Storytime

by Jane Sullivan

  This fits in very well with today’s common view of what makes enjoyable reading for both children and adults. So here’s my first hypothesis: I needed to identify with the main character.

  For my money, as a voracious nine-year-old reader, Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth took the dated, creaky world of Alice in Wonderland and blew it out of the water. Like Alice, Milo, its hero, is a bored child unexpectedly plunged into a world of absurd logic, serious questing and brilliant companion creatures. Unlike Alice, Milo gets to drive himself there, through the portal of a mysterious tollbooth someone sends him in the mail. In a world where the literal becomes real – he starts his journey in Expectations, on the road to Wisdom, and finally rescues the princesses Rhyme and Reason, restoring order to a divided kingdom, and so forth – there’s a feast of wordplay, puns, aphorisms, jokes and wisdom.

  Accompanied by extraordinary illustrations by Juster’s housemate Jules Feiffer, the story unforgettably planted the message that’s never left me: at the other side of your boredom waits the kingdom, and you return from it changed forever.

  Cate Kennedy

  These days in our reading, we are urged to find characters we can identify with, and characters we like. Clearly Alice fulfils both those roles for me, but I still have trouble liking anyone else in the stories, because none of these creatures bothers to be likeable; as a rule, they are either spineless and fawning or brutally appalling. I do, however, have two favourite characters, and they were my favourites the first time round too.

  One is the Gryphon. We meet him, a heraldic monster lying asleep in the sun; the Queen of Hearts orders him to take Alice to meet the Mock Turtle. He waits until she’s gone, then chuckles and says ‘What fun!’ He seems cheerful, good-natured and laid-back, rare qualities in a Wonderland creature. And he has such reassuring news, I want to kiss his cruel eagle cheek. The Queen who threatens to cut off everyone’s head for the slightest offence is just bluffing. ‘It’s all her fancy, that: they never executes nobody, you know.’ It turns out the Gryphon can be just as tedious and snappy as everyone else: he has a misplaced sympathy for the gloomy Mock Turtle and they share old-school reminiscences bristling with puns, but that bluff cheeriness and reassurance stay with me.

  My other favourite character is the White Knight. In my notes I’ve written with sudden enthusiasm ‘The White Knight – he is great!’ and underlined it. I’ve remembered him pretty much as he is, it turns out, but he’s not emaciated, and I’d forgotten some details: how he’s always falling off his horse, usually headfirst into the ditch; how he has a strange collection of tools and veggies dangling from his saddle. (The Tenniel illustration, I now discover, echoes a Pre-Raphaelite painting by Millais, Sir Isumbras at the Ford, in which an elderly knight in golden armour carries two peasant children over a river; so like Don Quixote, the White Knight is a mockery of knightly qualities.) The White Knight also shares a passion with his creator: he’s always inventing useless things. But for all his ineptitude, he’s the closest thing in the stories to a champion for Alice. When the Red Knight takes her prisoner, he rescues her in a battle where the two combatants spend most of their time falling over. He proposes to escort her to the end of his move, so she can cross the brook and become a queen. She has a plum cake dish with her and he offers to pack it in his bag: ‘It’ll come in handy if we find any plum cake.’ But he has trouble getting it in, because his bag is already full of candlesticks.

  “It was while re-reading this moment, as the knight is battling with his pointless clutter, that I realise what I suppose I had always known: he reminds me of my father.”

