by Lucy Mangan
Fashions in education and in reading change, but King Arthur, The Tale of Troy, The Saga of Asgard and all the rest are eternal. That is what legend provides: the sense of a connection reaching back through time, deep into the ancestral wildwoods, where an unacknowledged part of each of us still lives. Something visceral, elemental and, given the right teller at the right age, something understood. No wonder Lewis loved them so. I wish I’d been able to make the leap between him and the rest in time.
But I didn’t. I turned without demur from the Age of Heroes to the Age of Heroines. I discovered Noel Streatfeild.
Streatfeild
All children are, at a certain age, consumed by a ravening lust for stardom. In my playground, girls tended to express it through the re-enactments of great moments in social history (Bucks Fizz’s skirt-ripping, Lady Diana’s wedding, Jane’s transformation in Neighbours) while boys went more for sporting glory. In the football games that went on every playtime, they were all Kevin Keegan on the inside.
Noel Streatfeild has been sating this egomaniacal hunger (in girls, mostly) since 1936, when she wrote her first book for children, Ballet Shoes. ‘The story poured off my pen, more or less telling itself … I distrusted what came easily and so despised the book.’ Her readers had no such compunction – Ballet Shoes was an instant hit and is probably still her most famous and popular novel today.
It is the story of three orphan children, Pauline, Petrova and Posy Fossil, who claw their way up from nothing but a comfortable, upper-middle-class, post-war background to train at Madame Fidolia’s Children’s Academy of Dance and Stage Training and become the most renowned dancer, theatre actor and – er – engineer of their generation.
But the Fossils weren’t who I first met. My heart belongs instead to Sorrel, Mark and Holly Forbes, the protagonists of Curtain Up. This is the story of three orphan children who claw their way up from nothing but a comfortable, upper-middle-class, post-war background to train, thanks to scholarships from the Fossil sisters, at Madame Fidolia’s Children’s Academy of Dance and Stage Training and become the most renowned dancer, theatre actor and – er – impressionist of their generation.
I’m teasing of course. A little. Because although Streatfeild’s books do tend to adhere to the rags-to-riches formula, they also depart from traditional wish-fulfilment stories in important ways. For a start, all her characters are realistic children – like those of her idol E. Nesbit, Streatfeild’s heroines (and occasionally heroes) are all fresh, natural, lively personalities. In Curtain Up, Sorrel is the responsible, anxious oldest child, Mark a bit of a sulker always in need of cajoling and ‘managing’ by those around him, while the baby of the family, Holly, has a sunny self-belief and the kind of imagination that easily leads her to become convinced that she did not steal a coveted attaché case from her cousin Miriam but that Miriam gladly lent it to her instead.
Streatfeild’s children are beset by the same worries (frequently half-understood percolations down from the mysterious adult world above, or the insecurities that come with needing to make your way in a new school and negotiate relationships with people not immediately willing to offer friendship) as their readers are in real life. And they are capable of great loyalties and tendernesses, yet still prone to the same heart-squeezing jealousies (we have all been Holly at one time or another, even if our heart’s desire was rarely a pre-war quality briefcase – though I’d love one now) and petty squabbles as their readers. Streatfeild is always particularly good on the agonies of not having the right clothes to wear – not to stand out, but to fit in; a legacy of her upbringing as one of three daughters of a high-minded, impoverished vicar and a mother who came down hard on anything she interpreted as a sign of vanity. In Curtain Up Sorrel longs for a party dress that ‘rustles and sticks out … Suppose it could be yellow. Crepe de chine or silk net over taffeta’ and in the book I loved almost as much, White Boots (which is basically Curtain Up on ice), Lalla has an array of beautiful skating outfits, while Harriet must wear her mother’s old pink coat – a humiliation made worse by the fact that she has violently clashing ginger hair. I warmed deeply to this aspect of Streatfeild’s work. My father wasn’t a vicar, but my mother cleaved immovably to the belief that wanting to be anything more than decently covered by burlap sacking was a sign of moral depravity and shopped for our wardrobes accordingly. I was twenty-five before I owned an outfit that I liked. I didn’t wear it. I’d never go that far.
