3. I Know How a Jam Jar Feels

On greed and pickiness

One of the tastes of my childhood is the taste of golden plums. They were a Polaroid yellow; the colour of late evening sunshine. We had a plum tree in the garden and at harvest time it would chirp with little tits and finches pecking at their sweetness. We had to shoo them away. My dad often led school harvest assemblies, where I recall him standing in his suit before hay bales, piles of apples and glazed bread wreaths; bread mice with currant eyes. The children of the village had to make up harvest boxes for the elderly, then knock on doors with the gifts. Ours always contained a couple of tins, a packet of biscuits, a dozen golden plums. We’d have plum crumble for weeks.

When we first moved to Peckham and I was pregnant, my husband bought me a golden plum tree. It grew as Gruff grew. In his third year there was a bumper harvest, but then when I bit into the first fruit expecting a nostalgic reverie I noticed something – a kind of reddish scum around the stone. Tiny blood-coloured specks. I spat the plum back into my hand and broke open another one. Something tiny and pale pink squirmed there, like a maggot or a baby’s smallest finger.

Later I discovered the problem was plum moths. The blight has recently spread through gardens at great speed, no one is sure why. The dark scrim was shit. My golden plums were full of hungry caterpillars.

The first transgression involves fruit. Usually we think of an apple. This was possibly a misunderstanding or a pun on mălum, a Latin word which means evil, and mālum, which means apple. In fact, scholars now suspect the fruit in the Garden of Eden was a pomegranate or a fig. As children, we understand the story instinctively. We want to put everything in our mouths, after all: dandelion stalks, pebbles, Lego bricks, earwigs (I ate an earwig as a toddler and said it was ‘nice and crunchy’ when they tried to drag it from between my teeth). We want to taste and know.

One of Laurie Lee’s earliest memories, in Cider with Rosie, is of his sisters stripping the fruit bushes and cramming his mouth with berries whilst he sits like ‘a fat young cuckoo’. Ripe fruit, hung luminous in the trees by the road or on barbed-wire bushes, has always been a dangerous temptation. Children might, after all, gobble up a glut of it when the adults aren’t looking; make themselves sick. The historian Siân Pooley has written of how in the nineteenth century ‘death by fruit’ was frequently recorded as the reason for infant deaths. It was probably superstition, but born out of the fact that some berries are poisonous. That, and the sweetest fruit is often the most corrupt, only hours from bruises, collapse or rot. Filthy fingernails pick it off the floor.

Christina Rossetti’s 1859 children’s poem Goblin Market plays on this fear. It is about two girls, Laura and Lizzie, who hear the calls of goblin merchants to ‘come buy’ their dizzying array of fruits:

Apples and quinces,

Lemons and oranges,

Plump unpeck’d cherries,

Melons and raspberries,

Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches,

Swart-headed mulberries,

Wild free-born cranberries,

Crab-apples, dewberries,

Pine-apples, blackberries,

Apricots, strawberries;—

All ripe together

In summer weather,—

Longing for these fruits but with no money to pay for them, Laura offers the goblins a lock of hair and a single tear as payment. Lizzie reminds Laura about Jeanie, a girl who ate the goblins’ bounty, then pined away and died at the beginning of winter. But Laura doesn’t listen to her sister’s warning, laughing: ‘to feel the drip / Of juice that syrupp’d all her face, / And lodg’d in dimples of her chin’.

My children are fruit crazy. Both my first child, Gruff, and my small daughter, Cate, demolish punnets in moments; a mango in minutes. Truly, their faces are ‘syrupp’d’. And they love books about fruit. They adore Handa’s Surprise by Eileen Browne, for example, and know by heart who takes the ‘sweet-smelling guava’ from Akeyo’s basket (the ostrich), or the ‘spiky-leaved pineapple’ (the giraffe).

But for us, I think, the platonic ideal of fruit – the longed-for, perfect fruit of our fantasies – will always be the radiant collages of Eric Carle in The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969), made by layering hand-painted tissue paper on to white board. Cate was bought a stuffed Very Hungry Caterpillar when she was born, one of the many pieces of Very Hungry Caterpillar merchandise that fill the bookshop tables these days, and we call it the ‘Caterpillar’. Sometimes we call her the Cate-rpillar. I wriggle it and she giggles. When I read it she grabs at the die-cut holes with her fingers: one apple, two pears, three plums, four strawberries, five oranges, and then the finest prize of all, a huge lurid irresistible slice of watermelon.

You remember the watermelon.

Until he was six, Eric Carle lived in upstate New York – the Big Apple – with his parents, who had migrated from Germany. He has recalled it fondly in his talk ‘Where Do Ideas Come From?’, delivered to the Library of Congress, Washington D.C.: ‘I remember kindergarten there. I remember a large sun-filled room with large sheets of paper, fat brushes and colorful paints. I remember that I went to school a happy little boy.’

Then, in the mid-1930s, his mother got homesick. Persuaded by Carle’s grandmother that the post-First World War years of chaos had finished, she decided the family should move back to Stuttgart, even as others were moving away. It was a terrible decision. Carle’s new school was a dark room with narrow windows; a teacher who beat him with a bamboo stick. In an interview with Leonard S. Marcus, Carle has spoken of how, in Germany at that time, it was thought that children needed to be ‘broken in’, and a ‘free-spirited little American kid’ especially so.

