So up it pops again, that old perennial problem of what should be on the
shelves. Should Tintin in the Congo be in the shops? Absolutely not, says
the Commission for Racial Equality. No problem, insist the publishers,
explaining that the book has a wrapper warning that the material inside may
be considered offensive.
Let’s face it, that wrapper won’t last through one reading. And children are
drawn to cartoon books as surely as birds to the plough. We adults know how
to keep our distance from this sort of stuff (after all, even Hergé
regretted this book, and apologised for it). But books for children are
different. Along with their principal purpose of offering enchantment, they
find themselves, whether they choose to or not, playing a larger role. They
bring a picture of the world to inexperienced readers.
So there are good reasons why the works of Enid Blyton had to be ruthlessly
edited before they could again sit comfortably on the bookshelves in our
supposedly non-sexist, non-racist, more inclusive classrooms. I defy anyone
whose kneejerk response is to mutter “political correctness” to read one of
the stories in the Jolly Story Book I treasured as a child. Matty tells her
doll Sambo: “I don’t like your black face.” He runs away and gets drenched
in a storm, during which all of the dye in him is washed away. “ ‘Oh!’
squealed the pixie in delight. ‘You aren’t black any more. You’ve got the
dearest, pinkest, kindest face!’ ” The doll returns to the nursery, and
general acclaim: “ ‘You are a brave doll! You deserved to be made white! No
wonder he’s happy – little pink Sambo!’ ” That’s school, some might say: of
course we won’t have Tintin in the Congo there. But otherwise, once a
book’s written, we should be mature enough to leave it be.
Not always. Over a dozen of my books for young children have just been
reprinted in lovely bright new editions, and I’ve been astonished at the
changes I wanted to make. My first thought was to leave them exactly as they
were written, some as far back as 30 years ago. After all, I have six adult
novels on the shelves, and wouldn’t dream of going at those with a red pen
just because times have changed.
But children read their favourite books over and over, and absorb the thinking
inside them through their skin. I’m not the only author to want children in
schools to carry on reading my books more than I want to stand by the
unthinking insensitivities that make them unwelcome. What was so wrong with
airbrushing the buffoon black prince out of the enchanting Dr Dolittle? Hugh
Lofting did not set out to write Mein Kampf. He’d more than likely have been
the first to offer to wield the knife to introduce all his other delightful
creations to a generation of new readers.
None of the rest of us yet knows which parts of our books will make future
readers shudder. (“They ate meat? Really? Meat from things they shot and
kept in pens?”) But we are here long enough to see one or two things that
already make us a shade uncomfortable, or distance the books unnecessarily
from the modern child. Writers for children routinely bring amounts of money
up to date in new editions. “I need two and sixpence for school,” does not
have much of a ring. Sometimes you have to step in to stop a copy editor
suggesting things like “4.567 metres away” when you’ve talked of a few yards
(I know why J. K. Rowling was so supportive of the Metric Martyrs). And it
can usually be done with grace. “A few steps away” is the obvious solution.
Child readers have as much of a sense of history as they need when, as in the
fairy tales, or stories set in Roman, Victorian and Edwardian times, the
period is downright obvious. Bring forward the story until the fashions and
speech patterns are no longer strange, and it’s a different story. Children
don’t scour the front of their books for publication dates and something
written in 1970 or 1980 may mean something very different now.
Take my own The Granny Project, first published in 1983. As Granny lies dying,
the children pass the time remembering the stray remarks she made to their
good friends Lavinia and George, the first black neighbours ever to move
into the street. “Do you remember how she told Lavinia she must have been
standing behind the door when God’s angels ironed all the hair out
straight?” “She told George he’d been baked too long in the oven!” “She used
to call them Piccaninnies!” By 1990, any Granny still letting drop this sort
of thing was not the amiable character I had in mind. This passage, already
removed from school editions, has now gone entirely. Is this political
correctness? Yes, if that means sensitivity to the world in which we now
live. A book given by an adult to a child includes a sort of imprimatur:
this is a reasonable way of looking at the world unless the author somehow
shows you that the behaviour is unacceptable. And so Celeste, in The Angel
of Nitshill Road, no longer stares at the bully’s quite appalling playground
behaviour and asks: “Poor boy. Is he mental?” She says instead: “Poor boy.
Is he touched with the feather of madness?” The book loses nothing, and
there is one fewer free-floating insult in the world directed at a
vulnerable group with whom the children who read my books now, through
inclusion, have more educational connections, and who may well be reading
the book themselves.
