R for Roald Dahl

I am going off at a slight tangent today since Roald Dahl strictly writes for a slightly older age group than the other books I have been writing about during my A to Z challenge, but he is so deliciously irreverent that I just had to include him. He knows how to appeal to children in a totally unique way, there are lots of dispicable adults who get outwitted by lots of clever children, but the stories are more complex and not really suitable for the under 5's. Probably after the Narnia books 'George's Marvellous Medicine' and 'The Twits' were amongst the first chapter books that I read to my children. Today however I am writing about the delights of 'Revolting Rhymes'. They are for slightly older children because in order to really appreciate the humour in them you do need to be familiar with the original traditional stories of which these are a rewrite. This is also a return visit for Quentin Blake as his illustrations here really add to the general level of mischief. 

In Cinderella we have the traditional opening with poor Cinders locked in the cellar by her ugly sisters, but things take an unpleasant turn when the Prince comes calling in search of his lady-love and takes a dislike to the ugly sisters and chops of their heads.

"In the kitchen peeling spuds,

Cinderella heard the thuds

Of bouncing heads upon the floor,

And poked her own head round the door.

'What's all the racket?' Cindy cried.

'Mind your own bizz,' the Prince replied.

Poor Cindy's heart was torn to shreds.

My Prince! she thought. He chops of heads!"

And so she asks the Fairy to find her a decent man instead and ends up married to a jam-maker,

"Their house was filled with smiles and laughter

and they were happy ever after."

In Jack and the Beanstalk the unpleasant abusive mother berates and harangues her poor son over not just his lack of business acumen but his personal hygiene. The Giant it seems can smell him coming. But she gets her comeuppance when she tries to gather the golden leaves from the beanstalk:

"From somewhere high above the ground

There came a frightful crunching sound.

He heard the Giant mutter twice,

'By gosh, that tasted very nice.'

'Although' (and this in grumpy tones)

'I wish there weren't so many bones.'

'By Christopher!' Jack cried. 'By gum!'

'The Giant's eaten up my mum!'

'He smelled her out! She's in his belly!'

'I had a hunch that she was smelly.' "

Our favourite was Red Riding Hood where the young girl turns the tables on the wolf very satisfactorily (I guess we're not supposed to sympathise with the wolf at all.)

"The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers.

She whips a pistol from her knickers.

She aims it at the creature's head

And bang bang bang she shoots him dead.

A few weeks later, in the wood,

I came across Miss Riding Hood.

But what a change! No cloak of red,

No silly hood upon her head.

She said, 'Hello, and do please note

My lovely furry WOLFSKIN COAT.' "

(But we find she's not to be trusted as she makes a return visit in the Three Little Pigs, rids them of their troublesome wolf, but ends the story with a Pigskin Travelling Case.)

Goldilocks on the other hand has the tables turned on her as the story argues that she is the worst of criminals:

"Oh, what a take of crime on crime!

Lets check it for the second time.

Crime One, the prosecutions case:

She breaks and enters someone's place.

Crime Two, the prosecutor notes:

She steals a bowl of porridge oats.

Crime Three: She breaks a precious chair

Belonging to the Baby Bear

Crime Four: She smears each spotless sheet

With filthy messes from her feet.

A judge would say without a blink,

'Ten years hard labour in the clink!'

But in the book, as you will see,

The little beast gets off scot-free!"

and children should not be encouraged to sympathise with her and the only appropriate punishment is to be consumed by Baby Bear.

(Go to the list here and visit other A to Z Bloggers.)

Q for Quentin Blake

Ok, I confess, he is going to get several other mentions this month, mainly because he is so incredibly prolific, but Quentin Blake gets to have his own post because he is just the best (and his name is a gift for the most difficult letter of the alphabet.) It is a sign of a good friendship to be able to disagree, and my friend Julie really doesn't like these books; I was horrified when I learned this about her but I have tried not to let it come between us. All credit is also due to Russell Hoban who wrote the wonderful stories about Captain Najork, they are clever and witty and imaginative, and I always considered our hero Tom as a role model for home educated kids (he does lots of fooling around and there is no mention of school).