War broke out, and Carle’s father was drafted into the German army. He would spend eight years as a Russian prisoner of war and return home devastated. In his absence Carle struck up an important relationship with an art teacher, Herr Krauss, who showed him artists banned by the Nazis – Picasso, Braque, Matisse – when he was supposed to teach ‘realism, naturalism, Aryans with flags waving’. He even dared to call the Nazis ‘charlatans’ and Schweine. But Carle also saw things a child should not see. He and his mother began to spend many hours sheltering in their cellar. He told Newsweek: ‘It was scary at times. The nearest bomb was maybe 20 feet away, and it shook the house … when it passed, my mother took my head and put it in her lap. I will never forget that.’ When he was only fifteen the German government conscripted him to dig trenches on the Siegfried Line, where: ‘The first day, three people were killed a few feet away. None of us children – Russian prisoners and other conscripted workers. The nurses came and started crying.’ He was left with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Another episode also occurred that left its impact on Carle when he had to be evacuated. Foster families were allocated by default, with slips of paper handed out to children telling them the name and occupations of the people who would take them in. At the train station, Carle’s friend Herman complained that Carle had been given the best family – he would be living with a baker, and be sure to get lovely fresh bread. He moaned so much that Carle gave in, and they swapped addresses.

But Carle got the nicest family in town. The cruel baker made Herman sleep in an icy, unheated room under his eaves. He got no extra bread at all.

Since it was first published The Very Hungry Caterpillar has sold a copy every minute. It has been translated into over 30 different languages and sold over 20 million copies. But it started with holes. 1969. Carle, back in America, bored and punching holes in paper.

Carle wondered if a children’s book could use holes. It was not, in fact, the first time an artist had come up with this idea – Peter Newell’s The Hole Book in 1908 shows a boy fooling around with a gun and accidentally discharging it, sending it through clocks, hats, cats, hives and a cake – but Carle’s concept was perhaps more conducive to the nursery. His first idea was ‘A Week with Willi Worm’, about a green bookworm, but his editor, Ann Beneduce, was not persuaded – particularly as it didn’t have an ending. They tried to think of something better until Ann said, ‘Caterpillar!’ and Eric said, ‘BUTTERFLY!!’ The holes, they decided, would be holes in fruit. For a while they couldn’t find a manufacturer who could guarantee the holes would line up, until Beneduce found a printer in Japan.

Hunger is a kind of hole. A nothingness that somehow demands of you. A void that brims with hurting.

In his Paris Review interview, ‘The Art of Fiction No. 299’, Eric Carle observed:

My publisher and I fought bitterly over the stomachache scene in The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The caterpillar, you’ll recall, feasts on cake, ice cream, salami, pie, cheese, sausage, and so on. After this banquet I intended for him to proceed immediately to his metamorphosis, but my publisher insisted that he suffer an episode of nausea first—that some punishment follow his supposed overeating. This disgusted me. It ran entirely contrary to the message of the book. The caterpillar is, after all, very hungry, as sometimes we all are. He has recognized an immense appetite within him and has indulged it, and the experience transforms him, betters him. Including the punitive stomachache ruined the effect. It compromised the book.

That spread we all love is the essence of plenitude – the triangle of watermelon, the salami and sausage, Swiss cheese with holes in it like a Hanna and Barbera mouse’s dream, a vast pickle to enliven the palate, a cupcake and chocolate cake with a cherry and cherry pie, a lollipop of swirling blue and yellow like the roof of a circus tent, a cone of sunrise-coloured ice cream. It is designed to stimulate every type of hunger. ‘I’m licking my lips,’ my son says when he anticipates a meal. ‘Yum yum, I’m licking my lips.’

It is also, in a way, a depiction of the dream of America. In his autobiography The Art of Eric Carle, he writes about how at the end of the war he worked as a file clerk in the US denazification department, getting access to the American army kitchen where he swiped ‘peanut-butter sandwiches, lumps of butter, cubes of sugar, leftover bits of steak’ for his family. Imagine Carle’s anticipation when he saw that feast laid before him.

Carle’s friend Herman was no greedier than we all are when we look at those pictures. Brought up under rationing, having experienced the real physical pain of a clenching, empty stomach, what boy would not fantasize about food, or hope for more where he could find it? Herman did not deserve his fate at the hands of the baker.

And Eric Carle, hungry for success and publication, letting his editor persuade him against his instincts, is punished disproportionately too: ‘This disgusted me.’

He has betrayed his friend somehow.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar wasn’t Eric Carle’s first picture book. He had previously worked on Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? (1967) with the author Bill Martin Jr, at a time when Carle was art director of a New York advertising agency. Bill Martin Jr was inspired to collaborate with Carle after seeing an advert in which he had drawn a big red lobster.

Advertising is the semiotics of desire. That spread of food in The Very Hungry Caterpillar is, in many ways, like an advert too. The fantasy that indulging ourselves might in fact better us is, of course, a fantasy advertising sells us. It is based on the view that the pursuit of individual pleasure might create a better world, that you can have what you want without consequences. It is easy to see why The Very Hungry Caterpillar has come to be seen as a metaphor for capitalism. A young East German librarian once told Carle: ‘This book would never have been published here. The caterpillar represents a capitalist. He bites into every fruit, just takes one bite and he moves on, getting fatter and fatter. He’s exploiting everything.’ The critic Anthony Lane even suggested, in The New Yorker, that it is ‘a matchless parable for the entrepreneurial right’.

That’s not exactly fair, though. The caterpillar is a child. He still has so much growing and changing to do. Isn’t childhood the one time that we do not need to be responsible? As an adult, I find it hard to eat a beefburger or drink a flat white or buy a tub of air-freighted blueberries without waves of guilt. A dim, ugly sense of consequence. I have eaten of knowledge and the fruit tastes bitter. But can a child not eat and drink of the world’s delights without this burden?

Hunger does not always improve our lives. Hunger for home can lead your husband to a prison cell. It can lead to your fifteen-year-old son digging trenches and getting PTSD. This ‘immense appetite’ within us is a dangerous thing. But in The Very Hungry Caterpillar Carle wants to say not always. Not inevitably. Some children crave warm, fresh bread and there is no price to be paid. Some children gorge on fruit and become beautiful.

