Slowly, the reasons I loved this book begin to emerge. Four powerful elements are at work here: the concept of adventure; the ability of the reader to fill in the gaps; the lure of animals; and the pleasure of getting out and about with your peers, exploring.
“Four powerful elements are at work here: the concept of adventure; the ability of the reader to fill in the gaps; the lure of animals; and the pleasure of getting out and about with your peers, exploring.”
The concept of adventure is vital to this series, and not just as a convenient tag in the titles. The children are talking about having an adventure before it even begins. The girls reminisce about their previous exciting times, described in the first book in the series, The Island of Adventure. ‘Do you remember that marvellous adventure we had last summer?’ asks Dinah. And yes, Lucy-Ann remembers, but mainly how afraid she was, and how she trembles even to remember it. Dinah is more positive – ‘I wouldn’t mind having another one’ – and then regrets it won’t happen: ‘One adventure like that is enough for a lifetime.’ Just in case we haven’t got it, the whole scene is repeated a few pages later when the boys join them. Jack remembers last summer: ‘My word, that was an adventure!’ Philip would like another one, but doesn’t expect it in one lifetime. And then Jack comes up with the clincher: ‘Well, they say adventures come to the adventurous… And we’re pretty adventurous, I think. I don’t see why we shouldn’t have plenty more.’ And what happens next? Yes, Dinah suggests they should go up the hill and explore the castle.
From my adult reading I recognise at once that what is happening here is an unusually explicit Call to Adventure, as described in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, an analysis of the classic features of story that has become the scriptwriter’s Bible. And Lucy-Ann, with her fears, delivers a classic Refusal of the Call. Later she confesses ‘I only like adventures afterwards.’ Although Campbell was writing at about the same time as Blyton, I’m pretty positive she would never have read him, but it doesn’t matter: intuitively, she is delivering to her young readers all the features of archetypal myth and storytelling.
But more than that, I have an almost visceral memory of the emotions evoked by that magic word ‘adventure’, which to me meant both the most desirable and the most terrifying series of events I could imagine. Every morning I would wake up and long to have an adventure like the children I read about in books. It seemed the only thing that would brighten my humdrum existence. But did I really want to perform athletic, dangerous deeds, tackle villains, crawl down secret passages? There was too much Lucy-Ann in me and I was terrible at any kind of sport. It was both frustrating and comforting that an adventure was extremely unlikely to happen to a somewhat timid schoolgirl living a somewhat sheltered life in north London. But here were these kids, not unlike myself, including one at least as wimpy as me, opening up the possibility that an adventure might not only happen once, but many times, to the adventurous. To read their story was hugely exciting – but not too exciting. I knew Blyton would not let them come to any real harm. It was a safe outlet for my thrillseeking self.
The next enticing thing for me is quite a curious one: although Blyton never gives us anything but the vaguest and blandest of descriptions, I find I now have a very vivid picture in my mind of the countryside, the cottage, and above all the creepy castle, with its decrepit ill-lit rooms where cobwebs brush against you, and its secret underground chamber with a four-poster bed and suits of armour. I can smell the atmosphere: what Kiki calls fusty, musty, dusty. A recurring picture for me is an aerial (eagle’s eye?) view of the central courtyard of the castle, choked with sprouting saplings and thorny bushes. What’s going on here? The same, I think, as in my original reading experience. Blyton’s prose races along from one exciting incident to the next and has no time for scene-setting, but like any young reader, I fill in the gaps, I build my own castle in my mind’s eye, just as I once created the fictional Jack, Philip, Dinah and Lucy-Ann in the image of girls I knew at school – giving the boys a slight makeover to make them more masculine. And I can do this precisely because Blyton’s paucity of description gives me such leeway. Every reader has her own unique Castle of Adventure and her own unique band of adventurers. As Kiki says, I’m king of the castle.