Sometimes the airbrushing is for other reasons. Let there not be an ugly rush
for all the early editions of Bill’s New Frock, in which Mrs Collins
peers at her exasperated, baffled pupil and infelicitously asks: “Bill, are
you feeling yourself?” To save the nation’s primary school
teachers from endless bursts of sniggering, we slid in one useful little
word: “Bill, are you feeling quite yourself?” Some changes are designed
merely to pull the novel back in line to what I had before. In the comedy
about the horrors of having a tempestuous teenager in the house, The Book of
the Banshee, the head teacher gathers the parents to stiffen their sinews
about the virtues of sticking together to face down their offspring’s
determined and perennial claims that “Everyone else is allowed to do it”.
“Nobody smokes. Nobody drinks. And nobody goes to the discotheque!” Has
anyone over 12 been to a discotheque lately? They’re afternoons with
lemonade in parish halls. So that’s been changed to “clubs and bars” simply
to keep the meaning.
What about style? An author’s way of writing does alter over the years. I’ve
become leaner and meaner with the words and wasn’t sorry to take a good few
“very”s and “quite”s out of my earlier books. And when I came across my
third “he looked for all the world as if . . . ” I not only excised it, but
vowed never to use this verbal affectation again.
How do you know when you have gone too far, cutting and slashing? One of the
things I’ve learnt from being edited by others over the years is that when
you take something out that you want back it is the first thing on your mind
when you wake in the morning. If you’ve forgotten it already, then you are
happy to let it go. Books are like children in that you can smarten them up
and cut their hair – even get their teeth fixed – and they’re the better for
it. Only when you find yourself tempted to shave off their limbs do you have
to worry.
The only hard choice was a curious one. I’m still not sure I made the right
decision. In Anneli the Art Hater, Mrs Pears explains how you can learn
about the past from paintings: what foods the people ate, the clothes they
wore, the ways they lived. “The Spanish princesses had real live dwarves for
pets.” I hesitated before taking that line out. I know that even in the
first edition, written in 1985, Anneli’s response is a shocked “That’s
terrible”. But I decided that if I were writing this book today for readers
this young, this isn’t an example I would choose. We do not use the word
“dwarves” now, apart from in fairy tales, very much cushioned
and distanced by time. We have increasing numbers of children in our schools
with a whole range of physical and mental disabilities. Why should I run the
risk of hurting any child’s feelings when there are plenty of other examples
Mrs Pears can pick to make her point? (And there’s no way I’m going to try
to work the phrase “persons of restricted growth” into a glancing reference
to an old painting.) Which is the real version? Who’s to say? The originals
are the ones I would save from a fire. I rather hope the newer versions are
the ones my readers would take with them to desert islands. But it has been
a cheering and instructive task. If it has shown me one thing clearly, it is
that in some ways my readers live in a far kinder and more sensitive world
than that of 30 years ago, when I began to write. I bet you if Hergé was
still alive he’d be the first to sign any petition to have Tintin in
the Congo removed from the shops and have it, as the CRE suggests, kept in
museums – where it now belongs.
— Anne Fine’s new editions for older children are published by Corgi. The
new editions for children aged 7-10 are published by Egmont. Her most recent
comedy is Ivan the Terrible, Egmont, £7.99
The old, old story: sanitising children's books is nothing new
Once upon a time, it was quite acceptable for adults to alter or censor
everything a child might read. The Bible, Shakespeare, the story of King
Arthur: all were regularly sanitised for children, leaving out awkward
references to incest, adultery, or whatever else was currently considered
unsuitable for infant ears.
Another easy option was simply to let texts drop altogether: you have to
search hard to find copies of Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo
or Dr Heinrich Hoffman’s Shock-headed Peter on library shelves.
But these days, under the shadow of Nazi book-burning sprees, when children’s
books considered unsuitable were immolated alongside works by Marx and
Freud, there is less consensus.
Overprotecting children is now seen as perhaps worse than any dangers arising
from overexposure to adult truths.
Classics such as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with
its frequent references to “nigras”, are now seen as inviolable in that
taking out such references would make the book something that it was not. So
while it is still OK to continue to prettify certain nursery rhymes, fairy
tales and stories by Enid Blyton and Richmal Crompton of Just William
fame, it’s a different story when it comes to texts considered as great
documents for all time, not just their own.
NICHOLAS TUCKER, Author of The Rough Guide to Children’s Books
