Bookworm Read online

  I liked Tiger very much, but my enjoyment – as you might perhaps expect from a child who read Sugarpink Rose and basically thought ‘Stay in the pen, little girl! Stay in the pen!’ – was tinged with disquiet. A tiger who just turns up, without any explanation or invitation, and stays for tea? BOUNDARIES, PEOPLE. My sense of propriety was offended and the promise of domestic sanctity, upon which my childhood tranquillity largely depended had been breached. There are two types of people in this world – those who long for the arrival of a tiger at the door and those whose profoundest wish is that nothing so unexpected happens, ever. Ever, ever, ever. I have all my life been firmly in the latter. I blame temperament and my mother, who created such an overwhelmingly safe environment at home that the idea of venturing out even into normal life has ever seemed fraught with untenable amounts of risk.

  Kerr herself, you sense from reading interviews with her, or her autobiographical novels or her account (mostly) of her career in a book published a few years ago to celebrate her ninetieth birthday, is one of the former. She is joyful, outward-looking, generous-spirited and optimistic, despite – or perhaps because of – a very unsafe childhood, spent in exile after her family fled Germany in 1933. Her father spoke out against the Nazi regime and was in imminent danger of being arrested and killed. The family received a tip-off that his passport was about to be seized and he escaped to Switzerland just in time. Judith and her mother and brother followed, catching the milk train to Zurich, on the eve of the election that brought Hitler to power. The nine-year-old Judith was only allowed to take one toy with her and had to decide between her pink rabbit comforter and a more recent acquisition, a woolly dog. She chose the dog. Her first book for older children was published in 1971, entitled When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. It was a remark from her second child, her son Matthew, that had prompted it. When he was eight he was watching The Sound of Music and said, ‘Now we know what it was like when Mummy was a little girl.’ Unwilling to let this misapprehension persist, she wrote the story of nine-year-old Anna and her family watching the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany who has to choose between her toy dog and rabbit before they flee the country just in time. Though it doesn’t gloss over the truth, it is infused with Kerr’s innate optimism and by her own experience, shaped as it was by her truly heroic parents, who made the whole thing feel like such an adventure that she once exclaimed in excitement as they looked out over Paris from their tiny, squalid digs, ‘Isn’t it wonderful being a refugee!’ It is this as much as the careful tempering of the subject matter for the audience that makes it palatable – is that the word? Accessible, maybe. Copeable with – for the young reader.

  But to read it again as an adult – especially bombarded with today’s headlines and proliferating horrors – is to be almost undone. You bring too much to it and long for a child’s innocence to protect you once more.

  Mog the Forgetful Cat, Kerr’s second-most famous creation after the tea-guzzling tiger, was and remains a much simpler, safer proposition than the tiger or the pink rabbit. The first of what would become a long and lovely series of books based on the Kerrs’ own cat was written with a simple vocabulary of about 250 words because as it was coming together, Matthew was learning to read from the Janet and John books and looked up at her one day and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mummy, but these books are too boring. I’m not reading them any more.’ So she adapted it for him. This is parenting of the highest order. I try not to feel bad.

  I embraced Mog unreservedly when Dad added her to our repertoire. I was Mog. She liked to be at home, with her family, with her supper (despite being a picky eater) or curled up in bed. And in Mog’s Christmas, she learned to love Christmas. It was like looking in a mirror.

  By the time I had my child thirty years later, Kerr had very kindly written fifteen more sequels, including the distinctly hallucinatory Mog in the Garden, in which she falls asleep and ends up flying through the air on a mousedogbird, pursued by giant birds with teeth, which – aided by the repetitive yet elliptical text that uses just fifty words, to encourage children to read the book themselves – induces a feeling somewhere between ‘Have I missed a memo?’ and ‘Have I accidentally smoked a spliff?’ Quite nice at the end of a long day.

