My Side Of The Mountain - Jean George

This book was a recent charity-shop discovery of mine, although it was first published in 1959 and is still available today as a Puffin Modern Classic. It's the tale of a young boy who leaves his New York home to try living off the land in the Catskills Mountains at the site where his great grandfather once owned a farm. He makes a few mistakes but is largely successful, making a house by burning out the hollowed insides of a Hemlock tree and raising a peregrine falcon chick to hunt with. His existence isn't made out to be easy or straightforward; he suffers from cold and loneliness at times, and occasionally feels real fear, but he gains companionship from the animals that share his neighbourhood and experiences pure triumph when he achieves something through his own resourcefulness.

My Side Of The Mountain is very vividly drawn, and I think a lot of this is down to the fact that Jean George did many of these things herself in her youth. Her father was an entomologist and the whole family spent months living in the wilderness, where they lived off a wild harvest and trained their own birds of prey.

The story appeals to the adventurous outdoorsy streak in me, and surely there are kids today who would love this book despite the fact that they could never have a similar adventure. It would have been impossible for my generation back in the 1980s, even though we had a lot more freedom then compared to now. Today's kids may not be allowed to go off on their own exploring the local fields like we did but I bet there are still plenty of adventurous children who wish they could! I find an interesting parallel in the fact that back in the 1980s my best friend was a massive fan of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, despite the fact that it was first published in 1930; like my recent reading of My Side Of The Mountain, this was a fifty year old book being enjoyed even though there was no chance of her running wild or sailing her own boat. Both books may be dated in a lot of ways, but I think the spirit of adventure within them is timeless.

A Child's Garden Of Verses - R L Stevenson

Oh noes! You may want to leave this blog in disgust RIGHT NOW. This is because I am about to slag off Robert Louis Stevenson. Actually, that's not quite true; I'm going to slag off A Child's Garden Of Verses, or rather, it's suitability as a book for children today.

ACGOV was published in 1885, and I got given a copy at my seventh birthday party nearly 100 years later, by the daughter of the snobbiest lady in the village. She probably thought it was a lovely gift for a child. According to a lot of the internet it's a "timeless classic" full of "cherished" poems that would "last a lifetime". Shame I was given the Puffin paperback copy that has long since fallen to bits (not through being loved to death, might I add).

Once again, I've recently picked up the twin of my childhood book in a charity shop. I can remember, at seven, being vaguely bemused by the old-fashioned poems. There weren't any that I particularly liked, which was a shame because I did really like some poetry at this age, and was inspired to write my own - my teacher even gave my best friend and myself special exercise books just for this purpose, which other kids in the class weren't given. Hooray for Mrs Brooks! She was the most inspirational teacher I ever had.

ANYWAY. I am putting off writing about A Child's Garden Of Verses. I don't want to dislike it; it's a product of its time and I'm sure my great grandmother (born 1884) would have loved it. I'm also sure Robert Louis Stevenson didn't forsee children reading it over a century later. But please, kindly, well-meaning, snobby middle-class mothers, buy a copy of Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes instead of this outdated naffety next time you come to buy something for little Naomi to take along to her common little schoolfriend's birthday.

Overt moralising will always grate, and children do come fitted with a large bullshit detector these days. This sort of poem annoyed the hell out of my childhood self, and that was back in the 1980s!:-


Whole Duty Of Children

A child should always say what's true,
And speak when he is spoken to,
And behave mannerly at the table:
At least as far as he is able.


On second thoughts, I can't believe even my great-gran would have enjoyed this sort of thing. Good thing she couldn't actually read.


Good and Bad Children

Children, you are very little
And your bones are very brittle;
If you want to grow tall and stately,
You must learn to walk sedately.

You must still be bright and quiet,
And content with simple diet;
And remain, through all bewild'ring
Innocent and honest children....


There are several more verses of that one. Ick. On the next page is that poem about foreign children ("Oh! Don't you wish you were me?") though to be fair it is surprisingly not as patronising as it could be. Never mind, this one makes up for it:


System

Every night my prayers I say,
And get my dinner every day;
And every day that I've been good
I get an orange after food.

The child that is not clean and neat,
With lots of toys and things to eat,
He is a naughty child, I'm sure -
Or else his dear papa is poor.


Ouch.

I am being very harsh, because the book isn't composed purely of po-faced Victorian moralising. There are some nice poems which are quite pleasant to read as an adult: "Where go the boats?" is one, "My Shadow" is another. Sadly, as a child these poems just made me go "meh". They're all rather introspective, with none of the fun and vibrancy of A.A. Milne's Now We Are Six or Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense Poems:


The Cow

The friendly cow, all red and white,
I love with all my heart:
She gives me cream with all her might,
To eat with apple-tart.

She wanders lowing here and there,
And yet she cannot stray,
All in the pleasant open air,
The pleasant light of day;

And blown by all the winds that pass
And wet with all the showers,
She walks among the meadow grass
And eats the meadow flowers.


Zzzzzz. So there you are....I expect the RLS society (I presume there is one, somewhere) will have a price on my head now. I'll try to atone by doing a review of Treasure Island sometime, though I'll have to read it first, because sadly ACGOV put me off reading any more Stevenson if I could help it.