I have often observed other parents in the park teaching their children vague, general words, as if imagining specific vocabulary is too much for them to take in. Look: a birdy. Look: a pretty flower. I don’t know, perhaps some of the parents aren’t even familiar with the names themselves: that it is a great-tit or a bluebell. If the specific words aren’t passed on, in the end they vanish into obscurity, disappearing as catkin, lark and minnow did from the Oxford Junior Dictionary in 2015 (to be replaced by ‘cut and paste’ and ‘broadband’).

But children seem to me to have an enormous appetite for nouns. At only slightly over two, my son could name an absurd number of animals. He collected their tiny plastic replicas with a desperate obsessiveness, constructing whole continents on the coffee table and updating me daily on new mammals he had discovered he needed: a mandrill, a tapir, a tamandua (a genus of anteater that sadly could not be located for purchase). Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, Gruff seemed determined to name every creature in the world; to bring it into being. But also, of course, this appetite for words came from wanting to name the objects of his desire: other, different plastic toy animals.

Desire is very specific. Amongst my daughter Cate’s first half-dozen words are not bird and flower, but owl and daisy. She will not be appeased by a cuddly parrot or buttercup. In the kitchen she cries for fruit: nana she says, or melon, melon, melon. I cut a slice like the one the caterpillar eats: neon and dripping. She crushes fistfuls into the tiny, ravenous hole of her mouth, juice sluicing everywhere.

The sixties were the start of a golden period for picture book talent, with many of the greatest writers and illustrators – Dr Seuss, Eric Carle, Judith Kerr, Maurice Sendak – hitting their stride during this decade. Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea (1968), published the year before Carle’s masterpiece, is also a book about hunger. The tiger famously eats everything – he empties the table, the saucepans, the cupboards, the fridge and the taps. If the English ritual of afternoon tea – a teapot, buns, cake, biscuits and tiny crustless sandwiches (cucumber, perhaps, or ham, with lots of butter) – is considered by those who indulge in it to be a high point of civilization, the tiger’s desire is uncivilized. He is pure hunger and selfishness. But unlike the caterpillar, his appetites do him no harm: he just gets to eat until it has all gone and he leaves.

Kerr, of the same generation as Carle, also had her war story. Born in Berlin, she was the daughter of Julia Weismann, a pianist and composer, and Alfred Kerr, a revered German-Jewish theatre critic who openly criticized Nazism, mocking Hitler in witty verse. In 1932 he was put on a Nazi death list. After being tipped off that his passport was going to be taken, he disappeared, fleeing in the night for Prague. In 1933, on the day Hitler took power, the rest of the family fled too. Judith Kerr was nine.

It was the right decision, but the family’s lives soon became difficult. All Alfred Kerr’s payments for his writing were stopped and his books were publicly burnt in 1933 in the Opernplatz, under Goebbels’ direction. There was a reward placed on his head for anyone to capture him, dead or alive. As refugees, the family stayed briefly in Switzerland and France, but always felt pursued until they finally settled in Britain. Even there, staying in Bloomsbury, they found themselves in the middle of the Blitz and Judith Kerr said: ‘My main preoccupation at that point was a conviction that I wouldn’t live to be eighteen.’ However, Kerr never positioned herself as history’s victim. Her fictionalization of that period, the novel When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, frames the flight across Europe as an adventure from the child’s perspective, and in interviews she has said: ‘I wouldn’t have missed it for anything!’

After the war Kerr wanted to go to art school full-time but, being a refugee, money was still a problem. Instead she obtained a trade scholarship in the studio of a textile manufacturer, which allowed her to go to art school part-time. When this finished, she got a job as a script reader for the BBC for twelve years, of which she has said: ‘It seems extraordinary to me now that for about twelve years of my life, I did not do any serious drawing.’ She only began drawing again after she had her first child, a daughter called Tacy. Kerr recounts that when Tacy was ‘two going on three’ they often went to the zoo to see the animals, and afterwards, ‘She would say imperiously, “Talk the tiger.”’ The story Judith Kerr told her daughter became her first picture book, The Tiger Who Came to Tea.

So, the tiger is a tiger from the zoo, anthropomorphized to delight a little girl in a tale that included ‘everything she liked’. Except …

People have argued that the tiger is like the war. In early sketches, Kerr drew him with a top hat and cane, perhaps making a mockery of Europe’s civilized veneer; its powerful gentlemen with their brute intentions. The tiger turns everything upside down; leaves the middle-class family suddenly stripped of basics. In the ultimate barbaric act, tearing up the social contract, he pours hot tea into his mouth directly from the teapot (an image that led to calls for the book to be banned for setting a dangerous example to children).

There are parallels, too, between the beast and the child’s-eye view of Hitler in When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. In that book, when the children imagine the Nazis confiscating everything, they picture Hitler playing Snakes and Ladders with their games compendium and snuggling little Anna’s pink rabbit. Like the tiger, Hitler is figured as greedy, taking everything for his own pleasure and leaving their cupboards bare. The poet Michael Rosen, famously, also said that given Kerr’s history the tiger seemed to him suggestive of the Gestapo. ‘Judith knows about dangerous people who come to your house and take people away. She was told as a young child that her father could be grabbed at any moment by either the Gestapo or the SS – he was in great danger.’

It’s a fascinating idea, though it recedes slightly when you look again at the pictures and realize that the tiger is not forbidding. Although he is not a cartoon tiger, he has sweet, slant eyes and a warm smile. He never shows teeth, only a bright tongue, and says excuse me and thank you and waves goodbye. Before the tale even begins – on the title-page spread – we see Sophie riding his back under a benignly grinning sun, effectively quelling any anticipation of menace. Children are reassured that nothing in the pages that follow will frighten them. Also, the little girl is hugging his beautiful orange coat as he looks around the kitchen for more food, her fingers stroking the whiskers around his mouth. His tail cups her face as he empties the taps. Unless Kerr is making the same point as Sylvia Plath in her poem ‘Daddy’ (‘Every woman adores a Fascist …’), the Gestapo analogy won’t quite stick. Judith Kerr herself put it nicely: ‘I don’t think one would snuggle the Gestapo, even subconsciously.’

