Five British Authors Who Shaped My Childhood

Some of my favourites

“And now for your blunders. On your own showing you first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends … in other words you allowed him [a] real positive Pleasure.”

C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942)

1.       Joyce Lankester Brisley

Lankester Brisley, Joyce, Milly-Molly-Mandy Stories, London: Kingfisher (2001)

“But nothing happens.” Along such lines is the reaction of my sisters when I express a lingering fondness for these short stories about a little girl who wears pink-and-white-striped cotton frocks and lives in a nice white cottage with a thatched roof.

To some extent, I can’t refute the argument. Not much does really happen to Milly-Molly-Mandy. She runs errands, visits little-friend-Susan, hosts a party, makes a tea-cosy – in one particularly thrilling episode of the second anthology, she even gets as far as the seaside. I suspect that it was this very lack of tension and crisis that defined the charm the stories held for my younger self. I never had to fear for my heroine’s safety or happiness. I could simply follow her about the various interesting activities of her life, and such a pleasingly neat, idyllic, uncomplicated life it was.

“Reading these stories is like being wrapped up in a warm, reassuring blanket,” writes Shirely Hughes in the preface to my copy of Milly-Molly-Mandy Stories. And it is. In a world so often painful and stressful and perplexing, Milly-Molly-Mandy appealed to my deep-seated human longing for things to be good, for them to be right and innocent and genuine. Of course, by no means do I advocate her as a serious solution to that longing, but it explains why I still like her so much.

2.      A. A. Milne

Milne, A. A., Winnie-the-Pooh, London: Mammoth (1991)

Despite my ongoing love affair with all things Disney (as far as being Music Director of my University Disney Society¹), I never managed to form much of an attachment to the great animation company’s interpretation of the residents of the Hundred Acre Wood. In an odd sort of way, they just make too much sense: Pooh and Piglet’s visits on the Blustery Day, for instance, become to wish their friends a ‘Happy Windsday’, rather than the delightfully absurd ‘Happy Thursday’ Milne originally wrote about.

I seem to recall owning some kind of Winnie-the-Pooh treasury when I was very young, and, later, my dad used to read Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner to me and an assortment of small siblings at bedtime.² It’s all beautiful work, marrying unassuming hilarity with easy profundity, and the carefully crafted poetry is, of course, an added bonus.

3.      Enid Blyton

Blyton, Enid, The Faraway Three Collection, London: Dean (2002)

My love for Enid Blyton began with the Secret Seven and blossomed out from there. The sheer quantity of her work means I never came close to exhausting it, but I devoured book after book: instalments of the Riddle series and the Adventure series and the Five Find-Outers – not to be confused with the Famous Five – Malory Towers, Amelia Jane, the Enchanted Wood, one which nobody else seems to have read about the adventures of three brownies in various Lands…

As I understand it, Blyton’s work has often come under heavy criticism for, among other things, lacking literary merit, which seems to me like a strange criterion for judging children’s fiction. Blyton’s stories aren’t supposed to be intellectually dazzling; they’re supposed to be glorious fun – and if children are reading Blyton and finding it glorious fun, as I did, surely they should be encouraged, if only for the sake of their learning to recognise reading as something valuable and enjoyable? They may later come to reach a stage where, along with the critics, they consider Blyton’s prose uninteresting, her plots implausible and repetitive – but without the love of reading that she fuelled in the first place, they would never have developed the capacity to make such literary judgements.³

4.      J. K. Rowling

Rowling, J. K., Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, London: Bloomsbury (2003)

My older sister was into Harry Potter and, since she was, in my eyes, the coolest person on the planet, I therefore was too. Before I had even picked up …the Philosopher’s Stone, I started writing what was arguably my first fanfiction, based on information gleaned from conversation with her. I demanded a Harry Potter Easter egg, complete with Norbert the dragon cast in green-coloured chocolate, to match hers. And soon I was reading the books for myself – I was on the third one by the time I was six.

The irresistible allure of the Harry Potter series is the idea of this entire magical world hidden so close at hand to our own. Like ours, it has school and shops and media and money and government, but unlike ours, it sparkles with the possibilities of wizardry. The impossible becomes accessible. Add to that one of the widest spheres of plausibility⁴ in fiction, a generous sprinkling of humour, and plenty of heart-pounding adventure and heroism, and it was unthinkable for me not to love it.⁵

5.      C. S. Lewis

Lewis, C. S., Prince Caspian, London: HarperCollins (2001)

“Did you know C. S. Lewis was a Christian?” I remember gleefully asking my older sister one day, having caught a few moments of a TV documentary which informed me as much.

“Really?” Her surprise was evident.

“Apparently Aslan represents Jesus,” I continued.

“I thought he was trying to, you know, replace Jesus,” she replied.

“So did I,” I admitted, still grinning.

