Storytime

by Jane Sullivan

  “as I read the story that first time, I crossed the line with them. I was no longer passive. I was active.”

  Before they enter one of the worst passages in the mines, Durathror makes a revealing little speech about courage. Colin asks him if he is scared. ‘Mortally,’ he replies. ‘I will pit my wits and sword against all odds, and take joy in it. But that is not courage. Courage is fear mastered, and in battle I am not afraid. Here, though, the enemy has no guile to be countered, no substance to be cast down. Victory or defeat mean nothing to it. Whether we win or lose affects us alone. It challenges us by its presence, and the real conflict is fought within ourselves.’

  “I needed to confront my deepest fears, a little at a time”

  At last I have found a hypothesis that holds. I needed to confront my deepest fears, a little at a time: from the laughable fears Piglet had of the non-existent Heffalump to the shock of the Jabberwock, to the scarily real grown-ups in Maria’s Oxford… all the way to the silent snow. And the mines beneath Alderley Edge put a diabolical twist on my horror of annihilation: I can be crushed, I can drown, I can suffocate. But I must add something to my hypothesis. I needed to confront my deepest fears, and summon the trust and hope that I could overcome them.

  “The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was one of the first books I read to challenge me about my own courage”

  The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was one of the first books I read to challenge me about my own courage; to wonder whether I had the strength to stand up to my fears, to win that conflict within myself and take that step into active agency, as Colin and Susan did. It’s easy to imagine heroes and wizards and dwarves doing it, but these were two children just like myself.

  Could I? Would I?

  THE TEMPTATION AND THE CURE

  The Myths of Greece and Rome

  by H. A. Guerber

  It will make me feel efficient if I give you a list, so here it is. My hypotheses, in the order I formed them: a few sustained, many modified, many discarded. Wild surmises, perhaps, but as I went along, they were what I thought I needed from my childhood reading:

  • to identify with the main character

  • a well-written story about beautifully observed characters

  • adventure

  • animals, cute or awe-inspiring

  • scenes I could construct in my own head

  • children off on their own exciting magic

  • heroes: humble, enterprising, adventurous or champions

  • no overt moral messages

  • strong, lovable characters

  • scary magic

  • a cathartic release of my worst impulses

  • a cathartic release of my best impulses

  • a tale of vindication

  • to be transported into another world

  • to confront my deepest fears

  • to confront my deepest fears and summon the trust and hope I could overcome them

  Oh, what a ragged list. What glaring contradictions. Can’t I do better? Try as I may, I can’t patch these needs together into any form that will show a coherent universal philosophy of childhood reading. It’s not even complete: probably I should have added ‘humour’ and ‘food’ to the list, even though some of the books I loved were not at all funny and did not make me feel hungry.

  “What has emerged for me is that all these hypotheses are true some of the time, but they don’t hold true for all the books all of the time.”

  What has emerged for me is that all these hypotheses are true some of the time, but they don’t hold true for all the books all of the time. I needed different things at different times from different books. And I didn’t even know I needed those things until I started reading the book.

  Are any of these needs fulfilled in all the books? Adventure? Possibly, though the definition of adventure would have to vary very widely, from going on an expotition to the North Pole through the English countryside to sailing away to find the rim of the ocean.

  To be transported into another world? Yes, that’s vital, perhaps the greatest need of all, and strange that it was not until my Dawn Treader re-reading adventure that it emerged clearly. In the widest sense, I’m always entering the world of the book. Sometimes it’s quite like my own world, sometimes it’s hugely different, magic and faraway. Then there are books where I enter one world (Eustace’s house, say) and then another world (Narnia) and then perhaps glimpse another world beyond that (Aslan’s country). Every world I get to is bigger and wider and wilder than the last. And sometimes the people in the more faraway world come to the first book world. Some primeval yearning is surely at work here. Robert Dessaix touched on it in his Enid Blyton lecture, when he quoted the American neurosurgeon Eben Alexander’s famous account of his experience of being dead in 2008. Alexander said he felt trapped in a dark space, then lifted up through a purple hole in the clouds to an idyllic countryside, where he met a beautiful girl, rode with her on a butterfly’s wing to a light-filled void and encountered a wondrous being who unlocked for them many secrets of the universe. Dessaix appealed to his audience: ‘Does that not sound like the basic plot-line of a Faraway Tree adventure?’

  It’s easy to scoff at the improbability of Alexander’s vision or the banality of the Faraway Tree stories, but that would be to miss the emotional impact on the man who had his vision while undergoing cardiac arrest, or the child turning the pages. And yes, now I think about primeval yearning, there is something I missed completely, a need that is fulfilled in all these books, so obvious that it went under the radar. They made me feel things with great intensity. They made me laugh, cry, burn, freeze, either openly or on the inside. Perhaps the most amazing emotion some of them made me feel was awe, which can spill either way, into ecstasy or horror. What extraordinarily vast regions to be held in a little package of pages, in a little girl’s head and heart.

  “If I had to find a word for the most persistent emotion I felt, and still feel, when reading these books, it would be longing.”