I haven’t talked about Kiki yet, have I? She’s a very important parrot (I remembered wrong, she’s a girl parrot, and strictly speaking she’s an Australian white cockatoo), because an essential attraction of this story is the animals. I filled a whole page of my notebook with Kiki’s vocabulary, mostly commands adults make to children (Wipe your feet. Where’s your handkerchief? How many times have I told you to shut the door? Open your books at page six. Sit up straight and don’t loll. Oh you naughty boy! You naughty, naughty…) plus miscellaneous repetitions and a screech like a train whistle. The humour for young readers, of course, is the idea of a mere parrot telling people off, especially when it’s the terrified villains in the dark who don’t realise who is talking to them. As an adult I find her schtick too repetitive, but I can remember delighting in Kiki mixing up her expressions and turning them into nonsense. Philip the animal lover also has a toad, a hedgehog and a fox cub called Button (who knows a secret way in and out of the castle that eventually proves very useful) and Jack the birder is quite besotted with those eagles and the baby in their nest. I’m sure readers would find his obsession infectious; I didn’t remember the eagles from the first time round, but this time I did rather enjoy reading about these magnificent creatures.
Finally, there’s the intoxicating knowledge that the children are out every day on their own, in the countryside, exploring, never quite knowing what they might find. Those picnic meals of humble but hearty fare the girls pack – egg and ham sandwiches, cake, biscuits, fruit, chocolate, lemonade and ginger beer – become a symbol of their freedom. I feel quite hungry reading about them. Mrs Mannering is the only adult supervising the children, and even she conveniently disappears when she has to go off for a few days to nurse a sick aunt. (I’m not sure now that responsible mothers would leave children alone for so long even in the 1940s, but I go along with it.) Today, writing teachers frequently impress on those learning to write fiction for children that they must get the parents out of the way as soon as possible, because kids want to read about other kids on their own; Blyton knows it intuitively, does it effortlessly. The terrain is dangerous even before we know about the villains – there have been landslides around the castle. But Mrs Mannering is remarkably lenient in her permission, and in allowing Jack to go off on his own for a few days to sit in a hide and take pictures of the eagles.
“writing teachers frequently impress on those learning to write fiction for children that they must get the parents out of the way as soon as possible, because kids want to read about other kids on their own; Blyton knows it intuitively, does it effortlessly.”
We’re often given nostalgic pictures of the life that children used to live back in the day, when they were outside all the daylight hours playing in the streets, fishing in the creek or roaming the countryside, singly or in groups, never returning home until suppertime. My life as a young child in the 1950s in St John’s Wood in London was never so free and easy, though it was certainly less restricted than most middle-class children’s lives today. I was expected to walk to and from school on my own, even after the terrible incident with the man in the car, and I was allowed to go down the street on my own to play with my friend Polly in her unusually big backyard. But I can’t once remember going out all day with a picnic. The adventurous children’s hikes sound just fantastic: so independent, so bold, so resourceful, and so companionable, because you’re always with friends and family, and though there’s a bit of teasing there are never any fights, tantrums or sulks. They aren’t goody-goodies but they are invariably nice kids. Nobody bullies or bitches. Too good to be true; but as a child, that never bothered me.
“The adventurous children’s hikes sound just fantastic: so independent, so bold, so resource
ful, and so companionable, because you’re always with friends and family, and though there’s a bit of teasing there are never any fights, tantrums or sulks. ”
So here’s a fourfold hypothesis: I needed adventure; animals, cute or awe-inspiring; scenes I could construct in my head; and children off on their own. Surely this one is going to hold.
MAMMA ON THE BOOKSHELF
Finn Family Moomintroll
by Tove Jansson
A while ago, I was on a cruise ship sailing around the Baltic Sea. When the ship pulled into harbour in the elegant city of Helsinki, we had a few hours for visiting, and I had a leisurely plan. Visit a couple of cathedrals that looked good in the guide-book. Stroll around the harbourfront. Have lunch. Pick up a Moomin.
