Reading has been a great comfort for many of us over the last year. Especially to children. According to the National Literacy Trust, three in five children said reading makes them feel better when they were asked during lockdown. Unsurprisingly, it seems, children are reading more fiction – presumably to escape the reality of these isolating times. Given this, and in anticipation of World Book Day on 4 March, we thought we would invite our readers to share their own first great literary loves. Ours are below and we really look forward to hearing about yours.
Michael Bond, by Mark Jones
Michael Bond left school at 14. During the war and the years thereafter, he was in the RAF and the army. When he returned to civilian life in 1947 he thought he ‘wouldn't mind being a writer’.
That wasn’t a reliable way of making money. Eventually, he became a TV cameraman for the BBC instead.
He kept writing.The first Paddington book, published in 1958, wasn’t the spontaneous outpouring of a gifted amateur. Michael has been working on plays and short stories for some years. But the children’s story proved to be the best medium for his writing.
Over 35 million Paddington books have been sold.
The writing is such a gentle, understated joy. Children know when adults are putting on a voice, when they’re faking it. Michael tells the Paddington stories with the still, honest gaze of, well, a TV camera. Technically, it’s a masterclass in a certain quiet, sure-footed, unmistakably English kind of storytelling. There’s nothing fussy in his syntax. He never over-describes. He is never sentimental, yet you feel for the characters so strongly, especially in the story in A Bear Called Paddington when the small bear falls very ill.
None of this went through my head when I was seven. All I knew was that Paddington was the champion of seven-year-olds everywhere: plucky, always getting into scrapes, pitted against a grown-up world that we all know is bossy and silly and pompous.
My heart sank when they said they were making big-budget Paddington films. I’d watched the Disney films of C S Lewis’s Narnia. They made me far angrier than you should ever be about film adaptations. I felt that not only did the scriptwriters not want to follow the book, they had a kind of contempt for the dead white English male who had written them in some seriously uncool time in the past.
So I was, let’s admit it, moved to tears by the two Paddington films. I had a strong sense that these writers would rather not do the film at all if it meant upsetting Michael in any way. They got Paddington’s voice perfectly. They understood that London had changed since 1958: but that the things that mattered hadn’t – fairness, tolerance towards people (or animals) who aren’t like you, a dislike of bossiness and officialdom – it is all still there if you look hard enough.
There’s a silly saying that you shouldn't meet your heroes. Well, I did. I invited Michael Bond to lunch in the late 90s. We went to a rustic French restaurant in Soho, for this most English of writers loved everything about France. (His other fictional character is a mouse detective called Monsieur Pamplemousse). We didn’t talk too much about Paddington. I thought he might be a bit tired of all that, though, of course, he’d be too polite to say so.
We had a jolly lunch and talked instead about food and travel and books. I didn't thank him for making me realise that I, too, ‘wouldn’t mind being a writer’. Perhaps that’s as well. It might have embarrassed him.
Michael Bond died, aged 91, in 2017.
Enid Blyton by Kerry Smith
Rats destroyed most of my childhood mementos. They invaded my parents’ loft and made short work of creating a huge nest from my old Sindy dolls, cuddly toys and clothes. Only a few things survived. Joyfully, amongst them, was a box of childhood books containing my absolute favourites: about 40 Enid Blyton classics.
I loved Enid Blyton from the moment I could read. I started with Noddy, The Magic Faraway Tree and The Wishing Chair, before graduating onto The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, Malory Towers and St Clare’s. Luckily for my younger self there was never any danger of running out of books: Enid was prolific, often writing a story a week (sparking rumours in the 1950s that there was a factory of writers turning out Enid Blyton’s).
Enid’s tales consumed me: they were absolute page turners, the most moreish things in the world. In 1978, when Dallas arrived in the UK, Tuesdays became my favourite night. My family were avid Dallas fans, which meant I could go to bed an hour earlier to read. While they pondered who shot JR, I was with Moon-Face and Silky up the top of The Faraway Tree in places like The Land of Birthdays or The Land of Take-What-You-Want.
