Magical Classics: ROOM 13 by Robert Swindells

When vampires were vampires! Sally Nicholls, and the delights of being scared out of your wits.

There was one in the corner of every classroom. A bookcase on wheels, with shelves on either side, filled with books. The books were supposed to get more difficult to read as we went up the school, but there were a few titles which cropped up in classroom after classroom. Roald Dahl, of course. (It was the early 90s). Anne Fine. Dick King Smith. Carbonel the Witch’s Cat, and Noel Stretfeild’s The Circus is Coming. These were the books were supposed to borrow and write lists of in our reading journals. They were the books we read in Silent Reading every Friday, and from which our class readers were chosen.

Most of my class weren’t great readers, but since Friday came round as surely as the moon, we all borrowed books from the bookcase, and inevitably favourites developed. In Year Seven, our classroom favourites were Beverley Naidoo’s Journey to Jo’berg, which didn’t click for me, and Vivien Alcock’s The Cuckoo Sister; a wonderful, wonderful book which any publishers reading this blog should go and bring back into print immediately.

But in Year Six our classroom favourite was Room 13 by Robert Swindells.

Room 13 was about a vampire. Not a sexy vampire, but a vampire who was slowly murdering one of the girls on a school trip to Whitby. The hotel the class were staying in didn’t have a room 13, except in the middle of the night, when it did, because that’s where the vampire lived.

The vampire was frightening. That’s why we all loved the book. We didn’t want to date him, we wanted to murder him, as the children in the novel have to, with a stick of rock sharpened to a point, a large rock to hammer in the point, and a crucifix made from the crossed sticks of a plastic kite. (I think there may have been something else they used, but I’m deliberately not looking up the plot because I’m fascinated by how much I can remember of a novel I read once twenty years ago, when I was ten. Quite a lot, is the answer. Much more than I can remember of the Enid Blytons I read and read and read at the same time.)

Oh, a torch! They had a torch as well.

I didn’t have much opportunity to be scared when I was ten. There was Point Horror, about which I was somewhat snobbish, and were anyway mostly American and never managed to frighten me. My mother never censored my reading, but she did censor my viewing – I remember not being allowed to watch Labyrinth, and she was even a bit doubtful about The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, which went out on the BBC when I was six. I don’t remember actually being that scared of Room 13, but I remembered the thrill of reading something which didn’t patronise its audience, that included dark nights, and hidden rooms, and children with agency, and villains who were unashamedly evil. We felt respected by Room 13 in a way I rarely felt respected by Point Horror or Goosebumps. It was also a great story.

When writing my first ghost novel for children, Close Your Pretty Eyes, I never considered toning down the terror. I was more worried about making it frightening enough. I wanted the child reader to feel respected. I wanted to appeal to the sort of child who enjoyed novels like Coraline, or the scarier Doctor Who episodes. Doctor Who may cut down the blood or gore, but it rarely worries about being too frightening. I wanted a genuinely murderous villain, like the vampire in Room 13, and child characters with the agency to defeat her.

I was a little unprepared for the adults who read Close Your Pretty Eyes and professed themselves ‘too frightened’, who questioned whether it was a children’s book and read it with the lights left on. I am sure there will be children who will be too young for this book, and will not want to read it. 

But when I was ten, I wanted to be frightened.

Sally Nicholls, courting danger. In the act of being swallowed by a mad tree.

 Sally Nicholls was born in Stockton, just after midnight, in a  thunderstorm. Her father died when she was two and she and her brother  were brought up by her mother. She has always loved reading and spent  most of her childhood trying to make life work like it did in books.  After school, she worked in Japan for six months and travelled around  Australia and New Zealand, then came back and did a degree in Philosophy and Literature at the University of Warwick. In her third year she  enrolled in a Master in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University. It was here at the age of twenty-two that she wrote Ways to Live Forever, her first novel, which went on to win the Waterstones Children’s Book  Prize 2008. She was also named Glen Dimplex New Writer of the Year in  2008. Sally’s later work includes Season of Secrets, All Fall Down and the really rather terrifying ghost story Close Your Pretty Eyes.