Still, the war is certainly a presence in the book. The academic Rebecca Bramall is convincing when she argues that Sophie’s father’s return echoes men’s return from the war. The shift from the empty cupboards of a family on rations to the utter luxury of a restaurant supper ‘with sausage and chips and ice cream’ would have had a different resonance to adults reading it aloud in the 1960s, as would the images of the family walking beneath street lamps, to readers who remembered blackouts.

But you will have heard other theories too. The Tiger Who Came to Tea is remarkable as a children’s book, it seems to me, for the sheer number of theories that circulate around it. It can feel like there are more interpretations of its ‘meaning’ on Mumsnet than there are about Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ in academia. One theory suggests that as The Tiger Who Came to Tea was released in the year of Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, the tiger is the foreign ‘other’ who the family fear will take everything if he is invited in. The tin of Tiger Food, in this reading, re-establishes the divide between ‘them’ and ‘us’. I’m unsure about this racist slur against Sophie and her mummy, given Kerr’s own status as an immigrant, but perhaps there is something in the association with foreignness. Certainly, the tiger is conspicuously removed from his natural landscape and reduced to English social rituals. Perhaps he is homesick, and comfort-eating to fill that hole that can’t be filled.

Then there are the theories about the mother. She is lazy, and with her daughter concocts a fantasy about a tiger to explain away her empty cupboards. She is an alcoholic, and the story is her frankly unbelievable excuse for drinking all Daddy’s beer. She is having an affair, and the tiger is her lover in metaphorical disguise. Aren’t mothers often figured as tigresses too? Perhaps he is an expression of her id; the instinctual drive to pleasure usually suppressed by housewives.

The critic Jenny Uglow’s reading of the text doesn’t go quite so far, but suggests it is a story about seduction – of the mother who defers to this display of appetite; the complicit daughter with her arms wrapped around him. The tiger, she says, ‘harks back to the fatal fascination of the alarming mysterious stranger, like the devil in ballads and fairy-tales who arrives without warning and disappears with equal suddenness, and who is longed for as well as held in awe.’

Judith Kerr says ‘sometimes a tiger is just a tiger’, but sometimes writers can tease us. If he was just a tiger he would eat the girl and her mother before he worked out how to use a tap.

Anyway, tigers in stories are never just tigers. They are human inventions, puppeted by human longings: the longing to skip a bath, stay up late, eat hot salty chips, find meanings.

One thing I do think is clear from their attitude to greed is that Carle and Kerr are both anarchic spirits. In both books unspoken laws are broken about what should and shouldn’t happen, about actions and consequences. Wayward appetites are supposed to leave everyone in tears. Instead, in these books, they are energizing. They lead to beautiful rainbow-coloured butterflies and sophisticated café suppers.

Other famous picture books are more judgemental. In Martin Waddell and Helen Oxenbury’s Farmer Duck, the boxes of expensive chocolates the farmer eats on his bed while duck does all the hard labour are a sign of his immorality, leading to a coup. In Janet Burroway and John Vernon Lord’s The Giant Jam Sandwich the vast treat (so outsized ‘eight fine horses’ have to drag the bread to the picnic cloth and trucks have to dump on the butter) is not constructed for pleasure, but as a death trap for wasps, who deserve their comeuppance for making a beeline towards the bait. Maybe Carle and Kerr are so beloved because they take our children’s first and fundamental source of sensual pleasure and say: enjoy.

But what makes us take pleasure in something? Some books teach us new names for our desires. Stories can even shape them. Bee Wilson has written of how in 1936, a young psychologist exiled from Nazi Germany, Karl Duncker, carried out a taste experiment on children at a London nursery school. He asked their teacher to read the story of a heroic field mouse called Mickey who loathed a ‘sour and disgusting’ substance called hemlock, and thought nothing more delicious than ‘maple sugar’. Afterwards the children were given some white chocolate powder and told it was ‘hemlock’, and some horribly bitter valerian and told it was ‘maple sugar’. Sixty-seven per cent said they preferred the ‘maple sugar’.

Our tongues often taste the story not the flavour.

To Duncker, this evidence of suggestibility was chilling. The ease with which a child could be manipulated into changing their tastes mirrored the ease with which Nazi propaganda had manipulated the population of Germany into changing their morals. Two years later, aged just thirty-seven, Duncker killed himself.

I have certainly desired foods I have never tasted, because the story seemed to me so delicious. For me Enid Blyton was about skip-reading from picnic to picnic – the large hams, crusty loaves, red radishes, slabs of butter, melt-in-the-mouth shortbread, tinned pineapple and, most of all, lashings of ginger beer. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t tasted ginger beer and had previously dismissed radishes as tasting of stale water, I wanted them feverishly. And what young reader hasn’t dreamed of Roald Dahl’s Everlasting Gobstoppers or J. K. Rowling’s Fizzing Whizbees?

In picture books, though, only a few equal The Very Hungry Caterpillar in terms of actively making me hungry. The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch by Ronda and David Armitage is one – in a charming story (though one slightly marred by the fact that Mrs Grinling exists only to provide her husband with delicious lunches), Mr Grinling is fed at the lighthouse every day via a basket sliding down a piece of rope, until the seagulls start to sabotage his food. Who can blame them? For a sample lunch contains mixed seafood salad, cold chicken garni, sausages and crisps, lighthouse sandwiches, peach surprise, iced sea biscuits, drinks and assorted fruits. I’m sure few children know what ‘garni’ means, or what a lighthouse sandwich might contain, and yet mouths start to salivate at David Armitage’s radiant paintings. My children also adore Full, Full, Full of Love by Trish Cooke and Paul Howard, where Sunday lunch at Grannie’s house includes ‘buttery peas, chickens and yams, macaroni cheese, potatoes and ham’ as well as biscuit and gravy, collard greens, apple pie, vanilla ice cream and peach cobbler with raspberry sauce; Possum Magic by Mem Fox and Julie Vivas, with its list of Australian delicacies with transformative powers: pavlova, lamingtons, Vegemite sandwiches.