When I was nine, a teacher informed my parents that if I didn’t move on from Blyton, my reading would never develop. The thought of not reading Enid Blyton was horrifying, and I was baffled. What was wrong with her stories?
Now, I realise much is wrong with Enid Blyton, to the extent that paying homage to her as the first writer I loved is, quite frankly, embarrassing. I wish my first literary love had been Kenneth Graham, A A Milne or Beatrix Potter. But even all of those talking animals just couldn’t compete with Enid’s tales.
Enid was far from literary. She wasn’t even a good writer. She couldn’t have cared less about style or prose. Her writing is repetitive and babyish. Most stories start with, ‘Once upon a time…’ In addition, she was racist, sexist and homophobic.
After I rescued my box of Enids from the rats, I put it away not to be thought about again until I had children of my own. It was like finding a time capsule. Some books I dismissed immediately as unreadable (many are also rightly out of print because of the heinous, unacceptable views they contain). Others, we started reading together at bedtime. Most are dated, but they were already dated when I had initially read them (the first of The Faraway Tree stories was written nearly a century ago). But once we ignored this, and the fact that most of the main characters are named Dick and Fanny, they are still vividly compulsive. My daughter had to write a review of her favourite book recently, and she chose The Faraway Tree writing, “I wish I could go on a magical adventure and find something different”.
And that is Enid’s legacy. Enid is certainly no Roald Dahl, but she knew what made children tick and installed a love of reading into me and millions of other children. By the time of her death in 1968, she had written 800 books and sold more than 600 million copies. Today, her books still sell between six to seven million copies a year, which is maybe unsurprising. After all, what child wouldn’t want to head off on an adventure to a land peopled with pixies and where everyone drinks lashings of ginger beer?
Georges Remi by David Kean
Never heard of him? Yes, you have. Take his two initials, G and R. Invert them. Now pronounce them with your best pastiche French accent. Go on, have a go. There you are! “Air-jay” or, more properly, Hergé. The name is synonymous with his greatest creation, the boy reporter Tintin, scourge of opium smugglers (The Crab with the Golden Claws) and aggressive Eastern European dictators (King Ottakar’s Sceptre), of greedy plutocrats (The cigars of the Pharaoh) and currency forgers (The Black Island). The world created by Hergé was everything I associated with excitement, derring-do and adventure, and it was inhabited by a cast of original characters I loved: especially the foul-mouthed Captain Haddock. And because all the settings were meticulously researched replicas of the real world, the stories felt authentic – as if you were a child let loose in a world of grown ups’ toys (planes, trains, automobiles, guns) and adult issues.
As the youngest of three boys it was inevitable that, in 1960s Britain, I should come across Tintin early in life. I remember pestering my siblings to let me look at their Tintin albums and twisting their arms to read them to me. Normally, this meant us lying on the carpet, usually with me leaning on my brother Robert’s shoulder as I ogled the pictures and he – scarcely audibly – muttered the dialogue. It didn’t matter I couldn’t really follow the action; it was enough to be with him, sharing an exciting story. (Robert’s alter ego on social media is Professor Calculus, so he obviously got bitten hard by the Tintin bug, too.)
Due to divorce in the family, my brothers ended up living with their dad and I with my mum (a mystery almost worthy of Hergé). The Tintin albums went with my brothers. I had to build my own collection from scratch. All my pocket money was put aside until I could afford the next Tintin album. Each one took months of saving. All of them were bought from the same bookshop in the centre of Harrogate, where I would walk, the money in my sweaty little hand, from my Granny’s flat across the way. Having bought the treasure, I would walk back and savour the story frame by frame. It was a labour of love and I hated getting to page 62, the page on which all Tintin stories end. Like a literary junkie, I couldn’t wait for my next fix.
Hergé unfolded an exciting world of theft, deception, treasure, evil and crime. He made the idea of being a young reporter alluring and right through my university days I harboured dreams of becoming a war correspondent. A chance meeting with the legendary war photographer Tim Page – a real life Tintin – put paid to that ambition. On assignment in Vietnam, Page was shot four times and had a chunk of his skull the size of an orange blown off by a landmine. Hearing his tales rather put me off. You can see my reasoning.
