4. The Wild Rumpus

On boys and monsters

Death is represented in the picture book, almost exclusively, as a mouth with teeth.

Mickey in his pie reminds us that food and danger are all mixed up. To eat is pleasure, but to be eaten is pain. The gingerbread man runs as fast as he can but is ingested. We flee from the tiger’s mouth, the wolf’s mouth, the dragon’s mouth, the bear’s mouth. To die is to become Witch with Chips, owl ice cream, Gruffalo crumble.

Chicken Licken, Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky, Drakey Lakey and Goosey Loosey are gobbled down by Foxy Loxy. He licks his whiskers.

Why is this the only way we allow picture book characters to die? As a death, at least, to be eaten is not wasteful. It has a kind of rationale to it. And being eaten leaves – usefully for the illustrator – no corpse. It is a kind of magic trick: you are there and then gone. There is also, perhaps, the idea that being swallowed whole is somehow reversible, at least in the child’s mind, which makes it more tolerable. Jonah squats in the belly of the whale. In Prokofiev’s musical composition Peter and the Wolf, if we listen carefully at the end, we hear the duck still quacking inside the wolf’s tummy. In one of my children’s favourite books, John Fardell’s The Day Louis Got Eaten, the Sabre-Toothed Yomper swallows the Spiny-Backed Guzzler swallows the Undersnatch swallows the Grabular swallows the Gulper who has swallowed Louis. In one picture we can see them all, like Russian dolls nesting within each other, or a vast turducken, and then – burp – they all come back up.

Or should the question be, why is this the only way we allow picture book characters to kill? It is power displayed in its simplest form, as in a game on a mobile phone – you beat the other players and accrue their energy. Your shark eats the fish or begins to flicker; life draining away. Eating is often used in picture books to elicit an uneasy laugh from shocked children, who aren’t quite sure what just happened or whether they should be laughing. In Tadpole’s Promise, by Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross, tadpole and his beautiful rainbow friend, the caterpillar, grow up and he, er, digests her. In I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen, on the very funny last page, the rabbit’s disappearance is explained by bear’s unconvincing denial (‘I would not eat a rabbit’).

Perhaps we allow these stories to depict murder in the form of eating because, well, we want to normalize the relationship between murder and eating. As a mother, of course, I’m grateful to the Normans for their euphemisms pork, beef and venison; to sausages for their facelessness. Their intensive processing is likely to be the reason sausages feature so often in children’s culture – in Carle, in Kerr, in Mr Skinny, in Punch and Judy. In an interview with The Guardian, Allan Ahlberg observed of his oeuvre: ‘I like the word flabbergasted, I like the name Horace and I seem to write quite a lot about sausages.’ At one point, Allan and Janet Ahlberg even worked on the idea for a book called Sausages! where if a reader spotted a mistake they had to yell ‘Sausages!’ Perhaps it is because sausages are ‘Neat and hushed’, as the poet Mark Waldron has it in his marvellous poem ‘The Sausage Factory’, though I can never forget his final image of them: ‘wee circus elephants, / gripping the tail of the one that goes before, / marching uncertainly away from death.’ The famous schoolyard nonsense rhyme ‘The sausage is a cunning bird’ finds amusement, similarly, in zoomorphizing this least animal of meats, imagining it ‘makes its nest in gravy’.

I’m aware that the knowledge of where meat comes from is trickling through, slowly, into Gruff’s consciousness. And it makes me ashamed. I am waiting for unanswerable questions; for him to realize we are the wolf outside the houses of the three little pigs. I am the troll who listens for the billy goats trip-trapping over our bridge.

The bleakest story in all of children’s literature is about meat. It is called ‘How Some Children Played at Slaughtering’ and was collected by the Brothers Grimm. Part II begins:

There was once a father who slaughtered a pig, and his children saw that. In the afternoon, when they began playing, one child said to the other, ‘You be the little pig, and I’ll be the butcher.’ He then took a shiny knife and slit his little brother’s throat.

(trans. Jack Zipes)

In this tale, what our children look upon has consequences. Violent images beget violence.

Is it dangerous, then, to read our children picture books in which characters are cruel or brutal? Child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argued otherwise in his book The Uses of Enchantment, one of the great defences of disturbing fairy tales. He claimed that in modern life:

There is a widespread refusal to let children know that the source of much that goes wrong in life is due to our own natures … But children know that they are not always good; and often, even when they are, they would prefer not to be. This contradicts what they are told by their parents, and therefore makes the child a monster in his own eyes.

In contemporary society, where children are constantly exposed to the capitalist mantra that they must be ‘true to themselves’, this contradiction has only got worse. Actual adult life is a constant process of denying your own desires – forcing yourself to shun the lie-in, the sugar, the burger, the wine, the affair, the impulse to tell the boss what you think. Forcing yourself to mop up the vomit, work late, make the phone call, bake the birthday cake. Yet we often fail to teach our children that ‘good’ is not something we are but something we do. That ‘good’, anyway, is mainly used by parents as a synonym for ‘obedient’, even though that is not the same thing at all. Obedience is not a virtue. We say ‘What a good girl’ to the child who we have made share her sweets, although we know inside she is shuddering with resentment. ‘Follow your dreams!’ we declare, although we know children dream (as we do) of being ‘bad’.

If we follow Bettelheim’s logic, there is an important function, then, to children’s poems, tales and books that acknowledge the existence of monsters: as enemies, as friends, as doubles. They make appearances from the earliest children’s nursery rhymes, as in the German poem ‘Das bucklige Männlein’:

When I go to my small room,

To eat stewed fruit

A humpy little man is there

Gobbling it.

The humpy little man is the self’s dark twin, sabotaging everything: disfigured, grumpy, devouring.