  It was while re-reading this moment, as the knight is battling with his pointless clutter, that I realise what I suppose I had always known: he reminds me of my father. My father as my knight and champion, and also as someone a little mild, vague, absent-minded, his desk covered with important clutter, his head perpetually in one invention after another – only his inventions were cartoons. With his bald head and big white moustache, the White Knight even looks a little like my father’s creation, Colonel Pewter. And in some curious way Carroll shares my affection. Here he is, describing how the knight recites his long poem, ‘A-Sitting on a Gate’:

  Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through The Looking-Glass, this was the one she remembered most clearly. Years afterwards she could bring the whole scene back again, as if it had been only yesterday – the mild blue eyes and kindly smile of the Knight – the setting sun gleaming through his hair, and shining on his armour in a blaze of light that quite dazzled her – the horse quietly moving about, with the reins hanging loose on his neck, cropping the grass at her feet – and the black shadows of the forest behind – all this she took in like a picture, as, with one hand shading her eyes, she leant against a tree, watching the strange pair, and listening, in a half-dream, to the melancholy music of the song.

  This is a highly unusual passage. Carroll seldom goes in for long descriptions and scene-setting, being more concerned with moving his story along (if you want to know what a gryphon looks like, he tells us, look at the picture), and for the most part, this works very well. Alice observes things as they turn up, hardly ever looking back from some point in the future. But this sense of elegiac pause in the story, this relaxation of the nonsense, this dazzle and darkness, this quintessential demonstration of the knight’s good gentle soul… I don’t remember how I reacted the first time round, but this time I find it moving and lovely.

  But there’s one other moment in the story where the author pauses and seems to step outside it, and this one I don’t like at all, and never have done. It’s just after Alice visits the knitting sheep’s shop – perhaps the weirdest episode of all, and the incident that so stuck in my memory – where she tries to follow a ‘large bright thing, that looked sometimes like a doll and sometimes like a work-box’ that was always on the shelf above the one she was looking at, and finally vanishes through the ceiling. As elusive as nostalgia, in fact. I’d forgotten that then the scene dissolves, as in a film, and Alice finds herself in a boat, rowing the sheep down a river. She wants to pick some scented rushes:

  And then the little sleeves were carefully rolled up, and the little arms were plunged in elbow-deep, to get hold of the rushes a good long way down before breaking them off – and for a while Alice forgot all about the Sheep and the knitting, as she bent over the side of the boat, with just the ends of her tangled hair dripping in the water – while with bright eager eyes she caught at one bunch after another of the darling scented rushes.

  What is it about this scene that I don’t like, when the much longer description of the knight still appeals? It’s because we have lost Alice’s point of view. Suddenly we are seeing her as an adult might – an admiring and affectionate adult, to be sure, but not one who shares her feelings. It’s words like ‘little’ and ‘darling’ and the tangled dripping hair and the bright eager eyes. It feels all wrong. It feels like the poems at the beginning and end of each story, which I have always hated. They are written in mannered, slightly archaic style, they seem sentimental and cloying. I’m not sure I could have said it at the time, but I felt invited to share in something I didn’t understand. And though I now understand a great deal more, I still feel that way.

  Although I was a precocious reader, I doubt I would have read the Alice stories by the time I was six. But I certainly knew about them, and it was at that age that I had an Alice-like experience.

  I was walking home from school along a quiet street when a man in a parked car called me over. He couldn’t find his daughter, she was in my class, did I know where she was? Somehow the conversation got onto willies, and whether I had seen my dad’s willy when he was in the shower. The man was fiddling with his trousers in a way I’d never seen before. I don’t remember if he asked me to get into his car. I reacted just like Alice to a Wonderland creature: polite, puzzled, curious, not really alarmed. In the end, I ran off. Was it rising apprehension, or just
boredom? The man took a simple conversation into realms utterly bizarre to me, but had none of Lewis Carroll’s charm.

  When I blithely told my parents about the encounter, they called in the police. Everyone was very kind, but I was given to understand that something bad had happened. I felt vaguely ashamed, and in retrospect the man in the car became a dark grotesque figure. But I didn’t feel the least bit scarred. Only now do I fully comprehend the dread my parents must have felt at what might have been.

