Storytime

by Jane Sullivan

  “I’m amazed to discover that Thingumy and Bob, the odd and inseparable little pair with their own special language, are actually disguised portraits of Jansson and her great love at the time of writing, Vivica Bandler.”

  Jansson’s later lover Tuulikki Pietila turns up in Moominland Midwinter as the wise little creature in the stripey jumper, Too-ticky (Jansson’s nickname for her), a guide for Moomintroll through the unfamiliar world of snow and ice. The story tells us, ‘There are such a lot of things that have no place in summer and autumn and spring. Everything that’s a little shy and a little rum. Some kinds of night animals and people that don’t fit in with others and that nobody really believes in.’

  As I read about the later Moomin books I haven’t read, I’m astonished to learn that Moominmamma changes. How is this possible? She seemed eternal to me, a goddess, a life force. This was partly because Jansson herself changed: she wanted the books to reach adults as well as children. In the 1965 book Moominpappa at Sea, it is Moominpappa who instigates the change. Suddenly the marriage is under stress. He feels redundant, invisible: to reassert his manhood, he must take on a new role as a lighthouse keeper, and parents and troll-child leave the extended family and the valley for a remote island. But this means in turn that Moominmamma has nothing to do. Horror of horrors, she abandons her motherly tasks; she even abandons her handbag. But she too takes on a new role: she becomes an artist. She paints murals of the forsaken Moomin Valley, the place she longs to return to, with repeated images of herself, and she disappears into the paintings.

  I should be pleased. Wasn’t this just what I wanted to happen? Here at last Moominmamma is finding a creative role for herself where she isn’t at everyone’s beck and call being a traditional housewife. For once she has a chance to fulfil her own desires. And it’s a reply to some of the critics of the Moomin books in the 1960s, who complained the stories were too middle class, too conservative, with rigid gender roles: one went so far as to condemn Moominmamma for her illusory security, ‘at least as dangerous as the Groke’. But however much I castigate myself for thoughts traitorous to feminism, I can’t go along with it, and I don’t want to read the book. The adult in me wants Moominmamma to seek self-expression, to do something other than care for her little troll and her extended family. But the child in me wants her to stay exactly as she has always been.

  “I loved Finn Family Moomintroll with a passion because it was a world under protection: adventurous, stormy, perilous, even apocalyptic, but ultimately safe and loving”

  I loved Finn Family Moomintroll with a passion because it was a world under protection: adventurous, stormy, perilous, even apocalyptic, but ultimately safe and loving, because Moominmamma was always there with her handbag, as precious a thing as any giant ruby. In an essay, ‘The deceitful writer of children’s books’, Jansson said she wrote not to please children, but to cope with the childishness within herself; to create ‘something lost and unattainable’. When I bought my toy at Helsinki, I thought I was identifying with Moominmamma, but now I see I’m still Moomintroll, even though it’s far too late. Ham is long dead, Vicky is long dead, and Moomin Valley, or my version of it, is lost and unattainable to me as an adult, and that makes it all the more desirable.

  At the end of the book, after a huge party to celebrate the return of Moominmamma’s handbag, ‘perhaps the happiest of all is Moomintroll who goes home through the garden with his mother, just as the moon is fading in the dawn, and the trees rustling in the morning breeze which comes up from the sea.’ And the vital words, the ones that complete Moomintroll’s happiness, are the words ‘with his mother’. Not quite as moving as the boy dancing with his bear at the end of The House at Pooh Corner, but very close.

  Okay, my hypothesis about kids on their own is wrong, despite the fact so many books for children take this as their cornerstone. Tove Jansson showed it could work – and work brilliantly – to bring parents into the story, especially the mother.

  So what shall I propose as my next hypothesis? How about this: I needed magic. Magic in a metaphorical sense, in Blyton’s adventures; and in a literal sense here. Exciting magic is one of the best and most essential things about Finn Family Moomintroll – in the Hobgoblin’s hat and its stimulating and alarming possibilities; and in the Hobgoblin himself. It sheds a light over the Finn landscape like the giant King’s Ruby.

