by Lucy Mangan
6
Grandmothers & Little Women
BOTH MY GRANDMOTHERS were great grandmothers. Not great-grandmothers (at least, not yet – they would become so before they died but not by my womb), but great grandmothers. My dad’s mother – known as Nanny – had been a nurse in between having 800 children, but by the time I knew her she was Les Dawson. Chain-smoking, bosom-hitching, permanently smiling through a happy fug of smoke and booze (‘all snug in their Crimplene and gin’, I would hear the late, great Victoria Wood sing years later and be instantly catapulted back to Nanny’s precarious – there’s no friction with Crimplene – but coveted lap), her conversation was a thing of wonder. Up and down and round it went, taking in everyone she’d ever seen, met, chatted to in the bus queue, given birth to, loved, lost, never cared about to begin with. It ducked down side alleys about the shopping habits, scandals (actual, rumoured, and invented on the spot), pets, grandchildren, salaries (actual, rumoured, and invented on the spot), miscarriages and every other non-salient detail about everyone within a five-mile radius of her front door. By the end of the afternoon you were more closely informed about the lives of a thousand people you had never met than you were about your nearest relatives. It was impossible to tell how much was true and how much was the product of a lifelong conception of silence as a mortal foe. Alan Bennett once described his mother sitting in the lobby of a hotel they were staying in and speculating on the lives of the other guests she saw passing by. ‘He must be her son,’ she might say, before embarking on a series of speculations about his likely personal flaws and failures in life. The next day they saw them again and she would say ‘There goes that son again, up to no good,’ completely unaware of – or at least unconcerned by – the fact that it had all been invented from scratch the day before. That was Nanny. She was great. It was like having a television on all the time, but one that loved you and stroked your face and gave you biscuits whenever you liked. But it did explain much about my father’s Trappist approach to life. We value most what we have never had. In his case, it was a moment’s peace.
When I got a little bit older Nanny would curl my hair with her hot wand – I think she used it herself to warm up her night-time whiskey (gin’s a daytime drink, in case you were wondering) – and give me her old powder compacts and various little pots into which she had scraped the ends of her lipsticks. They were all a weird shade of deep pink that somehow managed to be so fantastically unfeminine that it was basically a contemptuous V-sign to all social convention. It was worn only by ladies of a certain heft and vintage and I have never seen it on anyone or anything since.
She also gave me Sam Silvan’s Sacrifice: The Story of Two Fatherless Boys, a leather-and-gilt-bound Victorian treasure. It was a ‘reward book’, one of the hundreds upon hundreds of morally sound nineteenth-century tales published first by the Religious Tract Society to give to deserving Sunday-school pupils (or distributed among poor households by parish workers, in the hope of making them deserving) but which gradually came to be distributed more widely, and published by more commercial, less devotedly Christian outfits.
Books specifically aimed at children – as an idea, as a genre, as a product – began in the mid-eighteenth century with an entrepreneurial publisher called John Newbery. The medal given every year by the Association for Library Service to Children for the most distinguished contribution to American children’s books is named after him in recognition of his achievement in making children’s literature a respectable and profitable field of endeavour.
Before Newbery, there had been a few stray bits and pieces for da kidz, such as John Bunyan’s A Book for Boys and Girls in 1686 (which was about as much fun as its 1724 retitling – Divine Emblems, or Temporal Things Spiritualised – suggests), James Janeway’s A Token for Children: being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths, of Several Young Children (again, not heavy on the laughs) in 1671 and Isaac Watts’ Divine and Moral Songs for Children (in 1715), alongside religious tracts that saw pious orphans being rewarded with new, godly families, naughty protagonists despatched to eternal hellfire or tiny shriven souls being vouchsafed redemptive ecstasies on their little deathbeds. But their main aim was pedagogic (and salvatory). In the main, children made do with the lighter end of adult fare, much of which still survives (in more or less attenuated forms) as children’s literature today: Arthurian tales, for instance, the legend of Robin Hood, Aesop’s Fables, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, classical and regional myths, and the more interesting parts of the Bible.
