn to death, if you do so! Your parents have forbidden you, you know!”’) than the eye could drag itself away from the jagged, evocative, full-colour illustrations accompanying Shockheaded Peter and his companions’ travails. How Hoffmann’s own tender toddler responded is not recorded. Maybe they breed them tougher in Germany. I hope so.

It came as no surprise to me to learn in later years that Hoffmann ran a lunatic asylum. At the time of my first exposure to this beast of a book, however, I had no recourse to facts that might validate my unease. I simply turned to the man who had brought it so carelessly into our lives and gazed at him with large, unblinking eyes, the better to let him read the horror now contained forever therein, until he closed the book and put it on a high shelf (‘No – higher. Higher again’) until I was much, much older.

*

Until Shock-Headed Peter arrived, the world of books my dad was reading to me had been divided neatly into two halves. One comprised the bright, simple books about cats, elephants, caterpillars and children dressed like me. And the other comprised books in more muted colours but full of much busier pictures. There was gilding. There were curlicues. There were more rhymes and less prose.

When I got a little older I would label them the ‘Now’ and the ‘Then’ books. ‘Now’ meant modern. ‘Then’ meant what I would only come much later to understand were the lush fruits of the great nineteenth century collaborations between Edmund Evans, Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway. Together, they invented children’s picture books in the format we recognise today.

Of course, there had been picture books – or at least books with pictures – for children before Evans and his gang found each other. Even the earliest books for children, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries generally managed to squeeze a few crude woodcut illustrations onto the pages, and in 1658 John Amos Comenius stepped things up a bit by publishing the Orbis Sensualium Pictus – a sort of early encyclopaedia, which had a picture of an object at the top of each page and its name in Latin and English below.

But that was just the beginning of the good times.

A New Lottery Book of Birds and Beasts for children to learn their letters by was published in 1771, with the letters on the left-hand side of every spread and a pair of suitable pictures for each on the right. These were woodcuts but done by the absolute master of the art, Thomas Bewick. His pictures bear as much relation to the massy, indistinct stuff children had been used to as Dr Scholl sandals do to Louboutins. When you look at them or the illustrations from his most famous book, A History of British Birds (intended for adults but doubtless pored over by children too) – the mind simply boggles to think that it is not done with pen, ink and hand but by drawing onto wood and carefully cutting away with infinitesimal care to different depths to leave the picture in relief and the block to take up (if, of course, the printer is as careful and as skilled at his craft as you are at yours) different amounts of ink in order to reproduce all the different gradations of blackness and bring all your precious details to life. As long as I don’t think about it, I could look at them forever. If I do, I very soon have to go for a lie down. Still, I hope the children of the eighteenth century appreciated his efforts. The Brontës owned a copy of A History of British Birds and by all accounts cherished it. Then again, so would you if it was the only thing available to take your mind off the TB-ridden siblings dropping all around you like flies.

Then, in 1789, into this occasionally beautiful but defiantly monochrome world of woodcuts rode the poet and painter William Blake with nineteen poems collectively entitled Songs of Innocence, printed, elaborately illustrated and exuberantly hand-coloured by the author himself. It was perhaps the first book – if not for children, then still eagerly consumed by them – whose pictures did not simply reflect the words on the page but evoked and added to them. It is of course easier to do this in a book of poems about the innocence of childhood than it is in an ABC primer or natural history book. A ‘D’ is a ‘D’ and a duck is a duck. You would be looking at a mallard a long time before you were reminded of a numinous state of being. Nevertheless, Blake really went for it. Even coming from a Technicolor age as we do, the illustrations are still quite overwhelming, as perhaps befits a man who thought of the imagination as ‘the body of God’.

I miss mad artists. There are times when Grayson Perry doesn’t quite cut it, you know?

This new idea, of pictures enriching and adding to a story rather than straightforwardly depicting what was being said, wasn’t followed up right away. In the Victorian era, toy books became popular – sixpence or a shilling got you half a dozen or a dozen five-by-six-inch pages whose colourful illustrations dominated, not to say simply overwhelmed, the text (which was usually a fairy story or condensed adult tale like Robinson Crusoe).

In 1865 the publishers Routledge & Warne hired Edmund Evans – a man whose talent and painstaking work in wood engraving and colour printing had made him a name to reckon with in the world of publishing – to make them some toy books. Little did they know they were inaugurating what would become known as the first golden age of children’s book illustration.