To return to Maurice Sendak, he is of course most famous for his own rendering of the beasts of self in Where the Wild Things Are (1963), which has sold over 20 million copies. The book seems to have been formed from memories of the gulf between desire and duty. In an interview with The Jewish Chronicle he recalled how often, when dinner was on the table and his mother had been calling him repeatedly, she’d make him feel guilty by saying: ‘Your cousins, you know they’re your age. They don’t play ball. They’re dead. They’re in a concentration camp … and you don’t come up and eat.’

The book was originally going to be called Where the Wild Horses Are. Sendak’s editor, Ursula Nordstrom, liked this poetic title, but then Sendak realized he couldn’t draw horses. After he told her it wasn’t working, she said, ‘Maurice, what can you draw?’

‘Vilder chaiah’ was something his mother would call him, the Yiddish version of ‘wild thing’. In the end, inspired by a shiva after someone in the family had died, he decided to base the ‘wild things’ on his older relatives from Europe: ‘They were unkempt. Their teeth were horrifying. They had hair unravelling out of their noses. And they’d pick you up and hug you and kiss you. “Aggghh. Oh, we could eat you up,” they’d say. And we knew they would eat anything. Anything.’ His very act of drawing them as grotesque, humpy creatures could be seen as a kind of cruelty. The book itself is an aggressive act by a bad little boy, wanting to wound.

This subversiveness has always discomforted parents, many of whom claimed at the time that the book was too scary. (Sendak suggested they should ‘go to hell’, while if children couldn’t handle the story, they should ‘go home’ or ‘wet your pants. Do whatever you like.’) One of the most amusing anecdotes about the book is Sendak’s recollection of a fight with his safety-conscious publisher, who wanted to change the dinner from ‘hot’ to ‘warm’ at the end of the book. ‘It was going to burn the kid,’ Sendak recalled. ‘I couldn’t believe it. But it turned into a real world war … Just trying to convey how dopey “warm” sounded. Unemotional. Undramatic. Everything about that book is “hot”.’ Where the Wild Things Are is a dangerous book, but the hot dinner is perhaps the least dangerous thing in it.

For me, the subversiveness lies in the fact that it is a book about power. Although many commentators, and Sendak himself, have spoken of it as a book about rage, I find Max disturbing because he doesn’t look angry – or at least not in the incontinent, temper-tantrum way I associate with small children. This boy has chosen to put on his wolf suit, then deliberately constructs some kind of grim lair, where a tortured teddy bear dangles like a warning. Tailed and with his fork aloft, he leaps towards his dog, smiling as purposefully as a devil. His declaration ‘I’LL EAT YOU UP!’ is not the impotent cry of infant rage, but a threat. He wants to possess the mother utterly; to own her by subduing her will and making her silent. (‘For each man kills the thing he loves,’ as Oscar Wilde noted.) As the forest grows in Max’s room, he doesn’t look furious so much as smug, then giddy with delight.

In the land of the Wild Things too, Max does not act out his rage, but lives out his fantasy of total control. Sendak’s father once told him when he was ill that if he could look out of the window without blinking he would see an angel (naturally, Sendak did). Max also gains uncanny power by not blinking once. Here he can tame and intimidate everyone. As King, he is treated with respect. The Wild Things bow. He can be as loud and silly as he wishes (in a bold move, when Mickey participates in the wild rumpus there are three whole wordless spreads, allowing the child to supply their own rumpus, although as an adult reader I always find the silence uncomfortable, chicken out, and choose to fill it with whoopings that fall dolefully flat). Max can punish his subjects, too, on a dictator’s arbitrary whim, sending them to bed without any supper.

Essentially, then, he gains adult freedoms but also adult responsibilities, and finds that ruling over others is not always pleasurable. Being in charge is lonely. He realizes he wants to be where he is loved ‘best of all’. Although this might suggest he learns some empathy with his mother, the illustrations undermine this reading – this is a picture book about the relationship between a mother and son in which the mother is never actually seen. Her reality is not important. The book is about Max resigning himself to his position as a child.

And what about that last, famous page, which boldly has no picture? The mother, I would argue, has lost her nerve. Despite all Max’s misbehaviour, she cannot bring herself to let him go hungry. Max doesn’t have to say sorry. He has discovered he does have power after all; the enormous power that comes from being loved. A picture of him eating the hot supper would be an irrelevance – it is the feeling that is important. How it makes Max glow inside.

It is a comforting story for children because it tells the truth that even if you behave badly, your mother still probably loves you unconditionally. This, understandably, is not a truth many adults want children to grasp.

My son likes to think of himself as good. A Goody not a Baddy. In the games he pesters me to play on the school run he is a sauropod and I am the theropod. He is Scooby-Doo (‘Yoinks!’) and I am ‘The Dark Mummy’. He is Chewbacca and I am an AT-AT walker firing at him: pew pew. On some very long walks to Morrisons, being a boy can strike me as gruelling – a never-ending chase scene. Is anything marketed to boys that doesn’t involve fighting? Life is figured as a perpetual battle in which you have to be good or you’re bad; you have to be best or you’re dead. As in that chant which has endured virtually unchanged since Roman times, if you’re not the king of the castle you’re a dirty rascal by default. (The poet Horace wrote down the Latin verse for the game in 20 BC: ‘Rex erit qui recte faciet; / Qui non faciet, non erit.’)

One of the ways in which Gruff manages to keep a sense of his own goodness is via Oneie (like ‘Onesie’ without the ‘s’), his bad hand. His other hand is called Double Trouble but is actually much better behaved. Oneie first appeared when we were shopping in a Tesco Metro and Gruff took a blueberry from a packet in the fruit aisle. I told him if we hadn’t paid for it, it was stealing and he could get in big trouble. ‘Oneie did it,’ he replied. Oneie has since been blamed for running his finger along filthy fences, all breakages and spillages, the unspooling of entire toilet rolls, the repeated tipping over of Gruff’s toybox, and a similar incident with Pick ’n’ Mix. (‘Oneie thought little children were supposed to have nice sweets,’ Gruff explained.) Occasionally I have heard Gruff talking to him. Oneie, it should be said, is not uncomplicated. He often wilts with remorse; curls into a lonesome fist.