The other major departure from tradition is that once the improbable circumstances have combined to get you to the dancing/singing/acting/sporting/skating/uh … engineering/uh … impressionism-ing institution of your choice, dreaminess is replaced by discipline, and sharpish. Once you are there, you have to knuckle down. It is the willingness to work, to be disciplined, and practise, practise, practise until you have mastered whatever techniques are necessary that turn Streatfeild’s heroines (and occasional heroes) from merely talented individuals into stars. This is the lesson Streatfeild learned during her own ten years treading the boards, during which she enjoyed all the seediness, glamour and hard graft that came with being a member of the Charles Doran and Arthur Bourchier companies. (She bought as many lovely clothes as she could too.)
Streatfeild’s insistence on a causal link between hard graft and success is actually quite a shock to the unwary reader – or at least it was by the time I was reading the books in the 1980s. I had been primed by at least two stories a week in the Mandy comics which Lauren Jones (lovely, kind, generous Lauren Jones to whom I owe a debt of happiness I can never repay) passed on to me once she had finished with them to believe that all you had to do was dance well at your local disco or do funny voices for your friends at school to be plucked from obscurity by a passing agent and hurled into the big time.
Now, of course, the two concepts have been uncoupled for so long that Streatfeild’s books may be starting to read like medieval runes. Kardashian Shoes would be a book with a very different message. But I suspect that if today’s star- and stage-struck youngsters give them a chance, they will come to life once more.
Torridon Library was also providing a plethora of practical, hardworking, morally and economically sound heroines. I had discovered pony books – my first taste of the delights of genre fiction (at least if you discount Enid, who was a genre unto herself). I had recently left the wooden bins and small shelves of slim paperbacks behind and, after a few weeks of research in the older children’s section, had mustered the courage to choose my first ‘proper’ book there and seat myself at the big boys’ and girls’ table.
It was a a chunky hardback with line drawings only – I checked – so everyone could be very clear that it had not come from the infants’ section and it was called Jackie Gets a Pony. It was by Judith M. Berrisford and in it, Jackie gets a pony. I was thrilled for her. And for me, because it was clear from the proliferation of similar hardbacks on the shelves that there were many more pony-based adventures to be had by her and many other remarkably and delightfully similar heroines.
I’m not quite sure why all the greats who had invented and fuelled the genre during its 1940s and 50s heyday were still, in the early to mid-1980s, so well represented on the shelves. Possibly the librarians were reliving their youths, or maybe there was some belief amongst Authority in proffering characters who lived for tack and mucking out instead of television and boys as a hedge against contemporary frivolity. I can’t believe genuine readerly demand abounded. Certainly Jackie and the Pony Thieves (pony thieves steal Jackie’s pony) was always waiting for me when I had read my way through her other fifteen adventures and returned, eager to begin the cycle of bran-mash-based adventures again. It may simply have been the case that so many pony books had been accumulated during the feverish peak decades that to have swept them all away once appetite had diminished would have left the place too bare.
Pony-book authors had many things in common (they were often from the same family for a start – Christina, Diana and Jose
phine Pullein-Thompson were sisters, and their mother was Joanna Cannan, one of the pioneers of the genre with A Pony for Jean in 1936, in which Jean gets a pony) but their foremost shared characteristic was their fertility. They were, in the main, writing about what they loved – horses, ponies, occasional dogs, horses, ponies, ponies – and genre fiction does not require intriguing new plots to be laboured over or emotional conflicts to be wrenched from your soul and rendered in exquisite prose. You can just get on with the job. All were capable of turning out a highly readable book a year. Berrisford wrote at least forty others in addition to her Jackie series over her thirty-seven-year career and the Pullein-Thompson sisters were virtually unstoppable. Christine probably takes the crown – though she would probably have preferred a properly soaped saddle – with at least 101 volumes published between 1948 and 1999.