Similarly, as a child I was hypnotized by the meals in Russell and Lillian Hoban’s masterpiece Bread and Jam for Frances (1964). Frances, based on a little girl who lived next door to the Hobans, is depicted as an anthropomorphized badger. She was originally intended to be a vole but Russell was apparently persuaded by his editor, Ursula Nordstrom, that it would be too difficult to create a likeable vole. The first book, Bedtime for Frances, was illustrated by Garth Williams, but after that Russell’s wife Lillian took over.

There is a scene in Bread and Jam for Frances in which Frances is eating bread and jam again when her friend, another little badger called Albert, gets out his packed lunch:

‘What do you have today?’ said Frances.

‘I have a cream-cheese-cucumber-and-tomato-sandwich,’ said Albert.

‘And a hard-boiled egg and salt shaker.

And a thermos of milk.

And a bunch of grapes.

And a tangerine and a cup custard.’

He tucks a napkin under his chin, arranges his lunch neatly, and then – after cracking his egg and sprinkling salt on the yolk, takes a mouthful each of sandwich, egg and milk until they all come out even.

It’s Albert’s delight but also his seriousness, I think, that moves me. How much it all matters to him. The first time I read it to my son my voice broke a little.

I think it’s the reason my last meal would be tapas.

Bread and Jam for Frances also means so much to me because it is tangled up with another memory.

In the village of Edgworth, social life centred around a building called The Barlow Institute which had a bowling green, playpark, cricket pitch and cricket club behind it. At weekends parents would watch cricket while kids went on the swings, and I would sip Britvic 55 (pineapple juice with a slight fizz of bubbles) and eat Scampi Fries while balls puttered towards the boundaries of the pitch. Thursday night was the men’s night out, when the cricket club became the meeting place of the local chess team (of which my dad was captain). He would psyche himself up beforehand, listening to ‘Eye of the Tiger’ in our living room. He drank pints of mild that they ordered in just for him. Once I heard him tell my mum about a typical conversation – the men had been deciding if they’d rather have sex with their wives or eat a pie. Apart from him, apparently, they all opted for the pie.

Whilst he was out, my mum usually had her friend Sheena over, and they would write plays for the WI. They rehearsed in The Barlow Institute on Wednesday evenings, and on that night Dad would babysit. He made it feel like a treat. My sister and I sometimes made a ‘Mr Men window’, laying out every single Mr Men book in a giant square grid – from Mr Small to Mr Tall – and then playing games to pick which one Dad would read. (It was a family joke that my dad was like Mr Skinny, because he was very thin and when he put on weight he would just get a little pot-tum.)

My dad, who, as it happens, was also called Albert, would then make us something called a ‘secret supper’.

Our bungalow was open plan, with a little partition between the dining room and the kitchen. My mother, always verbally inventive, called this the ‘interim-agreement’ and I believed for many years this was its actual name, rather than the term for a transitional agreement between nations like, say, the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords. Dad would pull a curtain across it so as not to spoil the surprise, then out of our vision he would assemble the ‘secret supper’. Bring it out like a magician producing a rabbit.

A cream cracker with a smidge of shrimp or chive Primula spread. Three grapes. A Jaffa Cake. Apple slices with cheese. Two Iced Gems, like tiny bobble-hats knitted by elves in the night. One cube of unmade jelly.

A little bit of everything seemed to me the perfect meal.

Looking back, my dad ate with the tastes of a child. He ate like a child who had been forced to masticate nothing but over-boiled cabbage and could finally choose for himself. Certainly, my Grandma Pollard was an atrocious cook, although in her larder, beside the blue-tit-pecked milk bottles slushy with ice, she did always keep something sweet like ice-cream roll. It was my Grandad Pollard, though, whom my father was really rebelling against – the mean, joyless Methodist who thought nothing my dad ever did deserved praise. My dad loved processed meat, so would frequently reward himself with a tin of hot dogs or pâté on toast (the cheap sort squeezed out of a plastic sausage) for breakfast. He often indulged himself with a paper bag full of Liquorice Torpedoes. Every night of his adult life – every single night – my father would wake up at 1 o’clock, tiptoe into the kitchen, open the fridge and make himself a banana milkshake. He would have a small Flake to accompany it, the kind you get in boxes for 99s. He would then brush his teeth and tiptoe back to bed, an adult in thrall to the idea of the midnight feast.

But he was also, like many children, a fussy eater. Because being picky is the other side of getting to choose. It’s choosing not to. It’s refusing to put something in your mouth, because you’re old enough to realize you don’t have to. They can’t make you. And the dinner table is a place where you have power.

He wouldn’t eat vegetables. He left them at the side of his plate when Mum cooked them. Or, I tell a lie, he only liked mushrooms, onions and butter beans. He would eat no fruit except bananas (he ate one briskly every break time at school, as his concession to health).

Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell and Lillian Hoban is a book about pickiness. The opposite of Albert’s delight in every flavour is Frances’s monomania. She likes bread and jam because if she knows what she is getting she is always pleased. Her opposition to other foods seems to be mainly textural – we discover this from the little songs she sings to herself about poached eggs and their ‘funny little quiver’. She, it is implied, is shivering like the eggs are. Such neophobia has a practical application in nature – children are right to be nervous of things they put in their mouth that are sloppy, squishy, tough, gritty or loose. It’s a way of keeping them safe, and Frances only feels safe with food that is familiar.