Perhaps the only picture book to equal Sendak’s as a portrait of the monstrous self is David McKee’s Not Now, Bernard (1980).

McKee is more famous for Elmer, the rainbow-coloured patchwork elephant who, amongst other things, decorates a plastic dinner set in my kitchen. Every evening, after the carnage of mealtime, I wipe my children’s hands, sweep the crumbs, rinse the bib, scrape baked beans off Elmer into the bin and recall the story of his invention. McKee was walking down the street in Devon with his wife, Violet, and daughter, Chantel, when a boy said, ‘Look, there’s a nigger.’ McKee’s wife was Anglo-Indian. McKee realized the boy was talking about his beautiful daughter. Elmer became a story about celebrating your true colours.

McKee is a moralist, then, but he is an unpredictable one. His books are fabular, yet, unlike that first Elmer, later ones often deliver confusing messages. His Melric series seems to advocate unshakable loyalty to their king, even when he is mistaken. His book Denver, about a rich philanthropist who makes the error of sharing out his money equally, has been savaged by Polly Toynbee as ‘Ayn Rand for baby beginners, trickle-down economics for trustafarian toddlers, a nursery Hayek for every little Conservative’.

Not Now, Bernard is his simplest but most ambiguous tale. The drawings of Bernard’s house, with its intricate seventies rugs and lampshades and TV dinner (sausages of course, always sausages) are stunning in their lurid, off-kilter realism. It is about a child whose parents ignore him. They are always busy doing something more important than attending to their son – hammering, getting something from a cupboard, watering a houseplant – and his attempts to engage them with a simple hello are met with ‘Not now, Bernard’. The parents are always drawn with their backs to Bernard. When the mother speaks to him her eyes are always closed. When Bernard mentions there is a monster in the garden that is going to eat him, this reaction does not change. The monster eats him. The monster comes into the house, roars, bites the father, breaks the toys, etc. The parents still don’t notice. ‘Not now, Bernard’ they say.

Is the monster Bernard? Francis Spufford has noted, in The Child that Books Built, that the monster is ‘very much Bernard-shaped and Bernard-sized’. Michael Rosen has called it a ‘cautionary tale’, suggesting that neglecting your children may turn them into monsters. In this metaphor, then, does Bernard genuinely become monstrous? Or just fantasize about being a monster? On one wall is a picture that, if you squint carefully, seems to show a man with a gun holding up a petrol station – people fleeing; a woman with her hands up. It seems as though it might foretell Bernard’s destiny. Heartbreakingly, the monster ends this story in bed with his teddy, saying: ‘But I’m a monster.’

Just as Max discovered, monstrousness changes nothing – but Max is still loved. Bernard is still unloved.

There is another way to read it too, though, in which Bernard does get eaten. ‘Hello, monster,’ Bernard says, smiling at the monster, and the monster meets his eye.

In her ‘Stroppy Author’ blog, children’s writer Anne Rooney has noted: ‘He knows the monster is going to eat him and he *still* goes to say hello to it – because even bad attention is better than no attention.’ A fellow reader, Rooney notes, called it ‘a book about suicide for kids’. Neglect might lead our children towards bad decisions, bad people, a quick and cruel end.

Coming back from the train station in Peckham at dusk last night, in cold violet air, frozen fish fingers swinging in a plastic bag by my leg, I passed two teenage boys. They were near the high school gates, beside a few brave daffodils trying to burn through a crust of snow. A younger boy approached in his hoodie. ‘About time, yeah,’ I overheard one of the teenagers say. ‘I was gonna have to stab you.’

I walked on, head down. Averting my eyes like Bernard’s mother. Wondering what had led that boy in the hoodie to walk out of his home and towards his monster. It is hard for me to imagine what it is like right now to be a young man growing up in South London, where gangs and knives are a fact of life. I try not to think about what it might be like for Gruff in a few years.

My own childhood was so sheltered by comparison. I think the first time I realized that cruelty existed in the real world, and not just in storybooks, wasn’t until I was in reception. It must have been spring. At half-three, Dad let me run to the playing field, down a steep slope behind the school. All day there had been whispers about a plague of thousands of frogs; a weird exodus. In my recollection the grass is pinging with them, although can that be true? Small bodies with damp, crooked legs; chests pale, pulsing fungi. We tried to catch the spill of them in cupped hands. They were so cute, like tiny wind-up toys.

On the barbed-wire fence at the back another child showed me a row of spiked frogs, like a medieval warning. Cold, congealed flesh. She was breathless with thrilled indignation. Big boys did it, she said, as if their masculinity was the explanation.

In Angry Arthur (1982), written by Hiawyn Oram and illustrated by Satoshi Kitamura, there is, more clearly than in Not Now, Bernard, no monster but the boy himself. Tortured by fury, he helplessly flails in the mess of a rage which expands page by page until it destroys the galaxy. And for what? Because he is not allowed to stay up to watch a western on TV. Goodies and Baddies, then. The TV is depicted by Kitamura with smoke and arrows pouring out of it into the living room, battles spilling into the domestic space. Angry Arthur is perhaps one of the first picture books to deal with our fear of toddlers becoming addicted to screens; our sense that televisual violence might seep into the real world to brainwash our children.

Except it is not just the lack of TV but the lack of power that makes Arthur angry. When the mother comes in to tell him to switch it off, her shadow looms large and menacing. She has disrupted the male fantasy. He sees the walls of his cell, his chains, and cannot endure her authority over him. In a stunning series of images, Arthur’s limitless fury smashes his home, his street, his town, the earth (which cracks like an eggshell), and eventually the entire universe in a ‘universe quake’ that seems to break the conventions of the picture book itself, despite his family impotently telling him ‘that’s enough’.