I read all that were there – A Pony for Jean and its sequel Another Pony for Jean (I discover only now, alas, that there was a further instalment called – you’ll never guess – More Ponies for Jean. Truly, the 1950s were a reassuring time), the Jackies, numberless Pullein-Thompsons, and I managed to buy a few Ruby Fergusons (pony books were nowhere near as prevalent in bookshops as they were in the library) for myself: Jill’s Gymkhana and Jill Has Two Ponies. It’s possible Ferguson’s Jill series stayed in print longer than some of the others because Jill has a much more modern sensibility than most of the others, even though some – like the Jackies – were in fact written later. Chapter One of Jill’s Gymkhana (first in the series of nine written between 1949 and 1962 – bit of a laggard, our Ruby, evidently), titled ‘My Dream’, opens like this:
JUST look at that title! You see, I am the Jill concerned, and quite honestly if anyone had told me three years ago that anything so terrific as a gymkhana would ever be associated with my name I should have thought them completely mad. Yet such was to be my destiny. (That lovely phrase is not my own, I got it out of a library novel that Mummy is reading.)
Who could fail to be warmed, charmed and in immediate need of the remaining octet of adventures? A bit later on, her status as a child for all post-war ages is confirmed by her thoughts on the books her mother has been penning (à la The Railway Children’s mother, had I known it then) to keep penury at bay since Jill’s father caught a fever on business in West Africa ‘and never came back to us’.
It seems awful to say it, but I never could get on with Mummy’s books at all. They are all terribly up in the air and symbolic, about very whimsy children who are lured away by the Elves of Discontent to the Forest of Tears from whence they are rescued by Fairy Hopeful, and so on. I suppose some children must like these books and buy them or Mummy wouldn’t get the cheques she does get; or perhaps it is that their aunts buy them and give them to the children for birthday presents. Anyway, so as not to hurt Mummy’s feelings I always read every word of her books as they come out, and try to say something appreciative, but honestly they leave me cold. I would rather have Out With Romany, or The Phoenix and the Carpet, or even something highbrow like The Horse in Sickness and in Health.
I can hear touches of Oswald Bastable, Cassandra Mortmain and assorted Fossils in there now, but at the time I loved Jill for herself alone.
The library’s stable of pony books provided all the pleasures of Enid Blyton – formulaic comfort, certainty, ease, a lot of reward for your reading buck – with a new, equine twist and a much more satisfying amount of detail. The authors knew that they were writing primarily for ‘outsiders’ (children who actually have ponies tend to be out and about on them, living the pony-having lifestyle instead of reading about it) and so were careful to explain not just about the strange world of ‘tack’, the points systems at gymkhanas, the finer points of dressage and so on, but also to provide plausible (enough) explanations of how the money was earned and savedfn2 first to buy the pony, then to furnish the kit, provide the stabling and of course the all-important feed. Oh, the horror of the unexpected vet’s bill that could throw off months of careful calculation and wipe out weeks of earnings yet to come from mucking out the stables of richer school friends and pile on yet more pressure to win a cheque at the next county show!
But the young reader lives for that kind of granular stuff. Careful, detailed world-building tells you that the author takes you seriously, that they want you to be right there, inside their vision with them. It’s an implicit acknowledgement that you might have gaps in your knowledge and an absolute absence of contempt for that. This is a great gift, and relief, to any child.
I also adored the fact that, unlike Blyton’s children, pony books’ protagonists lived in the countryside full-time, not just during the holidays. I don’t think I had realised that was possible before then. I didn’t hanker after a pony of my own, specifically, but the lifestyle generally. I still yearned to be surrounded by fields instead of houses and lanes instead of roads full of traffic. No bookworm wants to live in London. It’s noisy and hectic and it just doesn’t make sense. The past and the countryside. That’s where our souls reside. What we really want is to retire to a tiny cottage somewhere unreachable to all but a chosen few as soon as we have accumulated enough books and money to be able to live out the rest of our days reading uninterruptedly from dawn till dusk and living on fried potatoes, eggs and the occasional rosy apple that had been due to be given to a lame pony down the lane. I’ll give bran mash a try too maybe. I think it sounds delicious and have always chosen not to find out precisely what it is. If I hadn’t given into marriage and motherhood, I reckon I would be about five years away from my goal by now. Ah well. At least I’ve got the books. And I may win the lottery yet.
