By Hook or by Crook

When I was a child, we lived for a while in a small pink-washed villa called Owl's House. It had a living and dining room, kitchen, two and a half bedrooms, one bathroom and a verandah. It's a house I remember with great affection because it was there that I really learned to read, and there that my imagination first took flight.

Today I live in an old house on another continent, with an attic playroom and a study lined with children's books. We have seven grandchildren (so far) and although all are lucky enough to have parents who encourage reading and creative play, the outside world is now such a noisy, fast-moving, violent place that I feel the best thing we can give them is a space as far removed from it as possible, where their own imaginations will be free to roam.

I'm not the only one to worry about our children's world, judging from the responses to something I wrote recently. I'd had a rejection letter from a well-known agent. She had read and loved an earlier book I wrote about a magical journey through African time and space, and now she'd read and loved the sequel. This one has sea witches, serpents, and a mysterious lighthouse off the coast of Ireland, but however much she liked them - and she was lavish with her praise - she knew that she'd have difficulty placing them. The problem is that they're old-fashioned, in the sense of being traditional, magical adventures, and worse, they have no 'hook'. For hook read any of the fashionable issues and concerns that currently pervade so many children's books. I think the saddest response came from someone whose grandson had said he didn't want to know about these grown-up things, he just wanted to be a little boy.

Still, traditional writers shouldn't lose heart. What comes around goes around, and who knows? One day even  Enid Blyton might find herself redeemed. Parental responsibility could make a comeback too: after all, you don't have to buy your kids the latest badly written rubbish. You can even march into your local school and complain (as a writer friend did recently, more power to her elbow) when each pupil in her child's class was given a copy of a celebrity author's latest churned-out offering. Why not one of our many excellent, local writers, for goodness sake? Of course children won't always read the books you want them to, but there's nothing to stop you going into your local library or charity shop to look for alternatives: books you once enjoyed yourself, books that can be read aloud...and if it sounds good read out loud, it's probably ok. 

The autumn issue of Slightly Foxed not only features two wonderful children's writers in Maurice Sendak and Leon Garfield, it also has an article about A E Housman by David Fleming. He was converted to poetry, he writes, 'by the simple expedient of learning to read it out loud'.  In that long-ago pink house, my mother used to recite Matthew Arnold's Forsaken Merman to us at bedtime, an inspired choice for children who lived so close to the Indian Ocean - 'where great whales come sailing by, sail and sail with unshut eye, round the world for ever and aye'. But how many parents now have time to read aloud, or can compete with all the electronic devices vying for attention?

To get back to Slightly Foxed though, Hazel Woods 

added yet another title to my  endless shopping list: Dorothy Whipple's childhood memoir, The Other Day. And who knew Mary Norton of The Borrowers fame had written romantic fiction for women's magazines and led such an interesting life? There's also such an intriguing tribute to Elspeth Barker (by her daughter, Rafaella) that I bought her only novel, O Caledonia, at once. And yes, the writing is glorious, but I don't think I could ever bring myself to read it again. I found the story of the awkward, unlovable, Janet and her brief existence deeply unsettling. And no, I didn't think it bore any relation to I Capture the Castle, which is one of my all-time favourite novels. Don't take my word for it though - lots of people love it. And luckily Dorothy Whipple is now restoring my equilibrium. 

And one last story of childhood: Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah's Paradise. I love his writing and this was no exception. The story of Yusuf, pawned to pay his father's debts in colonial East Africa, somehow manages to be poignant, violent, beautiful and captivating all at once. I felt that Yusuf (unlike Janet) would survive.

I'm not sure my own children have read any of my novels (the adult ones are probably a bit too autobiographical for comfort - no-one really wants to read about their mother's misspent youth) but they do remember very fondly the books I read aloud when they were young. (Including The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - both still in favour, I'm glad to see.) I'll probably self-publish the two rejected middle grade stories, even if it still feels a bit like cheating, and in the mean time, the wheels of publishing will go on spinning to maximise profits - understandably, I suppose. It's just our children who are so often being short changed.