by Dennis Butts
I’m a children’s writer because Collins decide to put me on their children’s list. Yet I want children to read the books, and especially I want adults to read the books, and especially do I want adolescents to find them. Simply, children make the best audience. Connect with a child and you really connect. Adolescence is the same only more so.
With The Stone Book Quartet, Garner, in effect, created his own mystic-tinged mythology about generations of craftsmen in his home area of Alderley Edge in Cheshire, couching it in a style heavily loaded with local dialect. He then successfully linked this to Australian mysticism in his first adult novel, Strandloper (1996), and English rural traditions in Thursbitch (2003). His most recent novel comes full circle, as an adult sequel to The Moon of Gomrath, Boneland (2012). It was not universally well-received: Amanda Craig in The Independent, for example, wrote: ‘There are thousands of pretentious, second-rate adult novelists, and only a handful of first-rate children’s writers. Why Garner had to write this story as the first, not the second is, alas, the real mystery.’
For many critics, The Stone Book Quartet remains his masterpiece. A summary of the books seems reductive, given the spareness of the prose and the density of reference. The four stories concern fictionalised members of the Garner family, and are set 1864, 1886, 1916, and 1941. In the first, Mary, the small daughter of a master stone-mason Robert, is initiated into the secrets of her father’s craft, first by climbing the spire of a new church, and then going alone into a cave (threatened by new quarrying) where there are prehistoric paintings which her ancestors have adopted as masons’ marks.
In the second book, Mary’s illegitimate son, Joseph, the ‘Granny Reardun’, decides to become a smith, at least partly to ‘get aback’ of (to become superior to) his grandfather – who is delighted. It can be argued that Joseph is the real hero of the quartet, as he appears in, and his presence broods over, the next two books.
In the third, ‘The Aimer Gate’, Robert, son of Joseph – who is now a master smith, and afraid of losing his mastery because he has been forced to produce thousands of horseshoes for war – discovers his grandfather’s secret mason’s mark in the chapel steeple. He also finds that his uncle’s craft and mastery lies in killing – he is a sniper.
Finally, as the Second World War bombers drone overhead in ‘Tom Fobble’s Day’, William, son of Robert (who is ominously absent from the story), witnesses his grandfather Joseph’s last day at the forge. The old man’s final act is to make a sledge for his grandson from his forge handle and parts of the loom first mentioned in ‘The Stone Book’. He gives Robert the worn key to his forge – Robert puts it in his pocket in a box to stop it being scratched by his collection of shrapnel – and explains why there are two polished horse-shoes in the chimney (the Smiths’ wedding present). That evening, the old man dies, and William goes sledging. A sympathetic critic, Neil Philip in A Fine Anger (1981), sees this as a triumphant conclusion.
Whereas in ‘The Aimer Gate’ the war inspires a sense of aimless disillusionment, in ‘Tom Fobble’s Day’ the sledge, symbolic of all the crafts which have gone towards its making, symbolic too of the lessons written in The Stone Book, with the making of which Joseph’s manufacture of the sledge is a conscious parallel . . .
‘Tom Fobble’s Day’ [the day when one can claim other children’s belongings] brings the sequence up to 1941, and offers a final synthesis of the images of sledge (and pram), loom, forge, stone and field which pervade the earlier three books . . . The sledge which Joseph makes his grandson William from the remnants of loom and forge, the key which was his first prentice piece as a smith and the discovery of the first Robert’s Macclesfield Dandy pipe, dropped, like a fossil in the potato hogg, provide the bullied and nervous boy with a link with his past and family so concrete that he no longer fears sledging; he is part of the landscape.
However, consider the text: William, bullied and sledging, comes home to find his Grandfather dying:
He moved a coat hem, and looked straight into Grandad’s eyes. The blue eyes and the sharp nose. There was such a clearness in the eyes that William felt that they were speaking to him. Of the people crowded there, Grandad looked only at William. He must be speaking to him.
‘Grandad.’
The eyes answered with their fierce blue.