Kitamura has since illustrated a great many titles (I would highly recommend his collaborations with the poet John Agard), but this masterpiece was, astonishingly, his first book. Born in Tokyo in 1956, he had no formal art training, but had spent his childhood fascinated by forms of art – like many Japanese children he often drew on the pavement and roads; at school he drew caricatures of teachers; he pored over comics; he delighted in Kamishibai shows, a popular street entertainment until television took over, where the Kamishibai man would cycle up, sell children cheap sweets as an admission fee, then from a box on his bike take out a series of hand-painted sliding pictures to tell a tale.

Having decided to be an illustrator, Kitamura tried twenty publishers before he met Klaus Flugge of Andersen Press, who asked him to illustrate Angry Arthur. It was by a South African writer, Hiawyn Oram, who recalled growing up under apartheid – its unfairness; its carelessness with human lives. She had been an advertising copywriter, writing ads for toothpaste, chocolate bars and Lucozade before her first children’s book, Skittle-wonder and the Wizard (1980). A week later, Kitamura had produced a complete, perfect set of roughs.

Editor and writer Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers, has named as his ‘favourite page of any book’ the one on which Arthur creates a ‘universe quake’ that seems to destroy everything (except multiple vibrating Arthurs), saying: ‘For me it is right up there with Ted Hughes’ Crow, Francis Bacon’s Popes or Mahler’s Ninth.’ Porter also notes that, in 1982, it was easy to read it as a book about a nuclear weapon. ‘This is the boy pressing the red button, becoming destroyer of worlds.’

In the end Arthur is alone, in his bed on a tiny chunk of Mars, unable – despite thinking and thinking – to remember what triggered his anger. ‘He never did remember,’ the text tells us. ‘Can you?’ In a way this is a useful conclusion. It seems to ask not only whether we recall what caused Arthur’s fury, but what causes our own rages. It speaks to the listening children with their meltdowns over spoons; the reading parents, with their snapping impatience over spilt juice. The whole book is about perspective – how do we let little things become so grotesquely outsized? Arthur goes to sleep and, we might presume, wakes up with the universe restored to its correct proportions.

But what if it can’t be restored? The only cure for anger that the book seems to offer is the passage of time, but there are many men who seem unable to grow out of raging against their own impotence. What if Arthur is on Reddit now, still mesmerized by screens, typing furiously about cucks and feminazis? What if thoughtless, aggrieved men will annihilate humanity, and no one survive but a few friends of Elon Musk on Mars?

Everything might end like this, nothing more than bits in space.

Boys, though.

It’s always boys in the newspapers stabbing each other; misunderstanding consent. It’s always boys playing with monsters in these books. Boys filled with rage. Boys fighting. Boys roaring. HULK SMASH.

Or, that is, it’s always boys we depict like this. These are the stories we tell about boys to our boys. It’s not Angry Anna or Not Now, Bertha. Peter Rabbit misbehaves while his sisters Flopsy, Mopsy and Cotton-tail are ‘good little bunnies’. In Elfrida Vipont and Raymond Briggs’ The Elephant and the Bad Baby, in which the title characters are a kind of two-year-old’s Bonnie and Clyde, stealing lollipops, pies and buns and going ‘rumpeta, rumpeta, rumpeta’, with the shopkeepers chasing after them, the elephant and eventually Bad Baby are both revealed to be boys (‘He never once said please!’). In many of these tales too, whilst there is some notional punishment, it is the wild pleasure of the mischief that is memorable – the thrill of destruction, the illicit cake, the chase. What if these stories do, after all, have a negative effect on boys, naughtiness begetting naughtiness?

Girls are sugar and spice, it is only boys who are ‘frogs and snails and puppy-dog’s tails’. The first time I read Gruff that rhyme I saw him crumple. ‘What did you just say?’ he asked, his voice wavery with tears. ‘That’s not nice.’

No one seems to defend boy’s culture any more, but growing up there was much I liked about it: adventure, courage, jokes. I had no interest in pinkness, pony hair, dolls that wept actual tears, or any of the other sorry trivialities with which I was apparently supposed to distract myself. Because my dad only had daughters, he instilled in us a love of The Beano, Flash Gordon and James Bond. He loved watching Goodies beat Baddies, then rewinding and watching it again. He would show us clips of Bruce Lee fights over and over on the video, until I identified with that stray kitten perpetually watching the struggle in the Colosseum. Jason fought the Harryhausen skeletons, then the bones sprang back to life. Rocky Balboa chased chickens in infinite circles.

I wanted to be as cool as Indiana Jones or Dr Peter Venkman, or at least Garfield the cat, decorating my room with examples of his withering sarcasm. I think I’m allergic to mornings! (Unfortunately my wit was not quite as sharp. At four, when told to wish one of my sister’s little friends Happy New Year, I managed only: ‘Happy New Dirt, Ruthie Rat.’)

I didn’t want to be male, you understand. I wanted to be the one cool girl who got to hang out with the boys. I wanted to be Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters, Marion Ravenwood drinking men under the table in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Princess Leia leading the rebels. In reception I was proud to be friends with Chris and Matthew, who taught me to do Chinese burns. I remember going to Matthew’s house for tea and having a mixture of canned French onion and oxtail soup, the darkest tasting thing I could imagine, and him teaching me the word bitch. On Valentine’s Day I sent a card to Simon Hickey saying: ‘Be my Valentine or I’ll do Karate on you.’

Best Friends for Frances by Russell and Lillian Hoban was my introduction to feminism. I was outraged when Frances’s best friend, Albert, wouldn’t let her join in his ‘wander’ as he planned to do things he thought she couldn’t do. Frances asks him what those things might be:

‘Catching snakes,’ said Albert. ‘Throwing stones at telephone poles. A little frog work maybe. Walking on fences. Whistling with grass blades. Looking for crow feathers.’

In irritation, Frances takes her little sister Gloria out on a rival wander with a picnic hamper, sacks and eggs for games, a jar of frogs, balloons and lollies, and a sign saying:

BEST FRIENDS

OUTING

NO BOYS

I recreated this protest. A photograph still exists. I am crunching an apple with my funny little sister and small friends, our tops off in the sunshine against a backdrop of rosebay willowherb, holding our first placard.

