I wasn’t particularly worried about the state of modern childhood until I saw this book. It transformed me into a blizzard of concern. Children don’t know how to make daisy chains! Nobody is teaching them hide and seek! They need to be told, “Never use a blender, naked flame or knife without adult supervision”! They don’t know jokes such as “How do you start a teddy-bear race?”* Designed to be the feminine response to last year’s hugely successful nostalgia-fest The Dangerous Book for Boys, this is an incredibly perplexing book masquerading as a simple one.

While the Dangerous Book transported any middle-aged reader (male or female) back to happy childhood days of poring over educational comics for colourful illustrated stories about Napoleon and diagrams of the phases of the moon, its Glorious equivalent is, ostensibly, a prescriptive manual indicating how to recreate every facet of a 1950s girlhood, down to picnic tips, clapping games and baffling references to Coco the Clown (died 1974). Can it be serious? What good will it do millennial girls to be led back decades to a prefeminist era? What age of girl is this aimed at, any-way? Eight? Fifteen? Internal evidence is contradictory: helpful pointers on mascara and spots sit alongside the rules of hopscotch; a reference to Father Christmas (as if he were a real person) rubs shoulders with that essential advice to preteens, “Never walk with a loaded gun.” Meanwhile it’s clear that all the lovingly recollected family pastimes such as “whistling through a blade of grass” and making origami “fortune tellers” are set down here purely to make middle-aged female readers shed wistful tears for their own blue remembered hills.

I suppose these are confusing times, gender-wise. When I was a sportswriter covering football tournaments abroad, I used to do tapestry work in the evenings – which is an extreme example of gender dysfunction, but you see my point. Postfeminists would argue that girls can be in favour of equal pay and opportunities, yet still enjoy traditional female skills such as knitting, so why shouldn’t they decorate eggs for Easter, make fancy hats out of bits of cardboard, do a spot of windowsill gardening, create a crude piggy-bank out of papier-mâché, rake the leaves in autumn and attach their mittens to a piece of ribbon threaded through their coat sleeves? The answer, of course, is that such domestic omni-competence turns them not into old-fashioned children but into old-fashioned mothers. It is only when you realise that The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls is actually a gentle primer for useless millennial mothers that it starts to make sense, or at least stops being quite so bewildering.

It was the “raking the leaves” entry that clarified everything for me. “Store dead leaves in a shed or somewhere dry,” it says, “or pile them up and cover them with a plastic sheet or tarpaulin – they will come in handy for lighting your autumn and Guy Fawkes Night bonfires.” Lighting yourbon-fires? It was a relief to wake up, finally (on page 170), to the fact that all this “girl” stuff was just a cover. To be honest, being a girl had started to look like bloody hard work. Girls were apparently expected not only to organise their own parties, but to make up the party bags (“Don’t go over the top: a paper bag containing a few sweets and a little memento . . . will do fine”). They were supposed to sew their own Hallowe’en outfits, decorate the Christmas tree (remembering to test the lights before starting), and devise and produce occasional musical evenings (at which they would not only perform sonatas, but also bake the refreshments and hand-print the programmes). In short, one started to think of the consumer of the Glorious Book as a perpetually bustling prepubescent who, if you popped a broom up her bottom, would cheerfully sweep the floor as well.

The Glorious Book scores highly on enthusiasm. This is the good news. It will give many, many people good ideas about how to make childhood more creative. Kids who would never think of fashioning a bird-feeder from a yoghurt pot, eating snow, or singing “In and out the dusty bluebells” will have a whole new pleasant world opened up to them. The writers apparently care not, however, that they are equipping impressionable young readers to play age-old games that their friends can’t join in with, or to sing age-old songs such as “Mairzy doats and dozy doats” of whose meaning they haven’t the slightest clue.

Personally, I’m in love with the world the Glorious Book evokes, but it’s odd to think that I’m its target audience. From its pages I learnt (among other things) how to do a few magic tricks and how to read tea leaves; and I was grateful that it never made me feel stupid not to know this stuff already. You can tell that the authors are well-meaning people who yearn for a nicer childhood for our deprived modern youth. I still prefer the boys’ book, though, because I’d rather know the rules of poker than how to make a chocolate fridge cake. I’d rather read about naval flags than anything in the world. I suppose some girls are just made that way.

*(Answer: Say, “Ready, teddy, go.”)

Good ideas are hard to find

Some wheezes are so terrific it’s worth having them twice. Or three times. Or more. The absurdly retro style of Conn and Hal Iggulden’s The Dangerous Book for Boys – 600,000 hardbacks in Britain alone – has inspired so many lucrative copycat ventures (including The Boys’ Book and The Girls’ Book) that the Iggulden brothers have had to resort to self-plagiarism with The Pocket Dangerous Book for Boys. At £10, it’s been fighting with the original book (£20) on the Bestsellers list. And now the Glorious Book for Girls. Anyone know the Morse for ‘Fresh ideas, please?’

The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls by Rosemary Davidson and Sarah Vine
Viking £18.99 pp304

Buy the book here at the offer price of £17.09 (including p&p)

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