Every Tintin fan has their own favourite album (to the cognescenti they are albums, not mere books). For me, it is The Seven Crystal Balls, part one of a two part story about the Incas. Why? There are five frames on page 32 which depict Tintin’s nightmarish dream where the Inca king, Rascar Capac, comes back to life to exact a terrible revenge on the boy reporter. They are the most terrifying images my five year old eyes had ever seen. I was hooked. But clearly, I prefer my thrills in books rather than in real life: after my Tim Page experience, I steered away from being a foreign correspondent and opted for a career in advertising. The medium of pictures combined with words to tell a story had greater appeal for me. Billions of blue, blistering barnacles! I wonder where that idea came from?
The times, they are a-changin’
There are some storylines, as mentioned by Kerry in her homage to Enid Blyton, that don’t fit with the times anymore. The same can be said for Hergé: Tintin in the Congo wasn’t his finest hour and he was ashamed of it. Ditto Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, which was Bolshevik-bashing at its crudest. But many of our most cherished nursery rhymes from childhood – still sung in playgrounds up and down the land today – are also rather unsubtle propaganda. Their original meaning may have been lost as they hide in plain sight, but we thought it interesting to remind ourselves how subversive lyrics and stories pass under the radar whilst others receive censorship. Could this be down to the subtlety of the writing? If it’s crass and obvious, it withers away; if it’s crafted and clever, it lasts and lasts.
Everyone has heard that Ring-a-ring-o-roses derives from the great plague of 1665. But did you know that Goosey, goosey gander is a tale of religious persecution? The lines: “there I met an old man/ Who wouldn’t say his prayers/ So I took him by his left leg/ And threw him down the stairs’ refers to the rooting out of Catholic priests by Protestants from priest holes, to stop them saying their prayers in Latin. Or that Jack and Jill is an account of King Charles I’s attempt to reform liquid measures? Parliament rejected his attempt so the king reduced the volume on half and quarter pints. Hence jacks (a two ounce measure of wine) and gills (twice a jack).
London Bridge is falling down is believed to be a piece of Viking propaganda, describing the destruction of the river crossing by Olaf II of Norway in the 1000s, with “the watchman” being a reference to human sacrifice. Apparently, Viking architectural strictures required a human sacrifice to ‘keep watch’ over the integrity of the building. Advice you don’t read in Architect’s Journal nowadays.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary, far from being an C16th version of Gardeners’ Question Time, is a song about Mary Tudor’s – Bloody Mary – psychopathic obsession with torturing and killing Protestants. The imagery is clever, if sinister, and you won’t find “silver bells” (thumb screws) or “cockle shells” (let’s not go there) or “Maids” (an early form of guillotine) in the tools section of your local gardening centre.
All of which nastiness probably explains why children continue to sing these nursery rhymes generation after generation. As Roald Dahl once explained, children love contradictions. They find the concept of something or someone being “horribly good” enthralling. Which is what these nursery rhymes are: horribly good.
An extract from our Writer’s Guide
D is for dash.
Mark is a stickler for the rules. Nothing annoys him more than a misplaced apostrophe or a dangling participle. Except one thing: a hyphen where a dash should be. On the keyboard, to create a dash you press “alt hyphen”. But the uninitiated just press “hyphen”, which is wrong. A hyphen – as any grammar-pedant will gladly tell you – joins two or more words together. Whereas a dash separates words into parenthetical statements. With the former, they are not separated by spaces. With the latter, the words are separated by a space on either side. Once you are attuned to this, you start seeing incorrectly used hyphens everywhere. And you will start to get as annoyed as Mark does. We don’t know if that’s a blessing or a curse.
Writers on Writing
A. A. Milne
For I am a bear of very little brain, and long words bother me
This blog comes from Forthwrite, a new London-based consultancy dedicated to making writing more pleasurable and more profitable. Our adaptable online courses are intensive, lively and get results. If you’d like to know about the special introductory offers we have, please write to us at hello@forthwrite.co.uk.