And from then on, my appreciation of the Narnia series was transformed. I already loved it for the sheer wonder of travelling to another world rich in magic and marvels, for the adventure and the emotion: now I loved it for its spiritual allegories as well, though many of them continued to go totally over my head for years. I’m still finding new meanings in the narrative even now, as I employ chapters of Narnia as bedtime stories for my little brother (we just finished The Voyage of the Dawn Treader).

It was, unsurprisingly, several years later that I came across that other great work of Lewis’, The Screwtape Letters, which is an epistolary story consisting of advice from a senior demon (Screwtape) to a junior (Wormwood) on how to ensure the soul of his assigned ‘patient’ will have its final destination in hell. Re-reading it recently, I was struck by the way Screwtape is so vehemently against Wormwood’s allowing his patient to read a book he genuinely enjoyed. “…you were trying to damn your patient by the World, that is by palming off vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium as pleasures,” writes Screwtape. “How can you have failed to see that a real pleasure was the last thing you ought to have let him meet? Didn’t you foresee that it would just kill by contrast all the trumpery which you have been so laboriously teaching him to value?”

Lewis, C. S., The Screwtape Letters, London: Collins (2012)

I used to read all the time as a child. Books habitually nestled under my pillow, sometimes as many as I could fit along the width of the mattress – certainly I was almost always midway through both an upstairs and a downstairs book. Books crowded my birthday and Christmas lists. I endured with dismay the limit my parents placed on the number of library books I was allowed to borrow at a time, after one too many desperate searches for lost ones.

These days, I probably don’t manage an average of a book a month. My younger self would be ashamed of me. What happened?

It was some time ago that I became aware that reading, and fiction in other forms, had become an idol for me, and I have since been battling to make it not so. Nevertheless, I wonder if, in the process, I have not really torn down my shrine to Fiction at all, merely rededicated it to Productivity – a more demanding goddess to serve, and a subtler one.⁶ She persuades me that I am serving God by doing Useful Things, relegates time with him to merely one among many of these Useful Things, and taints the pleasure I get from reading by telling me I ought to be doing something more Useful. “If you insist on reading,” she says, “at least read a more important, intelligent book, the kind of book you can count it an impressive achievement for you to have read. And, for pity’s sake, stop reading things you’ve already read – cover some new ground!” Trumpery indeed – are these things really what I have come to value over whether I’m actually enjoying the book or not?

I sometimes thank and praise God for fiction after I have spent time reading a book I really enjoy. I don’t think I have ever thanked or praised him for productivity after I have spent time doing Useful Things. Unsure as I still am of exactly what relationship with fiction it is spiritually healthy for me to have, I’m pretty sure God would rather that I should read books I genuinely love to read, with the same joy with which I used to read those listed above, and so be prompted to thanksgiving and praise, than that I should shy away from a pleasure he has provided out of dedication to a false god.

Footnotes

¹ Yes, there is a Disney Society. Yes, we have an a cappella group. We do lots of other things too and it’s only £5 to join (well, I thought that since Freshers’ Week is coming up, I may as well mention it). http://www.exeterguild.org/societies/8265/

² He used to read us other gorgeous children’s classics as well – the Paddington books, Kipling’s Just So Stories, The Family from One End Street; we even made a valiant attempt at some of the later instalments of the Swallows and Amazons series, though were thwarted by library due dates. Still, excellent as these were, I felt Milne was most deserving of a spot on the list.

³ Actually, I perhaps feel like a bit of a hypocrite to argue for enjoyment over literary quality, since I have always taken rather a dim view of my little brother’s fondness for such series as Captain Underpants and Fleabag Monkeyface. Evidently the fairness of my judgement in such matters is something I should work on.

⁴ This is one of those moments where I don’t know what I’m talking about is a ‘thing’ or a personal theory I ought to explain. Essentially, what I mean by a ‘sphere of plausibility’ is the things which are established as possible in a particular piece of fiction. Harry Potter has a wide sphere of plausibility, because it allows for pretty much anything of a magical nature to be possible; Milly-Molly-Mandy, for instance, has a much smaller one, because all the events it contains could theoretically have happened in the real world. I find the term necessary because it’s hard to criticise certain kinds of fiction as ‘unrealistic’ if they are supposed to contain fantastical elements, but, quite often, a book or series of books will begin to include certain of these elements that do seem implausible based on their initial exposition. For example, I felt that Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series strayed outside its sphere of plausibility when it introduced a time-travel plotline: the secret underground high-tech fairy civilisation I was quite happy with, because it had been the premise from the start, but time travel demanded of the reader a whole new suspension of disbelief, and I felt Colfer was pushing it a bit. Generic location is as important a characteristic of a sphere of plausibility as size – for instance, Harry Potter would have infringed its sphere of plausibility if it had introduced aliens into the mix.

⁵ If anyone fancies adding me on Pottermore (http://www.pottermore.com/en/), my username is HazelDream11707. Let me know you’re adding me, though – I won’t accept if I don’t know who you are!

⁶ Just to be clear, I’m not trying to make any sort of statement by personifying Productivity as female. I’m simply more used to personified-abstract-concept deities being female from the ancient-world literature I’ve read.