This brings me to the end of my childhood and to the end of the fiction I recall most fondly from this time, although I have omitted any reference to children’s annuals, newspaper or magazine stories, textbooks, anthologies, short story collections and the like, all which I read with great pleasure. The end of childhood was not, however, to end my love of children’s books. We are told to put away childish things when we become adults, but parents and teachers are mercifully exempt from this. I was blessed enough to become both. A teacher of young people, I once read, never grows up. Once again, I could read, this time to my own sons, the timeless and lavishly-illustrated stories of Herge’s Tintin adventures, Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit series, Jean de Brunhoff’s Babar the Elephant, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows and A.A. Milne’s Pooh Bear books, the latter two titles in the original editions illustrated by the incomparable E.H. Shepard, not the facile and cartoonish Disney imitations. I was surprised by my younger son’s passion for the Enid Blyton adventure stories I had read as a child, an interest he explained once by remarking, “I like the freedom the children have: they get to leave home with sandwiches and lemonade, and go off to have adventures on their own,” perhaps a rebuke to the anxiously overprotective concern some of today’s parents practise. Adrian also spent a lot of his pocket money acquiring the historical novels of G.A. Henty that he found in a second-hand bookshop. These are now roundly criticized in some quarters for glorifying imperialism, but copies today are reportedly worth a lot of money. While Adrian and his brother Kit were still young, I even took an undergraduate course in Children’s Literature for fun, mounting serious studies of such classics as Richard Adams’ Watership Down, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, and Leon Garfield’s grim historical novel Smith. It was at this time that I also made the acquaintance of the brilliant study of children’s literature Written for Children, by John Rowe Townsend, a compelling, comprehensive and humane survey of all children’s literature of merit written in English up to 1974.
I came late to William Golding’s masterly parable Lord of the Flies, a realistic updating of R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, and to that meditation on alienated youth, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and also to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, but was fortunate to be able to teach them for years to enthusiastic students. Like Shakespeare’s great plays, they and all classic literature offer more and more insights into life the more they are re-read. We all need to know, for example, how to ‘read’ people in the workplace as much as in our families and communities, and the unconscious character analysis we all perform as readers is training in psychology for life. I am still moved to tears today by the memory of Scout’s instant recognition, in Harper Lee’s novel of Alabama life in the 1930s, of the mysterious Radley neighbour Scout had never seen who left gifts for the children in a tree, and later saved her life. “Hey, Boo,” is all she needs to say, as if to a long-lost friend, once it dawns on her who has been her rescuer. The tears come from the recognition of the truthfulness of the storytelling. This is how Boo would behave.