‘Grandad, I’ve been up Lizzie Leah’s, and it’s a belter. The irons have got a right polish on them now.’ Someone turned against William as he was kneeling. Grandad sighed, or spoke. ‘What, Grandad?’
The fierce, kind eyes were still urgent, but that small movement had taken William out of their sight. They were looking at what was before them, at nothing more.
William pushed away from the bed. The coats fell like a curtain. He went backwards to the stairs, and down.
It was a big room. He had never known it empty. William stood in the room and listened to the weight in the house up-ended. All in the bedroom, no one below. The table cleared, but with sawdust in the cracks.
William stood at the chimney. He saw the corner cupboard, the chair.
He spilled the shrapnel across the floor, and when he was rid of it and had only the key in the pocket, the pipe in the tin, he reached into the darkness, and closed his hands.
‘Tom Fobble’s Day!’
William held the two gleaming horseshoes.
‘No back bargains!’
He ran from the house. The horseshoes pulled his jacket out of shape, but their weight was light as he ran with his sledge to the top of Lizzie Leah’s.
The line did hold. Through hand and eye, block, forge and loom to the hill and all that he owned, he sledged, sledged, sledged for the black and glittering night and the sky flying on fire and the expectation of snow.
Does the line through the generations really hold? Is Garner asserting a connection between his characters, rather than convincing us? Are the stories of the children, and the symbols that they connect with really valid, really as coherent as symbols of the adult world? Especially as this optimistic, not to say ecstatic ending flies in the face of what has gone before – in philosophical as much as practical terms. The Stone Book Quartet seems to be a chronicle of degeneration, from a master stone-mason who built churches, to a master-smith who could craft anything, to a killer, and finally to a generation of boys who can do nothing of any value. All the latest character can do is be saved from his cowardly ways by a present from his masterly Grandfather; all he can do is collect shrapnel; and, ultimately, to ride a sledge built with skills that he cannot imagine. At every turn the older generation is more skilful than the younger – and every child (and the adults they become, presumably) more corrupt than the last. Is this a deeply conservative book? Is it a lament trying to disguise itself as an anthem?
An unsentimental (and perhaps child-oriented reading) might suggest that Garner is trying to disguise a deeply pessimistic view of the world – and one that is not very flattering to the present generation of readers – by simply asserting a transcendental truth, that the line of craftsmanship is preserved
Garner has form on this. Even sympathetic readers think that the ending of Elidor, when the children throw their accumulated emblems back into the parallel land, to somehow restore it to life, is at best confused. (Even Neil Philip conceded that ‘Grail symbolism is never coherent’). The unexpected ending of The Owl Service remains controversial (it seems that a majority of readers pick the wrong young man to be the romantic hero); and it is far from clear whether anything is resolved at the end of Red Shift (readers are left with a coded message).
The Stone Book Quartet may, then, be Garner’s farewell to the optimism of childhood and the children’s book – but a reluctant one. Being a children’s writer was what he did, and then being a writer (full stop); and the book that The Stone Book grew into may not have been the book that an optimist, which Garner perhaps reveals himself to be, would want to write. A more honest end
ing, in the sense of looking the truth of the tales in the eye, would have been for the sledge to overturn. That would not have made it any less a children’s book, but as with the wish that the four emblems would revitalise Elidor, or the wish that the cold-hearted Roger should become the knight errant in The Owl Service, or the wish that there is, in Red Shift some redemption, a tragic ending would not be what the optimistic children’s writer, Garner, would wish to give to his readers.
The website of the publisher of Boneland, 4th Estate, quotes the Guardian as saying ‘Garner has never been just a children’s writer: he is far richer, odder, and deeper than that.’ One can only hope that Garner rejects such a muddle-headed assessment of what children’s books can be: they are rich, and odd, and deep, even if their author could not always cope with the fact.
26. The Mayne Incident
Do Writers for Children Have To Be Nicer than Other Writers?
