by Lucy Mangan
fn2 Pony books also, incidentally, completed the numismatic education that had begun with Milly-Molly-Mandy and her confusing insistence that two sixpences made a shilling. In my childhood, the old shilling pieces were still in circulation but being used as post-decimalisation five pence pieces (alongside the shiny new five pence pieces). So in my mind, a shilling was – clearly – worth five pence, not twelve. And yet she kept getting over five pence in change every time she spent a shilling (Milly-Molly-Mandy’s outlays were never large). It baffled me, until I actually asked Dad for ‘a shilling’ to spend at the summer fete at my infants’ school and my confusion somehow became apparent to him. He patiently – do I need to keep saying ‘patiently’ when I tell you my dad’s doing something? It feels virtually tautologous at this point – explained that she was working in old money, when there were twelve pennies to the shilling, but that those twelve were now worth a modern five, so the coins had been pressed into alternative service. On this basis was I able to proceed with the fete, life and pony books, where funds were amassed in florins (two shillings! Twenty-four old pence! Ten new!), half crowns (two shillings and sixpence! Thirty old pence! Twelve and a half pence! Ask me another!), crowns (easy! Five shillings! 60d! Twenty-five new pence! You simply cannot stop me now!).
fn3 Or Great-Uncle Gulbaria as Alexander has it, a mispronunciation I cannot bear to correct.
6: Grandmothers & Little Women
fn1 G. K. Chesterton was a fan, admiring Little Women’s realism and likened Alcott’s work to Jane Austen’s, but said he felt like ‘a male intruder’ on its grounds.
7: Wonderlands
fn1 This wasn’t the reason I chose it for a bedtime story, but the writer Roger Lancelyn Green once suggested that the ideal was for a child first to get to know Alice by hearing her adventures read aloud anytime between the ages of four and eight, before ‘the Gradgrindian fact-pushing at school’ eroded the willingness to suspend disbelief. He was writing in the pre-league tables, pre-SATs, pre-unspeakable, ridiculous rest of it 1960s, so God knows how much more our children need her these days. The window of opportunity for tumbling rewardingly down the rabbit hole together is probably only moments away from slamming shut completely.
fn2 And a little after that I would find on the back flap of a hardback edition of What Katy Did in the library mention of another sequel – Clover. I ran to the librarian to beg her to track down a copy. But she had never heard of it, it wasn’t on the system anywhere and there my quest – pre-Internet, children – ended. We were all undemocratically at the mercy of institutional caprice and unreliable gatekeepers in a way that hardly exists now. However. A few years ago, both Clover and the final, even-more-thoroughly-forgotten book in the series In the High Valley were republished. The good news is that I now have the full set. The bad news is that Clover and In the High Valley went unpublished for decades for a reason. They are not a patch on Katy one, two or three. But I still think they are happy to be all together again.
fn3 I have most of my childhood books still – at least from the days of Plop onwards – but Tom is one of the few to have been lost along the way.
fn4 We still had skipping ropes in the playground. A girl at each end – don’t get cross with me, it WAS always girls and I am just reporting – and a queue of skippers awaiting their turn in the middle. Does this still go on, or am I remembering a time that will vanish from living memory with my generation?
8: Happy Golden Years
fn1 Though as you might expect with such a porous, abstract concept it has slightly different connotations from our word – theirs means something more like ‘life longings’, particularly for a home, or homelike place that you have not necessarily experienced, or for something unnameable and indefinable.
fn2 I must here make my marketing stand for another book, starring another lively, distinctively-voiced heroine, almost as beloved and now as long out of print as Private ever was: Life with Lisa, by Sybil Burr. It was one of the many Dad brought home with him one evening simply because it had caught his eye in the bookshop. Maybe he just read the blurb, or maybe he read the first page or two and was as instantly beguiled as I was. ‘When you look at yourself in the glass and your face is a Disappointment to you because you can see you are not going to turn out Beautiful, you know you have got to think of some other way of Making a Success of Yourself. I am very anxious to Make a Success, so Miss Brownrigg will be Sunk.’
Thus begins Life with Lisa, the diary of twelve-year-old Lisa Longland who, after coming across Pepys in the library, has decided to record her daily trials at home with her widowed mother and their lodger in a drab, post-war seaside town, and at school with the sarcastic Miss Brownrigg. ‘If persons are still wanting to read about your wife’s hat after 100s of years,’ Lisa reasons, ‘they might want to hear about another Ordinary Person (me) because my Life is very interesting in parts.’
Alas, life in Bladsole-on-Sea did not prepare Lisa for the vagaries of life and publishing any more than Nottinghamshire did Gwen Grant’s nameless heroine. Burr’s book was first published in 1958 but, despite being a deft, funny (especially once you get a bit older and understand all the Pepys jokes) and vividly rendered account of a year in the life of a natural Optimist if not Beauty, it has failed to endure in the collective consciousness. I have met few others who have read it, and I have found no mention of it in any history of children’s books. The copy my dad brought home is a 1979 reprint by the ever astute Puffin. There was also a Radio 4 adaptation of it in the early 2000s, which I missed but which captivated a Japanese friend of mine. I adduce this last as testimony both to my impeccable taste in friends and the power of Lisa’s liveliness to charm others, even across the oceans.