'How Tom Beat Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen'

 Tom lives with Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong who wears an iron hat and makes him eat cabbage-and-potato sog (and who's singing kills small birds):

 She doesn't like all the fooling around that Tom does and so she sends for Captain Najork, and he comes up the river in his pedal boat with his hired sportsmen:

 To teach him a lesson Captain Najork is going to make him play some very peculiar games. It turns out however that each of the games is very like certain kinds of fooling around that Tom is particularly good at. Womble is a 'high-up, wobbling and teetering sort of game':

 Muck is a slithering and shovelling kind of game:

 Sneedball was ever stranger, 'partly it was like dropping things off bridges into rivers and fishing them out and partly it was like fooling around with barrels in alleys':

 Spoiler Alert: in the end Tom advertises for a new aunt, called Bundlejoy Cosysweet who wears a floppy hat with flowers, and Captain Najork marries Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Stong, 'even though he had lost the Sneedball game, and they were very happy together'.

In 'A Near Thing for Captain Najork' we find ourselves with a love triangle as Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Stong-Najork suspects the Captain of having wayward affections and all hell breaks loose.

 Looking through his telescope one day Captain Najork sees Tom go past with his aunt in their two-seater jam-powered frog:

... so he jumps into his pedal-powered snake with the hired sportsmen. He wants to challenge Tom to some more games, "I'd like how good he is at thud, crunch and Tom-on-the-bottom."

In the exciting climax the headmistress of the girls boarding school across the river challenges Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong and they 'arm-wrestle for the Captain on the landing-stage', but fortunately the aunt wins and takes the Captain home for his 'swede-and-mutton slump'. 

There is another wild ride in store for Mrs Armitage when she decides to update her bicycle, adding horns, a toolkit, some food, music, umbrellas and eventually a sail to enhance her cycling enjoyment. Another book that I have repurchased, the original story in what is now quite an extended series about Mrs Armitage and her dog Breakspear. 

(Go to the list here and visit other A to Z Bloggers.)

P for Pooh and Pienkowski

There are certain characters who can't be missed out in any perusal of children's stories and 'Winnie the Pooh' by A.A. Milne has to be top of the list. Again I no longer have the set of books that my friend Michelle bought for Lewis when he was a toddler but they were read and read and read. They are such lovely stories, this wonderful safe and slightly magical place, The Hundred Acre Wood, where a group of toys come to life and live and play together. The best writers tune in to the way children think, and imagining your favourite toys as real life friends is something all children do. I think my favourite is the one where Pooh and Piglet walk round and round the spinney thinking they might be hunting a woozle but are only following their own footsteps.

(Visit here for the only other mention of Pooh on my blog)

Another much loved illustrator is Jan Pienkowski  and I think that 'Meg and Mog' (with Helen Nicholl) may well have been the very first children's book I ever bought. I love the bright simplicity of these books. I sometimes wonder what small children make of the idea of a witch on a broomstick, but then again perhaps it is no more surreal than an elephant to a child who has never seen one.

(Go to the list here and visit other A to Z Bloggers.)

O for Ormerod

Jan Ormerod is the second illustrator I have come across this month who sadly died earlier this year. 'Sunshine' is the book that brought her to public notice back in 1981. It is very typical of her style of very simple pictures of everyday life. This one is apparently based on her own daughter and follows a little girl as she gets ready for her day. Wordless books are so nice because as a parent you just sit and talk about the pictures, pointing things out, comparing experiences, telling a story that can be improvised and changed each time. They are pitched more at children just learning to talk because they love to be able to name all the familiar things in the story and it encourages them to describe things with increasing fluency as time goes by. They are very much books to be lingered over. It's pretty self-explanatory, enjoy:

(Go to the list here and visit other A to Z Bloggers.)

N for Not Now Bernard

'Not Now Bernard' by David McKee is a book that subverts all the conventions, in the same way that Hitchcock's Psycho did, yet both succeed as stories.

Our protagonist announces to his mother, "There's a monster in the garden and it's going to eat me", and he then goes into the garden to face his destiny. Fortunately he is not really in the story long enough for anyone to strongly identify with his character.

The monster makes very short work of eating Bernard, it's the parents he has more trouble with. 

None of my children ever seemed to have much sympathy with poor Bernard; it seemed that if he was stupid enough to go out there even when he was aware of the monster's intent, then he deserved to be eaten.

It is a tale of parental indifference, and we never had much sympathy with the parents either, in fact you can't help but side with the monster. This is another clever twist since they are invariably the baddies in any story.

The monster has about as much luck in attracting the parents attention as poor Bernard did, roaring at his mother and then biting his father:

Then he eats Bernard's dinner, reads one of his comics and breaks one of his toys (the frustration is beginning to show):

With not even a blink of acknowledgment the mother sends him off to bed with a cup of warm milk. The monster is utterly disarmed by their failure to notice the fact he has taken Bernard's place.

