This is an old paperback of mine from the mid 1980s, given to me by a kind friend of my mum's when I was in hospital for 6 weeks when I was ten. The cover looks promising - nice and colourful with a pirate treasure chest with lots of goodies spilling out of it, and this encouraging blurb:
Stories....riddles....poems....limericks...things to make and do, all collected for your delight!
Sounds great doesn't it? Unfortunately this book is very hit-and-miss. Mostly miss, to be honest. As a ten year old it completely bemused me. Here are some of the random poems and things that it contains:
- An extract from On Gardens by Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
- Little Things by James Stephens, a poem about "little things that run and fail, and die in silence and despair..."
- An extract from Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas
- Parts of the Book of Revelation and Ecclesiastes from the Bible
- A Lyke Wake Dirge, a traditional English song that tells a Christian tale (although the ideas and the imagery may be pre-Christian) of the soul's travel, and the hazards it faces, on its way from earth to Heaven. Told in an old form of Yorkshire dialect from the 1600s.
- A rambing bit of prose by JB Priestley about "the delights of making stew"
- An extract from a medieval book of etiquette that was probably written for the Princes in the Tower
Even as a ten year old I remember thinking "this person really has no clue about what kids actually enjoy". All of the above are wonderful and I really adore A Lyke Wake Dirge nowadays, but as a kid lying in hospital I can remember listening to my uncle read it to me from this book, and thinking "wtf is he going on about". It's not that I was a thick kid either....just that my idea of pleasure was not grappling with a symbolic poem about the soul's travel written in seventeenth century Yorkshire dialect.
Such a shame, the editor obviously really wanted to make something kids would treasure but I actually prefer it now I'm 35.
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