Heroines

Some time ago, out of interest, I pulled a list of ‘Children’s Classics’ off Wikipedia.  There were 66 titles, and Aesop’s Fables headed the list with William Caxton’s edition of 1484.  Apart from a couple of obscure titles - at least, I have never heard of ‘A Token for Children’ by James Janeway, and ‘A Pretty Little Pocket Book’ by John Newbery - I can hand on heart say that I encountered most of them during my own childhood.  'Robinson Crusoe’, ‘Ivanhoe’, ‘The Swiss Family Robinson’, ‘The Coral Island’, ‘Journey to The Centre of the Earth’, ‘Uncle Remus’,‘Black Beauty’, ‘Treasure Island’, ‘The Happy Prince’. Tick, tick, tick.  And so on. 

What strikes me now is the extreme scarcity of heroines in these books. Fairytales apart, there are only 12 stories out of the entire 66 in which the main character is female: they are ‘Little Goody Twoshoes’ (1765), ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (1865) and ‘Through the Looking Glass’ (1871), ‘Little Women’ (1868), ‘What Katy Did’ (1873), ‘Heidi’ (1884), ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ (1900), ‘Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm’ (1903), ‘Pollyanna’ (1913), ‘A Little Princess’ (1905), ‘Anne of Green Gables’ (1908), and perhaps Mary Lennox of ‘The Secret Garden’. There are some deceptive titles which sound as though they are going to be about heroines, such as ‘Lorna Doone’ (1869) and ‘The Princess and the Goblin’ (1871) but these are really more about the male protagonists, John Ridd and Curdie.

  

Even though the last book on the list was published in 1918, many – in fact most – of these titles formed part of my reading a full half century later. As a child growing up in the sixties, I can’t say I consciously noticed the absence of strong female characters, since naturally I identified with the hero, whoever he might be.  I swam lagoons with Jack, Ralph and Peterkin, roistered and swashbuckled with D’Artagnan, escaped across the heather with Alan Breck, roamed the jungle with Mowgli – but I did notice the rare occasions when the main character was a strong heroine. This, I think, is why so many of us loved – loved – Katy Carr, Jo March and Anne of Green Gables.  We were resigned to encountering girly girls in books. And by girly girls, I mean girls filtered though a conservatice male imagination. Girls who needed to be rescued, who swooned on manly breasts, like Lorna Doone.  Girls who were sweetly domestic, decorative, helpless and good like David Copperfield’s Dora.  Girls who were ill-treated victims like Sara Crewe.  Or else girls who simply were not there at all. It was a literary world in which boys were allowed to be Peter Pan but girls were condemned to be Wendy.

So we were thrilled when Katy lost her temper, disobeyed her aunt and swung in that swing; all the Victorian stuff about becoming an invalid and the heart of the family hardly seemed to count in comparison.  Some of Susan Coolidge's writing is still extremely funny. You can sense her delight in her heroine's realistically child-like outbursts.  Here's Katy inventing a break-time game:

…Katy’s unlucky star put it into her head to invent a new game, which she called the Game of Rivers.  It was played in the following manner: - each girl took the name of a river and laid out for herself an appointed path through the room, winding among the desks and benches, and making a low roaring sound, to imitate the noise of water.  Cecy was the Plate; Marianne Brooks, a tall girl, the Mississippi; Alice Blair, the Ohio; Clover, the Penobscot, and so on.  They were instructed to run into each other once in a while because, as Katy said, ‘rivers do’.  As for Katy herself, she was ‘Father Ocean’, and, growling horribly, raged up and down the platform where Mrs Knight usually sat.  Every now and then… she would suddenly cry out, ‘Now for a meeting of the waters!’ whereupon all the rivers bouncing, bounding, scrambling, screaming, would turn and run towards Father Ocean, while he roared louder than all of them put together, and made short rushes up and down, to represent the movement of waves on a beach.

Naturally they get into trouble, but anyone can see it's worth it to have had so much fun.  And Jo March, too, could lose her temper, and acted – in boots! – and wrote stories, and did things. While as for Anne – impulsive, rebellious, outspoken Anne –   

“How dare you call me skinny and ugly?  How dare you say I’m freckled and red-headed?  How would you like to have such things said about you?  How would you like to be told that you are fat and clumsy and probably hadn’t a spark of imagination in you?  I don’t care if I do hurt your feelings by saying so!  I hope I hurt them.  You have hurt mine worse than they were ever hurt before even by Mrs Thomas’s intoxicated husband.  And I’ll never forgive you for it, never, never!”