Her parents decide to let her eat bread and jam exclusively, in a rather high-stakes game to see if she gets sick of it. But it’s also a clever strategy, because if pickiness is about children claiming what power they can over themselves, her parents allow Frances that power. Instead of forcing string beans and veal cutlets down her throat with forks or threats, they give Frances what she wants until she discovers she doesn’t want it. Until she skips with her rope and finds herself singing:

Jam for snacks and jam for meals,

I know how a jam jar feels –

FULL … OF … JAM!

(As an aside, I am always interested in what parents do at bedtime when they arrive at a ‘song’ such as this. Do they simply read it aloud? Do they sing it? Do they make up a tune or use a well-known one and try and make it fit? I always put words to the same kind of repetitive, lilting, semi-flat tune I must have made up off the top of my head long ago for just this purpose, without really putting enough commitment into it, and the results are fairly disappointing.)

In the end two tears roll down Frances’s badger cheek, and she asks if she may have some spaghetti and meatballs, then eats it all up. In the triumphant final scene, Albert asks her what she has for lunch, and she brings out a doily and a tiny vase of violets. She has tomato soup in a thermos, celery and a salt shaker, a sandwich filled with lobster-salad, carrot sticks and two black olives, plums and a miniature basket piled with cherries, and a vanilla pudding in a cup with a spoon.

Albert decides this is a good lunch, and I agree. It still delights me, because it is a book about the wonderful, various world. A world which has so much more in it than predictable sugars and bland white carbs. A world of pleasures that awaits if you only let yourself try.

Which brings me to Green Eggs and Ham (1960). It is perhaps, thinking about the profound pleasure I take from reading it aloud, one of my top ten poems ever. This is notable because I don’t recall even reading a Dr Seuss book as a child, although I was vaguely aware The Cat in the Hat existed – Seuss’s books weren’t such a big thing in the UK in the 1980s. My love of him is not nostalgic – it’s based on my complete admiration, as a fellow adult poet, for his genius. If anything, before my first child was born I was absolutely prepared to loathe him. My head was full of garish, shouty movie trailers (Mike Myers, Jesus!). His presence on my Twitter feed was split evenly between articles about his racist cartoons and supposedly ‘inspirational’ quotes:

‘Keep on shining’ #DrSeuss

‘Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened’ #DrSeuss

‘You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams’ #DrSeuss

‘Only you can control your future’ #DrSeuss

I mean, he sounded appalling.

In fact, to read about Dr Seuss is to discover a man full of complexities and contradictions. A shifting, ambiguous figure, who said ‘kids can see a moral coming a mile off’, yet somehow managed to write books that have been seized on as moral fables by everyone from environmentalists (The Lorax) to pro-life protestors (who use his slogan from Horton Hears a Who!, ‘A person’s a person, no matter how small’). A man who, during the war, drew caricatures of Japanese Americans as invading hordes and Africans with monkey-like features, yet who could write The Sneetches, a children’s book about the evils of racist propaganda. Oh, The Places You’ll Go! is so sentimental it is a popular gift for students graduating from high school in the USA and Canada, with a sales spike every spring. Yet it is also true that Seuss could be, as he claimed, ‘subversive as hell’.

He was born Theodor Seuss Geisel in 1904, to a family of German immigrants in Springfield, Massachusetts. His father managed the family brewery, Kalmbach and Geisel (known locally as ‘Come Back and Guzzle’), making thousands of barrels a year of porter, ale and lager. His mother had been a baker’s daughter and would chant the names of pies, as she had done at the counter, to send her children to sleep: ‘Apple, mince, lemon … peach, apricot, pineapple … blueberry, coconut, custard and SQUASH!’ His childhood memories were largely happy, although an eighteen-month-old sister, Henrietta, died of pneumonia when he was three. He would always remember the sight of her tiny casket in the house.

When he was a teenager two shadows appeared. First, America entered into war against Germany and anti-German feeling began to run high, with frankfurters renamed ‘hot dogs’ and sauerkraut ‘liberty cabbage’. Then in 1919 the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified and the family brewery doomed.

Prohibition was a time of forbidden fruit. Seuss grew to love drawing, inspired by comic strips like Krazy Kat. At Dartmouth College he regularly contributed to the humour magazine Jack-O-Lantern, but was banned after being caught swigging gin with friends in his room. In this genesis story, to continue to contribute, Geisel began signing himself off as ‘Seuss’. (The pronunciation is usually anglicized, but he said that the correct, German pronunciation is to rhyme it with ‘voice’.)

Seuss’s real breakthrough didn’t come until 1954. Life magazine ran an article that blamed high illiteracy amongst school children on all their books being too boring (they were typically primers about ordinary kids, like Dick and Jane, Seuss memorably summing them up as ‘Dick has a ball. Dick likes the ball. The ball is red, red, red, red, red’). The director of education at Houghton Mifflin, William Ellsworth Spaulding, responded by compiling a list of the first words that early readers needed to recognize – or, as Seuss put it, ‘the number of words that a teacher can ram into the average child’s noodle’ – and asking Seuss, who had already published a couple of picture books, to write a poem using them that children couldn’t put down. Legend has it that Seuss found the first two that rhymed – ‘cat’ and ‘hat’ – and proceeded to write The Cat in the Hat.

It took him many months, though. Part of the problem was the words themselves. His article ‘My Hassle with the First Grade Language’, written for the Chicago Tribune, has a brilliantly funny passage about this – the words were ‘thrillers … like am, is, but, if, in, into, no, yes. Words full of great adventure … like milk and mitten and mop’. He had been given a near impossible brief – to write a joyful, action-packed page-turner, whilst remembering to ‘Repeat! Repeat! Taking care, of course, not to be boring.’ There was also the problem of finding rhyming pairs. ‘The list had a daddy,’ Seuss notes. ‘But it didn’t have a caddy. I found myself snarling: “faddy, maddy, saddy, waddy”.’