  If I had to find a word for the most persistent emotion I felt, and still feel, when reading these books, it would be longing. C. S. Lewis has some perceptive thoughts on this in his essay ‘On three ways of writing for children’. He distinguishes between two kinds of longing: askesis, a spiritual exercise, and a disease. My feeling is definitely askesis. Lewis says that when a boy (of course it could be a girl too) reads about fairy land, it ‘rouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his lifelong enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all woods a little enchanted.’

  Where I disagree with Lewis is when he says that reading a relatively realistic school story about a popular or successful or heroic child provokes the diseased kind of longing, leaving the reader dissatisfied and frustrated. For me, the school setting of The Silent Three was just as much a fantasy world as an enchanted wood; and while I ached to be Betty Roland, and sometimes I achieved that transition with great triumph in my head, and then considered the idea of forming my own secret society, it didn’t go any further, not because I couldn’t design the right costume but because I never wanted any of those things to happen in the world outside the book or the comic. It was enough for me to crack open the possibilities – in this case, that a girl could be a hero. Whatever world I was transported to, I felt like Lewis’s child in fairy land, who ‘desires and is happy in the very fact of desiring’.

  Another hugely important aspect of these books was what they led me to see, both on the page and in my head. The illustrations and the maps on the endpapers were vital parts of my memory and the first things I looked at when I started my re-reading, and they invariably invoked a flood of new memories. The Alice stories are Sir John Tenniel as well as Lewis Carroll; the Pooh stories and The Wind in the Willows are Ernest Shepard as well as A. A. M
ilne and Kenneth Grahame; The Castle of Adventure is Stuart Tresilian as well as Enid Blyton; The Enchanted Castle is H. R. Millar as well as E. Nesbit; the Dawn Treader is Pauline Baynes as well as C. S. Lewis; The Warden’s Niece is Dick Hart as well as Gillian Avery; and The Silent Three are almost entirely the drawings of Evelyn Flinders. And Norman Lindsay and Tove Jansson brilliantly provided the perfect combination of words and pictures.

  “Another hugely important aspect of these books was what they led me to see”

  Maps hold a special magic all of their own. In The Writer’s Map, edited by Huw Lewis-Jones, various writers pay tribute to the maps in children’s books that inspired them. As a child, Abi Alphinstone could point out exactly whereabouts in Narnia Edmund first met the White Witch: ‘C. S. Lewis’s map, drawn by Pauline Baynes, dared me to be curious from the off.’ Frances Hardinge loved the Moominland map: ‘a map that a child of the Moominhouse might have drawn, with a child’s deep-seated understanding of what is important.’

  ‘What is the use of a book without pictures?’ Alice famously said. But I didn’t always need pictures on the page, because I had pictures in my head. Books gave me an effortlessly reinforced lesson in using my imagination, and often the less description provided, the more vivid my pictures became. Between seven and eleven, I saw very little cinema or television, but as I focused on the letters on the page, the coloured images moved as if I was watching a film behind my eyes, and somehow I could hold that simultaneous perception. And even after I’d closed the book, the images would come swimming back into focus with remarkable clarity and sometimes with a glowing magnificence. I still read with those pictures behind my eyes. Which is why it’s so disorienting to me to see ‘the film of the book’ – it’s never the same as the one in my head.

  Going back to my childhood favourites has confirmed and reinforced my belief that reading helps us grow. When we reach adolescence and maturity, we need different books. But if we pick wisely, they can still help us grow. And growing helps us read better.

  “reading helps us grow”

  When I began my re-reading, I feared an anticlimax. But I wasn’t disappointed. Nothing was spoiled, even if I didn’t like a book as much as I did the first time. I have felt brief moments of shock and shame at young Jane’s ill taste, or her complete lack of the usual alerts I have in place today when I spot something unpalatable, such as racism or sexism. But these moments passed, and I came to realise that shame and taste and virtuous alerts, though they might well be important in themselves, have nothing to do with what young Jane felt. Much as I would like to declare that these early reads lit a beacon of feminism for me, for example, I can’t. I was a 1950s child, for heaven’s sake. Still, there were little flames here and there: Maria’s mad dream of being Professor of Greek at Oxford, the Silent Three’s justice crusade, Lucy Pevensie’s bow and arrow, even Jo’s genius burning.

  “When I began my re-reading, I feared an anticlimax. But I wasn’t disappointed.

  Considering the bulk of what I was reading, it’s a wonder I grew up feminist at all. Of the texts I re-read for this book, nine were written by men, six by women. Five depicted worlds that were all-male, or almost all-male. In eight stories, the main or dominant character was male; in five, female. I’ve left out Great Tales of Terror, but if we include those short stories, the statistics become far more skewed: sixty-one male authors, eight female; sixty-one stories where the main or dominant character is male; six, female. Apart from the writers of Little Women and The Silent Three, nobody was creating stories specifically for girls.

  “Much as I would like to declare that these early reads lit a beacon of feminism for me, for example, I can’t.”

