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Philippa Pearce Philippa Pearce died on December 21, 2006, in Durham, England, at the age of 86. Over the span of fifty years, she wrote more than thirty books, including The Minnow on the Say, Who’s Afraid?: And Other Strange Stories, Emily’s Own Elephant, Familiar and Haunting, The Little Gentleman, and the classic Tom’s Midnight Garden, winner of the 1959 Carnegie Medal. She was appointed OBE (Officer of the British Empire) in 1997 for her contribution to the field of children’s books. We remember her with two pieces: From the February 1962 Horn Book Magazine The Writer’s View of Childhood
Even though the accusation is not violent, not even explicit, still you will detect it in the amused glance and pitying smile. Some writers for adults, when they think of children’s writers at all, despise us as the Peter Pans of literature. The charge is that the view of childhood in children's literature reflects not only a recognition of the limitations of immature readers but also the writer’s own shameful limitations — his own immaturity, his own childishness. Among writers for children examples are unkindly quoted of intelligence and literary sensitivity at work in some kind of over-close relationship to the experience of childhood: Lewis Carroll, James Barrie, Kenneth Grahame. Perhaps there are many more, and living, too, waiting to be exposed. After all, every adult must have a peculiar relationship (in the sense of an individual and private relationship) with his own childhood. No wonder if the relationship is sometimes peculiar in another sense. A man can never entirely free himself of the child he once was, and that ghost-figure haunts him during this curious action of writing books for children. There seem to be two main motives (apart from a sensible regard for cash) in the writing of good books for children. One is to re-create the author’s own childhood or childhood interests for self-entertainment. The other is to entertain a particular child or group of children. The child may be a real audience, as Lloyd Osbourne was for Robert Louis Stevenson when he wrote Treasure Island. Or he may be imaginary. You can identify an imaginary audience for Mary Norton’s Borrowers stories in “Paul’s Tale” in the anthology edited by James Reeves called A Golden Land (Hastings). There the child Paul is listening to his aunt’s story of a dear little man in a foxglove cap who lives in a bluebell wood. But Paul, whose tastes are different, interrupts with his tale of a real little man, about six inches high, not very attractive really, with his skin thick and wrinkled like a twig’s, his scuttling, rat-like gait, and his croaking voice. Paul caught him and kept him in an old cake tin with holes bored in the top and sent him — on the end of a long string — down rabbit holes to find out what was going on and report back. Paul is freely imaginative, practical, and (like so many children) callous without intention. Perhaps that makes him a character for adult reading rather than for children’s; certainly “Paul’s Tale” could usefully be prescribed for all adult writers of children’s fantasy. But Paul’s callousness is chiefly in reaction against his aunt’s sentimentality. One feels that he has a heart responsive to the right appeal, that he is the reader for whom the Borrower books are written. Yet, in these books, Mrs. Norton was also re-creating a fantasy of her own childhood, for this is how she describes herself then, a shortsighted little girl: “When others saw the far hills, the distant woods, the soaring pheasant, I, as a child, would turn sideways to the close bank, the tree-roots, and the tangled grasses. Moss, fern-stalks, sorrel stems, created the mise en scène for a jungle drama. . . . One invented the characters — small, fearful people picking their way through miniature undergrowth; one saw smooth places where they might sit and rest; branched stems which might invite them to climb; sandy holes in which they might creep for shelter.” So perhaps those two main motives are really one. Significantly, Stevenson wrote to a friend about the completed Treasure Island: “If this don’t fetch the kids, why they have gone rotten since my day.” The italics are mine. From those words it seems that Stevenson was really writing for children he knew even more intimately than he knew Lloyd Osbourne — for the children of his own childhood, for himself as he was then. Lloyd Osbourne became a convenient device by which he projected that child from the past into the present, to tell him the kind of story he knew for certain that that child would enjoy. Notice that Stevenson was not re-creating even remotely the kind of thing that might have happened to him as a boy. He was in fact, delicate and shielded from rough adventures. No, he was inventing just the kind of thing such a boy liked imagining; voyages, pirates, treasure, and all the rest. In children’s bookswe should be prepared to find the fantasies as well as the realities of the author’s childhood. Even what seems fairly realistic may have been heightened and distorted for a private purpose. An unusually honest writer for children said of one of her books: “The children themselves . . . were quite simply the kind that at fourteen I would like to have been myself: extrovert, with clear-cut and developed values, plenty of courage, and good at games — I having been the kind of child who had and was none of these things.” Sometimes children’s literature is written from the more obviously “real” experiences of childhood, as in Richard Jefferies’s Bevis (Dutton) or Ernest Thompson Seton’s Two Little Savages (Doubleday). For this recalling of childhood one needs to have a clear memory, a quickening sympathy for the child one was, and. above all, perhaps, a brisk disregard for the biased remarks of the adult one has become. Childhood is so easily romanticized: the further off in time, the brighter the gleam of that Golden Age; or, on the other hand, the formative years can be blamed and blackened as the origin of all adult unhappiness and failure. Both views of childhood are oversimplifications. They are a view from such a long, adult way away that the distance creates a kind of mirage. Writing about and for children, one should have a view almost from the inside, to re-create — not what childhood looks like now—but what it felt like then. What did it feel like, for instance, to be little, physically little? What did it feel like to be a child among children? Mr. and Mrs. Opie’s factual study