IT IS ALWAYS GOOD TO TRACK down the source of a lifelong traumatic revulsion, so I am grateful to Boys and Girls, an anthology of miniature-format Ladybird Books from the 1950s to the 1970s. I never realised why I harbour such an unreasoning hatred of rounded, sans-serif fonts, such as this, and get in a temper if magazines print my pieces in it. Now I remember why. It is because I hated Ladybirds.

This was, and is, unfair. As the introduction (“A golden age”) points out, the reading schemes and instructional books about “Adventures from History” or “Far Lands” were well drawn, unpretentious and innocent; classic commercial art. They conjure a world that is “safe and good and simple and bright”. The look is consciously postwar and modernist, celebrating or imagining a never-had-it-so-good comfort. Children wear shorts, skirts, bright V-necks; little boys have ties and their socks stay up (how much more beguiling, how real, were the drawings in Just William!). Peter and Jane visit shops, farms, and seaside, smile at policemen and milkmen, and admire firemen and miners for their honest toil. Badgers and foxes frolic in woodlands free from flashers and fly-tippers. Children play on bikes, tumble in very safe ponds with the dog, pick blackberries and generally lead just the kind of cheery outdoor life that desperate upper-middle parents now struggle to reproduce, at vast cost, in 21st-century Walberswick or Cornwall.

Everyone knows their place. At The Library Peter likes reading about ships and planes, Jane reaches for The Story of Houses and Homes, or The Nurse. Mummy dusts and washes up, Daddy reads the newspaper. Cups have saucers. Tea comes in pots, not bags. At school, Miss wears a lovat green tweed suit and plays the piano before supervising PE in vest and pants and a lunch of corned beef and semolina. Great Men are celebrated with discretion: Admiral Nelson loved England and always did his duty, Henry VIII is remembered for his six wives but: “This is only important because his second marriage was the reason for the Establishment of the Church of England.”

Indeed, never will you catch a Ladybird feeding children’s taste for the grotesque, the mischievous, the intricate, the wild. There is one curious aberration in the Do You Know book, in which a fat man tips the scales at 50st, but we are quickly reassured: “He is too large to run fast and too large to jump. You are not as big as this. You can run and jump.” The books were perfectly targeted – at adults – and ineffably bland. It is no surprise that this tribute volume, lavish and self-consciously retro, appears in the wake of the Dangerous Book for Boys and its imitators. Parents today seem to live in a state of controlled panic, feebly resisting their little daughters’ demand for trollopy thongs and boob tubes, and their sons’ taste for Grand Theft Auto and gangsta rap. They will yearn happily over pictures of obsolete kettles, wax crayons, and decently clad children having fun.

I would have welcomed a slightly more serious, less camp take on all this: a couple of provocative essays on postwar imagery and dreaming, a touch of Fay Weldon or Peter Hennessy. Instead, this book is a curious mixture: plenty of pictures, chosen to provoke knowing irony, pages of nostalgic commentary and essays by an odd assortment of the Ladybird generation: Robert Elms , Wayne Hemingway, Alan Titchmarch, Valerie Singleton, Kim Wilde. Why? I suppose it is useful to know that Robert Elms defined his politics by reading about Oliver Cromwell and “decent folk overcoming overpowering kings”. Perhaps we can usefully trace Kim Wilde’s pop career onstage with the likes of Michael Jackson to her devil-may-care enjoyment of Piggly Plays Truant.

Few attempt irony, though Tony Robinson muses on what is not drawn in the Birthday Party book (“Has Susan’s seemingly perfect mother prepared all this on her own, or are her friends cutting fish-paste sandwiches in the kitchen while drinking Harveys Bristol Cream and smoking Craven A cigarettes? Alas, we will never know”). Rowland Riv-ron chooses the edgiest book, about police, including two villains being bundled into a van by coppers with their macs well buttoned up and not a truncheon in sight.

Wayne Hemingway puts his finger on the only proper purpose of such a collection: “A visual reminder of everyday life in mid-20th century Britain.” And the draughtmsanship really is brilliant, photo-realistic with a simplistic idealism: airbrush Britain.

But what killed Ladybirds for me 50 years ago, and still does today, is the denial – almost a violent denial – of imagination and mystery. Everything is clean-edged, tidy, nicely drawn, drenched with optimism. And any child knows that the world is not like that, not really: there are pictures in the clouds, omens in the pebbles, splendour in the grass, unaccountable nightmares in the neat white bed. Peter and Jane rebel and quarrel and try out rude words, and fear that one day they’ll look behind the newspaper at breakfast and Daddy will have gone.

Not in Ladybird-world, they don’t. Which is why the grown-ups will sigh over this retro mishmash, and futilely imagine that there once was a time when life was lovely.

Buy Boys and Girls: A Ladybird Book of Childhood
Ladybird, £20; 288pp

Libby Purves appears at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on October 6 at 6pm
Call 01242 227979 www.cheltenhamfestivals.com

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