But she has been out of print again for thirty years and more, although there are always a handful of (unfortunately relatively pricey) second-hand copies to be found on the Internet.
Perhaps if she had gone on to be a naval administrator and MP things would have been different, but that’s a tough one for a secondary-modern schoolgirl to pull off, especially when the lodger keeps making Cutting Remarks and sending her out for peppermints, her friend Bert (‘a Good Enemy’) commands attention, and any spare time must be spent finding ways to amass the frills and furbelows needed to attend her first proper party. ‘Mother is always in a Flap about money and she would say: It is waste when you only have a party once in a Blue Moon and you cannot wear white net for Best or Church.’ Lisa is a wonderful, beguiling creation – a clear Success to anyone who reads her, but deserving of a wider audience. So do go out and look for her. And if you like her, as you surely will, do spread the word. As our heroine says, ‘it is not much good when you want to be famous right now, but Better than Nothing’.
fn3 There are lots of things posh people keep from us. Land. Money. Cabinet positions. But I don’t really mind about those. We have learned to rub along quite happily – and in many cases, perhaps even more contentedly than we might otherwise – without them. It wasn’t until I got to university, however, that I realised They had been keeping something far better, something far more rewarding and uplifting than rolling acres or political power from Us. Every time I went to visit the study of any floppy-haired, privately educated posh boy, there would always be a row of P. G. Wodehouse books somewhere on the shelves, usually bright little Penguin editions from a kindly uncle when the boy hit thirteen or so, always thoroughly thumbed and broken-spined. Intrigued, I asked to borrow one of them from Aloysius (not his real name, but his real name was even worse. That is the price you pay for inheriting castles). ‘It’s pronounced Woodhouse,’ he said kindly, as he loaded me up with Jeeves in the Offing, The Mating Season and four or five others. ‘Although he’s often nicknamed Plum. And you’ll need more than one. Start with The Code of the Woosters. It’s Plum’s plummiest plum.’ How right he was, on all counts. I gobbled the books down, and what plums they were – yes, especially The C of the W – indeed. Who could fail to warm to congenital idiot Berti
e Wooster and his valet/sage/salvation Jeeves, Aunt Agatha, ‘the nephew-crusher’ who chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth? Who cannot feel the agony of being Gussie Fink-Nottle (‘Many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming on sight’) or the almost equal pain of being engaged to Madeline Bassett, who thinks the stars are God’s daisy chain and that every time a fairy blows its wee nose, a baby is born.
But above all, who cannot fall instantly and irrevocably in love with sentences such as ‘I could see that she was looking for something to break as a relief to her feelings and courteously drew her attention to a terracotta figure of the Infant Samuel at Prayer. She thanked me briefly and hurled it against the opposite wall.’ Or ‘If a girl thinks you’re in love with her and says she will marry you, you can’t very well voice a preference for being dead in a ditch.’ It was joyful, fluting music in paperback form.
There are those who would say that it was bad luck rather than upper-class conspiracy that kept us apart all those years, but I know what I believe. I’m letting others in on both secrets here. Pass them on.
fn4 Brent-Dyer had to relocate during the war years so that her fictional charges didn’t end up in occupied territory.
fn5 I didn’t. But only because I didn’t know about them. I was already saving for a house. No, really. Remember, we’re into the second half of the 1980s now. The only thing in the news and the only thing adults talked about was house prices, which were skyrocketing. My parents were appalled and anxious. As nature abhors a vacuum, into the void left by my mother’s quietening of my nuclear-war fears rushed that of future homelessness. How would I ever be able to buy somewhere to live? Thus I became consumed at a very early age with the need to own – not rent, I knew I would never be able to relax if I was renting, because a landlord could kick you out at any time – a home. Didn’t have to be big. Didn’t have to be fancy. But it had to be mine. As it turned out, this was one of the more sensible anxieties to have, and that if you save hard from pre-adolescence onwards, you can actually amass enough for a small deposit. You have to spend it all on anti-anxiety therapy in the end, but still. You were close.
9: Darkness Rising
fn1 There was one drawback to the school library, which was that you weren’t allowed to use it. You would have English lessons in there occasionally, which would sometimes finish early and allow you half an hour’s browsing time, but you weren’t allowed in there at lunch or playtime. I suppose this was probably due to a lack of money and staff, plus an underlying belief in the value of getting some fresh lead poisoning in your lungs before afternoon lessons began, but still it seems a bit of a shame.
fn2 I am actually sitting here now trying to decide if I could buy it and keep it in my house now. I think not. Maybe in Kindle form? No, because pixels of it could leak out and pollute the place like those trillions of deadly particles ‘drifting on the wind, landing unseen on clothing, skin and hair …’ OH, GOD.
fn3 This crossover mindset years before the concept was (marketably) understood was perhaps one of the reasons it was rejected by seven publishers before finally finding a home with Rex Collings in 1972. It has not been out of print since.
