Christmas 1959
My earliest memory with a book, I am sorry to say, is of sitting on the floor luxuriously tearing every single page of Beatrix Potter’s Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle in half. I did not like her prickles sticking out through her clothes, but after this momentary distaste, the sound of the rich art paper tearing was irresistible. The next landmark was when my brother, aged five and a half, wrote and illustrated a racy book called Percy Rainsbull Edwards, the Adventures of a Pig. I was admiring, envious, and extremely interested to discover by these means that books were actually written by people and not simple mysterious whole occurrences like boiled eggs or steam rollers. When I was a child it did not occur to me that there was an immense choice of books to read. Books arrived at Christmas and on one’s birthday, and there were a few that one seemed to have been born with - part of the landscape before one ever opened them, but otherwise, that was that. There were bookshops (I never discovered about libraries), but it was years before Woolworth’s, with goldfish at threepence each, and whole packets at one penny of seeds or Japanese flowers - according to one’s impatience - did not seem to provide better value for one’s sixpence a week. One accepted what one got; if one liked a book one came to know it almost by heart; if one disliked it, one never - after the first exploring examination - opened it again. How did one arrive at these lightning judgements, since they were certainly not based on knowledge; one could hardly ever compare anything with something else - supposing it had occurred to one to do so - and any taste one had seemed to originate from some freakish instinct?
I liked books with magic in them, with marvellous, unaccountable events, and as I accumulated fairy books and my private society was peopled with witches, dragons, king’s sons, woodcutters’ daughters, dwarfs, giants, magicians and princesses, it seemed to me quite reasonable that people should be turned into toads for careless behaviour, or build their houses entirely out of pear seeds, or throw up a golden life in a palace for some mysterious quest. The fact that I did not understand all the language of these stories rather added to their charm for me, and I enjoyed listening to them long before I could read. Their inevitable patterns, with the black and white distinction between chance and fate, never struck me as ruthless or cruel, as one is told today that they should, as I never expected my own life to correspond to the people’s in these stories. Secondly, I liked stories about animals - ordinary, not magic and behaving like themselves and not people. Ernest Thompson-Seton was just right. Thirdly, I loved books about large families of children, particularly E. Nesbit, and of hers, Five Children and It, the one about the peevish sand fairy, was my favourite. The Nesbits and some of the Andrew Lang fairy books had belonged to my mother: there was also a work called Holiday House, about two children called Harry and Laura who exceeded the wildest bounds of one’s imagination of naughtiness and who had an insufferably priggish elder brother who died (I thought of sheer, stark goodness, as there did not seem to be anything else wrong with him).
Some grandparents had Struwelpeter, whose violence left me unmoved excepting for the haunting line ‘ the hare’s own child, the little hare’, at which I invariably wept, and some of the Golliwog books which were written in racy pupperel with large and lovely illustrations about a debonair and optimistic golliwog and his friends, who were all Dutch dolls. ‘Poor Golliwog despairing lay, For heart and hope had fled, He did not wish to live, because, He thought his friends were dead,’ and there was a terrible picture of him lying in a pond with his hair streaming out round some bulrushes. Then, of course, there was Winnie-the-Pooh and The Wind in the Willows. (Perhaps it is necessary to explain here that our books were censored and drivel and vulgarity - by my mother’s standards - were removed, that we did not suffer in the least from this at the time, and priggish though it may sound, I am extremely grateful for the reasonable standard of language and intelligence that her discrimination secured.) Edward Lear’s Nonsense Verse was some of my earliest reading, but not for amusement; ‘Two owls and a hen, four larks and a wren, had all built their nests in his beard’ - one read it with mounting astonishment and consternation; this was no laughing matter, but a credible anxiety. Belloc, however, filled one with a kind of raging rhythmical delight and there were also those serene books about Johnny Crow and his garden: ‘Johnny Crow, whom perhaps you know, has improved his little Garden’.
When I was about ten, and hoping desperately that any minute I would stop being a girl in order to go to prep school with my brother, I started to read the South Sea island shipwreck books: Stevenson, Marryat, Defoe and Ballantyne were some authors, but possibly because I was also addicted to Louisa Alcott, Black Beauty and even The Wide Wide World, the seamanlike and bloodthirsty adventures failed to change my sex. In the end I compromised with Arthur Ransome, Bevis, Two Little Savages, and Stanley Weyman and Charlotte Yonge, these last two satisfactorily combining adventure with romance. I also amassed a good many books about horses, and goodness knows how much more boring I might have become about them if some educational accident had not introduced me to Shakespeare, which was like seeing the sea for the first time in one’s life, or going to the country in June when one had never seen it so rich and beautiful, or the first time I had dinner in the evening alone with my father, and Brahms in the drawing-room afterwards - whole areas which seemed to have been invisible or wasted were suddenly presented like gold or a live bird in the hand … By now, it must be clear that, like most children, I was addicted to series or sets - I carefully counted his plays and thanked God he had written so many. For years it was my chief grudge against Jane Austen, but on the other hand one couldn’t complain about Dickens. I began to press my father’s trousers at threepence a pair to augment the sixpence pocket money and bought books with the proceeds. I bought a complete Shakespeare and The Imitation of Christ (both of which were heavy on trousers) and mingled these with second-hand editions of Little Lord Fauntleroy and extraordinary work in two volumes called Coelebs in Search of a Wife, Comprehending Observations on Domestic Habits and Manners, Religion and Morals - this cost a penny and still seems to me intoxicating value.
My library accumulated on these fitful lines for several years: like all children I wanted books that would stand or invite constant re-reading, and like most children I was undeterred by my partial understanding - either of words, or of the behaviour of the characters about whom I read. In this manner I read Bleak House, which was my favourite Dickens, more than five times and most of Jane Austen once a year, and learned some three thousand lines of Shakespeare by heart in order to have them handier than they were in my complete volume, which, like a cook we had once said of herself, was ‘bulky, but fragile’. But I also re-read Miss Allcott, and books that my father had about the Great War. I did not read with a great desire to uncover fear, horror or excitement, but fell into the other category who enormously enjoyed and became adept at reading unimpaired by streaming eyes at the sadness of it all.
As to the books that one discarded or disliked practically on sight: I think illustrations had a good deal to do with this. Books that were fraught with rather arty, very black woodcuts were high on my list of hates; or ones that had wispy or woolly pictures in pastel colours with a cowardly amount of detail. Good pictures meant an accurate and thorough representation of the matter in hand - colour was not essential, but if used it must not be anaemic. My favourites were the Henry Ford illustrations to the fairy books, the Edward Lear drawings, the Shepherd drawings for the Pooh books, all the Beatrix Potter pictures excepting of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, and the original Nesbit illustrations. I loathed coy stories about inanimate objects - like dining-room chairs racketing sentimentally about like people, and for years entertained a sombre aversion to Greek mythology. Also an extremely reliable and good aunt once gave me a book written entirely in French by someone who was naturally called Anatole France: this maddened me.
The only conclusion that I have come to out of these very personal findings is that on the whole there is a part of me which can still enjoy many of the books that I enjoyed as a child, and that when, now I stumble upon a child’s book which gives me great pleasure - such as E. B. White’s two, Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, and Margery Sharp’s The Rescuers, which is published this autumn - they seem to me to be direct descendants of these older books: they, too, have ideas, and an invention which is both practical and kept within the bounds of its scale, but above all they have style, and I think children have that mixture of inquiry and love of tradition which gives them a very good appreciation of that.