"But I'm a monster" says the monster at the end.

"Not now Bernard," says his mother.

McKee is perhaps best known for Elmer the Patchwork Elephant, which we also enjoyed, though Elmer's further adventures mostly came when we had moved on to more involved stories. He is an interesting writer because he tackles themes like diversity and racism in a way that is understandable to young children. I also remember we had one called 'Two Monsters' about two monsters that lived on opposite sides of a mountain and communicated through a hole in the mountain. 

(Go to the list here and visit other A to Z Bloggers.)

M for Mirinda the Castaway

Jacob had plenty of books that were his, and the chances of finding one for Thymian were pretty slim, so when we came across one for Creature we had to have it. Admittedly I always read this book as 'Mirinda' (that's her name by the way, an Esperanto word that means 'amazing'): 'Miranda the Castaway' by James Mayhew.

 A little girl is cast away on a desert island (she's kind of just there without an explanation of how it happened). When no one comes to rescue her she realises she is going to have to help herself. Now while the scenario could be quite frightening to a small child the pictures are warm and friendly and the aim is to show her being clever and resourceful. First she finds water:

 then copies the animals to find food:

She builds a house for herself and lights a fire with her glasses (any similarities with Lord of the Flies end there fortunately);

She extends her treehouse and build more rooms, and a system of pipes to bring water from the spring. My mum always objected to this picture (this is the toilet) because under no circumstances should you poop in your water source (in case you should ever find yourself shipwrecked on a desert island):

Another slightly suspect one is the garden she starts at the edge of the beach, the soil here would be no good to grow anything, but you get the idea:

She tries to make friends with the monkeys and the spiders but in the end she decides that although life is pretty good on the island she is lonely and misses people:

So she builds a raft and sails away

I think that although it is adults that provide the security in life for young children the best stories don't have any, allowing the children to gain some sense that their choices and decisions can have real meaning and impact. While cute animal stories are wonderful I think part of the role of reading stories is to help a child along the path to independence, introducing them to new experiences in a safe way so they can greet experiences in the real world with more confidence.

There are lots of M books and characters but the other that just can't be missed out is Mog the Forgetful Cat by Judith Kerr. I recently bought a copy of 'The Tiger Who Came to Tea', but her books about Mog were regularly in our library pile. I always liked them because it wasn't a cat being like a person but a cat who was always concerned about cat things.

A final M: 'Mole and Troll Trim the Tree' by Tony Johnston and Wallace Tripp that I mentioned back in 2009 and I finally bought a new copy just after Christmas (all ready for next year).

(Go to the list here and visit other A to Z Bloggers.)

L is for Ladybird

It is sad that I no longer have the copies of these vintage Ladybird books and even more sad that they are now collectors items fetching ludicrous prices. Ladybird Books are a nostalgia things for me on two fronts, having read them myself as a child and then the collection we inherited that I read to my own children. But then of course (because sometimes they just can't leave well alone) Ladybird updated the illustrations and the stories and they just weren't the same. The modern illustrations have a nasty plastic cartoon quality with harsh artificial colours. While the Peter and Jane early readers are best consigned to the history books along with their tired sexual stereotypes there is much to recommend these traditional story books. My particular favourite ones are in the Well Loved Tales series. The Three Billy Goats Gruff and Chicken Licken were both books that I could recite from memory when we were out walking, in fact any wooden bridge we crossed would be called a 'trip trap bridge' and would spark a game of trolls (I think I usually got to be the troll). I love them because they are often silly, but are making a point about life without labouring it or being preachy. They pose a situation for the protagonist which then prompts the question, what would you do?

 Three Billy Goats Gruff has a slightly simplistic message about standing up to bullies, or maybe about standing up for people who are smaller and weaker than you (or maybe just facing your fears?) but I like the troll and the trip trapping over the bridge bit, it's nicely theatrical to read aloud:

Chicken Licken is about stupid people following the crowd and getting what's coming to them:

The Elves and the Shoemaker is about hard work and helping others and gratitude:

 The Magic Porridge Pot is about being careful what you wish for (and also maybe the importance of remembering instructions carefully):

 The Enormous Turnip is about the importance of cooperation:

What's not to love?

(Go to the list here and visit other A to Z Bloggers.)