The tone of this book has been predominantly light-hearted, which is natural given the joyous nature of the subject. However, it has often touched on the sometimes difficult relationship between adults and childhood. As one wag put it, looking at Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie and more recent authors who it would be legally unwise to mention, their books may be delightful and their reputations technically unsullied – but would you let them baby-sit your children?
Of course, that is the problem: children’s books are in a sense baby-sitters, or at least child-minders, and every advocate of children’s books would vocally support the idea that they are important and influential. After all, readers become entranced by the books, and every new book makes a much bigger difference to a child than it does to an experienced adult reader. And if we believe that it is not just the ‘surface meaning’, or the story that makes an impact, but the subliminal subtexts (and if we didn’t believe this then we would not worry about propaganda or advertising) then we might pause to consider where these subtexts come from.
Children’s books don’t have to be nice. From their inception children’s books have dealt with the darker side of life: the early evangelical texts did not shy away from horrors, corruption and death. Children’s favourites of earlier years included Fox’s Book of Martyrs (1563) with its graphic executions and disembowellings, The Fairchild Family (1818) where stories of burning to death and corpses on the gibbet encouraged good behaviour, and Mrs Charlesworth’s Ministering Children (1854) with its pious children starving to death. Little Women and Treasure Island deal in unpleasant realities. Popular literature has always been full of casual slaughter, from the penny dreadfuls, G.A. Henty and Biggles, and contemporary Manga; today’s teenage fiction features sex, drugs and rock-and-roll and touches on troubling realities from the holocaust to serial killings and child abuse. Edward Ardizzone, the great illustrator, once remarked that if we give our children no clue about the harshness of the real world, we are not playing fair – and children’s books can now break almost any rule. But that does not apply to their authors.
The case of William Mayne, who has been described as ‘possibly the best, and certainly the most original children’s author of the twentieth century, was summed up by Julia Eccleshare in her obituary of him in The Guardian (5 April, 2010).
William Mayne, who has died aged 82, was one of the most highly regarded writers of the postwar ‘golden age’ of children’s literature. His output was huge – well over 100 titles, encompassing novels and latterly picture books, rich in a sense of place and feel for the magical, and beautifully written. He wrote several books a year in a career that spanned more than half a century and won him the Carnegie medal and the Guardian children’s fiction prize. Although never widely popular and sometimes thought of as inaccessible for his young readers, his distinctive, allusive and spare writing had considerable influence and, despite being sometimes out of fashion, his books were often thought due for a comeback. That was never to happen. Instead, Mayne’s books were largely deliberately removed from shelves from 2004 onwards following his conviction and prison sentence for indecent assault on children [in the 1970s].
Or as Brian Alderson, a partisan, put it in a Books for Keeps obituary: ‘He was jailed for two-and-a-half years (less remission) and was vilified in the manner customary to our enlightened times’. In the full version of the obituary that he wrote for The Times (published on the Faber Website) he analysed the main characteristic of many of Mayne’s books. It is not ‘the excitements of the narrative but a deeply sympathetic exploration of the confusions and the vulnerability of many of his youthful protagonists – moving accounts of children triumphing in the discovery of their own strengths against many odds.’ He goes on in a troubling vein:
How ironic then that, with his tender understanding and respect for these children and their language, to which he was acutely sensitive, Mayne should find himself being arraigned in 2004 for abusive behaviour towards young girls some thirty or more years in the past, pleading guilty (through a plea-bargaining process which he later regretted), and being sentenced to a two-and-a-half-year term. This he served with dignity, laced with bitter humour, only to discover on release that there was no truth to the adage that you cannot be punished for the same offence twice. He was ostracised by vindictive or cowardly editors and publishers (but not by his faithful and supportive agent); his books were withdrawn from sale (only now being revived through the print-on-demand series of Faber Finds), and no possibility was open for the publication of new work. (A new story accepted by a magazine editor had to be withdrawn on the insistence of the management.)