Were there boys’ books then? I mean, I guess there were. I guess they just used to call them books. In the forty-two books Dr Seuss wrote, not one has a female lead in its central story. But I don’t remember many picture books that seemed aimed exclusively at an audience of boys. Some of Richard Scarry’s perhaps, like Cars and Trucks and Things That Go (1974), in their ridiculously detailed, exhaustive drawings of vehicles (‘gravel truck’, ‘asphalt oil spreader’, ‘asphalt dumpcart’, ‘asphalt finisher’), but these did feature Officer Flossy in hot pursuit and Mistress Mouse doing the repairs (and Ma puts on the snow chains).

It only seems to be in recent years that manufacturers have realized dividing up any product by gender is a way of making money, as parents of a son and daughter feel pressured to buy everything twice. It was also only in the 1970s that the idea that boys were failing to engage with reading began to gain traction. In the USA the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) began undertaking reading assessments in 1971, and girls have outscored boys every year since. Over the decades, one of the ‘solutions’ that has grown in popularity is to pitch books specifically at little boys (even though you could have argued they were the default audience beforehand). It begins with the assumption that boys must be struggling because they think reading is boring and ‘girly’. To raise their literacy, books need to be made subversive and macho.

What do these boys’ books consist of? Soldiers and cowboys – those variations on violence which, I suppose, were the classic male genres – are no longer generally considered acceptable (even in my childhood I can’t recall seeing them, though grown-ups still occasionally spoke of ‘Red Indians’). Instead the violence is now situated in a fantasy or securely historical world: monsters, pirates, aliens, knights, zombies, robots, T-Rexes, anything ‘spooky’. All the characters in this world will, in defiance of biological reality, be male. Boyhood, these books say, is about fighting and bravely laughing off danger. As neuroscientist Cordelia Fine has noted in her book Delusions of Gender, priming subjects to be aware of their gender before a task – for example, reminding a girl that she is a girl before doing a maths task – can actually have a huge impact on results. Members of a group who know there are negative stereotypes about them can become anxious about their performance, with their ability to perform therefore hindered, a phenomenon Fine refers to as ‘stereotype threat’. It might be argued that boys’ books are counterproductive, reminding boys that they are boys and therefore supposed to find books dull, even as the texts attempt so sycophantically to titillate their supposedly jaded palates.

Also, noticeably and increasingly, these ‘boy’ books are full of yukky stuff: snot, farts, burps, underpants, bottoms, toilets, sick. Interestingly, it is the bodily waste products that French theorist Julia Kristeva associates with abjection and disgust that leak through many of these pages. It is worth observing that Kristeva has linked our taboos around these substances, which are both part of us and yet must be ejected, to the fundamental rejection of the maternal body. At the time young boys are trying to become independent of their mothers, we might ask why they are seen to relish the excremental so much.

Not that the writers have usually thought very deeply about this. The bulk of these titles are a lazy, focus-grouped mashup of the same elements: The Burp that Saved the World. No-Bot, the Robot with no Bottom. Robo-Snot. The Dinosaur that Pooped a Planet (I was actually shocked, I have to say, by the sheer quantity of loose yellow diarrhoea in this one). Monsters Love Underpants. Pirates Love Underpants. Aliens Love Dinopants. The last three are part of the enormously successful Underpants franchise by author Claire Freedman and illustrator Ben Cort. Freedman’s website tells us the genesis story – apparently, after ten years of writing: ‘A spaceship landed in her neighbour’s back garden and some funny aliens stepped out. Then – would you believe it – they stole the red spotted bloomers hanging on their washing line! Of course she had to write about it – and Aliens Love Underpants was born!’ To which I can only say that no, I wouldn’t believe it. ‘Red spotted bloomers’ is the kind of wholly unconvincing detail that makes me question the veracity of the whole pants-mad aliens metanarrative.

I’ve never been fond of toilet humour, so I suppose this isn’t the sort of male culture I would have enjoyed as a child myself. In fact, I’m sure we would never have been allowed a book with the word ‘Poo’ in the title in the house. An obsession with cleanliness was one of the factors that darkened my father’s miserable childhood. He was constantly fed syrup of figs to clean him out; circumcised when he was four (an event he never forgave his parents for) because it was more ‘hygienic’. Granny Pollard thought breastfeeding was a dirty habit. In her chilly house, the toilet roll was hidden under a dolly’s frilly skirts.

‘Loo’ was forbidden for being common. A poo was called a ‘mess’. After we ‘had a mess’ we were encouraged to spray a smog of floral air freshener.

As a mother of a son, too, I find these books ugly. Not that I’m squeamish, not now. I’ve re-educated my gag reflex. Your sense of taboo really does loosen after you’ve found yourself shitting during childbirth; watched that entire slick organ, the placenta, lug out of your body. Babies are tiny animals constantly sitting in their own piss and dung, letting off rich scents, yet they are somehow the opposite of revolting. As a mother you watch the loose explosions of yellow slowly thicken and darken. You fish faeces like polished brown stones out of the bath. You wake in the middle of the night and shower clumps of puke, its bile-and-nana stink, from rainbow jimjams. You pick your own daughter’s nose.

But milk and stories is our special time, cosied up on the bed. I want to teach Gruff about the lovely, intricate world and all its enchantments. I want us to fall under a magic spell, not a farty smell.

The first couple of globally successful ‘poo’ books should probably not be blamed. They were both, rarely for picture books in the UK, translations – Everybody Poos (1977) by Taro Gomi, from the Japanese, and The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew it Was None of His Business (1989) by Werner Holzwarth and Wolf Erlbruch, from the German. Both have quite a charming, matter-of-factness in their acknowledgement of our status as animals, and are probably useful tools around the period of potty training. Taro Gomi’s Everybody Poos, particularly, isn’t cheap at all. He has said in an interview with the Japan Foundation Newsletter that the book was inspired by a trip to a zoo one winter morning to interview a vet:

I got there before it opened, so most of the cages weren’t cleaned yet. There was a lot of poop around. It was a cold winter morning, and steam was coming out from each pile as the morning sunshine streamed down on it. It was such a vivid scene.

