Storytime

by Jane Sullivan

  Maybe I read Alcott’s book at the wrong time. Maybe there was never a right time for me and Little Women. But that’s not to say it couldn’t be the right time for many other young readers.

  I talk with friends who loved Little Women when they were girls, who read it many times and cried over it. Kelly says that perhaps such readers aren’t remembering Little Women the book, but Little Women the feeling. But no: my friends are loyal to their memory, they feel impelled to defend their love. This I understand: I feel almost physical pain when someone disparages a favourite book of my childhood. So I listen to them. I’m told that I don’t ‘get’ Little Women. This is incontrovertible: if you don’t get something, you can’t even begin to get what it is you’re not getting. I’m told I haven’t paid enough attention to the character of each sister, to the bonds between them and the warmth of family life. I’m told the novel makes a case, rare in that era, for friendship between men and women. And above all, I’m told I should assign more value to a book that is so earnestly concerned with what it means to be a good woman, and that offers more than one model to choose from (the creative and the domestic, the latter a role perhaps unjustly treated by feminism). Would it be so bad today, says one friend, to yearn to be ‘a wise wife and mother’?

  “The moral education of young women is not just some mothballed relic from the era of crinolines: it was important then, and it’s important now.”

  Nothing they say seems unreasonable, and indeed the last point touches a nerve in me. The moral education of young women is not just some mothballed relic from the era of crinolines: it was important then, and it’s important now. Writers such as George Eliot were also earnestly concerned with what it means to be a good woman, and I could take any amount of finger-wagging from Eliot in later years, when I read Middlemarch. Also, it seems to me sometimes we have replaced one narrow set of aspirations for girls with an even narrower set. In her book The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, Joan Jacobs Brumberg compares the New Year’s resolutions of two adolescent diarists. ‘Resolved,’ one wrote in the 1890s, ‘to think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self-restrained in conversations and actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.’ And in the 1990s: ‘I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can… I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories.’

  So I reckon I’d better investigate the contrasts in the moral lessons between Little Women and Middlemarch, between the nineteenth century and the present day… until it occurs to me I’m barking up the wrong tree at a Cheshire cat that is going to disappear any minute. This difference between Little Women lovers and haters isn’t about literary criticism, or social history, or role models for girls. It’s a difference that sadly cannot be reconciled. I cannot ever say the lovers are wrong and I am right, but neither can they get me to change my mind. Everything that seems so rational goes back to the deep emotions of childhood. I don’t think I was a bad child – too timid, too anxious to please for that – but I really didn’t want anyone telling me how to be good.

  “it seems to me sometimes we have replaced one narrow set of aspirations for girls with an even narrower set.”

  Here’s my next hypothesis, then, even if it’s a negative one: I needed a story that didn’t have overt moral messages.

  Looking back now, I can see how I have made my living as a writer with much the same thoughts as Jo. I wanted to do something splendid, but I needed to be paid regularly, to support myself and later my family, so I became a journalist, and wrote what editors and readers expected of me. Far from pushing me into difficult compromises, it turned out to be an absorbing career that both satisfied and provoked my curiosity, and it rewarded me in ways that were not just about money; it was decades before I rediscovered any urge to write fiction. And now, when my writing friends do well, I am excited and happy for them.

  “I can see how I have made my living as a writer with much the same thoughts as Jo.”

  And yet every now and then, that washed-up child-author rises like a geyser in my head. It’s not fair. What about me? Why isn’t it me winning the Nobel Prize for Literature? Why isn’t it me sitting for a year or two at the top of the New York Times bestseller list? It’s that bloody Jo March, isn’t it. She’s sucked up all the oxygen. She takes everything and leaves me nothing.

  Christopher Columbus, Jane. Grow up.