  It is a measure of how deeply we revere our childhood books and the characters within them that when in 2002 Kerr published the final book, Goodbye Mog, in which Mog dies, there was a stricken outcry. And an only slightly tongue-in-cheek and really rather touching obituary in the Guardian. ‘She was nice but not intelligent,’ it read. ‘A conservative of whom it was said “she didn’t like things to be exciting. She liked them to be the same.”’

  I told you – like looking in a mirror.

  I was three and life so far was excellent. Me, Mum, Dad and an ever-increasing number of books. This perfect harmony was violently disrupted when the powers that be decided that I had had literally got under her feet for long enough and that it was time for me to go to nursery school.

  Nursery And Clinic

  This was still the 1970s, so going to nursery simply meant being thrown into the local church hall for a three-hour stretch every morning to be semi-supervised by a handful of disaffected local women looking for somewhere to smoke in peace. It was miserable, but it could have been worse. At least children that age aren’t keen on playing together and our overseers didn’t care enough to try and make us, so I was left largely alone. I wandered around for a few days and eventually discovered nursery’s one redeeming feature – the book bin, whose contents an adult could occasionally be prevailed upon to read. It contained about twenty dog-eared paperbacks, most of which have been lost to memory. But two remain vivid: Frank Muir’s What-a-Mess books and Jean de Brunhoff’s Babar the Elephant.

  I didn’t like either of them much.

  The What-a-Mess series is about an Afghan puppy, Prince Amir of Kinjan, who is always on the brink of, or absolutely in the middle of, disaster. He tries to eat trees and dig holes in puddles and, unlike his endlessly elegant and self-possessed mother, is always covered in something sticky. People’s first words to him have so often been ‘What a mess!’ that he thinks that is his name. I found the kinetic energy of his stories quite stressful.

  With Babar, I had the opposite problem. He was lumberingly dull. Jean de Brunhoff’s pachyderm – an orphan elephant whose adventures were first invented by de Brunhoff’s wife Cecile to keep their two little boys amused when they were ill – was first printed in 1933 in, relatively unusually for the time, bright flat colours and a child-friendly font that looked like handwriting. I loved that font. I hated Babar. I’d like to claim that my juvenile self took some kind of instinctive issue with the many arguments that have been made against him since the book was first published. The playwright Ariel Dorfman speaks for many critics (‘official’ and parental) when he claims that the Babar books are ‘none other than the fulfilment of the dominant countries’ colonial dream’. Babar escapes his native jungle and is generously embraced and civilised by the (rich, idle, if ya wanna see it) old lady in town. He becomes a product and ally of the very society that killed his mother in the opening pages. Green-suited and booted he returns to his home where, in recognition of his now greater sophistication than the rest, he is made king of the elephants and he begins to civilise them too. Houses, clothes, the accumulation of stuff, uncritical emulation of the old lady (and by extension – again, if ya wanna see it – the ruling class) are shown as the way to accomplish all of this. It’s hard – very, very hard – not to become uncomfortable as you read it now. My son Alexander was given the collected Babar as a present. I read the opening one to him and then – especially after noting the ‘savage cannibals’ in the later Babar’s Travels – quietly put it aside. The critic Adam Gopnik once argued in an essay that accompanied an exhibition of the Brunhoffs’ artwork (Jean’s son Laurent continued the saga after his father’s early death in 1937) that Babar is not ‘an unconscious instance of the French colonial imagination’ but ‘a self-cons
cious comedy about the French colonial imagination’. Which, I thought as I pushed it a little more firmly to the back of Alexander’s bookcase, may be totally, objectively true. But not to a four-year-old.

  As I say, I would like to claim that I instinctively grasped and recoiled from the whole ‘four legs good; four legs clothed, driven everywhere and returning to the homeland in triumph better’ vibe, but in truth it was just his dullness. If What-a-Mess was Too Much, Babar was Too Little. He is a very boring hero – patient, industrious and, for all his eventual willingness to hand off responsibility to Cornelius while he goes on balloon rides, basically an adult soul in a child-elephant’s body. Honestly – whose first thought when they pitch up in an unimagined, unexplored city is to buy a suit of clothes? And events just happen, one after the other. Nobody explains anything, has feelings about or motives for anything. It is a book that depends on charm to sweep you along. I found it cold. And now that it’s become colonially suspect for me too, I suspect the Gallic elephant and I will stay forever at a distance.