  I can’t put it off any more: I have to turn to the real Lewis Carroll, the Reverend Charles Dodgson, and the real Alice, a young girl called Alice Liddell. What I discovered as a teenager when I wrote that ill-fated essay, and what I have discovered now, as I read Mr Woollcott and Mr Haughton and whatever other biographical information I can find. (This doesn’t include the book that I plagiarised for my essay; although some books about Carroll published at that time are still in print, I can’t remember enough about my source to be able to identify it.)

  “The famous riverboat trip and picnic, said to have inspired the Alice books, took place on 4 July 1862, when Dodgson was apparently pestered into telling the children a story, prodded to keep going, and then further begged by Alice to write it down”

  Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was the third of eleven children. He wrote funny comics for his siblings. He became an Anglican minister, a shy young man with a stammer, brilliant at mathematics. A geek, as we would say; or in our casual colloquial appropriation of medical terms, ‘a bit Aspy’ or possibly ‘on the spectrum’. Photographs of him suggest a gentle, melancholy soul. Mr Woolcott says he was ‘a puttering, fussy, fastidious, didactic bachelor, who was almost painfully humorless in his relations with the grown-up world around him,’ and puritanical to boot. He spent most of his life in his quarters in the Tom Quad at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was a mathematical lecturer. He always wore grey cotton gloves. He was the kind of man, Mr Woolcott tells us, who catalogued twenty-seven years of letters sent and received, so when he died there were more than 98,000 cross-references in his files. He kept a diagram showing where you sat when you dined with him and what you ate, in case he served you the same dish when you came again.

  He doesn’t sound much fun. And yet children loved him, because he conversed with them in nonsensical stories, verses and games, which were clearly a release for him. The Liddell children loved him: Lorina, Edith, Harry and Alice, children of Henry, who came to Christ Church as the new Dean in 1856, when Dodgson was twenty-four and Alice was four. A close friendship grew between Dodgson and the Liddell family, particularly the children. The famous riverboat trip and picnic, said to have inspired the Alice books, took place on 4 July 1862, when Dodgson was apparently pestered into telling the children a story, prodded to keep going, and then further begged by Alice to write it down: it is this trip he describes in ‘All in the golden afternoon’, the poem that prefaces the Wonderland adventures.

  So what kind of friendship was there between Dodgson and Alice? Nobody alive today knows for sure, and opinions depend on which looking glass you use to interpret the facts that are known. Mr Woolcott says that Dodgson was a free spirit only in the presence of little girls, was happy to play jester in their courts, and wrote them ‘charming and frivolous’ letters. Mr Haughton, writing decades later, is more suspicious. He notes Dodgson was fond of taking photographs of the Liddell children and other young girls, sometimes in semi-clothed or nude states (a popular art form in the Victorian era, where parents would be present at the session). Mr Haughton describes these photographs as ‘haunting, yet subliminally creepy’. There were mysterious expressions of anguish and guilt in Dodgson’s diaries. There were rumours that he proposed to the eleven-year-old Alice, and that she rejected him. One of Dodgson’s biographers, Michael Bakewell, said that the photographs tell us that he was in love with Alice.

  “Was Dodgson an innocent who could only make proper friends with children, or a repressive who didn’t understand or admit to his own nature?”

  Strangest of all, Alice’s mother, Lorina Liddell, abruptly banned Dodgson from the Deanery and from all association with the family in 1863, for reasons that have never come to light; by the time Alice in Wonderland was published, he was already banished from the world of the ‘golden afternoon’. He went on making friends with little girls for the rest of his life, often meeting them at the seaside or in railway carriages, delighting them with his nonsense letters, and recording his ‘conquests’ in his diaries. Mr Haughton comments that he was ‘the Casanova of the Victorian nursery’ and concludes ‘he transformed his perverse imagination into works of art.’