Such girls seemed to be going places.  The trouble was that there wasn’t really anyplace for them to go.  I don’t know why the imaginations of the women who created them could come up with so few goals in an era that was producing strong women by the bucketload: in the States, the early suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; in Britain reformers like Florence Nightingale, Josephine Butler, the Pankhursts. Writing and teaching figured largely. Anne of Green Gables becomes Anne of Ingleside, a teacher, marries Gilbert Blythe and has children.  Jo marries Professor Bhaer not Laurie (this we could hardly forgive, though it may be more realistic!); she does become a writer, but then goes all matriarchal and nurturing and 'womanly'.  Katy travels to Europe and marries a young naval officer who is attracted to her because of her – wait for it – selfless nursing skills. No one becomes a doctor or a politician or a reformer.

So the vigorous rushing rivers of Katy’s game end up flowing decorously into the great calm land-locked sea of wife-and-motherhood.  Still, at least these books gave expression, release, validation to the passion and energy of growing girls.  Nowadays we take it for granted.  My own daughters were never very interested in Little Women or Anne of Green Gables.  They didn’t find Jo an exciting rebel but a prissy homebody taking covered baskets of Christmas dinner to the poor, selflessly selling her hair. (Her hair?  What?  Why?)

In Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’, how I and my schoolfriends identified with the tomboy George, who cut her curly hair, wore shorts, owned a dog, told the truth at all costs and was brave and passionate.  How much better she was than sissy Anne (who wore a plaid skirt and a hairslide)!  And yet, and yet – that cry of hers, “I’m as good as a boy any day” – is the very mark of inequality.  Why should a girl have to masquerade as a boy to be taken seriously?  Why should bravery, independence and action be seen as masculine qualities?

We shouldn’t be complacent.  I can think of plenty of independent, strong heroines in modern children’s fiction – Joan Aiken’s Dido Twite would come top of my personal list, and Harriet of ‘Harriet the Spy’, Lyra in ‘The Golden Compass', and Garth Nix's gallant Sabriel and Lirael. These girls aren’t trying to prove that they are as good as or better than boys.  They simply get on with life and grapple with its problems. But there are many books for teenagers in which the heroines need – rely on – yearn for – the strong arms and love of some idealised boy.  Compare Bella of 'Twilight'  to Katy Carr or Jo March. It's hard to imagine either of them languishing after 'perfect' Edward.  

Of all the girls in all the titles on this list of classic books for children, the most independent of all is Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who calmly steers her way through the looking glass wonderlands of her own imagination.  Alice never feels in the least inferior to any male character.   She stands up for herself in her own very feminine way, experimenting, chopping logic, lecturing herself and others, refusing to be snubbed, insulted or put in her place.  At the end of each book when her imaginary world threatens her, she pulls it down about her ears like Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple in Gaza.  She is extraordinary – and the creation of a man.  But she is pre-adolescent: what does the world really hold for ‘alices when they are jung and easily freudened’?  Carroll’s Alice touches a kind of bedrock: a certainty of self-worth that may be felt by many little girls in stable and happy families – but which is still all too easily lost as the teens commence. 

Magical Classics: 'The Last of the Dragons' by A. de Quincey

Lucy Coats and the mysterious A. de Quincey's vegetarian dragon:

In Book IX of the History of Animals, Aristotle states:

"When the draco has eaten much fruit, it seeks the juice of the bitter lettuce."

Fruit? Lettuce? Dragons? Some mistake, surely, O Venerable Greek Philosopher? Well no. Not if you're A. de Quincey, author of the favourite fantasy of my childhood - The Last of the Dragons.

Perhaps you may never have thought of a dragon as a vegetarian sort of creature. Perhaps you have always seen it as a creature of blood and gore, rending sacrificed virgin princesses from limb to limb and crunching armoured knights like lobsters.  I suppose I thought like that too until I met De Quincey's Ajax.

This is how de Quincey describes him:

"He was as handsome a creature as ever lived, what with his soft and satiny dark-green skin...and the row of gold-tipped spines that ran down his back.... On his head were two pairs of horns, one shorter and the other longer, like a snail's; but they were for adornment and not for fighting or anything of that sort. His teeth were beautifully regular, and neither too large nor too small. He had a most engaging smile."