  Why, then, do they stick in my mind? It is because they were the ones that revealed to me the bookworm’s prime directive: any book is better than no book. Always. You don’t necessarily have to enjoy the book – though obviously that’s the ideal, and most books ARE enjoyable – as long as the space inside you that can only be filled by reading is receiving the steady stream of words for which it constantly hungers. So What-a-Mess, Babar and I were bound.

  They and their companions in the book bins alleviated some of the drudgery of nursery school – I largely had them to myself and both staff and children happily left me to my own devices until my mother arrived at the end of the morning like a miniature tornado, to gather me up and sweep me off with her to her afternoon clinics.

  Whichever one it was, the procedure was the same. I would sit in a corner behind the reception desk, trotting to and fro between my little chair and the books that had been provided by the council or donors in the futile hope of keeping children occupied while doctors took their mothers into their rooms to work out with them the best way of preventing more. As pills were issued, injections given and diaphragms checked for seaworthiness, I was benignly supervised by Joy or Gwen, who ran the place. (And by ‘the place’ I mean the clinic, the health centre it was in, the NHS and possibly most of south-east London.) Over the years they became firm family friends and from the earliest days they were my protectors. My mother would emerge from her room to call another patient in and roar at me – a three-year-old sitting so quietly in the corner that I should have been the occasion of medical concern rather than fury – to behave myself. Joy or Gwen would roar back that I was an angel, under their jurisdiction and she should get back in her room forthwith. It was most gratifying.

  Even more gratifying were the books on offer. There were not many per clinic, but there were many clinics. During those early tours of Lewisham and north Southwark’s gynaecology and family-planning departments, I made many friends beside Joy, Gwen and assorted kindly nurses. Spot the Dog. Hairy Maclary. Elmer the elephant. And, above all, Miffy, who said the most by saying nothing. A design classic, 85 million copies of the thirty-odd books by Dick Bruna starring the world’s most featureless yet boundlessly expressive rabbit have been sold since she first appeared in 1955. Forget yer Titians and yer Michaelangelos. To look into Miffy’s face – two dots for eyes and a cross for a mouth comprising a face that somehow looked back at me with happiness, sadness, anticipation, bewilderment, surprise and all points in between even if I didn’t have a name for them yet – is to appreciate the infinite power of art. I loved Miffy. I still love Miffy, even if these days she seems to gaze back at me with just one expression, which hovers somewhere between eternal reproach and sad resignation. But I think we’re both hoping for better times to come.

  Best of all were the clinics that had Shirley Hughes. I couldn’t read the words to Lucy’s and Tom’s adventures yet, or Dogger’s (or those of the many other books she illustrated but were written by someone else), but I didn’t need to. I fell into her warm, untidy drawings wherever I found them with a sigh of satisfaction, responding instantly to the evocative gifts of a brilliant draughtswoman who, as she once said of her hero Edward Ardizzone, ‘with just a few lines of pencil could open up this astonishing depth in illustration’. Hughes’ pictures were a riot of autumnal colours rather than monochromatic like hisfn1, but her books and her world was full to overflowing and endlessly appealing.

  I got general delight from almost every book I came across, but hers were perhaps the first time I felt the sense of a specific need being met. I disliked, profoundly, being away from home. Nursery was the worst, of course, but even at the clinic, with Mum in her office and kindly protectors all round I was always unsettled and fretting inwardly until we were in the car going home. Then the small, gnawing worries, sometimes at the pit of my stomach, sometimes deep in my brain, sometimes both (at nursery they talked to each other up and down my oesophagus), as nameless as they were insistent, would start to lessen as the car ate up the miles between me and safety and finally cease completely once I set foot over my own threshold again.