  MR TOAD AND THE GATES OF DAWN

  The Wind in the Willows

  by Kenneth Grahame

  My parents, knowing how much I loved The Wind in the Willows, once bought tickets to a celebrated London theatre production, adapted from the book. It was offered to me as a rare treat, but I was apprehensive: I had to be reassured the actors wouldn’t wear animal masks, so I could see their faces. All went well at first, and I was relieved to see the actors just wore Mole, Rat or Toad hats. But then the stoats and weasels came out on stage under eerie red and green lights, stood in a row facing the audience and chanted ‘Down with Toad’. All that evil intent flooded over the footlights, straight at me. Down with Jane.

  I jumped up screaming, fled the theatre screaming, hid in the toilet sobbing, and could not be coaxed back. My parents had to take me home. This episode still leaves me with a feeling of deep shame – what a crybaby I was–and a faint twinge of horror.

  “Adults are very keen these days to find good female role models for girls in their reading. This never worked very well for me.”

  But of course I was not Jane when I read the book. I was Mole: the timid little fellow fighting his way up to the light and into a strange world where everyone else seemed to know what they were doing. He bumbled around being a hopeless oarsman and getting things wrong while the worldly Ratty and wise old Badger tried to set him right. That pretty much reflected the way I felt a lot of the time.

  Adults are very keen these days to find good female role models for girls in their reading. This never worked very well for me. Often it was because I didn’t like the females in the story, but in this case I can’t recall one at all. As far as I remember, all the animals were male. This never struck me as remarkable, or a problem. Apart from Moley, they were confident, mature adults: they were chaps. If they smelt of anything, it would be tobacco.

  Badger was a grandfatherly grumpy authority figure. Ratty was the sort of raffishly cheerful, devil-may-care chap that I later found attractive. It was very plain we were meant to laugh at Toad, and I did so with great pleasure. Poop poop, indeed. I knew plenty of boast-ful boys like him. But I grew very anxious when he disguised himself as a washerwoman, escaped from prison, thumbed a lift in a fast car, took over the wheel and began to drive recklessly. I was sure he could crash the car and kill himself and others, which was distressing. I do remember wondering how both human prison guards and human motorists could be taken in by a toad dressed as a washerwoman, but it was only a fleeting thought.

  The car was clearly not a modern car – you had to wear goggles, for one thing – but that was practically the only indication to me that this book was set in the past.

  Why did Toad live at Toad Hall, I wonder now? Was he an aristocrat or a nouveau riche? Was there some class consciousness going on? These are my present-day thoughts; at the time, I accepted without question that he was in a mansion while the other animals were in much humbler homes.

  I never felt the same terror reading the book as I felt in the theatre. And yet the hints and portents of terror were strong, lurking in the Wild Wood. Moley went into the wood even though he’d been warned not to, and had a horrible encounter with the villainous stoats and weasels. My memory seems to have drawn a veil over the details: maybe they were too harrowing. I’d never seen a stoat or a weasel, but there was something very creepy about their skinny elongated bodies in the pictures. They seemed too thin to stand up.

  I read this book several times, usually lying on my parent’s bed when they weren’t in t
he room. As I recall it was episodic, with different stories in each chapter, and a climactic fight with the stoats and weasels. Part of the charm, as with Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, were the black-and-white drawings by Ernest Shepard. ‘Charm’ is perhaps too adult a word. ‘Magic’ might be better. They depicted small animals walking upright and dressed like humans, but dwarfed by the natural world: huge, elaborately detailed trees. Moley always had his nose pointing up in the air, as if to sniff out what was happening. I scribbled over the drawings with coloured pencils, as I always did, convinced I was improving them vastly.

  “I scribbled over the drawings with coloured pencils, as I always did, convinced I was improving them vastly.”

  I was particularly fascinated by a chapter called ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’. It didn’t seem like the rest of the book at all. It was written in a completely different style I would probably now describe as lyrical.

