The savage stories behind our best picture books
‘ Even now,” wrote JG Ballard, when he was in his 60s, “simply thinking about Long John Silver or the waves on Crusoe’s island stirs me far more than reading the original text. I suspect that these childhood tales have long since left their pages and taken on a second life inside my head.” Like Ballard, the poet and playwright Clare Pollard knows that our childhoods – both the lived experience, and our memories of it – are as much peopled by the characters in the storybooks we read (or are read to us) as the real people around us. Although a firm believer in their magic, she knows these stories as “more than diversions, they are teaching our children how they should be”. In her mission to understand how the books she read as a child, and those she now reads to her own children operate, Fierce Bad Rabbits: The Tales Behind Children’s Picture Books is more than just a trip down memory lane. It’s also an enlightening, perceptive analysis of – to invoke Francis Spufford, whose bibliomemoir of childhood reading is a cornerstone of the genre – the
books that build us. The world of children’s picture books is shown to be rife with tensions. From the outset, Pollard acknowledges what the critic Jacqueline Rose famously claimed as the inherent impossibility of children’s fiction: the “child” that it’s aimed at is always an adult construction; these are books written, illustrated, published and bought by grown-ups, dictated by their desires – “to educate the child, to keep it quiet, to make it sleep, etc.” It’s apt then that Pollard notes “the gap between the sentiment attached to the idea of the child and care for actual children” in Victorian sweatshops producing colour illustrations for early picture books. The 19th century is a troubling period all round; take Kate Greenaway, whose illustrations “spoke to the contemporary cult of childhood innocence”. One of her biggest fans was John Ruskin, a man obsessed with little girls (he supposedly refused to sleep with his wife because he was disgusted by her pubic hair). The Tale of Peter Rabbit ushers in the modern picture book. (Animals are important, we tame both them and children, Pollard suggests, hence their popularity in childhood tales, but they also allow authors to show things they couldn’t with humans: take the abandoned protagonists of Martin Waddell’s Owl Babies, for example; exampl turn their careless mother into a human, and the story is a decidedly darker one.) Beatrix Potter’s “brilliance”, “brillia Pollard surmises, “is in the path she walks between sentiment s and savagery”, something som that could also be said sa of many of the favourites discussed: d Babar, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, even The Gruffalo. Delightfully, Delightfu Pollard isn’t just a bibliophile; bib she’s a discerning critic c too. How many people have h connected Dr Seuss with the Austrian film director Michael Han Haneke? She describes the The Cat in the Hat as “so sinister and contrary to our current awareness of child protection issues” – a “mysterious, dangerous cat and his minions, Thing One and Thing Two, descending on the house when Mother is away”– that it reminds her of Haneke’s chillingly transgressive film Funny Games. Indeed, there’s a lot of darkness here, especially that which lurks behind the colourful, often cheerful, comforting images on the page. There are those now near-mythic real children “sacrificed to children’s literature” – mercilessly bullied at school, Christopher Robin’s “real life was stolen and made unreal”; Kenneth Grahame’s son Alastair, “Mouse”, lay down on a railway track and killed himself; and John Uttley, son of Alison, drove his car off a cliff two years after his mother’s death. Often the grief and pain precedes the writing: Anthony Browne was only 17 when his father dropped down dead in front of him, and Raymond Briggs’s loss of both his parents and his wife seeps into The Snowman. Cicely Mary Barker, author of the Flower Fairy books, died aged 43 “from a virus contracted from contaminated corn”, which sounds like something straight out of the Brothers Grimm. Then there’s Roger Hargreaves, who suffered a stroke walking down to breakfast one morning – I can almost see it as a scene from one of his Mr. Men books, especially as Pollard reminds us that theirs is a universe “without a coherent moral system”. Pollard likens the lands Hargreaves created to the 55 fictitious cities described by Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Some might scoff, but her sincerity is everything. When she describes Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s “masterpiece” Stick Man as “a kind of nursery version of The Odyssey”, I was moved. “We are lucky,” she writes at the end of this splendid book, “that some of the geniuses in this history knew that picture books are not a minor form, but the most important of all.” We are just as lucky, I should add, that Pollard recognises this too.
Animals allow authors to show things they couldn’t with humans