At this point, certain readers might legitimately raise an objection. Why, they might ask, is this chapter not called ‘The Mary Jones Incident’, Mary Jones (not her real name) being one of the young girls abused by the author. Did not she serve her sentence as a violated child with dignity – and possibly bitter humour; what makes Mayne so special? After all, he had a choice about how to behave, and made it. There is not, in this instance, much to be said on both sides.
Mayne’s fall from grace does raise serious issues about the relationship between books and life, however, and whether children’s authors are in a singular position. Are they, unlike other authors, in loco parentis? Or should their private lives be separated from their literary lives? After all, a book is not an infectious object (or is it?) – and in any case, if we read only those authors of whose morals we approve, our shelves might be a lot lighter. To argue that if we condemned those authors who have broken the law in letter or spirit, then who would ‘scape whipping introduces the question of whether the issue of judging books separately from the author somehow elides the actuality of a crime. Can we argue that the art transcends the man?
Despite the assertion by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams that although his view of William Mayne had changed since the court case, this would not stop him recommending his work, the reaction to Mayne’s conviction was overwhelmingly that books can be infectious – the man is the book, and the book is the man. Michele Elliott, director of Kidscape (a charity dedicated to preventing bullying) wrote: ‘I wouldn’t touch his books with a barge pole. Books are the sum of you as a person. To divorce the writings of an author from the author himself is impossible.’
Clearly this is a matter of personal opinion, but it does highlight the curious relationship between children’s books and childhood, and between the author and the dual audience of adults and children. It also points up the equally curious attitude of British adults to the relative importance of the influence of books. It may also confirm the opinion that adults dealing with children must be placed in the ‘guilty until proven innocent’ bracket. The suggestion that children’s authors should be checked by the Criminal Records Bureau before being allowed to visit schools (which was so strongly condemned by Philip Pullman and many others) is symptomatic of this.
Mayne has been punished, then, but should his books also be punished? Should we rather judge them out of the context of Mayn
e’s life and in the context of his children’s literature peers? Certainly his style is unique. Take the example of The Battlefield (1967), an ecological tale about ancient monuments in (very) rural Yorkshire being disturbed by modern developments. It is set at a remote country pub. In the first chapter, the mother is making a shopping list for the two daughters, Debby and Leslie, and Mayne treats us to an intricate, naturalistic, family dialogue:
‘Sugar, buttons, white cotton, butter, two dish-cloths, pound of stewing steak and kidneys for a pudding,’ said Mum. ‘The buttons are for Dad’s shirts.’
‘Go on,’ said Debby, writing it all down. ‘Something more romantic. A peacock, or a golden tree.’
‘There should be threepence each in the change,’ said Mum. ‘Bring two loaves, as well.’
‘I love my love with an “a”,’ said Lesley, reminding Debby how to spell loaves.
‘I know how,’ said Debby. ‘It’s sugar I can’t spell. I know there’s an “h”, and I know it doesn’t go with the “s”, but where does it go?’
‘It doesn’t belong,’ said Lesley. ‘It’s one somebody dropped.’
‘Oh,’ said Debby. ‘Well, I can’t keep it. It won’t live, they never do.’
‘Come on,’ said Mum. ‘Don’t stand there. Get on down to the village.’
It will probably not be long before an unsympathetic academic points out that many of Mayne’s plots hinge on discoveries of things that lie just beneath the surface, and which emerge, phallically, in moments of flood or earth movements, or how often secrets are hidden by the very normalcy of daily life. For some critics, it may be that Mayne can never be read without the awareness of unwholesome subtexts. And it would be special pleading to suggest that these may not exist. Can books that at the time of publication were taken as a sensitive portrayal of family and mental breakdown (A Game of Dark, 1971), or as a breakthough in Arthurian fantasy (Earthfasts, 1966), or a masterly satire on Eastern European communism (Tiger’s Railway, 1987), or a sensitive portrayal of autism (Gideon Ahoy!, 1987, dedicated to Simon, ‘who does not understand the words themselves, but knows why they are there’); can these books ever shake off the betrayal of childhood implied in Mayne’s actions?