Tell
School Gate the book that inspired you as a child
Daniel Finkelstein
“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of
his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way
of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another
way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.” Whenever I
do the washing-up, put my baby son's shoes on, write a column, whenever I do
pretty much anything really, I think about Edward Bear. Or Winnie the Pooh
as he is better known.
So an easy choice as my favourite book for a child to read? Not quite. For
there are two problems. The first is that Winnie the Pooh isn't really a
children's book. Yes, it was appealing for me as a child, but it is only
now, as an adult, that I properly understand how funny and insightful it is.
The best characters - Owl and Eeyore - are brilliant descriptions of adults
that I encounter all the time. Pomposity and pessimism has never been so
brilliantly skewered. And without a hint of unkindness. To manage to be
merciless without being cruel is a wonderful achievement.
The second problem is that while I loved reading Pooh, it was really best when
read to me by my mother. In fact it still is. I pretend, of course, that she
is reading to my children. But I don't think either they or she is fooled.
Simon Barnes
To learn your lessons from a bear; to have a black panther as your best
friend; to have a she-wolf you call Mother; to have as your blood enemy a
lame tiger: this was the world I was born for. Mowgli, a mere toddler,
sought refuge from the tiger in the wolf's lair and suckled from the den
mother: could any book begin better? Mowgli had to learn all the Master
Words of the Jungle, because he could climb almost as well as he could swim,
and swim almost as well as he could run. He wore no clothes, ever, a problem
for illustrators for the last century and more, but a wonderful thought for
tie-strangled boys in school uniform.
This was a magical world, then. You could tell, because the language was
magical: “We be of one blood, ye and I,” is the Word for the Hunting People.
Mowgli had to learn it, and it kept him safe when his folly took him into
danger.
After the three Mowgli stories come other wild tales of other wild things: how
Kotick, the white seal, led his kind to safety, how Ricki-ticki-tavi fought
with the cobras. These stories are crammed with marvellous words: and
enormous themes of life and love and death.
The tales are all fizzing with perfection, told with dizzying confidence. As a
tree-climbing, wildlife-besotted boy I loved them all. I love and reread
them to this day, for they are profound joy and a great deal more besides.
As a boy, I sought life's meaning through the imagination and through the
wild world: as I read The Jungle Book, it became quite clear that they were
one and the same thing.
Carol Midgley
It's tempting to cast one's self as a child prodigy floating around aged 7
with a well-thumbed copy of Ulysses. Alas, the truth is more prosaic. Ruby
Ferguson and Enid Blyton were the goddesses that rocked my world: Ferguson
for her 1950s Jill books with such thrilling titles as Jill Enjoys Her
Ponies and - oh, how I could weep for my averageness - Enid Blyton for
everything, but especially The Magic Faraway Tree, The Wishing Chair and the
Five Find-Outers, the first books I remember being truly unputdownable.
I was unhealthily obsessed with Jill. She had ponies called Black Boy and
Rapide, but in later reprints Black Boy was recast as Best Boy. I'd waste
summer days lying under an eiderdown reading them to the end, then
immediately starting again. The books were unrelentingly middle-class, and
poles away from my life but there was a slight bitchiness therein -
especially towards snooty Susan Pyke - which I thought “edgy”. And since
horses (not that I owned one) were a passion, it was like reading about your
pop idols in Heat.
The Magic Faraway Tree seemed impossibly sophisticated and scary with its
supernatural characters such as Moonface and spectral worlds (favourite: The
Land of Dame Slap). But it was the Find-Outers and the politically
incorrectly-named hero, Fatty, that I remained addicted to for longest. I
don't know why. The sinister-sounding titles such as The Mystery of the
Spiteful Letters and The Mystery of the Strange Bundle felt a bit dangerous
but, at the same time, safe.
Oh, and then obviously for relaxation there was Proust.
Libby Purves
I would choose Moonfleet by J.Meade Falkner. It's a Victorian adventure story
about the 18th century; about an orphan boy who becomes involved with
smugglers and with one particular mentor figure - the grim old Elzevir
Block.
It is beautifully written and astonishingly vivid: you live alongside the boy
trapped in a tomb, escaping along a cliff track, let down a deep well by a
villain to find a lost diamond, fleeing to the Hague, being duped, arrested,
put in a prison camp for years, transported to Java, shipwrecked at last on
his own home beach...