Evans, a man with artistic vision as well as commercial nous, felt deeply that the still-crude pictures then being used to illustrate children’s books could be improved upon without impoverishing everyone involved and bankrupting firms. You simply had to be able to justify a big enough print run to provide sufficient economy of scale. Which meant producing something beautiful enough that people would want to buy in droves. Which would be expensive, but practicable if you could do a big enough print run. Which you could because you were producing something beautiful enough that … You get, I’m sure, the point.

To this beautiful and economically sound end he first commissioned Walter Crane, an artist he had worked with on adult ‘yellow-backs’ (inexpensive books with yellow covers, for adults and sold at railway stations – also known as ‘penny dreadfuls’ or ‘mustard pla(i)sters’, they were often re-covered editions of previously unsold books. Evans realised you could shift them if you commissioned good enough artists to repackage them irresistibly). Crane shared Evans’ belief in the importance of giving children the best experience possible. ‘We all remember the little cuts that coloured the books of our childhood. The ineffaceable quality of those early pictorial and literary impressions affords the strongest plea for good art in the nursery and the schoolroom.’

Between 1865 and 1886, they collaborated on around fifty books, starting with relatively simple affairs like the nursery rhymes ‘This is the House that Jack Built’ and ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ before moving onto richer, more fertile fare like the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast. The market exploded. Evans had been right. If you print it, they will come. Especially if ‘they’ are a population beginning to feel the mind- and literacy-expanding effects of recent educational reforms, living in an era of growing affluence and characterised by a rising middle class desperate to spend their new-found wealth on further self-improvement. The late 1800s were a perfect picture-book-producing storm.

By 1871 Crane had moved abroad, but he and Evans still managed to produce two or three books a year, exchanging illustrations, proofs and finished pictures by post, as if the process of transferring picture to wood block to page in full colour were not already laborious enough. Not for the first time you have to applaud the can-do, will-do, why-the-hell-would-we-not-do? spirit of the age.

And by the end of the decade, Crane and Evans were flying and confident enough to produce books so elaborate that they barely qualified as toy books at all. In 1878 they published The Baby’s Opera (‘a book of old rhymes with new dresses’) made up of fifty-six pages (a nursery rhyme on each), a dozen of which are fully illustrated and all the rest of which have decorative borders round the rhymes and music.

My own childhood picture books have, alas, long since vanished; victims, I can only presume, of my mother’s constant mission to maintain a house that shows no sign of human habitation. Even now, after 40 years in the same place, you would not be able to guess a single thing about the people who live there. Apart, possibly, from the fact that one at least must be a monomaniac who has forgotten more about decluttering than Marie Kondo will ever know.

But when I looked up The Baby’s Opera online, its illustrations are so familiar that I think I must have owned a copy. Maybe as part of an anthology – I seem to feel a substantial weight in my hands as I scroll through them onscreen. Fruiting plants in delicate yellow, orange and green grow up the sides of ‘Oranges and Lemons’ while a row of children ring bells below. Children in clothes and a garden tinted an unmistakeable azure sit beneath ‘Lavender’s Blue’. A liberal scattering of cockle shells and smiling flowers answer the question of ‘How Does My Garden Grow?’ An intertwined gathering of crocodiles, puppy dogs and snails are similarly provided in response to ‘What Are Little Boys Made Of?’ It’s completely beautiful. No wonder it sold 10,000 copies in a month. Both it and its companion two years later – The Baby’s Bouquet: A Fresh Bunch of Old Rhymes and Tunes – look like miniature medieval illuminated manuscripts and went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

Eventually, however, the prolific Crane needed a rest and Evans brought in an illustrator called Randolph Caldecott, whose work he had admired in magazines. With Caldecott, children’s picture books took a giant leap forward.

Crane’s drawings had been charming and immensely attractive, but as one contemporary put it, ‘He knows too much, and has not enough inspiration.’ There was a carefulness, a pedestrian quality to his pictures that you might not notice while you were being beguiled – until and unless, perhaps, they are set alongside Caldecott’s. Suddenly, Crane is static where Caldecott is vibrant and fluid – you can better imagine life for his creations continuing while Crane’s are consigned to oblivion once you’ve turned the page.