In addition to all this handsomeness, Ajax can blow double smoke rings, tell a great story, draw, play the concertina (with extra twiddles because of his six fingers and two thumbs), sniff out treasure and fly "as fast as a Spitfire". He is also, as mentioned above, a vegetarian, liking grass, leaves, fruit, nuts and, most especially, mushrooms and truffles. However, he has a problem. Ajax is the last of his kind - and he's dead bored of his own company, so decides to find a job with "the next most intelligent creatures to Dragons" - ie us humans, with varying results. 

The tale which follows is as entrancing to me now as it was when I was eight. I've just read it again for about the fiftieth time in order to try and work out what it is about this particular fantasy which has drawn me in and held me for all those decades. Is it the grumpy and ghastly Fairy Frowniface, with her wand "made for magical purposes by King Solomon himself'? Is it the mean, green-eyed slinking stinker of a cat, Mrs Maul? Is it the polite would-be dragon-slayer, Prince George of Hesperia, with his insouciant air of bravery, and rat-generalling skills? Is it villainous, black-bearded Baron Terrible and his rough and tumble henchmen, who repent after being turned into an embarrassed frog and a squiggle of tadpoles?  Or is it Ajax himself - the dragon from Venus whose King is the legendary Phoenix? 

It's all of these and more. While De Quincey's authorial voice has a delightfully old-fashioned tone akin to E. Nesbit and E. Goudge, it's also surprisingly modern in attitude - I think there are few books from that period (1947) which are so respectful of Islamic traditions, or even mention them. But apart from the great storytelling and characterisation, the thing I like best is the rich and uniquely satisfying descriptive prose, which then and now satisfies my inner reader's desire to know what things look like, where they come from, and how they got there.

Who A.de Quincey was is a mystery.  He (or she) only wrote one other book - The Little Half-Giant - which I have just managed to track down a copy of on AbeBooks. The Last of the Dragons was illustrated by Brian Robb, who lectured at the Chelsea College of Art, (inspiring a generation of fantastic illustrators such as Quentin Blake), and later took over from Edward Ardizzone as head of illustration at the Royal College of Art. Blake says of him: "Robb's work had a humane, wry, almost teasing character that makes me wish he had set his hand to more children's books than he did" and I would agree with that. The slightly fuzzy but endearing black-and-white illustrations are a big part of the book's charm for me.  But of this particular de Quincey's life and times I can find no trace, despite it being a literary name of some renown in a sphere other than children's books. If anyone knows more about A. de Quincey, I'd love to hear from you. We fans of Ajax are few and far between, but devoted to the last. If only Hamish Hamilton would bring him back into print....

 

Lucy Coats is reads, writes and blogs magic, myth and fantasy – as you might expect from someone who remarks: ‘I was born in a shrubbery nearly half a century ago and have been looking for fairies in the trees ever since.’ She has written over 25 titles for children, including her Greek Beasts and Heroes series, published by Orion, Hootcat Hill, a fantasy for older children, and her new picturebook, Bear's Best Friend has recently featured on CBeebies Bedtime Stories. Lucy's website is http://www.lucycoats.com/
and she currently blogs at http://lucycoats.tumblr.com/

On Bedtime Stories

When my daughters were small I used to read aloud to them every evening, just as my mother used to read to me, and her mother to her, I dare say…generation before generation.  It’s something I miss, now they’re all grown up.  No matter what sort of day you’ve had, how cross and tired you may be, there’s something lovely about snuggling up with your children on the sofa, or on the edge of one of their beds (strictly alternating between younger daughter’s bedroom and older daughter’s bedroom: ‘it’s my turn tonight!’), and reading a book chapter by chapter.

Since they were keen readers anyway, I used to choose books to read aloud which I thought they might not actually pick for themselves.  So instead of contemporary fiction I chose older books, things I’d loved as a child, books which might develop slowly, in that leisurely, let’s-take-time-over-the-first-chapter way which we’re not allowed to write any more, since children’s attention spans are now supposedly so short.  Well, children love to be read to, and they rarely get bored while they’re cosied up next to you, the centre of your attention, listening to a lovely story competently read. It’s completely different from struggling along by themselves. Reading aloud is just a huge pleasure all round.

And so together we read all sort of classics.  The Treasure Seekers, The Wouldbegoods, The Hobbit.  Black Beauty, Brendon Chase, The Little Grey Men.  The Brothers Lionheart, Finn Family Moomintroll, Martin Pippin in the Daisyfield. The Enchanted Castle, Mary Poppins, The Bogwoppit. The Land of Green Ginger, The Little House on the Prairie, A Christmas Carol.  The King of the Golden River, The King of the Copper Mountains, the Chronicles of Narnia. Anne of Green Gables, Tuck Everlasting, The Search for Delicious.  And many, many more.

