Safe place
In her debut children’s novel, Tiger Skin Rug, Joan Haig explores how two brothers cope with moving from India to Scotland. Fiction is a great way to help young people understand their world, the author writes
Author Joan Haig on the importance of home in children’s literature
Ideas of home have been at the forefront of my thoughts this year. In February, my debut novel Tiger Skin Rug published with Scottish independent, Cranachan Publishing. It’s the story of the Patel brothers, Lal and Dilip, who move with their family from India to Scotland and feel far from home. In March, lockdown was announced and the nation was told to ‘ Stay at Home’ for several pages- worth of wall calendar. In May, I edited an anthology – titled Stay at Home! – by 40 authors across Scotland reaching out to children confined to their houses. And then, when lockdown lifted, my family and I began our own process of moving house and settling into new, unfamiliar surroundings.
In Tiger Skin Rug, when Lal and Dilip arrive in Scotland, to an old, cold stone house called Greystanes, nothing is familiar. Although Greystanes is Indian by design, and the tiger skin rug lying flat on its wooden floor hails from India, neither are a comforting connection: Lal immediately contrasts Greystanes to the modern city apartment and its shiny tiles that he left behind. The name Greystanes is borrowed from a friend’s house in Perthshire – the ‘ grey stains’ pun was too good to pass up – while the layout and garden are a fictionalised version of an Anglo- Indian bungalow in Dumfriesshire dating to 1836 and the earliest of its kind in the British Isles.
British house designs have shaped and been shaped by children’s stories since the heyday of the ‘ classics’ ( a 25 year stretch from the late 19th century to wartime). JM Barrie’s Peter Pan was inspired by Moat Brae, now Scotland’s national centre for children’s books and storytelling. In turn, the aesthetics and ( often gendered) values built into houses in children’s books form part of a wider, cultural portfolio that informs architecture. They also inform children. Descriptions of houses, particularly in ‘ classics’, are normative and tend to conflate ‘ house’ and ‘ home’. They tell child readers and listeners what the ideal home should look like.
Children will know the basic purpose of a house: it is a structure designed to keep people safe from external threat – thieves, weather, the Big Bad Wolf. Children will also know, often through story, to differentiate between their house and someone else’s. As a cautionary tale, Hansel and Gretel warns against entering the domain of a stranger. In The Vanishing Trick by Jenni Spangler ( Simon & Schuster/£ 6.99), the caravan of Madame Pinchbeck has a gingerbread- house quality. For Spangler’s characters unfamiliar with nomadic life, the caravan is at first enticing and exciting, packed with curious objects, but constant relocation brings uncertainty and distrust: there are dark secrets inside. Conversely, the stone- built house indicated at the start and end of their journey represents, for them, a sense of stability.
The ‘ home/ away/ home’ metaplot is regarded as the most common in children’s literature. Whether it is through a wardrobe, down a rabbit hole, by rowboat to Kirrin Island ( or by flying tiger to Mumbai), storybook children have been escaping and then returning home for centuries. As one scholar put it, ‘ Max may go to where the wild things are but he comes home again to his still warm dinner’. Criticism of this pattern is that it represents a model for reality rather than a reflection of it. Being ‘ away’ is dangerous, even childish, while returning ‘ home’ to familiar grownups is rational and the right thing to do. Children’s experiences in the postmodern world frequently do not map on to this standard, causing disjuncture between what children experience and what they read.
One study of award- winning children’s books in the US, UK and Australia demonstrated that a new narrative arc is developing that begins with an absence or severing from home ( if home is understood as a safe, nurturing environment constructed within four walls and under a roof). In this new arc, the threat takes the form of a status quo of displacement, broken relationships, physical or mental illness, neglect or abuse. I don’t deny that this is a welcome shift in helping children see themselves represented in books, but perhaps it needn’t be cast as a dichotomy. AM Dassu’s Boy, Everywhere ( Old Barn Books/£ 7.99) details how moving from the known
Whether it is through a wardrobe, down arab bit hole or by boat to kirr in island, story book children have been escaping and returning home for centuries
to the unknown, from privilege to poverty in the life of a Syrian refugee character, can be devastating. At the same time, it invites children into a conversation about intersectionality – in this case, the crossings of class, culture and political circumstance. It is also about what it means to have, lose and gain a sense of belonging and home.
In Breaker by Annemarie Allan ( Cranachan Publishing/£ 6.99), the child characters are reluctant to hang around their new fixer- upper house in North Berwick, and they only begin to feel a sense of loyalty and connection to the place when their local coastal environment comes under threat from a crashed oil tanker. This rendering of home, as a community spirit and being part of a wider ecosystem ( and purposefully juxtaposed to the children’s feelings about their new house) opens up our understanding of how, rather than just where, we belong. As with Boy, Everywhere, it demands that we envision home and belonging beyond buildings.
Nevertheless, many houses written into children’s books are places where characters have or can put down roots ( literally, in the case of Badger’s earthy abode in Wind in the Willows). Disruption through loss of or temporary escape from this stability is an excellent metaphor for a range of issues. The houses in Jasbinder Bilan’s Tamarind and the Star of Ishta ( Chicken House/£ 6.99) and in Pog by Pádraig Kenny ( Chicken House/£ 6.99), for example, are active settings for helping children confront grief. In both these cases, as in the films of Hayao Miyazaki or in Wuthering Heights, hauntingly retold by Tanya
Landman ( Barrington Stoke/£ 7.99), the dwellings themselves perform like characters in the story. Sophie Anderson in The House with Chicken Legs ( Usborne/£ 7.99) and Tom Easton in Our House ( Templar/£ 5.99) take this all the way – in the latter, the house has a mind of its own and its behaviour sheds light on the human relationships it shelters.
This year’s lockdown experience highlighted that for children everywhere, houses in the real world – just as those built metaphorically of straw, sticks or bricks – provide varying degrees of security and protection. The Stay at Home! collection was created specifically to help children confront or escape their individual circumstances, and share the lockdown experience by letting them peek through a diverse set of windows. What my protagonist Lal discovers by the end of Tiger Skin Rug is that home is neither his flash apartment in India nor the chilly rooms of Greystanes; at least, not on their own. Rather, home is constructed from layers of events, emotions and expectations, imbricated like rooftiles on a house. Individual tiles – and the house – are only part of the story.
Tiger Skin Rug by Joan Haig ( Cranachan Publishing/£ 6.99) has been nominated for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2021, and is showcased in the People’s Book Prize Winter 2020/ 21 competition – open to public voting at peoplesbookprize. com;
Stay at Home: Poems and Prose for Children Living in Lockdown ( Cranachan Publishing/ free, downloadable) is available from www. cranachanpublishing. co. uk