It haunted my childhood from the age of about 8, but I forgot about it. Then
one day I was sailing with my husband in the Solent and casually said:
“There's this amazing deep well in Carisbrooke Castle, really sinister, I
went there when I was a child.” Then later: “Portland Bill - they used to
call it The Snout, it looks like an alligator on the water. There's a really
dangerous beach for shipwrecks beyond it.”
And suddenly I realised, waking that night with a start: I had never been to
the Isle of Wight, never seen Carisbrooke or the The Snout. And I remembered
Moonfleet, and read it again.
And I realised how certain vivid images, memories, even ideas had arisen from
that early reading, and gone so deep that they endured when I forgot it was
a book that gave them to me. Not just the cliffhanging adventures, but the
sense (often missing in one-act children's books) that life is long and full
of different fortunes, and that, as the motto on the Mohune tomb says, “Ita
in vita ut in lusu alae pessima jactura arte corrigenda est” (As in life, so
in a game of hazard, skill can make something of the worst of throws).
Matthew Parris
Hardly anybody remembers the Pookie books now, but I will never forget them.
Aimed at children from about 6 to 10, they recounted the adventures of
Pookie the Winged Rabbit, found and cared for by Belinda, a kind girl in a
threadbare frock who lived alone in a wood, surrounded by woodland
creatures. Pookie slept in a shoe-box.
The author of the (then) hugely successful series was Ivy Wallace; but a boy
of 7 doesn't notice authorship or literary style. To me, Pookie and his
friends were a kind of parallel world of which I read reports. My mother
kept reading us Wind in the Willows but, left alone, I turned to Pookie.
Indelible in my childish memory was the story of when Pookie went to visit
Winter. It was called Pookie Puts the World to Rights and the plot, though
simple, was not shallow. Hating the end of summer and the onset of winter,
Pookie led a delegation of woodland creatures to the North Pole to ask
Winter, an icycled giant, never to return. Winter agrees. They go back home
to the wood.
Summer never ends. Everything goes haywire, no creature knowing when to
hibernate, no flower knowing when to bud, while the healing, cleansing
effect of the seasons is lost.
The pictures of the North Pole, and Winter, with his glacial arms and fingers,
were deliciously terrifying. Opened at that page, I hid the book under my
pillow at Nana's, and after she'd switched off the light, I switched it on
and looked at the picture until I was too scared to look any more, then put
it under the pillow, turned out the lights, snuggled under the bedclothes -
and switched the light on again to have another peep.
Maybe Ivy Wallace was warning my generation about global warming.
David Aaronovitch
History and geography were always my things, from the earliest age, when my
primary school supplied short illustrated books charting the lives of the
Eskimo Twins, the Dutch Twins, the Japanese Twins and so on - some of them
originally published before the First World War. I loved the costumes and
the sense of being in some other place.
It was a narrative hop from the Twins to the books of the poet Henry Treece,
in most of which a boy would encounter and fall in with a group of
battle-hardened actors on the historical stage, invariably armed to the
teeth. Illustrated by Christine Price to emphasise the sinewy toughness of
the characters and the detail of their costumes and weaponry, Treece's books
- mostly written in the 1950s and 1960s - included two Viking trilogies and
some Romans in Britain.
But the Treece book that stands out for me, though I cannot recall much of the
plot, was called The Bombard, and depicted the use of gunpowder for the
first time by an English army, at the battle of Crecy in 1346. There was, of
course, a boy, who finds himself caught up in the war against the French.
And the chief bombardier, I recall, was a prototypical Treece gnarled
veteran, full of courage, blasphemy and independent spirit. At 40 years
distance I can almost smell the discharge of the crude cannon that gave its
name to the book, and recall the terror that its blast caused among the less
technologically advanced (though doubtless effete) French.
Erica Wagner
I don't remember when I first read this novel; only that I can't seem to
remember a time when I had not read it, when it was not part of me. It is,
in part, about a school for wizards, though fans of a later magical academy
may be surprised at the depth and richness of this book. It's the story of
Ged, a poor boy born with a great and terrible power; yes, he can save his
village from invaders, but unschooled he might also destroy himself - and
much more.