Of course not every single book was a success.  Neither child cared for Anne of Green Gables, to my surprise; and they never thought much of Jo March, either.  Are today's children so used to independent, strong-minded heroines that flaming-haired Anne and hot-tempered Jo have paled in comparison?  Both daughters regarded the March sisters as a bunch of wimpish goody-two-shoes who gave away their Christmas breakfast.  And that was that.

One child loved The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge; the other was less keen.  One went a bundle on The Treasure Seekers; her sister felt lukewarm about it.  ‘Swallows and Amazons’ was an utter failure.  I loved that book when I was a child (I remember when I first saw it, in a row of children’s books in the dark, glass-fronted bookcase on the landing of some farmhouse where we’d gone on holiday), but it fell completely flat as a read-aloud.  I don’t know why.  Maybe Ransome’s meticulous descriptions of how to do things – whether sailing a boat, building a campfire, or setting up a pigeon post – work better on the page?  At any rate, this was the one and only book I ever read aloud which really did bore them to the point where I gave up, and we found something ‘more interesting’.  Even the Narnia stories, which they enjoyed hearing, turned out not to be books they went back to re-read. But they did go back, again and again, to read many of these books and authors by themselves.

There’s something quite emotional about reading to your children, especially stories with which you feel a special connection.  Books I read with total composure as a child can now bring tears to my eyes, and I have developed a family reputation for doing a wobble on the last page. Black Beauty in old age, dreaming of the past: 

‘My troubles are all over and I am at home; and often, before I am quite awake, I fancy I am still in the orchard at Birtwick, standing with my old friends under the apple trees.’

Or:  ‘They thought he was dead.  I knew he had gone to the back of the north wind.’

Or: ‘It is autumn in Moomin valley – for how else can spring come back again?’

I’d be struggling to keep my voice level, and tears would come brimming up. The children pounced on this. They would sit up as I turned the last page, watching me like hawks for any signs of sentiment. They regarded it as funny but embarrassing. “Oh Mum… Why do you always cry?”  And this made me self-conscious, till, conditioned by their expectations, I’d be brimming up – and laughing too – on the last page of almost any book I read aloud, even ones which weren’t sad at all.  I reckoned it was their fault for staring at me and making me worse. But it didn’t matter. I didn’t mind then, and I don’t mind now.

For it can't be a bad thing, can it - to let our children see how stories move us?

'MUDDLE AND WIN: The Battle For Sally Jones' by John Dickinson

If I described this book as ‘The Screwtape Letters for children’ I would be both spot on and way, way off at the same time. Because even though it’s about a devil and an angel and their battle to possess, or at least influence, the soul of young Sally Jones, it’s not a religious book.  And therein lies its strength.  John Dickinson is too nuanced a writer to fall for a polarised good/evil view of morality. This is not a story about Sin. Perish the thought. Neither is it a story about Being Saved.  It’s a story about the dark side of the mind – the soul, if you will – and the multifarious ways in which we manage to convince ourselves that we’re in the right and everyone else is being totally unreasonable. And it’s funny, and it’s scary, and it’s very, very sharp in its observations of human nature.

Deep down – deep, deep down, Dickinson suggests – everyone has a dark and fiery place within them, accessible from a trapdoor in one of the backrooms of the mind:

There won’t be much light there, and there’ll be things scattered all over the floor.  Most of it’s stuff you’ve always known about but don’t get out and look at too much.  You start clearing it to one side.   Never mind the dust.  Never mind the smell.  (Listen – even the best-kept minds have rooms like this.)  When you find you’re shifting aside thoughts you would never, ever try to explain to anybody – and there will be some – then you’re in the right place.

Underneath it all there’ll be a trap door.  …If it’s locked, you open it.  You have the key, of course.