Newbery saw an opportunity and took it. He started producing volumes like A Little Pretty Pocket Book. This, published in 1744, is generally held up as the first ‘proper’ children’s book – to be read for enjoyment, not under duress for the good of your immortal soul. It cost sixpence, and for tuppence extra the infant owner got a toy with it: a red and black ball or pincushion (for boys and girls respectively – the publishers of Sugarpink Rose are not yet around to object). With them they could record the day’s progress, adding a pin to the red side for instances of good behaviour, to the black for bad.
The sequel was called A Little Pretty Pocket Book Identifying the Symptoms of Blood Poisoning Arising from the Conjunction of Dirty Pins and Imprecise Wieldings Thereof by Tiny Hands. No, not really. But I imagine it would have sold well. The book itself contained letters from Jack the Giant-Killer exhorting Little Master Tommy and Little Miss Polly to be good, and poems about common children’s games, followed by a moral extracted (often very dubiously) from each. ‘Baseball’ – the first documented use of the word, incidentally, though it’s being used to refer to modern baseball’s ancestor, rounders – runs:
The Ball once struck off,
Away flies the Boy
To the next destin’d Post,
And then Home with Joy.
MORAL
Thus Seamen for Lucre
Fly over the Main,
But, with Pleasure transported
Return back again.
Still more fun than reading about dying orphans, okay? Context is all.
By the second half of the eighteenth century, religious tracts had developed into the more narratively coherent and compelling moral tales that would eventually give rise to the reward book industry. Written mostly by women, the first of these is generally thought to be Sarah Fielding’s The Governess, in which various students are encouraged to identify and reflect on their individual flaws and all pledge to do better on the morrow.
The aim of such tales was to train the childish mind out of frivolity and into sober, adult ways – an aim which reaches its apogee in a book called Fabulous Histories (later History of the Robins) about being kind to animals, by one of the most redoubtable, prolific and dogmatic of the moralists, Mrs Trimmer. Having given in, despite the era’s and genre’s fear of the power of fiction to corrupt, to the temptation of writing a book about talking birds, she goes to great lengths to strike pre-emptively against all possible harm. Readers should consider the tales ‘not as containing the real conversations of Birds (for that it is impossible we should ever understand)’ and her fables are designed ‘not merely to excite compassion and tenderness for those interesting and delightful creatures on which such wanton cruelties are frequently exercised; but also to convey moral instruction to the young reader; and, in particular, to recommend the practice of general benevolence’. Are we all quite clear? Good. Then let the story, at last, commence. There are footnotes along the way to keep you from straying from the path of righteousness. ‘The Mock-Bird is properly a native of America,’ reads one, ‘but is introduced here for the sake of the moral.’ Duly noted, Mrs T.
Over the course of the century after The Governess first appeared, the bonds of propriety loosened, fiction ceased to be quite such a dread force in the minds of the good lady writers, and they gradually allowed the tale rather than the moral to come to the fore. In 1818, the first of three volumes of The History of the Fairch
ild Family: The Child’s Manual, being a collection of stories calculated to show the importance and effects of a religious education was published, replete with dying children gloriously redeemed/emphatically not in their final hours, depending on how godly their tiny lives had been until then. Further volumes followed in 1842 and 1847, with a notable softening of attitudes each time.
This alteration in children’s fare was partly because religious attitudes became a bit less blood-and-thundery, and partly because of the sheer weight of social change. The first half of the nineteenth century brought with it compulsory education for children and the invention of mass manufacturing, which meant books could be produced relatively cheaply for the first time. Now, suddenly there was a market of 3 million newly literate, story-hungry children to cater for, and catered for they certainly were.