  But until that true safety could be gained, Hughes provided a fine proxy. I wanted to press my face on the pictures, but generally managed to refrain. Her interiors were Everyhome, not chaotic but comfortably messy, well appointed but not luxurious, recognisably contemporary but not aggressively modern. Hughes is a specialist in making the domestic and quotidian attractive. They contain something elemental – an intimation of what we all mean by ‘home’. I could live here temporarily, without too much fretting and anxiety. My mother would know where to find me. The notion that books could provide succour as well as entertainment was born. My adoration and my need for them grew accordingly.

  I did eventually start to read as well as simply gaze adoringly at most of Hughes’ stories a few years later but somehow I either overlooked Dogger or simply failed to appreciate then the masterpiece it is. The book won the 1977 Kate Greenaway Medal and made Hughes’ name as an author–illustrator. I didn’t remedy my lack until I bought it a couple of years ago for Alexander.

  A word of warning: do not read Dogger as an adult unless you are in peak mental and physical condition. It will break you. The story of Dave and his lost toy dog, accidentally sold to another child at the school fair, turns on a selfless act of kindness by his big sister Bella. If you are a grown-up reading this for the first time you will be caught unawares and soon your bewildered three-year-old will have to let himself out of the bedroom and go looking for his father to ‘come and help Mummy. She crying. Tears AND snot.’

  It’s a book you long to become your child’s favourite so you can read it night after night, despite the pivotal scene in which Bella nobly trades the giant bear she has won in her three-legged race with the little girl who bought Dave’s dog tearing a new layer off your heart every time, because you want him to absorb the lessons it offers – like all the best books, as adjunct and never as didactic driver of the plot – into the very marrow of his bones. Of course, my own child has never fulfilled this longing – he likes Dogger now and again, but it doesn’t own him as I would like it to – but we have nevertheless read it many, many times over the last couple of years and it is still all I can do not to lie prostrate on the ground with grief, crying ‘Look! Look what we are capable of if only we would try! Oh, the humanity! What is wrong with us? What is wrong with the world?’

  Motherhood is very difficult.

  Back in 1977, an indisputably Good Thing was at last about to emerge from the nursery situation. One lunchtime, the woman my mother occasionally asked to pick me up forgot to do so, so one of the supervisors walked me home. No-one, of course, was in. So, with the robust approach to child safety that characterised the era, she left me next door with a neighbour I had never met. Her name was Jenni and her house contained a lovely smell of baking – a large slice of cake with blue icing was soon pushed into my hand – and a t
iny two-year-old child, also called Lucy. I loved her immediately and have not stopped yet. Jenni still lives next door to my parents and Lucy and I live ten minutes from each other and them.

  We are very alike. We both like to stay in, wear three jumpers at all times, watch telly, not talk and sleep a lot. Our only real difference is that I also like to read and she prefers to put on a fourth jumper and another DVD instead.

  At this point in history, however, Lucy’s antipathy to reading was not yet apparent and so she had a bookshelf above her dresser that groaned with such delights as a full set of Jan Pienkowski’s Meg and Mog books and Roger Hargreaves’ Mr Men. Over the next few years it would become a rich resource for me. Lucy gave me free rein and I went round there a lot to borrow and exchange various volumes and take them home to Dad so we could marvel anew at the length of Mr Tickle’s arms (he was the first in the series – Hargreaves made him up as a bedtime story for his son Adam and then thought – ‘Hey – I might have something here’), the number of eggs Mr Strong could eat, and the heart-rending ceaseless clumsiness of Mr Bump.

  Re-reading the Mr Men now with my son – and it was Lucy Donovan who bought him the full, boxed set for his third birthday – is a discombobulating experience. The stories that once wholly enraptured me stand revealed, usually, as miserably flawed, broken-backed things. Maybe one in five comprises something that actually qualifies as a plot. The rest leave you hanging in mid-air, wondering what kind of blackmail material Hargreaves had on his editors that they allowed this to pass muster.