  There was an otter’s child called Portly who went missing, and Moley and Ratty went out in the boat to find him. After rowing all night they finally located him curled up at the feet of a mysterious otherworldly pipe-playing creature. There was some talk about going through some gates to somewhere else, and a great deal of hushed awe. Whenever I read this chapter I felt really weird and uncomfortable without knowing why, as if listening to atonal music, and sometimes I wanted to skip it altogether, but I never did.

  What was all that about? What was Grahame getting at, and why on earth did he think children would want to read it? In my case, he was right.

  The book made me long to go to a river and row a boat. I’d never done such a thing. Ratty made it sound so seductive. Although we lived in London, I don’t remember seeing the Thames, or any other river, until years later. Anyway, the kind of river I wanted to row on was in the country, on a lazy summer’s day, shaded by bushes and trees. Golden sun and dragonflies.

  To this day, I’ve never rowed a boat, but I do like being rowed. I think I first had that Ratty feeling on a punt in Oxford when I was nineteen. I think there was a Ratty boy on the punt with me. It might have been my future husband.

  Two early ones stand out for me. I was deeply entranced by Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White in about Year Three at school, when our teacher read it to us and I would have been too much of a walking fencepost back then to realise that beautiful spider was opening my brain to things I love in storytelling today: perspectives, worlds within worlds, compassion, friendships formed in the most unlikely places. Then dear wise Charlotte goes up to the big web in the sky and young me realises that we can die and live on at the same time.

  About five years later, another big one was Papillon by Henri Charriere. My dad handed me this book when I was twelve or thirteen. He thought the themes of prison escape and freedom might appeal to a skinny Bracken Ridge Housing Commission tearaway. He was right.

  Trent Dalton

  For my re-reading, I was tempted to buy a deluxe hardback edition, but I was on an economy drive – all this research was getting costly – and so I settled for the Classic Mammoth paperback edition. No introductory essay, no footnotes, somewhat muddy reproduction of both the text and the Shepard drawings, which is a shame. But it’s all there and it still works its magic.

  “I was so happy to meet everyone again, even though – or more likely because – there’s an uneasy tension running through it that stretches very tight at times”

  It is a gorgeous story, beautifully told, and I was so happy to meet everyone again, even though – or more likely because – there’s an uneasy tension running through it that stretches very tight at times. For as our old friend A. A. Milne very astutely observed when he was trying to adapt it for the stage, The Wind in the Willows is two books in one. On the one hand it’s a rambunctious no-nonsense down-to-earth tale about animals messing about on the river and in the surrounding countryside, and in particular the mock-heroic exploits of Mr Toad, with lots of knockabout comedy and feasts of various kinds, and sturdy realism, and battles with stoats and weasels, told with Dickensian relish. On the other hand, it’s lyrical, a bit mystical, full of intense yearning, and approaching the visionary.

  How can you possibly combine two such different moods in one story? Grahame pulls it off, I think: sometimes brilliantly, sometimes only just. I’d remembered ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ as the odd chapter out, but it’s just the most extreme example of a tendency that weaves through the whole book. Even on the first page, it’s there in the language. The visionary side of things is getting through a bit to Mole as he does his spring-cleaning underground and suddenly feels the pull of spring’s ‘spirit of divine discontent and longing’. But when he climbs to the surface, we’re back to the rambunctious mood: ‘he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged… till at last, pop! His snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the long grass of a great meadow’. ‘Scrooged’ is not a visionary word. It’s earthy. And so much of this book is experienced at or below ground level, or at river level, as if you the reader are a little animal scampering snout-up through the landscape.

  And yes, I’m Mole again… but I find that though the other animals are much as I expected them to be, I’ve remembered Mole completely wrong. He’s not a bit timid. He’s actually quite forward, cheeking the rabbits, keen to greet the day and meet the Water Rat, happy to hop into Ratty’s boat though he’s never boat-ed before, even eager to seize the oars and try to row himself because it looks so easy (but here, of course, he meets his comeuppance). Why did I remember him as such a shrinking violet? Whatever the reason, I much prefer him the way he is, and I’m quite comfortable wearing his velvet smoking jacket that Ratty so admires. True, he is rapidly reduced to terror in the Wild Wood (who wouldn’t be?), but in every other respect he’s a brave, venturesome and resourceful animal, if a touch naive. He wins more respect from Badger than any other creature in the neighbourhood, and he more than gets his own back on the stoats and weasels.