The fanciful and fantastic were increasingly welcomed, and fairy tales, which for a long time had been judged the greatest possible pollutant of innocent, impressionable minds, were fully welcomed into the fold, in both their traditional forms and in new, such as Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River. Charles and Mary Lamb wrote Tales from Shakespeare for young readers, and Catherine Sinclair even let the children in her 1839 tale Holiday House be unequivocally naughty without being eternally damned. GOOD TIMES.
By the middle of the century, the fashion had moved from strictly virtuous exhortations to stories about virtuous (or learning to be virtuous) children, and within another few decades the market and notions of acceptability had broadened further to include historical fiction and (for boys especially) adventure stories and relatively secular melodramatic tales, albeit with an ‘improving’ moral in there somewhere. It was to this later school that Sam Silvan’s Sacrifice belonged.
It had also belonged to my dad. Inside on the flyleaf was written ‘For Richard – see how long you keep it nice. Granny Mangan’.
I was speechless. It was old enough, Dad pointed out, for her to have owned it before she passed it on to him just as Nanny was now passing it on to me. I was holding HISTORY IN MY HANDS. Real history, family history in my hands. The flyleaf message was covered in crayon. ‘Did you do that?’ I asked Dad. He nodded. I was awed and appalled in equal measure. It gave me a new measure of the man. My quiet, gentle dad – a born recidivist. I’m reeling still.
Sam Silvan’s Sacrifice was my first exposure to untrammelled Victorian melodrama. It’s quite a thing, you know. The ‘two fatherless boys’ are Sam and his younger brother Fred. Fred is selfish. Fred is selfish, greedy, thoughtless and always being hauled out of scrapes or given extra crusts of bread or having his general mess cleared up by the ever generous, noble, selfless Sam. Fred is, frankly, appalling. Eventually, we reach the climactic set-piece of our morality tale. Fred’s ineluctable … Fredness has landed them in a field with a snorting, maddened bull. The bull turns on them. The bull runs towards them. The boys run towards the high wall around the field. There is only time for one of them to boost the other one over. This, I knew, would be the moment when all that Sam had done for him over the years would suddenly overwhelm Fred and he would choose to boost his brother over the wall to make up for a lifetime of sin.
I don’t know what part of Sam Silvan’s Sacrifice I didn’t understand.
Because of course, the Victorians being what they were, Fred has no such epiphany. He gladly accepts Sam’s shove over the wall and then looks down in horror as his saintly brother is gored to death below him. He sure feels bad then! But IT’S TOO LATE! I mean, like, REALLY too late! Because Sam’s dead! Completely dead. I really cannot convey to you how dead he is. The finality of it was terrible. I didn’t grieve for Sam. You’re dead, you’re dead, I reckoned, and the keen edge of my compassion for him and his innards was further dulled by the slight contempt in which I continue to hold all pushovers and softies. But the contemplation of the infinite punishment Fred’s now-awoken conscience had in store for him held me completely in its thrall. My own conscience was an overactive organ that had already colonised large parts of my mind and was pursuing the rest relentlessly, and my own sins, I knew at least in the rational part of my mind, were small. But what it would be like to live with something so awful pressing down on you, such guilt abrading your very soul … I shrank in horror from the idea and yet could not resist tiptoeing around it, trying at least to gauge the size and shape of such a burden.
Fred and Sam, you live in me still, every time I think of taking the easy route out of a difficulty or am tempted to let someone else deal with the consequences of some stupid thing I’ve set in motion. Well played, Victorian moralists, Granny Mangan and Nanny. Well played.
My other grandmother – Mum’s mum, known as Grandma – was equally great. She was born and bred in Edinburgh but moved to Lancashire when she got married and gave birth to a child every year or so there until her husband David contracted rheumatic fever while serving as a naval doctor in the war, and died. ‘Good job,’ my Auntie Nancy, looking at the five children under seven, told her.