The result is a remarkable poetic feat. Poetry often works by using constraints – it is language pushed to its limits by imposing ‘rules’. Poetries can be structured around alliteration, metre, rhyme schemes or syllable counts. Seuss uses these, but in The Cat in the Hat he was introducing a whole new form of constraint – a highly restricted vocabulary. There are parallels with the work of the French avant-garde movement known as OuLiPo, founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, who invented forms like the Lipogram, which excludes certain letters, or the Univocalism where you are only allowed to use a single vowel (such as ‘a’ or ‘u’). But Seuss’s innovation is in a mainstream children’s book a decade earlier. And the remarkable thing is that the constraint is never noticeable. The story – of that mysterious, dangerous cat and his minions, Thing One and Thing Two, descending on the house when Mother is away (a story so sinister and contrary to our current awareness of child protection issues that I am often reminded of director Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games when reading it) – never feels forced or limited by the vocabulary. In fact, the book feels deliciously lawless, even though this is, to some extent, an illusion.

Maurice Sendak has memorably said that Seuss drawings ‘all look like bowel movements’ and the book is ‘in the literal sense shitty’, enacting a rebellion against the tyranny of toilet training before conceding that the mess needs tidying up. It is a poem bursting with anarchy that makes us long for the anarchy to be over (the parents reading it aloud feel themselves identifying with the anxious pet fish). It is a book in which anything might happen, yet one written under the pressure of incredibly tight linguistic laws. In The Cat in the Hat, Seuss manages to hold anarchy and authority in tension in a way that is part of his talent.

If you find that impressive, wait until you try Green Eggs and Ham, the result of a bet between Seuss and Bennett Cerf, his publisher, that Seuss could not better himself and write his next book using only fifty words.

Those fifty words are: a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you.

Fifty words! A book! It’s impossible, yet Green Eggs and Ham is a story with a beginning, middle and end. It has genuine narrative propulsion. It’s memorable. It’s funny. It even achieves poetic scansion.

It’s the tale of an unnamed character who looks a little like The Cat in the Hat, except his stovepipe hat is a rather dull black rather than striped like a barber’s pole. He’s also not a cat. More of a dog, loose-eared, a bit battered and jowly, with the air of a put-upon authority figure. But he has the same long, fuzzy step; the same identical eyebrows and lashed lids and tiny pert nose.

As the book begins, this character – let’s call him Anon – is like anyone’s exhausted parent, trying to read the newspaper. And then another, smaller, more upbeat little fur-fellow enters the book, standing on a strange beast’s back, grinning, with a sign that declares: ‘Sam I am.’ (What kind of name is that, by the way? What a boastful confidence in his own existence!)

He proceeds to offer our unnamed protagonist, via a long mechanical arm, a plate of green eggs and ham. It is interestingly a kind of reversal of what usually happens in homes, where the grown-up offers the food and the small person refuses. This time, it is the grown-up who turns up his nose at a proffered dinner. However, as the yolks of the eggs are a vibrant algae colour and, it should be noted, the ham is also completely green, it could be argued that it is a meal no one in their right mind would eat. This is nothing like the Seuss-inspired recipe for green eggs and ham that Martha Stewart says ‘is a fun meal idea your kids will love’ (involving an arugula, basil and parsley pesto folded into scrambled eggs). Rather, this screams mould and twenty-four hours hunched over a toilet bowl. His proffered plate refused, Sam-I-Am spends the whole of the rest of the book wondering whether Anon would, perhaps, eat it if only the context was different.

It is a delight to read. The constant repetitions, particularly, as Anon gets angrier and angrier, and must list all the ways in which he does not want to try green eggs and ham are marvellous to perform aloud. The iambic tetrameter makes it roll along on the tongue with such momentum (an iamb is a basic ‘foot’ or unit of poetry which has an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. ‘I will.’ Each line here is made up of four iambs – ‘I will | not eat | them with | a mouse / I will | not eat | them in | a house’).

The work is a dialogue poem – an interesting form in itself. It means you’ve just worked yourself up into a peak of irritation when you have to cut back to the chirpy voice of Sam-I-Am. I can never get through it without giggling. Always a sign of the best books, Green Eggs and Ham has also become part of my everyday dinner table conversations with my son. I’m lucky that, so far, neither of my children are very picky, although Gruff has taken against leaves in all their guises, but whenever I want him to try something new I make up new questions: ‘Would you eat it with a dog?’

‘I would not eat it on a frog,’ Gruff says, solemnly, poking a mushroom.

Because the moral seems to be that you can’t know whether you will like something until you try it. Sam-I-Am is proved right, after all. Following a wonderful wordless double-spread in which fox, mouse, goat, Sam-I-Am and assorted others hold their breath as Anon raises a sagging green egg on a fork, he eats it and realizes it is delicious after all. Trying is shown to be the key.

But is this actually the meaning of Green Eggs and Ham, or is something darker at play? Is Seuss on the parent’s side, helping us encourage our children to sample new foods, or is he satirizing our hysterical attempts at persuasion?

In some ways, I must admit, Sam-I-Am is a kind of over-zealous advertiser, selling his heavily adulterated foodstuffs which, frankly, must be full of E-numbers and colourings. (Look, you can even eat them in a car or in the dark! They might lead you to new friendships with mice and foxes! They taste of adventure and company!) He repeats his message, over and over, until the consumer gives in.

Do I want my children to learn that they should eat something that looks bad for you, just because a cute cartoon creature with catchy jingles repeatedly tells you so (I’m looking at you, Honey Monster and Tony the Tiger)?

Or could he even be a propagandist, of the kind Karl Duncker was reminded of when he persuaded children to go against their own taste buds? In many ways this is a tale about suggestibility. Sam-I-Am brainwashes Anon into embracing what he naturally reviles. What, in fact, he should reject. It ends with poison entering the bloodstream. Submission. Our unnamed protagonist obsequiously thanks Sam-I-Am as he cleans the plate of its grotesque fare.