I love that sinister last line.  Of course we do.  And below the trap door is a dark void, and at the bottom of that – well, we don’t get anywhere near the bottom, all we get to see is the topmost brass towers of the city of Pandemonium (‘They like brass here’) from which the oddly loveable little imp Muddlespot – up till now merely one of Pandemonium’s cleaners – is despatched to do his best, or worst, to corrupt the incorruptible Sally Jones, a schoolgirl so Good that her LDC (or Lifetime Deed Counter) reads:

                        Lifetime Good Deeds: 3,971,570

            Lifetime Bad Deeds: NIL nil NIL nil NIL nil NIL nil

Sally Jones is a poster girl for Heaven. Not only is she Good, she is Popular (except possibly with her twin sister Billie: no one likes to be shown up that much, do they?). 

Because, if your phone was out of credit, you could borrow Sally’s.  If you’d left your maths homework at school, you could call Sally and she would give you the questions. …Her allowance wasn’t great, but if you needed any of it, it was yours.  She’d hear your lines for the school play. And when all was lost and the Head of Year was bearing down on you and your last alibi was blown, Sally would get you out of it.  Somehow.  Without even lying.

Not surprising, then, that the angelic squadrons scramble in her defence. And Angel Windleberry (‘no one watched more sleeplessly, praised more mightily or fought the good fight more fiercely’) is chosen to become Sally’s guardian angel and put Muddlespot to flight.

But the Battle for Sally Jones turns out to be a lot more complicated than either Muddle or Win could ever have anticipated. For one thing, Sally’s got her own strong views on things. Then there’s her sister Billie’s guardian angel and resident devil, who’ve … reached a certain understanding.  There’s a war to be fought over a batch of muffins.  There’s an amoral cat.  And anyway, is it really good for Sally to be That Good?  And if not, can Good sometimes be Bad?

If I had one tiny niggle with the book at all, it's the role of the fiend Corozin, Muddlespot's master.  I'm not entirely sure how he fits into Sally's psyche, and he's so hands-off during most of the book that his appearance at the end (as arch tempter) feels something of a diabolus ex machina. But that's all it was, a niggle.  It's a huge relief to come across such an intelligent, thought-provoking book for children.  Give it to good readers of ten and up.  And read it yourself. It's fast-moving, vivid and funny, there’s not a dull line in it, and I adored it. I think you will too. 

Muddle and Win, by John Dickinson, will be published next month by David Fickling Books. 

Dogs in Books

Polly the puppy is currently ruling my life during every waking minute of hers. Things will change week by week, but at the moment she sleeps all night (what a good dog!) and wakes, whining, just before 7am. This is my cue to jump out of bed and take her into the garden in my pyjamas, where she darts around, nose into everything, small tail wagging furiously. Then it’s all go for the next two hours – chewing, galloping about with squeaky toys, leaping at our knees with flattened ears, beseeching eyes and scrabbling paws, and staring transfixed at the cats – one of which saunters past with a coquettish glance, while the other bushes out her fur and vanishes.

The rest of the day follows a two-hours-off/two-hours-on pattern of mad play followed by utterly flopped-out sleep. I try to do all my other tasks while she’s asleep. And you can bet she’s waking up, fresh for more fun, just before I’m quite ready. Boy, do I sleep well at night.

Anyway, in honour of Polly, I thought I would write today about dogs in books.

Dogs in books are a Good Thing. I always try to have a dog or two in each of mine. In my first book ‘Troll Fell’ there are three, all quite different: Peer’s faithful little brown mongrel Loki, his uncle’s unpleasant mastiff Grendel, and steady old Alf, the sheepdog at Hilde’s farm. And in my fourth book ‘Dark Angels’ (‘The Shadow Hunt’) there is the whole pack of Lord Hugo’s hounds, including the elegant white greyhound Argos. Country people have always had lots of dogs, and in past centuries most people were country people, so to have a lot of dogs in the books makes perfect sense.

Historical fiction and dogs make me think immediately of Rosemary Sutcliff, whose books I devoured as a child. Sutcliff – who must easily win the title of Britain’s most loved writer of junior historical fiction – loved dogs, and there is a noble dog in many of her books - 'Whitethroat' in 'Warrior Scarlet', 'Argos' in 'Brother Dusty Feet' - but for me the most iconic is ‘Dog’ (in ‘Dawn Wind’, 1961, illustration by Charles Keeping), the young war-hound that the boy Owain finds by moonlight on the ruins of the battlefield:

…it was something alive in the cold echoing emptiness of a dead world. It stood with one paw raised, looking at him, and Owain called, hoarsely, with stiff lips and aching throat: ‘Dog! Hai! Dog!’ … [It] came, slowly and uncertainly… once it stopped altogether; then it finished at the run and next instant was trembling against his legs.
He was a young dog; the beautiful creamy hair of his breast-patch was stained and draggled, and his muzzle bloody in the moonlight… ‘Dog, aiee, dog, we are alone then. There’s no one else. We will go together, you and I.’