When we went to stay with her, which we did at least three times a year, she fed us Hawaiian sandwiches, Club biscuits and Wine Gums without surcease and when Mum tried to object, she would say ‘For heaven’s sake, Christine, they’re on their holidays!’ It was the only time I ever saw my mother cede any kind of ground. When Grandma came to stay with us, which she did at least three times a year, she would sneak us toffees in between playing ‘Bobby Shaftoe’ and ‘Soldier, Soldier, Won’t You Marry Me?’ on the piano 800 times a day for us while we marched up and down the carpet pretending to be silver-buckled sailors and treacherous soldiers, and as soon as my parents left for work in the evening we would play pontoon and three-card brag for pennies and tuppences until pleasingly far past bedtime. She would bet on a six high ‘just to make a game of it’. You would not have known from her cavalier attitude to her rapidly diminishing purseful of coppers that this was a woman who came fifth in the national Civil Service exams in 1930-something and knew the entirety of Scottish history like the back of her hand.
Whenever she left to go home it was an occasion of much lamenting on our parts. So she started leaving ‘a wee present’ for each of us in the top drawer of the chest on the landing. We would say goodbye to her in the morning before we went to school but have the thought of the gift to distract us from finding her gone when we came home.
One day after Grandma had done her disappearing act, Emily and I rushed upstairs to open the drawer. A box – an entire box, not plastic packet! – of Maltesers for her. And for me – something even more incredible. The most gorgeous book I had ever seen. She would give me many over the years, from Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrar to George Eliot’s Silas Marner and I will regret forever that she died before I discovered my own liking for the Waverley novels, which she loved with a passion befitting a Caledonian expat, but this was by far the most beautiful. A hardback, bound in red leather with gold curlicues all over it, and inside were onionskin pages covered in an attractively quaint font. The title – on the spine of the book only, not the front cover lest it interrupt all those gold curlicues – promised they would tell the story of Little Women.
It would prove to be a great story when I got to it, but there was much to detain me first. Beautiful endpapers – those flourishes repeated in a duller gold on a chocolate-brown background – gave way to a strange thing called ‘a biography of the author’ (a Louisa May Alcott, apparently), which lasted three and a half pages and was almost as good as a story.
In fact, it was such a heavily bowdlerised version of the author’s life that it did almost amount to a story. According to this brief outline, the Alcott family were as gently and picturesquely impoverished as the Marches and almost as content. It glosses almost entirely over the fact that Louisa’s father, Amos Bronson Alcott, was a relentless narcissist who put his family through hell with his commitment to his Transcendental ideals and who had a messiah complex that precluded him ever doing a proper day’s work and providing for his growin
g family. In 1840 he abandoned the little school he had set up, in order to preach and write full-time. This was about as bad an idea then as it would be now (‘I wait not for the arithmetic of the matter,’ he cried, the sentiment of the incurably selfish everywhere), and it marked the last time he would ever bring in a regular wage.
He never liked Louisa very much. She was too outgoing, impulsive and opinionated. He called her and his wife Abba ‘my two demons’, and much preferred his docile oldest daughter Anna who would often greet him at the door with a list of her ‘sins’ and ask forgiveness.
I know. Unpick that at your leisure.
It was his two ‘demons’, however, who kept the family afloat via their various labours, though they both became – understandably – embittered by the process over the years, and it was the success of Little Women in 1868 that finally brought them some true financial relief and Louisa a measure of personal freedom.
Or, as my copy’s biography puts it, ‘Henceforth she was her own master, able to live where she liked and the way she liked, and – and this had always been one of her fondest dreams – minister to the well-being of her family.’ Okay …
After those pagefuls of factoids, there was an even stranger thing called an ‘Introduction’, which was about the book itself. I skipped that. Why would I read ABOUT the book when the actual book was there, waiting to be read just a few pages on?
And what a book it was. In the story of the March family grappling with genteel New England poverty and finding ways to keep themselves happy and busy while their beloved father is away fighting in the war, there is something – and someone – for everyone.