  The ruby changed colour all the time. At first it was quite pale, and then suddenly a pink glow would flow over it like the sunrise on a snow-capped mountain – and then again crimson flames shot out of its heart and it seemed like a great black tulip with stamens of fire.

  But don’t the day-to-day domestic realities of family life (the need for dry socks and string and sweets and tummy-powder) work against the magic? Not at all. Indeed, magic imbues the family itself with something numinous.

  I look again at my Moominmamma on the bookshelf. Why did I choose her, not Moomintroll? I don’t know if this is getting too presumptuous, but I’m thinking of Tawaret, the ancient Egyptian goddess of childbirth and fertility. She walks upright on her hindlegs, she has a stubby body and a hippo face. The Egyptians made little Tawaret statues and wore Tawaret amulets. She is a nourisher and protector, especially of children, she rejuvenates the dead.

  Moominmamma, please watch over me.

  THE FLASHING EYES OF BETTY ROLAND

  The Silent Three

  by Horace Boyten and Stewart Pride,

  illustrated by Evelyn Flinders

  Long before books, comic strips were in my DNA. The first one I read was my father’s daily strip, Colonel Pewter in Ironicus, cut out of the News Chronicle and pasted into a big scrapbook with marbled covers (it was published as a book in 1957 by the Pall Mall Press). I used to lie on my stomach beside the coke stove in the huge, draughty studio at St John’s Wood which had once belonged to the sculptor Leigh Hunt. I could barely read then, and lots of words were too hard to pronounce or understand, but that didn’t stop me, particularly as much of the humour was in the pictures. My dad would sit at his desk nearby, drawing the latest strip, and I had to be very quiet so as not to disturb him. I laughed a lot, very quietly, at the adventures of the Colonel, an eccentric retired military man who takes his great-nephew Martin and his cat Chloe on an expedition to darkest Africa and the lost city of Ironicus – an expedition that involves a flying bicycle, a flying ostrich, a magic holdall from a gully-gully man in Spunjbhag, a chimpanzee dictator and a revolutionary Night of the Caterpults. What I didn’t know was that this fabulous tale was also a satire on contemporary politics– all those Swiftian jokes went right over my head. But I was quietly thrilled at Martin, the little boy in gumboots. I didn’t just identify with him, I really was him. My father based him on me at the time. (It’s only now that I wonder: if he was based on me, why didn’t my father make Martin a girl?)

  “my first efforts at telling stories were in cartoon strip form”

  It was not surprising, then, that my first efforts at telling stories were in cartoon strip form. First, I drew – on everything I could get hold of. I had a favourite trio of characters to whom I gave the most splendid-sounding names I could think of: Escalator, Toilet and Jean. I took my drawings into the bath with me and drew underwater. As soon as I could form words, I was giving my characters balloons, and putting words in them. I particularly loved those fluffy balloons where you could put what people were thinking rather than saying. The interior monologue was born.

  My parents didn’t approve of comics for children. They thought such things were vulgar (a strange view from socialist, egalitarian parents, but perhaps it was an aesthetic judgement), and Julia and I weren’t allowed to have them, which made them all the more desirable. The one concession was at Christmas, when Santa gave us copies of Beano and The Dandy, and for one morning a year we lay in bed and wallowed in the adventures of Desperate Dan or the Bash Street Kids. But apart from the odd character such as Beryl the Peril, it was a pretty masculine world. It took me a litt
le longer to find the girls’ comics, and the Silent Three.

  They were Betty, Peggy and Joan, students in their early teens at a romantic private boarding school, all Gothic battlements and bosky courtyards. They had crisp striped blazers, confident smiles and winsome curly hair. Every now and then they would dress up in hooded robes and masks and become the Silent Three, a secret society devoted to righting wrongs and hunting out criminals. Oddly, nobody ever suspected the girls’ secret: how many trios of friends about that age were in this school?