Perhaps I am going too far, but there is something about the books of Dr Seuss, a kind of radical ambiguity, that allows people the space to project all sorts of theories. That’s his great genius. And I am not going as far, at least, as the People’s Republic of China, which in 1965 banned Green Eggs and Ham for its ‘portrayal of early Marxism’.

There is one more book that belongs in this chapter. It is In the Night Kitchen (1970), by Maurice Sendak, one of his trilogy loosely based on children’s psychological development in which In the Night Kitchen is about the toddler, Where the Wild Things Are the preschooler and Outside Over There the pre-adolescent. Each of them, he notes, is about ‘one minute’s worth of distraction’ and ‘begins with a child in rage’. In the Night Kitchen is another book I only discovered as an adult which puts the symbolism of food at its centre and in which I find, like Green Eggs and Ham, strange depths.

At first In the Night Kitchen seems to be about a little boy called Mickey’s bad dream after he is made furious by a ‘racket in the night’ – which some have suggested, quite convincingly, might be the noise of his parents having sex – and tumbles out of bed and out of his clothes.

What follows is a midnight feast turned horror movie, as he falls into a kitchen where the jars of jam and oats and baby syrup have morphed into the skyline of a brutal city. Three bakers (triplets who look like Oliver Hardy of ‘Laurel and Hardy’ in white coats, with Hitler moustaches and chef’s hats) try to cook Mickey, mixing him up in their cake batter until only his flailing hand is visible, then lifting it into the oven where he begins to steam and bake. It has hints of classical tragedy, of Thyestes unknowingly being served a feast of his own sons, or nightmares of still being alive in the coffin as it incinerates. For Sendak, a Polish Jew who lost many members of his extended family in the Holocaust during what he called the ‘terrible situation’ of his childhood (his father found out about their fate on the day of Sendak’s Bar Mitzvah), the symbolism of the oven must also have been unavoidable.

In all these books the shadow of Nazism seems unavoidable.

But then Mickey does not accept his fate – instead he sits up, ruining the cake. There seems to have been some confusion between his own name and the word milk, as they have letters in common. He declares, gleefully and defiantly: ‘I’M NOT THE MILK AND THE MILK’S NOT ME! I’M MICKEY!’

Milk is at the beginning of it all. Breast milk or formula milk is everyone’s first food. Slightly sweet. Slightly warm. Filling. As we get older, the same flavours find their way into so many comfort foods: Petit Filous, Babybels, ice creams, rice pudding, custard, bowls of cereal steeped in sweet milk, macaroni cheese, cream cheese bagels, stringy toasties, stuffed-crust double cheese pizzas, cream cakes, cheesecake, enormous buckets of caramel latte, Goodnight Moon’s bowl full of ‘mush’.

At first, too, this flavour is linked to power. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott has spoken of how newborn babies have no conception of the outside world, only experiencing that when they are hungry they eat, so that it appears as if milk is conjured by their need – they seem to will it into existence. Growing up means having to learn that the world can frustrate and will not magically shape itself to our desires.

Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen contains the fantasy that the child can access unlimited milk. Having told the bakers that he is not the milk, Mickey sets about getting them some, fashioning himself an aeroplane from bread dough, grabbing a measuring cup which he uses as a dashing helmet, and flying to the top of a giant milk bottle. He dives in and his dough-clothes dissolve, leaving him to swim deep into the deep milk, utterly naked. The illustrations even show his little buttocks and genitals, due to which the book has frequently been challenged or banned in the USA. (Sendak commented: ‘Mickey has a penis. Gevalt! Who would have thought such a thing could happen to a child?’) Sendak’s homosexuality – he lived with his partner Eugene Glynn for fifty years until Glynn’s death – is perhaps an important factor here. He is queering the picture book, allowing a boy to enjoy his body without shame. It is a delectable dream of freedom and excess.

The American poet Rita Dove has a wonderful poem called ‘After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed’ that captures some of the reasons people might find the picture book threatening. It begins with her daughter spreading her legs ‘to find her vagina’, perhaps inspired by Mickey’s shameless nakedness, then demanding to see her mother’s and shrieking: ‘We’re pink!’ In the last verse we are told that every month the little girl asks about her mother’s period (another taboo fluid), before ending:

How to tell her that it’s what makes us –

black mother, cream child.

That we’re in the pink

and the pink’s in us.

Dove’s poem reveals how In the Night Kitchen opens a space in which both children and parents can think about bodies, flesh, fluids, intimacy, nakedness.

But the milk is also importantly not Mickey. He has realized he is separate from his mother. That milk will not magically appear but can only be obtained if he acts in the world, with physical or imaginative work. Mickey saves the day, pouring milk into the batter. Suddenly filled with a glorious sense of self and self-pride, Mickey crows: ‘Cock a Doodle Doo!’ (in thick, twirly, giant red letters) before falling back safe into his bed.

I have reached the final page. It shows a radiant sun, with rays of gold and orange and lemon and biscuit and rose gold and, in the centre, Mickey smiling contentedly in his dough suit clutching a big bottle of milk. My son is clutching his own milk. ‘And that’s why, thanks to Mickey,’ I tell him, ‘we have cake every morning.’

Wait though – we have cake every morning? Cake? Do we? Did I just say that aloud to my child, as if stating a fact? Who has cake every morning for God’s sake?

It’s a brilliantly tricky last line, like a joke played on the parent. We have entered the child’s world and forgotten ourselves, and now look at what we’ve gone and said. Sendak is always hyperaware of the parents both in the story and reading the story, their absence and presence.

Sendak is also always on the side of the child.

‘Of course, we must have cake every morning,’ Gruff replies, smiling up at me.