I love that warm, painterly image, and it is notable he finds a strange beauty in his illustrations too – the golden loaf of elephant’s poo, the mouse’s tiny grains, the fish’s delicate stick, the bird’s pale splutter, the pangolin’s modest burial.

Although his publishers argued over it, children immediately responded to his honesty about this weird substance that comes from their bodies. Gomi notes: ‘It was a funny, curious, and interesting thing for them. One boy who loved the book sent me cards entitled “Today’s Poop” almost every day for six months.’

Potty-training books are now commonplace – showing, as Gomi did, the ritual of wipe and flush. Unfortunately, books which just shout POOPYPANTS and then wait expectantly for hilarity to ensue are commonplace too. (I am sad to report the children usually oblige.)

Wait, though – while yukky jokes have only recently been sanctioned by the gatekeepers of children’s literature (adults), let’s not pretend that small children have not enjoyed them forever. It’s just that previously they spread orally, in whispers and giggles, from child to child, rather than from commercially benefitting grown-ups. ‘The one who smelt it dealt it.’ Or:

Tell Tale tit

Your tongue shall be slit,

And all the dogs in the town

Shall have a little bit.

Or:

Scab and matter custard,

Green snot pies,

Dead dog’s giblets,

Dead cat’s eyes,

And a cup of sick to wash it down.

Versions of all of these circulated in my playground. I came across them again recently in the married couple Iona and Peter Opie’s masterful piece of research, the anthology The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959). Although not picture book writers or illustrators, as chroniclers of all the children’s culture that isn’t written down or illustrated, the Opies had a huge impact on the genre.

Exiled by the London Blitz to Bedfordshire, the couple’s obsession with rituals and rhymes began when they were walking by a cornfield and Iona was pregnant. One of them lifted a red-and-black spotted bug on to their finger (‘I forget whose finger it was,’ Iona Opie said. ‘Somebody’s finger’) and chanted:

Ladybird, ladybird,

Fly away home.

Your house is on fire

And your children all gone;

All except one

And that’s little Ann,

And she has crept under

The warming pan.

As the ladybird took off, they found themselves wondering what the words meant and who had written them. They decided to find out, though it was not easy for the Opies to launch themselves into such a substantial project, given they had no academic background or qualifications. Soon they had established a working pattern where Peter did the writing, while Iona did the research (he nicknamed her ‘old mother shuffle paper’). For a long time they were so poor they famously picked nettles from the park for vegetables at dinner. They were fortunate that a librarian at the Bodleian in Oxford found them collecting riddles, so recommended them to the Oxford University Press.

The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren is a book that influenced a whole generation of picture book writers. It references, for example, the trope of the tale without end, a ‘stock joke’ that usually begins: ‘It was a dark and stormy night, the rain came down in torrents, there were brigands on the mountains, and thieves, and the chief said unto Antonio: “Antonio, tell us a story”.’ This is almost verbatim how Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s It Was a Dark and Stormy Night begins, except in their book there are also wolves for good measure. Just a couple of pages later, the Opies refer to the multiplications of the word ‘dark’ in spooky kids’ tales meant to frighten others by torchlight:

In a dark, dark wood, there was a dark, dark house,

And in that dark, dark house, there was a dark, dark room …

Instantly, we can see where the Ahlbergs’ Funnybones, which tells the adventures of big skeleton and little skeleton, sprang from too. (‘On a dark dark hill / there was a dark dark town …’) The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren must have been very well thumbed in the Ahlberg house.

Janet and Allan Ahlberg specialize in likeable monsters. Their oeuvre is full of them: cheerful ghosts playing football; a giant with a smiling baby on his knee; Wolf reading a story to the three little pigs with glasses perched on his snout, and of course, everyone’s favourite warm-hearted criminal Burglar Bill. A husband and wife team like the Opies, Janet and Allan married when they were both students at Sunderland College. After trying various jobs (postman, plumber, gravedigger) Allan became a primary school teacher. Janet started illustrating non-fiction craft books of the type that involved empty yoghurt pots. It was only when Allan was in his late thirties that Janet asked him to write a story for her to illustrate, for a change. Allan Ahlberg has said it was like ‘a key turning in my back’.

Although they sometimes worked with other creative partners, arguably their finest work was undertaken together in the 37 picture books they created over the next 20 years, seeing themselves as book ‘makers’ who oversaw every aspect of design. Many of their books have an interactive element that makes them almost like a game parent and child can play together – pulling tiny letters from envelopes in The Jolly Postman, peeping through the holes in Peepo!, playing I-Spy in Each Peach Pear Plum. Often they combine traditional sources (nursery rhymes, fairy tales) with a particular twentieth-century charm – the witch in The Jolly Postman lives in a ‘gingerbread bungalow’ and receives a mail-order catalogue from Hobgoblin Supplies Ltd selling non-stick cauldrons and ‘Little Boy Pie Mix’, reminiscent of the Avon and Littlewoods catalogues that everyone on our estate had delivered. For me they seem like time capsules, capturing childhood in the 1970s and 1980s.

Allan Ahlberg said that: ‘Just because a book is tiny and its readers are little doesn’t mean it can’t be perfect. On its own scale, it can be as good as Tolstoy or Jane Austen.’ The books he created with Janet Ahlberg fulfilled this promise, until her painfully early death from breast cancer in 1994, aged fifty.