  I discovered The Silent Three at George Eliot Primary School in Marylebone, London, a no-nonsense brick and concrete edifice quite devoid of battlements and courtyards. The school kept collections of yellowing back numbers of School Friend, Girls’ Crystal, girls’ annuals and a series of little books, precursors of graphic novels, with teenage girl heroines. There were also comics for boys, such as Eagle, but I wasn’t interested in them. All of us were allowed to read them in our breaks when it was too wet to go outside, sucking up our free bottles of milk: comic books still conjure up that sour smell. Soon I was saving up pocket money to buy my own comics, and asking for the School Friend annual for my Christmas present.

  The Silent Three adventures hinged around mysteries, clues such as torn letters and treasure maps, flashing lights. Much of the action happened after dark, with a great deal of creeping around in moonlight. There was often a nasty older girl at the school involved in the skul-duggery. You could always spot her because she was dark-haired, had a name like Norma, she might wear glasses and a sour milk expression. Sometimes the villain was her brother or her uncle, but never her boyfriend. Sex didn’t exist. Nor did unbearable suspense, for I never doubted for a moment that the Silent Three would triumph. This made the stories very comforting.

  “I never doubted for a moment that the Silent Three would triumph. This made the stories very comforting.”

  I liked the fact the chums were subversive: only mild transgressions by today’s standards, but they did disobey school rules and were sometimes on the brink of expulsion. I enjoyed trying to work out the mysteries and I thought the Silent Three were very brave and clever and extraordinary quick-change artists (how long did it take to get in and out of a robe and mask?). I toyed with the idea of starting my own Silent Three with my sister and my friend Polly, but it never got off the ground, mostly because I couldn’t work out the right kind of robe (dressing gowns wouldn’t cut it) and I had a sneaking feeling we would only look stupid and embarrassing. Not like Betty, Peggy and Joan, who always looked like the Vogue branch of the Spanish Inquisition.

  Other stories in the comics were about cowgirls, jungle girls, circus girls, ballerinas and skaters, but the school stories were the most fun and seemed the most real, even though – or perhaps because – the school (for boarders, upper class, from a much earlier era) was always a fantasy compared to my own experience.

  In 2001, I returned to the girls’ comic world when I wrote about it in a feature for The Age, the Melbourne newspaper where I worked. Camberwell Books and Collectibles obligingly lent me some of their back copies of the little Picture Library strip cartoon books (School Friend, Princess and Schoolgirls’ Picture Library) to bring back the memories. What gold I struck. I was particularly taken with the tale of Mary Marlow, who comes to Kingston to visit her friend Mistress Olivia. The talk of all Jamaica is a mysterious pirate who comes and goes like a shadow – the dashing Masked Pirate in his swift sloop, the Sea Hawk. Soon Mary and the Masked Pirate are embroiled in a thrilling adventure, saving each other from peril at every turn. Only Mary knows the pirate’s secret – that he is really her friend Olivia’s lost brother.

  Ah, but there’s a twist of Shakespearean proportions; the most amazing discovery yet, and Mary is unable to believe her eyes. When she discovers the pirate without his mask, she sees that he is really a she – none other than Mistress Olivia. In the last frame of the cartoon strip, Mary and Olivia, in her pirate gear, clasp hands and gaze into each others’ eyes. ‘Dear Mary! You have been a true friend,’ breathes Olivia, while Lionel, the handsome lost brother they have rescued from the evil governor of the island, hovers as a benign, ignored presence behind Mary. What a weird and winning combination of innocence and unconscious eroticism: I wonder how many lesbians discovered their sexuality through girls’ comics.

  The Camberwell Books stash revealed many more treasures. There was Tracy Jones, teenage fashion model (a bouncy, wholesome lass: absolutely no anorexia or drugs or nudity); Sally Doyle, Circus Ballerina; Torama, Jungle Princess; Lola, the Gay Princess. All pretty, all feminine, but all also bold and athletic and dashing – and the men and boys reduced to bit parts: shadowy retainers or officials, comic or evil crooks. I found my heart still quickened when I read introductions such as ‘The girls of Maxley College were agog’, or ‘High above the tropical jungle of South America droned an aeroplane bound for the interior’, or ‘Thrills for Jan Fenton, just starting her first term at Mountain School in the Swiss Alps!’. And yes, I remembered how I’d been all those people, even though I couldn’t ski, ride a pony, dance a ballet or model a frock, let alone command a pirate sloop and boss around the crew in a rough, manly voice. But for all the charms of the masked pirate and friends, my heart still belonged to those other three masked girls.