It was all easy, except for the Moomin, which surprised me. Here we were in Finland, home of Tove Jansson’s adorable little creatures, who looked a bit like white hippos with big snouts, so you never saw their mouths. I’d known them since I was tiny, about the same time that I discovered their spiritual cousin Mr Hip packing his ‘dumborah’, and I expected to see them all over Helsinki. Indeed, there were plenty of animal souvenirs for the tourists at the market stalls lining the harbour, but they were all elk and reindeer. Elk hats, T-shirts, postcards. Reindeer fridge magnets, key rings, snow domes. Not a single Moomin. I couldn’t understand it: weren’t the Moomins up there with Nokia as Finland’s most famous exports? Or were they all under strict copyright, only available through a gift shop at a Jansson museum I had yet to discover? (There is a new Moomin museum in Finland, but it opened after my visit.)
Eventually, I found what I was looking for, more or less, almost hidden away on one market stall: two wooden figures, each with three rounded feet so you could use them to massage your aching limbs, which seemed an odd use for a Moomin. I had a choice between Moomintroll, the son, and his mother, Moominmamma. Once I would have chosen the son, but these days there is no question: I identify with Moominmamma. She sits on my bookshelf now, looking at me with a typical worried expression, wearing a red-and-white striped apron and clutching a big black handbag. Moominmamma, I remember, is like the Queen: she never goes anywhere without her handbag.
The Moomins seemed to have always been around: they were characters in a strip cartoon in a newspaper (Jansson did all the drawings), so I was familiar with what they looked like, but I didn’t get to read about them until I got the first book, Finn Family Moomintroll. I must have been about six. After that I couldn’t wait to read others in the series, such as Midsummer in Moominland, where they put on a play in a floating theatre; Moominland Midwinter, when Moomintroll wakes up during the hibernation period and explores his habitat buried under snow and ice; another story I can’t remember much of except for Edward the Booble, an enormous very jolly sea monster; and Comet in Moominland, my first encounter with an apocalyptic story, where the Moomins are in danger from a comet on a collision course with Earth (spoiler alert: it just misses). I’ve been a bit nervous about comets ever since.
It was, however, that first book, Finn Family Moomintroll, that made the most impact. I had that pleasure of being plunged into an exotic world of fantastic and appealing creatures, a bit like humans and a bit like animals and a bit like toys, living in a world of vast pine forests and mountains and seas that to a child in St John’s Wood seemed just as exotic as the creatures themselves. The family consisted of Moominmamma, Moominpappa and their boy Moomintroll (the one I identified with), who had a girlfriend, the Snork Maiden, a rather vain and wimpy Moomin with a fringe. There was also Snufkin, Moomintroll’s friend, a gypsy-like figure who looked a bit like a scarecrow with a big pointy hat; and two weird little fellows, Thingumy and Bob, who turned up one day out of nowhere, looked at the Moomins’ house and spoke to each other as follows:
‘Smoke.’
‘Foke means smood.’
Oh, how I loved that! Thingumy and Bob always talked like that: spoonerisms that weren’t witty and didn’t make any sense, but I thought they were hilarious. Any kind of wordplay, however lame, delighted me.
The story I don’t remember in great detail, but it was about a magician’s hat. Just an ordinary top hat that turned up out of nowhere, like Thingumy and Bob; but if you put it on, or if you put things into it, they changed into something else. Like a magician’s tricks, only for real. You could wish for things with the hat, but you didn’t always get what you wanted. The Snork Maiden wished for beautiful eyes, and got two enormous saucer-like eyes with long lashes that didn’t suit her little hippo face at all. Serves you right, I thought.
There was one sinister, scary creature: the Groke. She was silent, she glided, and she was very cold. You opened the front door and there she was – just sitting looking at you. And when she went away, the ground where she had sat was frozen. I think the magician’s hat belonged to her and she wanted it back. I’d have given it to her straight away.
But despite the Groke, I can’t say that Finn Family Moomintroll was a frightening book, exactly. It was fun, and excitingly foreign.
I began reading late, aged eight, because I was, as would now be recognised, somewhat dyslexic. Kids who were dyslexic were considered dumb or, at best, not part of the group. Perhaps that’s why my favourite childhood reading, when I finally mastered it, was The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling.