Allan was born illegitimate in 1940s Croydon. Adopted, he grew up poor in Oldbury in the Black Country, a place that smelt of its local plastic and glue factories. His new mum was a cleaner, his dad a labourer. In his earliest years, the occasional bomb would fall. His mum would make up a den for him under the kitchen table with his toast and soft toys, and in his lovely memoir The Bucket: Memories of an Inattentive Childhood, Ahlberg vividly recalls ‘that little secret place with its green tablecloth hanging down, velvet tassels and a fringe’. He has said that the Peepo! baby, with its tin bath, was him. It was a childhood of clips round the ear, Tizer, model soldiers, few books.

His story makes me think of my own father’s. He was born in Salford, a city with smog so thick that sometimes you bumped into lamp posts. A city of chimneys and factory gates. When he was born, they couldn’t afford a cot so he slept in a cupboard drawer, like the baby in Burglar Bill.

Both Ahlberg and my father remembered being caned at school. Ahlberg has described how, ‘If you were sent to the headmaster, he would take out a bamboo cane with one end burnt black to harden it, and bring it down on the tips of your fingers.’ But Ahlberg got into grammar school, as did my dad.

Once there, my dad remembered poring over novels about angry young men: Billy Liar; Alfie; Room at the Top. Realizing the future his father had mapped out wasn’t the only one, he decided, he often said, ‘to change his script’. For a bright, working-class boy there were still ways you could alter the narrative of your life.

Burglar Bill (1977) was my favourite of the Ahlbergs’ perfect books as a child. It deals with masculinity and misbehaviour (and includes poo), but is also full of love and marvels. In ‘John Wayne and Sibelius or The Train Has Rain in It’, The Philippa Pearce Lecture he delivered in 2016, Ahlberg describes how Burglar Bill came to life when he was teaching a reception class in the 1970s, the register with the children’s addresses in it open in front of him:

And off we’d go … Burglar Bill walks down Severn Road until he comes to number … hm – quick glance at register … number 8 where Alice Hicks lives. Meanwhile Alice Hicks snaps to attention and looks rather pleased with herself. Burglar Bill creeps into the hall – that’s a nice umbrella, says Burglar Bill – I’ll have that, and he puts it into his sack. Burglar Bill creeps into the living room – that’s a nice antique clock, says Burglar Bill. I’ll have that, and he puts it into his sack. Burglar Bill creeps into the kitchen. Here Alice Hicks’ mummy is making a nice cheese and pickle sandwich for Alice to eat when she comes home from school. That’s a nice … MUMMY, says Burglar Bill, I’ll have her, and he puts her into his sack. Thereafter, the possibilities of the story, whatever they might have been, collapse. The children – all of them – completely absorbed in the possibility that Burglar Bill would come to their house and put their mummy in a sack – sit up rigidly on the story mat – like little tethered self-important balloons tapping themselves on the chest, some of them, hoping to get the nod.

It’s interesting to see how Bill’s catchphrase ‘I’ll have that’ was one of the first things to develop. Burglar Bill makes children see that one of our earliest, most basic impulses – to want to possess things, to cry ‘MINE!’ – has consequences for other people. It affects real lives, real homes (their lives! Their homes!!). They feel the raw injustice as a shock.

Bill’s outfit makes him a stock figure – the striped jumper, the flat cap, the black eye mask. It’s now so associated with Burglar Bill that whenever a thief wears stripes or a flat cap, the newspapers love to run stories with headlines like The Mirror’s ‘Silly Billy: Thief caught on CCTV raiding supermarket dressed as cartoon villain Burglar Bill’. (‘CCTV cameras caught the crook, who bears a striking resemblance to children’s storybook character Burglar Bill, breaking into a Waitrose store in Essex …’) It’s actually an outfit with a long history, though. The domino mask descends from Venetian carnival, and the trickster character of the harlequin. The striped shirt comes from the duotone uniforms of prison inmates in the 1800s, designed to make them instantly recognizable if they tried to escape. The flat cap is, of course, a marker of class. Even the name ‘Bill’ is familiar – there was a nineteenth-century poem published in Punch called ‘Burglar Bill’ by F. Anstey, in which the robber encounters ‘Baby Bella’ during a break-in and has his heart melted (‘Fast he speeds across the housetops! / But his bosom throbs with bliss, / For upon his rough lips linger / Traces of a baby’s kiss.’)

An important thing about the book is how, like Anstey, the Ahlbergs take their stock villain and humanize him. The terrifying image of a mother abducted in a sack, with which Allan Ahlberg originally alarmed his students, is softened. Instead a baby is (accidentally) taken in a big box that is reassuringly punctured with holes. Once Burglar Bill realizes he has stolen a baby, he is also instantly concerned with nappies and warming up bottles. The danger is domesticated. The Ahlbergs do this a lot, taking frightening figures and making them comfortingly ordinary – the fairy-tale witch has to put on her reading glasses and hangs her bat up to dry on a plastic clothes-maiden; The Ghost Train has a luggage rack. In a way Burglar Bill is a story about adults – their wicked power; their shadowy night-time lives when the children are asleep. It’s also a story that reassures the child that adults are changed by parenthood: being a father means choosing to live an ‘honest life’. (Although Betty, it should be said, is one of the worst mothers in all of fiction before she gets round to experiencing her epiphany. She has lost her baby after leaving him outside during a burglary, but when we meet her, she is still happily stealing a date and walnut cake ‘with buttercream filling and icing on top’ from Bill’s breadbin.)

It’s a very funny story. The fact that the first thing Bill steals is a toothbrush always makes me smile. Then there’s the picture of the baby covered in beans. The way the baby shouts ‘Again!’ when Bill falls off the piano stool and bangs his nose. The first word the child says is ‘Boglaboll’. The details in Janet’s illustrations are absolutely delightful too – the way the cat’s stripes mirror those on Bill’s jumper; the House of Lords jug he uses as a teapot.