The brilliance of the writing is to show us, in the lonely and innocent terror of the dog and what he has been made to do, the full dreadfulness of war.

Most children love dogs and enjoy reading about them. Enid Blyton used the combination of ‘four children and a dog’ again and again. ‘The Famous Five’ would not be five without Timmy the dog, who is big enough to offer some protection and even to be of use to the plot – many’s the time Timmy carries that essential scribbled note (‘Help! Locked in the old castle! Our tutor is a spy: call Scotland Yard!’) attached to his collar. ‘The Secret Seven’ had a dog called Scamper, I think, and there’s a black spaniel in the ‘Barney’ books, and so on.

It used not to be unusual for even quite young children to be let out alone with a doggy companion. In the 1960’s my brother and I were allowed to roam about on our own on the moors or streets of our country town, so long as we took the dog with us. Stories about children with dogs were so common that many children must have believed ownership of a dog was some kind of right. But what about children who couldn’t have dogs? In Philippa Pearce’s 1962 classic ‘A Dog So Small’ (illustrated by Anthony Maitland), the child hero Ben longs for a dog, but lives in a London back street with no room for one. His grandfather promises him a dog for his birthday, but the promise can’t be kept:


…[Ben] cut the string around the parcel and then unfolded the wrapping paper.
They had sent him a picture instead of a dog.

And then he realised that they had sent him a dog after all. He almost hated them for it. His dog was worked in woollen cross-stitch, and framed and glazed as a little picture. There was a letter which explained: ‘Dear Ben, Your grandpa and I send you hearty good wishes for your birthday. We know you would like a dog, so here is one…’
…Ben said nothing, because he could not.

To compensate, Ben begins to fantasise about a dog of his own – ‘a dog so small you could see it only with your eyes shut’. If by some chance you haven’t read this book, I won’t spoil it for you by telling you the ending, only that it’s one of the most touching stories ever about longing, and the dangers of wish fulfilment, and of coming to terms with reality.

Not all dogs in children’s fiction are noble characters. Witness the memorably vain and selfish King Charles spaniel Wiggins, the pet of Maria in Elizabeth Goudge’s ‘The Little White Horse’:

It was the belief of Maria and Miss Heliotrope that he loved them devotedly because he always kept close at their heels, wagged his tail politely when spoken to, and even kissed them upon occasion. But all this Wiggins did not from affection but because he thought it good policy... The only parts of Wiggins that were not cream coloured were his long silky ears and the patches over his eyes. These were the loveliest possible shade of chestnut brown. His eyes were brown too, and of a liquid melting tenderness that won all hearts; the owners of the said hearts being quite unaware that Wiggins’s tenderness was all for himself, not for them.

Of course this is funny, and we forgive Wiggins just as Maria does, because he fulfils a comedic function that is another important role for dogs in books and in life. Young children often regard a dog as a clownish, non-threatening little brother or sister – reassuringly clumsier and more foolish than themselves. Yet, like clowns, dogs can get away with ‘naughty’ activities a child secretly enjoys. Loki, in ‘Troll Fell’, can express rebellion against Peer’s bullying Uncle Baldur by simply being himself – an irrepressible, lively little dog.

But now I’m wondering. Have there been many dogs in recent books for children? The only one I can think of, off-hand, is Todd’s dog Manchee in Patrick Ness’s ‘The Knife of Never Letting Go’ – a wonderful character in a wonderful book, though to be read with a large box of tissues handy, if you are tender-hearted. Are there many others? And if not, why not, and does it reflect the fact that children nowadays don’t get to roam around on their own with their dogs?


Whoops, Polly’s waking up. Got to go!

Alice, Creator and Destroyer

I once read, I think in an essay by C.S. Lewis – that to have weird or unusual protagonists in a fantasy world was gilding the lily. Simply too much icing on a very fancy cake. And then he cited Alice as a good example of an ordinary child to whom strange things happen.  I’m not sure he was right.