  All my texts were by white people, and with few exceptions, the people in them were white. C. S. Lewis’s Calormenes were swarthy, vaguely Middle Eastern garlic-eating enemies of Narnia. The only books I came across that told stories entirely about people of colour (All the Proud Tribesmen; Australian Legendary Tales) were written and illustrated by white people. Today, I find that extraordinary and disturbing. Back then, it was entirely off my radar. Writers and readers alike, we were all creatures of our times.

  Finding out about the authors of my favourite stories has given me a keener and sometimes more painful sense of appreciation for what they achieved. I think they worked their wonders not because they knew children well, but because in some sense they still were children: as Gore Vidal said of Edith Nesbit, they had vowed not to kill off the child inside, as most of us do. Reading these titles again has given me a keener and more painful sense of my child inside. At first it seemed such a warm and fuzzy journey, back to a time when I was a fortunate child in a loving family. But there was something innate in me that made life hard and frightening.

  “there was something innate in me that made life hard and frightening”

  I remember a moment when I was sitting in the bath and looking down at my child’s body and a thought popped into my head: One day I will be a grown-up. I will have to do grown-up things, all on my own. My mum and dad won’t be there to help me. Nor will anyone else. I will have to find somewhere to live, get a job, go to work, go shopping, deal with mysterious things like washing machines and banking facilities.

  The bathwater was suddenly cold. My idea was so horrifying I couldn’t think any further: friends, boyfriends, marriage, children. Only me – small, alone, bereft, helpless. It never occurred to me that by the time I had to fend for myself I would be an adult, with an adult’s knowledge and maturity and resources. All I could think of was being young Jane, hurtled into an adult’s world.

  My mother read me Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie from a beautiful illustrated hardcover edition. I was at an age when I was just starting to wrestle with some big existential concepts: things like death (my great-aunt had recently died), loss, growing up, and ideas of good and evil. As the best children’s stories do, Peter Pan introduced me gently, kindly, to these dark and ultimately irreconcilable topics.

  I remember making my mother read over and over again the part in the story when Tinker Bell drinks the poison left by Captain Hook for Peter and is then brought back to life, ingeniously, by the direct action of the readers. It also instilled in me a deep terror of growing up, and especially of growing up a girl (they missed out on everything). In my late thirties, I still have it. Peter Pan literally gave me a Peter Pan complex.

  Emily Bitto

  Books helped with moments like that. Stories gave me a chance to be other people, to try out possibilities, to make decisions, but without risking anything in real life. It’s probably not a coincidence that I spent a lot of time reading in the bath.

  “Stories gave me a chance to be other people, to try out possibilities, to make decisions, but without risking anything in real life.”

  And yet the books were not what I thought they were. As I have shown, I remembered many things wrongly. I got stories muddled up, transposed characters, forgot some characters and events completely. More importantly, though, my re-reading experience has shown me that I was not the child I thought I was. I had forgotten myself.

  I had always thought that young Jane was a passive reader. Books happened to her. It’s bound up with those watery metaphors of the pleasures of reading: I was swept away, immersed, engulfed. Or the sensation of being under a spell: I couldn’t put the book down; I couldn’t wait to get back into it. Today I still have that voluptuous sense of surrender when I’m engrossed in a particularly powerful thriller.

  But I have discovered that I was wrong. Young Jane was an active reader. Sure, she adapted to her reading environment, but she also adapted the reading environment to herself. She happened to books. She made Moley and Maria more like herself as she imagined them while she read, and she saw out of their eyes. She created scenes in elaborate and vivid detail, however sketchy the text, based on what she’d seen in real life or in another book, or just completely made up. She gave characters the faces and hair and bodies of people she knew,
regardless of illustrations or descriptions in the text, regardless sometimes even of gender. She identified readily with girls, boys, adults, animals, fantastic creatures – whatever suited her purpose, which was to be the hero of the story. But her hero was not necessarily the author’s hero, and could change through the story. Yet always she utterly refused some things. She would not be told what to think or feel, and she would be neither a wimpy girl, nor a strong girl she saw as a rival. And she had her own ingenious ways of dealing with setbacks. If she thought the story was being unfair to girls, either she took it in her stride or she just imagined herself as one of the boys. Why be the Snork Maiden when you can be Moomintroll?

  “I like this young Jane: intuitive, imaginative, a touch rebellious and stubborn and prickly, surprisingly resilient, determined to possess her reading.”

  I like this young Jane: intuitive, imaginative, a touch rebellious and stubborn and prickly, surprisingly resilient, determined to possess her reading. She doesn’t think about these things she does to her books, she just does them. She is much more in control than I thought she was. But why did I first remember her as a helpless, passive reader? Perhaps because helpless and passive was how she felt about herself. And perhaps, I think now, she was mistaken.

  Of course children at that time, especially good middle-class children, were under the rule of parents and school and society: there was a limit to what they could control. But I’m thinking more about the things I could have done, and didn’t. Between the ages of seven and eleven, I experienced no great grief or trauma, I was loved and well cared for, and I was often content, even cheerful. Yet I remember a persistent sense of wretchedness, a combination of loneliness and shame. It was because I couldn’t make friends. I saw it as some essential failure in myself. I was a lost soul.