Witch Child - Celia Rees

Witch Child is a novel for older children/young adults that was first published in the UK in 2000. I bought a first edition back then and have reread it many times; I enjoy historical fiction set during the seventeenth century anyway, and this immediately appealed as soon as I picked it up in the bookshop.

After her grandmother is executed as a witch, Mary Newbury is forced to flee first to the countryside and then across the sea to the New World in order to escape persecution. Mary and her grandmother had made a living as healers using age-old skills and knowledge of herbalism to look after the people in their village, and it was this knowledge that had led to their accusation. When things start to go wrong in America Mary is again forced to flee, but she falls in with some natives and is honoured by them for her skills as a healer rather than despised. The contrast between the life of the settlers and the life of the Native Americans is fascinating and the tensions between the two are beautifully drawn, with Mary moving from one life to another.

Witch Child is an absolutely beautiful book, as is the sequel, Sorceress, which deals with a modern-day girl who is intrigued by Mary's life. I'm now a big fan of Celia Rees's novels and have been buying the hardback editions as soon as they are published - it's not possible to be patient for the paperbacks! I have to admit to being a massive fan of the photograph on the original cover (above); it was the perfect choice as you can believe that this girl really could be Mary, and indeed reference is made to this picture by the protagonist of the sequel so apparently Celia Rees was suitably impressed too!

Sunshine Book - Enid Blyton

This book is one of the "Deans Popular Rewards" series of Blyton books that were published in the UK in the 1960s. There were 48 brightly-coloured hardbacked books in the series, and many children of the 1970s had a small collection of these on their bookshelves - if their parents weren't too right-on to let them have them, that is!

Looking back at all the Blytons I read as a child, I remember them as very moralising, very focused on class and probably too archaic for me to consider them as good reading material for children today. From the books I read back then, I think perhaps only The Magic Faraway Tree series (which is extremely inventive and magical) really stands up alongside the wealth of children's literature being produced today.

Sunshine Book was one of the Deans Rewards series that my sister owned as a child, and I thought it would be interesting to re-read the stories and see what I thought as an adult. I picked up this particular copy in a charity shop. It has a jolly picture of some children catching tadpoles on the cover and a bored child has coloured in some of the line-drawings inside with a variety of crayons and felt-tips. Reading it was like nursery-food for the brain; there was something quite comforting about being tucked up in bed re-acquainting myself with these old stories even if half of them are about pixies and I did feel like a bit of a berk. I reminded myself that I do have a Classics degree, and have the latest Helen Dunmore on order from Amazon, and then got over myself.

So! On to the stories. By far the most interesting and inventive was Father Time and his Pattern Book. A young boy, Robin, hears footsteps outside late at night on New Year's Eve, and finds that it is Father Time himself, calling round the houses to pick up the "patterns" which everyone creates, year on year, the design of which depends on the individual's behaviour. Robin asks to see some so Father Time whips out the patterns of various friends - brother Lennie has a beautiful pattern because he is kind, nasty Harry from next door has an ugly pattern, etc. Robin's own pattern is generally lovely but has ugly smudges which show that he told some fibs, so he resolves to make a better pattern next year. It's as moralising as many other Blyton tales, but somehow this story manages to do so without grating. The concept of people creating patterns made me wonder if Blyton had pinched it from folklore - I need to do more digging. Certainly another of her stories in another of the Rewards books (not sure which, I read it nearly 30 years ago!) has a fairy living in a hut that runs around on legs, which is very very similar to Baba Yaga's hut on fowl's legs which appears in Slavic folklore.

Another nice little story is Prince Rollo's Kite. A wicked wizard kidnaps Prince Rollo and hides him in a hut far away. Luckily he has his kite with him, so he writes a message describing his whereabouts on its tail and then lets it fly away, allowing the person who finds it discover where he is being held.

I'm a big fan of the countryside, so theoretically I should have enjoyed the two factual pieces called A Country Walk in England(Spring/Summer) and A Country Walk in England (Autumn/Winter). Sadly the conversational style made me want to heave: "Oh look, what do we see here? It is a Germander Speedwell. How pretty! Let us go and look at the old pond" and so on. It seems horribly twee and patronising, but I suppose they could have been written for poor towny kids who have never even seen a cow before (cf Benjy in the Happy House stories at the end of the book). Thank god for the internet, for books containing colour photography, and for actually being able to travel to the countryside.

There are some poems in the book too. Ugh, Ugh. I can remember hating them as a child as well, so this isn't just me being snobby about them as an adult. One of them is about pixies sleeping in rose beds and is suspiciously like The Old Man's Beard Fairy poem by Cicely Mary Barker, only without the charm.

Well, there we are. I am fascinated enough to want to read more of these books now, and they do look colourful on my bookshelf. Deans Rewards have become extremely rare to find in charity shops though, so it might take a while. I wonder what the original owner of my copy of Sunshine Book would think of it.....her name was written in the front, and I've actually just managed to find her profile on Facebook (she now has two kids of her own and is listed as having been to school eight miles from here). It is a very different world today, indeed.

Ludo and the Star Horse - Mary Stewart

First published in 1974. This has to be the first book in this blog, because it had a massive impact on me as a child. I'll review it when I am able to get hold of my copy again.