One of my daughters refuses to have anything to do with
social media (she still writes letters) but her younger sister has 2,500
followers on Twitter, and their brother has 24k. I think I’ve got around 50, so
even I can see I haven’t got a hope in the social media stakes, although Professor Gloom wins the Low
Profile title hands-down: he has 6, and I think one of them might be the cat. The
problem is that blogging is addictive: I find I miss the fun of it too much not to start another,
so in spite of everything I said, here I am back in the blogosphere, Losing the
Plot Again…
One of the good things about blogging is it loosens up the
writing muscles. It’s a sort of mental pilates, it keeps my brain ticking over, and it
staves off the moment when I actually have to get back to the work in progress. It
also lets me to say something about the often forgotten writers, books and
people who've inspired me. (I could do another whole blog on who and what has
depressed me lately, but there’s enough gloom out there already.)
So, this week I’m tipping my hat to a small group of women
who meet once a month because they have a mutual passion for a lonely, undervalued and mostly unprofitable occupation: they write books
for children. Children’s books are a growing market, but it’s harder than ever
to get published, and good children’s
books - books that delight, that fire the imagination, the ones you remember for
the rest of your life – these are not so common. And a good writer teaches a
child how to read, just as a good
teacher opens a student’s eyes to the infinite possibilities of maths or music,
or whatever.
One of the striking things about our group is that most of
them write for Young Adults. I’m old enough to remember the days before YA;
back then we had teenagers, who stayed in a dreary limbo until they reached 18 and
were finally allowed to be Adults. It wasn’t much cop being a teenager: we had no
social media, not much social life outside of school, and no-one was interested
in our feelings, fashion or opinions - although we could at least get drunk and
take our clothes off without anyone posting up the details for all the world to
see. And because life was so devoid of other distractions, we had time to read. Apart from the classics deemed suitable for school, there wasn't a lot between Nancy Drew and Hercule Poirot, so thank god for I Capture the Castle and Catcher in the Rye. For Sci Fi: for John Wyndham and Ray Bradbury.
But now the world’s a harsher, brasher, faster place, and Young Adult-hood begins at 12, or so I'm told. I worry that childhood is shrinking, that our children are being bombarded from babyhood by the noise and racket of modern life. By constant visual
imagery and the relentless pressure of social media; by the jostle and haste and din of everyone shouting to be heard.
So, to anyone trying to contribute to one of the few peaceful, solitary, affordable pleasures available to our children
– to books that transport their readers to extraordinary worlds, that make them
laugh, and think, and wonder – and sometimes just make their lives a little more
bearable – well, all I can say is, what better thing could you be doing?
So, what are the books that I remember most from my own childhood? My father reading the Just-so Stories to my brother and me; my mother reading The Wind in the Willows. Pippi Longstocking, sent by my grandmother with an inscription reading ‘Helen dear, I hope you will like Pippi, but please don’t imitate her!’ George MacDonald’s Princess and the Goblin, borrowed from a tiny country library; Patricia Lynch: The Turfcutter’s Donkey; The Borrowers; all the E Nesbitts brought to me by a family friend during a long illness; C.S.Lewis, Tolkien, Rosemary Sutcliffe…just writing down their names is as comforting as being tucked back into my childhood bed.
And why is there a picture of Clementina at the top of this?
I’ll tell you why: every time I post anything with a picture of a cat, I get
twice as much interest as before…and if I flatter her enough, who knows? She might even
start following me on Twitter.