In the first draft, Allan Ahlberg has said that Bill was ‘less inclined to remorse’, just retiring happily to a farm at the end. Yet it is the section where Bill and Betty return stolen goods that is the most memorable – back goes the toothbrush, the goldfish, the chamber pot to the HMS Eagle. It is absurd and lovely. The published version ends with ‘Bakery Bill’ getting married, the nuclear family listening to the town hall clock strike four and passing the police station on their way home to tea, the systems of patriarchy and authority reaffirmed. In some ways it’s very conservative, but it’s also a quietly generous vision in that there is no punishment, only a putting right. It says that good people make bad choices, especially when they are poor. It doesn’t make them monsters. Given a bit of love, they can make better choices.

It is a story that is not told often enough in our newspapers, with their cartoon headlines about Goodies and Baddies; to the boys on our street corner with their knives.

Comedies, since Aristotle, have always ended like this, with a rise in fortune for our sympathetic hero: with redemption, marriage and love. Most picture books tend towards comedy.

But the final book in this chapter is, instead, a tragedy, perhaps the great tragedy of the picture book genre: The Lorax (1971) by Dr Seuss. The Lorax is a book of nonsense verse that rings chillingly true in its depiction of environmental destruction. It begins at the end of the story, in a wasteland where the wind has a ‘slow-and-sour’ smell, and where ‘you’ might find the old Once-ler (who sounds a bit like my son’s friend Oneie, now I come to think of it), lurking in his Lerkim, with teeth that sound ‘grey’. The Once-ler proceeds to tell the story of how he arrived in the landscape when it was pristine, and noticed that the sour-candy-coloured Truffula Trees had the fragrance of ‘fresh butterfly milk’. (What a remarkable image that is – full of innocence yet profoundly disturbing – giving him the air of a serial killer.) The Once-ler set up a business chopping down the trees to make completely amorphous, unnecessary things called Thneeds. Proud of his position as provider, he gave all of his family jobs, then set about remorselessly ‘biggering / and BIGGERING’ his factory until the final tree fell.

The boldness is in how Seuss lets the bad-guy tell the story – like Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert in Lolita, the Once-ler condemns himself in his own words even as he mounts a defence. We also, strikingly, never see him, except for a pair of gloved green hands that chop trees, count coins, make calls: it is not his visage that makes him monstrous, but his actions with those ironically green fingers (an effect, incidentally, utterly destroyed in the film where the Once-ler is depicted as an ordinary-looking young man). As the child listening blurs into the ‘you’ being addressed, so the adult reader in some way becomes the Once-ler.

Though the Once-ler has success, his ambition is his downfall. In his tragic hubris, his over-reaching, he transgresses nature. He is a kind of Midas figure whose hunger for a more prosperous future turns everything around him into past. At his touch, now becomes once; Eden is lost. ‘Adults,’ Seuss wrote, ‘is a word that means obsolete children,’ and the Once-ler embodies this obsolescence. He is not an expression of the child’s inner nature, but rather a stark warning against adults who want to continue growing when they are grown: adult greed and adult ambition.

(And just to reiterate – because how can I not? – it is David Cameron’s favourite bedtime story.)

‘I meant no harm,’ the Once-ler tells us, ‘I most truly did not.’ But he cannot claim ignorance – he repeatedly spurns the advice of the furry Lorax, who is both the voice of nature and, like Jiminy Cricket, his embodied conscience, and who warns him of the consequences of the smog and goo. The child listening is given a lesson in the gap between what adults say and what they do; between truths and excuses. The story happens in the space between the Once-ler’s account and the picture they see of a forest reduced to stumps.

It is so bleak that environmental activist Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, has described how she read The Lorax to her two-year-old son, Toma, ‘watched the terror cross his face’ and decided, ‘No, this is completely wrong.’

The story behind its creation perhaps explains its darkness. When she was fifty-five, Seuss’s wife and long-time editorial collaborator, Helen, was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, which causes ascending paralysis. Seuss nursed her with Popsicles, and by setting up a series of mirrors so that she could see their dog waiting outside the window. She recovered enough to come home, but after that struggled for many years with health problems including a cancer diagnosis, as well as with Seuss’s ongoing affair with Audrey Stone Dimond, a married woman eighteen years his junior. In 1967 Helen committed suicide with sodium pentobarbital capsules and was found in bed by their housekeeper. Her final letter began: ‘Dear Ted, what has happened to us?’

It was signed off with their old code – the name of a made-up law firm: ‘Grimalkin, Drouberhannus, Knalbner and Fepp’. (Such a terrible authority.)

Describing how he felt after her death, Seuss said: ‘I didn’t know whether to kill myself, burn the house down, or just go away and get lost.’ In their home in La Jolla in San Diego over the next few years, he stared from his studio at a coast which had been unspoilt when he and Helen had arrived, but which now was cramped with condominiums. He hadn’t been paying attention to its ruin. Writing seemed difficult, until a trip with Audrey to East Africa. He was at his swimming pool when he saw a group of elephants passing, and suddenly experienced a kind of ‘release’ that meant he scrawled 90 per cent of the book that afternoon. The trees of the Serengeti became Truffula Trees.

One can only assume his experience as a tourist in East Africa made him uneasy, as The Lorax is a book rank with guilt. It is also about an old man who cannot live his life again or undo his mistakes. The Once-ler lives in his shack, in the middle of the grim, polluted mess he made, trapped forever in his moment of anagnorisis, or tragic recognition, worrying his heart away. He will send down a ‘Whisper-ma-phone’ and tell his story for money, which he secretes in a hole in his glove. The story is a warning.

Finally, the Once-ler throws the reader the very last Truffula Seed. ‘Catch!’ he says. It looks like a pinprick of light. Unless they care enough to plant and nurture it, to grow a new forest ‘nothing is going to get better’.

It is an awful responsibility, but all that Seuss can offer.

In a way it was a premonition. Isn’t it all we too can offer, now, as we look into a darkening future; as Northern White Rhinos go the way of the Brown Bar-ba-loots and the sea chokes on needless plastics? Have the generations who could afford to make mistakes gone?

If we are the monsters, how can we teach our children to be something else?

There was once a father who slaughtered a pig, and his children saw that.