First published in 1968, A Wizard of Earthsea hasn't dated. It's striking of
Le Guin to confine the power of wizardry to men and boys, but as all who
truly love reading understand, that will never stop anyone, man or woman,
boy or girl, from “identifying” with a protagonist. Ged is fierce, angry,
sometimes brutal and coarse - as we know we are, sometimes, somehow,
somewhere inside ourselves - and a young reader can travel and grow
alongside Ged. His struggles with himself, his attempt to make his way in a
world, which - for all it contains dragons - is very much like our own in
the interactions between its inhabitants, don't seem like “science fiction”
or “fantasy”: they are purely human. Amanda Craig, The Times's children's
book critic, is as big a fan of this book as I am, and has called it “the
most thrilling, wise and beautiful children's novel ever”. She's right. If
you have never read it, read it now.
Hear Ursula Le Guin read an extract from A Wizard of Earthsea at
www.ursulakleguin.com/WizardOfEarthsea.html
Ben Macintyre
The best children's book ever written is Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice
Sendak (1963), mostly because it passes the crucial test of being loved by
children and then re-loved by adults, forever. The pictures are just as
fresh and funny on the millionth reading; the female monster still looks
like Ann Widdecombe. It is a book about fantasy, rebellion, adventure,
taming inner fears, redemption and devilry. It is about the way your parents
always forgive you, and the way the walls of a child's bedroom expand in the
imagination to become “the world all around”.
I have long believed that Wild Things is meant to be Sendak's metaphor for
constructive American imperialism and the original pioneer spirit:
loner-adventurer travels to scary lands, tames inhabitants, leaves, despite
the pleading of the locals, and returns to a homeland where the supper is
always hot. Even if that is nonsense, it is still the most enduring
standalone children's book.
Children's books are immeasurably better than they used to be. Gone is the
chilling moralising of Peter Rabbit, replaced by books that describe the
sorts of things children are interested in: being disrespectful to grown-ups
and unhygienic (Horrid Henry); pretending to be a dog (Hairy McClary from
Donaldson's Dairy); coping with annoying siblings (Katie Morag) and going to
the loo (I Want My Potty).
I was always a Tintin and an Asterix fan. Tintin is probably responsible for
my becoming a journalist, but Asterix is a master of the pun and the sly
literary reference, sarcastic and cynical and violent. The names alone are
semantic gems: I discovered the word cacophony through Cacophonix the Bard.
A book that makes child of 8 pick up a dictionary is, surely, a work of
genius.
Caitlin Moran
If you read all the Narnia books in order, then The Horse and His Boy is the
sixth - coming out of the rainy, giant-riddled moors of The Silver Chair.
The Horse and His Boy is, in contrast to its predecessor's gloom, set in
Narnia's version of Arabia - Calorman: all sherberts, palm trees, desert
moons and hot sand. Usually books set in hot places are oppressive and about
huge battles, and women being oppressed behind their veils. This one has
Calorman princess Aravis, who comes across like a miniature Ava Gardner -
lush, stroppy, adept with a scimiter. The Horse, meanwhile, is a Talking
Horse, and quite camp - it's as near as you get to gays in Narnia: unless
you, like me, harbour certain beliefs about Prince Rillian, who only seems
to cheer up from his kidnapping when he gets his luxuriant velvet robes
back.
Aravis, the Horse, and the Boy - the pleasingly weedy Sashta - bicker their
way across the desert, having alarming but ultimately manageable aventures.
As the book has no priggy human kids, it feels pleasingly isolated from the
rest of the series. It's just all about Narnians, and their Narnian ways.
Even Aslan turns into a bit of a bitch, released from the adoring gaze of
Lucy.
When Aravis causes her maid to be whipped, Aslan chases her across the desert
and rakes herback with his claws. Although I'd enjoyed all the fauns and
centaurs of the “proper” Narnia books, it was this volume drawing on
Eastern, rather than European, mythology that disturbed and disrupted me -
in an exciting way. The magic was darker and bloodier; the mental and
spiritual tortures of the characters far more unpleasant and thrilling.
The next book I got out of the library was one of Persian fairytales - full of
sky-filling genies and sisters feeding their starving brothers their own,
snapped-off fingers. And, yes, as soon as adolescence kicked in, I did turn
into a goth.