  What sort of world do these creatures live in? In the way of so many children’s stories, it comes into very sharp focus at some points and remains curiously fuzzy at others. They walk upright, talk, wear clothes, and be-have like humans, but they also retain their individual animal characteristics to different degrees (so the otter swims, but the water rat, instead of swimming, likes to row a boat). In the illustrations they are sometimes larger than they would be in real life, but still much smaller than humans (again I wonder: how could anyone believe in Toad for one second as a washerwoman?). As an adult I keep asking myself a question that never occurred to me as a child: how does their economy work? They have ample supplies of scrumptious food, but they don’t go out hunting or working for it. At one point Rat sends a young fieldmouse to the shops with money for a banquet, but where does the money come from? These are gents of leisure, they love nothing so much as idling the day away. If they are the privileged class, where are the workers? And it’s all so blokey and clubby and my-dear-chappy: where are the females? Mere cameo parts: a fat barge-woman, a jailer’s daughter and a few mother-weasels. I find I just have to forget about the fuzzy edges and concentrate on the sharper picture. And in a way my curiosity about the unexplained parts of his world is a tribute to Grahame’s skill at creating it so convincingly in the first place.

  “As an adult I keep asking myself a question that never occurred to me as a child: how does their economy work?”

  There’s a theme running through all the adventures that didn’t strike me the first time I read it, but resonates with me strongly now. These are stories about home: the importance of it, and the importance of feeling at home. The term applies both to the place where you live (whether it’s Mole’s humble abode or Toad’s stately mansion) and also to your immediate environment: the river, meadows, woodland. It might well be called a patriotic book: it’s certainly very English. Many are the lush and often beautiful passages (though sometimes put a little uneasily in the mouths of the animals) in praise of the se
asons, the arrival of flowers, the sounds of the river and reeds, the rising moon, the austerity of winter. And once you’re indoors, there’s praise again: for the blazing fire, comfortable chairs, good company and the hearty feasts the animals indulge in whenever they can. They eat just like children with healthy appetites, and you get your own appetite up from Rat’s first description of the contents of his picnic hamper: there’s cold chicken, ‘coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeef-pickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssandwidgespot-tedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater—’ until an ecstatic Mole begs him to stop.

  But however cosy this sense of home, it’s not going to work in a story unless you set up its opposite. For every Shire, there has to be a Mordor. Not that Grahame goes to Tolkien’s epic extremes, but he has his place of wickedness. Right on the edge of all this familiar and delightful territory is the Wild Wood, a dark hostile place that Mole is warned off – but, I note this time, only in the mildest possible fashion. The weasels and stoats are ‘all right in a way’, says Rat guardedly, ‘but they break out sometimes’. I’m reminded of those wary ancient Greeks who referred to the Furies as ‘the kindly ones’.

  When I re-read the Wild Wood chapter now, it comes home to me how chilling it is, simply because Mole doesn’t know what to expect, and nor (the first time round) does the reader. The reason I couldn’t remember Mole’s first encounter with the stoats and weasels in the wood is that there isn’t one, and the absence of any solid and palpable presence that can account for the all-pervasive sense of dread and danger makes it much more powerful. Even now as an adult I’m shivering a bit at these stealthy little faces that peer out from the trees – first one, then two, then hundreds – and the eerie whistling and pattering. What does a child feel? I know now. It comes back to me. I feel so cold. And then Mole gets lost, and it starts snowing… and the salvation is not to break free of the trees into the open, but to break into a warm home: Badger’s home, hidden under snow in the very heart of the Wild Wood.