  The response to my feature was the strongest I had ever had in about twenty years of writing for The Age, although I had covered many stories I had thought were far more serious and significant. I had letters for weeks, from both women and men, and people accosted me in department stores to tell me about their own favourite girls. To this day I sometimes get letters enclosing other examples of schoolgirl comics. It’s not something that’s talked about very much, but it remains in the memories of many people of my generation: the pleasures and thrills of schoolgirl reading.

  As a child, I felt an affinity with Anne Shirley because she was a bit of a tomboy like me. My mum had also read the L. M. Montgomery novels when she was a girl and those characters created dialogue between us.

  Without doubt, Anne and her world have shaped my writing. I use community, much like Prince Edward Island, to dump a character in. One with prejudices to be challenged and quirks to be embraced.I have an Anne of Green Gables moment in each one of my novels, inspired by the scene where Anne breaks a slate over Gilbert Blythe’s head. My slate-breaking moments are metaphorical, used to convey the intellectual competition between two characters who are simmering with chemistry.

  But in revisiting the novel, I have less tolerance for Anne and more for Marilla and Matthew, her adoptive parents. As an adult reader, I’m interested in their story. Siblings, not husband and wife. Each with their own history.

  Melina Marchetta

  You can buy School Friend annuals or copies of the old comics and there’s something of a collector’s market for them. But I don’t have a re-reading copy, because I have decided the best way to visit The Silent Three is online. There are several websites that feature their adventures, and I’ve picked Comic Book Plus, which has eight of them. As I soon discover, eight is plenty. I’d remembered the stories as somewhat similar: I was wrong. Apart from minor details of place, props and personnel, all eight are identical.

  “I’d remembered the stories as somewhat similar: I was wrong. Apart from minor details of place, props and personnel, all eight are identical.”

  There’s a story template into which they all fit. It goes something like this: the three chums – Betty Roland, Joan Derwent and Peggy West – are happily pottering about their business when they come across a damsel in distress. She immediately evokes their spontaneous sympathy because she is slim, pale and her voice trembles. (In one story the damsel is a boy, but there is ‘a sincere vibrant note’ in his voice, which means they trust him.) She is in pursuit of some mysterious treasure, but she has been thwarted and wronged and cast in a bad light by a plotter, or plotters, who are also after the treasure. You can pick the plotters, male or female, by a harsh voice
, an angry manner, or ‘a rather supercilious face’. So we know at once whose side we’re on, as we embark on a combination of quest story, detective story, vindication story and thriller.

  The Silent Three vow to help the damsel against tyranny and injustice, which is after all their job. This invariably involves solving a mysterious note on a scrap of paper, a riddle that leads to various objects, some of them red herrings, and then the final reveal, which is usually inside a secret passage or hidden compartment. Along the way there is much donning of robes and masks in case they are recognised, skulking around in forbidden places, plotting and counterplotting, eavesdropping, pursuing, fleeing, climbing dangerous walls or diving in dangerous waters, confronting in melodramatic style with a shout and an outstretched pointing finger. There is even ‘grappling’, though it never seems to amount to violence or injury. The villains are caught out at the moment of the grapple, when they reveal their plans and announce triumphantly that they will get away with it all, just at the moment when the forces of rightful authority (the headmistress, the property owner, or whoever) arrive on the scene. The damsel is cleared of all suspicion, the plotters are disgraced, the treasure is won, and non-alcoholic toasts are drunk to the mysterious Silent Three: ‘Long may they flourish to fight against tyranny!’ And all this done in about ten pages, a masterpiece of compression.