Of course it’s true that many heroes and heroines in classic 20^th century fantasy are ‘ordinary’ – hobbits, for example; and Lewis’s own Pevensie children, and Alan Garner’s Colin and Susan in ‘The Weirdstone of Brisingamen’ and ‘The Moon of Gomrath’.  There’s a pleasure in seeing an ordinary person rise to the occasion, as when Bilbo Baggins turns out to be a very good burglar indeed, or when Frodo self-sacrificingly takes on the burden of the Ring. Tolkien must have seen many instances of ‘ordinary’ heroism in the trenches of World War I. 

And I’d agree that one does need to able to identify with characters in fantasy. For me, one of the difficulties of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy is that apart from Titus and Fuschia there are too few characters for whom one can feel any empathy.  Although I love the setting and the descriptions of the immense castle and its strange ritual life, I become emotionally exhausted by Peake’s cast of grotesques.  Peake had, it’s fair to say, a line on the darker side of life.  And not coincidentally for this post, he illustrated the two Alice books.  Just look at his picture of Alice emerging out of the mirror into Looking-Glass Land, and compare it with Tenniel’s.

Tenniel’s Alice is barely halfway through the mirror.  She looks not at us, but around and down at the room with an expression of calm interest.   She is a little excited, perhaps, but not alarmed.  We don’t feel there in the room waiting for her: instead, we are looking through the window of the picture.  We can glimpse part of the room.  The grinning clock is strange but not threatening.  The room itself appears to be well lit.  In Tenniel’s drawing, Alice is firmly planted on the mantelshelf.  She has a chance to look around, and will jump down when she chooses.

 

Peake’s Alice appears through the misty glass like an apparition.  She looks straight into our eyes, as if we are the first thing she sees. Her face is very white, and so are her hands, outspread as if pressing through the glass, but also gesturing an ambiguous mixture of alarm and conjuration.  She is coming out of darkness, and there are no reflections to suggest what the looking glass room may contain – except us, for we are already there, waiting for her.  (We may not be friendly).  With one leg waving over the drop, she is about to fall off the mantelshelf into the room – for her position is precarious.

Even the 1951 Disney cartoon recognised the tough element in Alice’s character, and the latent terror in Wonderland.  They made her into a prim little cutie, but she still managed to stand up to the frightening Queen of Hearts and the Mad Hatter.  

So how ordinary is Alice, after all – is she really just an innocent and rather pedestrian Every-little-girl in a mad, mad world?  Or does she have her own brand of illogical weirdness with which to combat the weirdness she finds?  I think she does, and I think modern readers often miss it.  We look at the blonde hair, the hairband, the blue dress and the white pinafore, and forget her speculative, inventive mind, her impatience – and passages like this:

And once she had really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Nurse!  Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena, and you’re a bone!” 

Compare that with George MacDonald’s heroine in ‘The Princess and The Goblin’. Can you imagine Princess Irene doing anything so bizarre? Irene is truthful and brave, but always a little lady – the Victorian gentleman’s ideal child. The adventures that happen to Irene are not of her own creation. But it’s Alice’s weird imaginings about what might be happening on the other side of the glass – that take her into Looking Glass Land at all. Alice is both a credibly strong-minded little girl – capable of losing her temper, of defending herself in the White Rabbit’s house by kicking Bill the lizard up the chimney – and a surreal philosopher, as some children are. She is the maker of her own imaginary worlds and when they get too chaotic, she ends them – amid considerable violence. 

“Who cares for you?” said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time) “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”    

            At this the whole pack rose up into the air and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off…

(Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)

“I can’t stand this any longer!” she cried as she jumped up and seized the tablecloth with both hands: one good pull, and plates, dishes, guests and candles came crashing down together in a heap on the floor.

            “And as for you,” she went on, turning fiercely upon the Red Queen… “I’ll shake you into a kitten, that I will!” 

(Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass)

Tenniel’s illustrations catch the vivid threat and drama of the situation.  In Peake's, lit by three tall sinister candles, it looks as if Alice and the two Queens are being sucked into a black hole.  

Some books with dream endings can feel like a cheat. ‘And she woke up, and it was only a dream’ seems to negate all that has happened. But in the case of Alice, the dream settings are absolutely necessary. She has not strayed into a pre-existing Narnia like Lucy Pevensie.  She is the Alpha and Omega of her own fantasylands. She is, like dreaming Brahma, the creator and destroyer of worlds: and when she awakens from her dreams, it is utterly logical that Wonderland and Looking Glass Land will cease to be.