  I can’t help thinking that any man today who went round chatting up little girls at the seaside or on trains, let alone recording his conquests, would soon find himself locked up, and quite right too. He’d be no better than my man in the car. But am I being unfair? There is absolutely no evidence of any wrong-doing. Was Dodgson an innocent who could only make proper friends with children, or a repressive who didn’t understand or admit to his own nature? A man who would die rather than hurt a child? Are we making enough allowances for the morality – prudish in some ways, curiously unsuspicious in others – of a very different age? Was he, as some have sought to prove, really interested sexually in grown women, but his family suppressed the evidence, so he came down to us in history as this creepy celibate bachelor?

  “I don’t like that smug teenager one bit. Not only because she doesn’t really care about Dodgson; she doesn’t really care about Alice either. The real Alice.”

  Recently I saw a BBC documentary, The Secret World of Lewis Carroll, that revealed a newly discovered and particularly disturbing photograph Carroll had almost certainly taken of a naked young adolescent girl identified as Lorina Liddell, Alice’s older sister. The program interviewed Alice experts and aficionados with a range of opinions. Will Self was positive Dodgson was a paedophile (if repressed) but others were equally positive he was no such thing, while still others said we will never know for sure. ‘It is tempting, of course, to think of Carroll as a Victorian Jimmy Savile,’ said English scholar Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, ‘but, in fact, we have dozens and dozens of records from girls who he befriended who made it clear that there was a kind of ritual to their friendship. It involved kissing them chastely and that was it.’ Why is it ‘tempting’ to think of him that way? And why does all this matter now? Can’t we just enjoy the Alice books on their own merits without worrying about their creator? As my teacher said, it’s not up to us to question genius, and sometimes I think she was right.

  But still, I am worried. I’m worried about myself, about the sixteen-year-old in the 1960s, sprawled on my bed, reading a clever book and jotting down notes and getting unusually excited about the essay I was going to write. I daresay I was listening to Grace Slick singing about asking Alice in Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’, one of my favourite songs at the time, about mind-altering mushrooms and the like. I can still remember that smartarse ‘Gotcha’ feeling, that predator’s instinct, that I was going to catch out Dodgson, aka Carroll, and show my teacher and my class what he really was. And meanwhile, in other parts of London, certain celebrated showbiz men were doing things to girls younger than I was, and we would suspect nothing about it for decades.

  “I am still Alice when I read her adventures, but I am also a mother, old enough to be her grandmother, with a fierce desire to protect her from something I am not quite sure I understand or believe in.”

  I don’t like that smug teenager one bit. Not only because she doesn’t really care about Dodgson; she doesn’t really care about Alice either. The real Alice. She never once thought, as I think now, Did he think about touching her? Did he pray not to? Did he wrestle with his feelings? Did he ever give in, and touch her? And if she knew or intuited anything about his thoughts, or if she felt his touch, what did that do to her? We can’t go ask Alice. The grown-up Alice Liddell never spoke about her old friend with anything but affection and respe
ct. But it was a secretive age, and girls growing up must have sometimes repressed scarce-understood experience that they knew would only cause more trouble if revealed. Yet between them, Alice and Dodgson created these wonderful stories, and how could they have come out of anything bad?

  So my thoughts go round and round, and suck me down into a rabbit hole where there is no soft landing, and spit me out as a Jabberwock, all claws and teeth and leathery wings, but with a nice buttoned-up waistcoat. I am still Alice when I read her adventures, but I am also a mother, old enough to be her grandmother, with a fierce desire to protect her from something I am not quite sure I understand or believe in. I laugh, I admire, I take delight and I quail.

  A BOY AND HIS BEAR

  Winnie-The-Pooh

  The House at Pooh Corner

  by A.A. Milne

  Is there anything wrong with Winnie the Pooh? Nothing. In my memory, he’s perfect and adorable, without ever being irritatingly cute. And so are all his friends, and so is their habitat. Everything is right, and though some characters – particularly Piglet – are fearful, nothing is really dangerous. There is no high drama. You can get flooded out, but you just sit on your tree branch with a row of honey pots, humming a tune, and sooner or later Christopher Robin will turn up in a boat to rescue you.