If I couldn’t live in the countryside or the past there was another option towards which I was almost equally drawn: underground. Torridon Library’s shelving system was not infallible and so within the Judith M. Berrisford section often appeared books by Elisabeth Beresford. They were about a set of short, stout, furry creatures who lived in a burrow beneath Wimbledon Common – the Wombles. The gentle but lively adventures of the irrepressible Bungo, greedy Orinoco, scholarly Wellington and lovely, loyal, athletic-but-dim Tomsk (overseen by Great-Uncle Bulgaria, Tobermory, Madame Cholet and Miss Adelaide) as they go about their business of picking up the litter human beings leave behind to recycle and adapt for their own use, were born of the first stirrings of the green movement in the late 1960s and a chance mispronunciation by one of Beresford’s children as they walked across ‘Wombledon Common’. (The Wombles actually move to Hyde Park in later years; a crazy but true fact which I include here in the hopes that it will propel you to victory in more than one pub quiz over the coming years.) They had been embedded in the national consciousness since about 1973, when the stop-motion animation series voiced by Bernard Cribbins had begun its two-year run. The programmes had been repeated many times since, but I wasn’t aware of this. My mother had full powers of veto over our television-watching and – for reasons now lost in the mists of time but which something tells me will have been the mad fruits of dictatorial whim – The Wombles didn’t make the cut. I knew them only on the page, save the occasional glimpse on other children’s tellies or in battered annuals skim-read at jumble sales. The rough-textured nature of the animation and the backgrounds (sets? They must be sets) and the Heath Robinsonesque quality of all the things they built was a perfect rendering of the world Beresford had created and I thoroughly approved. Most importantly, the series’ creators managed to capture the warm safety and cosiness of the Womble burrow.
I remember one day on holiday at Grandma’s in Preston walking over a cobbled stretch of street near the old marketplace and pointing to them, saying ‘This is what I like! This is where I want to be!’ because I couldn’t convey my liking for the past – I didn’t know the word ‘history’ or ‘historical’ which might have gone some way to explaining myself to her. As it was, she thought I wanted to live on cobbles and watched me closely for years afterwards for further signs of mental instability.
I
had the same problem explaining my Womble ’n’ burrow love until last year, when I finally came across the word ‘hygge’. It is a Danish word for a very Danish concept that has no direct translation into English but seems to be a mixture of cosiness, security, comfort, kinship and familiarity, coupled with a desire to keep things simple, uncomplicated and unexaggerated. They live it. Bookworms find it down fictional burrows. But whatever works, y’know?
The Wombles’ indefatigable industriousness was also deeply satisfying. The furry clan had the same pleasing purposefulness as all those pony-book children – and all children long for a purpose. And their dedication to recycling, to squeezing every last droplet of usage out of everything, seemed an immensely sensible way of life too. Newspapers, old envelopes and bus tickets being turned into papier mâché and used to make bowls and mend burrow-cracks, jumpers and scarves being patched or unravelled and reused, tin cans, jam jars and every other sort of detritus being pressed into service of some kind – this all feeds some deep need in the juvenile psyche.
I wonder – often, actually – about when we lose that aversion to waste. When does that receptive little corner of our minds start to harden and grow impermeable to such simple common sense and make us into the adults Great-Uncle Bulgaria will never understand, ‘Not even if I live to be 300’? Are we born preprogrammed with the sound survival instinct that tells us to be careful and salt away our resources against times of scarcity which the shrieking messages of consumer capitalism eventually drown out? Or is it just another manifestation of the general process of calcification we know as ‘growing up’? It’s a bugger, either way. And now we live in a world where, as I embark on a nightly reading of Bungo et al.’s adventures to Alexander, Great-Uncle Bulgaria’sfn3 kindly explanations of the beastly ‘Pollu’ (pollution) and how to fight it, and Wellington’s experiments in the greenhouse resulting in an organic mixture that destroys plastic, read like relics of a ridiculously optimistic bygone age. So, not only have we ruined the world, we have ruined The Wombles. The burrow is my refuge no more. Brilliant.