I identified with Mowgli, the abandoned boy, and I loved the wild animals, particularly the tiger, the bear and the mongoose, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. The Jungle Book is set in India and although I never lived there, in my twenties I lived for five years in Indonesia and Malaysia, spending as much time in the jungles – back then both countries had lots of jungle – as I could, including staying with orangutans in Kalimantan, actually having them inside my hut. Not recommended: they were terrible flatmates.
I was a tomboy, and I think this was another influence of the stories, from identification with Mowgli. When I turned into a girl at puberty, he became my abandoned boy.
Blanche d’Alpuget
My re-reading copy is a Puffin paperback, translated by Elizabeth Portch. The original edition was first published in English by Ernest Benn Ltd in 1950, but this must be a much more recent edition because the frontispiece tells us that Tove Jansson died in June 2001. Inside there’s a list of six other Moomin books; I’ve read at least four in total (I got one title wrong, it’s Moominsummer Madness). There’s a little biography: Jansson was born in Helsingfors, Finland, in 1914. Her mother was a caricaturist who designed 165 of Finland’s stamps, and her father was a sculptor. She studied painting in Finland, Sweden and France and lived alone on an island in the Gulf of Finland, where most of her books were written. Her parents and the fact that she lived alone on an island all sound interesting: I make a mental note to explore further. But first, the book.
The cover suggests a kind of heaven: Moomintroll and the Snork Maiden are relaxing on two little clouds, with a gold butterfly between them. The colour of the first butterfly of summer in Moominland, I recall now, shows you what kind of summer you are going to have: yellow means happy, white means quiet, black and brown are never talked about because they are much too sad. But Moomintroll has never seen a gold butterfly before: what does it mean? ‘Gold is even better than yellow,’ says the Snork Maiden. ‘You wait and see!’
I remember this now because I also remember it inspired me to spend the early days of summer hunting high and low for a gold butterfly. We didn’t get many butterflies in the paved backyard at St John’s Wood, and they were mostly white. But I didn’t give up hope. Hadn’t I found a four-leaf clover the very first time I looked for one?
As I read Finn Family Moomintroll, I feel as if the gold butterfly must hover permanently over Moomin Valley, it’s such an idyllic place for young creatures. The story begins with everyone going to bed to hibernate through the long winter, then waking up in spring. There’s no school, no work, no chores, no hardship, no predators: just ‘a place where everyone did what they liked and seldom worried about tomorrow’.
What’s their world like? There’s not a lot of description, but you can see most of it in the black-and-white pictures, which are lively, gorgeous and totally charming, and a map. Moominhouse is a tall round building with a spire, in splendid isolation near a river, the sea and the Lonely Mountains, and it must be pretty crowded, for within its walls live Moominpappa, Moominmamma, Moomintroll, the Snork Maiden, Snufkin, and other creatures I’d forgotten about – Sniff, the Hemulen, the Muskrat, the Snork Maiden’s brother (the Snork) and later, Thingumy and Bob. The core family is the Moomin father, mother and son: the others function as an extended family, mostly childlike, though the Muskrat is more like a grumpy uncle, and the Hemulen could be any age at all.
There are adventures – catching a giant fish, sailing to a mysterious island inhabited by the even more mysterious Hattifatteners, who worship a barometer, and surviving a storm – but the main thread of the plot is the magician’s hat, which I now discover is a hobgoblin’s hat, and it’s the Hobgoblin, not the Groke, who wants it back. There is potential for some horrendous transformations here, but on the whole the hat’s magic is benevolent. Moomintroll tests it on the Ant Lion, a nasty creature that builds traps in the sand, and for a while everyone fears the hat will turn it into something even more dangerous, but all that crawls out of the hat is ‘the world’s smallest hedgehog’. (An author’s note assures us the Ant Lion is real, which I always thought was a joke until recently, when I saw David Attenborough on television peering into an ant lion’s lair.) There’s an even more scary moment for the reader when Moomintroll hides under the hat, but his transformation is treated as a comic scene with a dash of pathos, because he doesn’t realise he’s changed, and his friends get angry with what they assume is an insolent stranger.
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