10: A Coming of Age
fn1 On 6 June 1822 a fur trapper called Alexis St Martin accidentally shot himself in the stomach. The local doctor William Beaumont saved his life, but St Martin was left with a hole in his stomach through which Beaumont was able, over the years, to view and learn much about the digestive process. I used Sally in much the same way, viewing and learning all sorts of things through her as we made our way through adolescence together without ever having to delve into anything messy myself. She really has been useful.
fn2 This is why there will be almost no talk of poetry in this book. I can’t bear it and never could. All that feeling. All that true, fully accessed, held up to the light, turned slowly round and examined in all its microscopic, exquisite, agonising detail, owned, digested feeling, felt by the writer and then rendered slowly, painfully into the handful of allusive words, the clutch of evocative sentences that will convey it in its purest form to the reader, who will then embark on the same process in reverse. Madness. Who wants to put themselves through that?
fn3 Yes, YES Bruce Patman I’m looking at you.
fn4 They are pendant necklaces. Which apparently repel nuance, characterisation and feminism, and thank goodness for that.
fn5 ‘She had been surprised to notice that Tish had very thick, muscular legs when the rest of her was quite slim and graceful.’ To this day I don’t quite know what Anne Digby was thinking here. Sure, she says it to minor villain Debbie, which gives her a chance to stick the knife in later, but still. Thick legs. It’s just a bit … weird.
fn6 In an interview in 2012, promoting what turned out to be the abysmal sequel to the SVH books Sweet Valley Confidential, which picked up Jessica’s and Elizabeth’s story ten years after high school, Pascal talked about some of the sacrifices she had had to make in order to turn a 100,000 audience for her books into a 100 million strong army – ‘Humour is one of the things I gave up. It is a very sophisticated tool and it didn’t work in these books.’ Rereading them now, however, is A Right Laugh.
fn7 Such a lot of historical fiction there used to be (Peacocks was not alone). Barbara Willard, Cynthia Harnett, Geoffrey Trease, Ronald Welch, Hester Burton, Margaret Irwin were all authors of multiple books, often centring on one family’s fortunes through the ages. To say nothing of the likes of Leon Garfield, whose books – like Jack Holborn, Smith and The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris – were set in a hazy, Victorianish past even if they didn’t depend on real historical events or pinpoint background detail for their plots or settings. I love and revere them all now but I never came across anything but Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase at the time. They simply weren’t in fashion. Maybe this was because history had stopped being taught in the old-fashioned way (comprehensively, linearly) in school. Certainly by the time my generation was in education, it was just scraps and husks. I have no more idea of how this country or the world came to look and function the way it does than I do of how my computer is producing these words on the screen or saving them on its innards. And you need a certain amount of knowledge of the past before you can enjoy – or, perhaps more importantly, even want to pull down from the shelf – a book about the past. Of course it can/will/should supplement your knowledge once you do, but as with anything there is a de minimis requirement before it will all hang together, before you can get enough out of it for its pursuit to be worth your while. I could barely follow, let alone enjoy, The Children of the New Forest (despite doing so at an age so advanced that I am not even going to admit what it was here) because I’d never heard of the English Civil War – and wouldn’t until after I left university. So I had to do so much work just keeping Cavaliers, Roundheads and the hastily researched basics about Puritanism and King Charles II in my brain that I had no mental energy left to enjoy the story properly. (Though I must urge anyone who feels that they would be similarly afflicted to give it a go anyway. The Civil War stuff basically brackets the long section in which the children shuck off their aristocratic clothes and habits and learn the ways of the foresters, and this is all that even anyone properly educated remembers. The Beverley kids beat down acorns for pigs, trap hares, learn the minutiae of caring for hens, building cow-houses and stalking, shooting and skinning stags. By the end of it I was at least able to recompense Dad for some small fraction of the information he had imparted to me over the years with the news that a stag was a brocket until three years old, a staggart at four, a warrantable stag at five and a hart royal – there is still no more splendidly evocative phrase – after that. However scanty your historico-factual knowledge may be, you can always feel the primeval pull of the forest and want to run your hands over the texture of that life, as rough as bark and as delightful in its detail. But I still wish I had been taught some stuff. I would have g
ot a lot more Blackadder jokes for a start.) Multiply that mindset by however many children there are per reading generation and you can see the market for historical fiction falling away pretty rapidly.
fn8 This was the story of two cousins, Bonnie and Sylvia, who are turned out of Bonnie’s home by the wicked Aunt Slighcarp and sent to a viciously cruel orphanage, from which they eventually escape with the aid of a loyal servant and the forest-dwelling Simon, travel to London to find the family lawyer and ensure that justice is done. I never realised then that this book is just the first in the Wolves Chronicles, Aiken’s series of books set in an alternative version of England, during the reign of King James III. Most of the rest, which I discovered and devoured in virtually a single sitting about ten years ago, centre round a vivid, sprightly girl called Dido Twite. The dozen volumes are full of tiny, wondrous details, highly coloured characters and a sense of imagination perpetually fomenting, dark and joyous by turns. Taken individually and together they are fine-grained and sweeping epics, almost overwhelming to the senses but not quite – the perfect preparation, in fact, for Dickens. I blame my ongoing inability to tackle him on the absence of Dido in the formative stages of my biblio-life.