of The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (Oxford) has documented a children’s culture in Britain of almost unsuspected richness and vigor — and also savagery. One should remember that as a corrective to what is represented in so many jolly children’s stories. Really, there is very much unpleasantness in childhood that we adults forget — and much that some simply dare not remember. For, let’s face it, a good deal of childhood is strong stuff for adults and totally unsuitable for children. Psychologists since Freud have told us some home truths, and novelists have always been able to guess a great deal for themselves — Henry James, for instance, in The Turn of the Screw, L. P. Hartley in The Go-Between, William Golding in Lord of the Flies. The most intense experiences of childhood can be, in more than one sense, unspeakable, certainly far beyond anything that a child’s vocabulary of words and ideas is capable of, either for understanding or expression. Henry James wrote: “Small children have many more perceptions than they have terms to translate them; their vision is at any moment much richer, their apprehension even constantly stronger, than their prompt, their at all producible vocabulary.” So novelists are sometimes driven literally to take the words out of the mouths of their child-characters, in order to replace them with something less realistic but much more deeply expressive. But writers for children clearly have to use a language understood by children, more or less. (“More or less” only because some meanings may enter a child’s mind and wait there for a later time of full understanding.) The children’s writer must acknowledge himself unashamedly as a writer for children, without, for example, sly whimsicalities meant for adults reading aloud rather than for children being read to. He must write of children’s interests, which are wide enough, anyway, and in children’s language of understanding, which is a good way ahead of children’s language of expression and always ready to be advanced still further. At the same time, he must do much more and be much more. Through the re-creations of childhood one should feel the quality of an adult mind. Mrs. Hodgson Burnett, for instance, is a writer of moral seriousness but also of sentimentality; she is the creator of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Through Mrs. Norton’s fantasies one feels the comment of a mind no less serious but much tougher; she is the creator of Paul. So, in any good book for children, we should expect the two parts of an author’s life to come together: his own childhood experiences or interests, recreated fictionally, and his own maturity, reflected in the significance he chooses to give to them. Both parts must be present and within the limits of what young readers can intellectually grasp or intuitively feel. Everyone knows that children are bored with writers with no understanding of childhood; but, equally, children will eventually begin to see through a writer, however entertaining, who is childish in outlook. Children themselves are facing toward maturity and taking steps toward it: an adult, who stands still, peering backwards into their faces, is very soon going to become an embarrassment, and useless — even an obstacle — to their advance. Then, is it not a curious, perhaps dangerous, discrepancy that the very child-heroes with whom this ever-developing child-reader is supposed to identify himself never grow to full maturity? In a good children’s book, however, the child-characters, although not actually growing up, always appear capable of it. The children’s writer not only makes a satisfactory connection between his present maturity and his past childhood, he also does the same for his child-characters in reverse — makes the connection between their present childhood and their future maturity. That their maturity is never visibly achieved makes no difference; the promise of it is there. The reader cannot predict what the mature individual will be; one can seldom predict that, even in real life. But there will be the certainty that the child-character already means something now, and will mean something more later; he’ll grow up after the end of the book. Such a character is a fit companion for the imagination of an actual child who is actually growing up. From the November/December 2000 Horn Book Magazine Future Classics
In case you’ve forgotten: Tom, in quarantine for measles, is sent to stay with his aunt and uncle in their apartment, a small part of a converted old house lapped around now by new development. In the central communal hallway there’s a grandfather clock, relic of earlier days, ceremonially wound every week by old Mrs. Bartholomew the landlady, who lives in the apartment on the top floor. One night, the clock strikes thirteen. Tom, sleepless and lonely, goes downstairs to investigate. He can’t find the light switch, so he opens the outer door at the back of the hallway, to let the moonlight in. The light is bright, and outside the door he sees, not the mean little concrete yard of the present day, but a great wonderful garden. And in the hallway, just for a little, he sees elaborate Victorian rugs and furniture, and is passed by a uniformed Victorian housemaid who can’t tell that he is there. Night after night he goes back through this door, into the past, into the garden, into the old house. It becomes his world. He meets one person who can see him, a lively little girl called Hatty, lonely and displaced like himself, and they become friends. Tom’s Midnight Garden is the story of this friendship, flickering between the present and the past. It grows and grows, and fills Tom’s life with happiness — until the point when he has to go home. On his last night, Tom can’t reach the past; there’s no garden outside the door. Out of a dreadful sense of loss, he shrieks in desperation for Hatty, and wakes the whole house. Next morning he is sent to apologize to old Mrs. Bartholomew, the owner-landlady — but he doesn’t need to. “You called a name,” she says, gentle, happy, loving. “Oh, Tom, don’t you understand? You called me: I’m Hatty.” Now there’s a gift: the discovery that something most precious, stolen by time, has not been lost after all. Tom’s Midnight Garden could be a hand reaching out from the year 2001 to the year 2101, linking that future child to us just as Hatty was linked to Tom. Hey, kid: your world’s different, but back here in the past you have friends. — Susan Cooper |
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