A Walk with the Walrus and the Carpenter

Sandsend beach

Sandsend beach in North Yorkshire is a beautiful sandy bay surrounded by cliffs with a view of the ruined Whitby Abbey at the south end. It is an interesting sort of beach with rocks, caves, fossils and rivulets running into the sea, the sort of beach where you could while away a whole day beach-combing or exploring. What makes it interesting and relevant to this blog is that apparently it was whilst walking on this beach that Lewis Carroll thought up his  poem the Walrus and the Carpenter which was told to Alice by Tweedledee  in Alice through the Looking Glass, published in 1871. If you don’t know the poem you can read it here http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/walrus.html.

the sea was wet as wet could be, the sands were dry as dry…

You can imagine thinking up a poem on Sandsend beach. It is just about the right length to get thoughts going. At the north end the sands stretch out far into the distance and you can see why the tidy-minded Walrus and Carpenter might have  ‘wept like anything to see such quantities of sand: ‘if this were only cleared away’, they said, it would be grand!’.

There have been several attempts to interpret the poem. Some describe the elderly walrus and carpenter as aggressive sexual predators, preying on the innocent young oysters. Others comment on the Victorian morbidity and ‘creepiness’ of the poem. Some consider the walrus, carpenter and oysters to represent political figures of the time. I prefer to enjoy it as a clever and entertaining nonsense poem. As a child I loved the contradictions in it (the sun shining in the night, the oysters wearing shiny shoes even though they had no feet, the boiling hot sea etc.) and the form and language of the poem made it easy to remember.

By John Tenniel

The Victorians of course loved oysters which were a cheap, easily obtainable food and something of a staple for the poor. Oysters were gathered from beds around the coast in their thousands until they ran out- quite suddenly- due to pollution and over-fishing. Having walked the length of Sandsend beach I can confirm that the Walrus and the Carpenter did a pretty comprehensive job in finishing off that particular oyster bed. I couldn’t find a single oyster shell, ‘but that was scarcely odd because they’d eaten every one’.

Shivering with Shackleton

Readers of this blog who know how I love a story set in chilly climes will understand how thrilled I was to find this copy of Shackleton’s Epic Voyage by Michael Brown and illustrated by Raymond Briggs, mouldering forgotten and unloved on a school library shelf! Briggs may be best-known for his rather cuddlier snowy tales The Snowman and The Bear, but I think this little book is far superior. Published in 1969 the book marries sparse but effective text with some wonderful expressive drawings by Briggs. They seem to convey the drama and vastness of the South Pole with a very limited palette and really show how drawn illustrations have a valid place in non-fiction books, offering an additional perspective , a sense of ‘being there’ which photographs are not always able to show.

‘There were storms, and seas so big that in the trough of a wave the boat seemed surrounded by mountains of water’.

Briggs’ explorers, bundled up against the cold, are simply and sometimes crudely drawn, with little individual characterisation,  but this seems to emphasise their fortitude and vulnerability in the face of unbelievable odds. Here they are preparing to set off on a five month trek across the ice, pulling the sledges towards Elephant Island.

Shackleton, a gaunt , bearded figure, gave the order, ‘Hoist out the boats!’

The expanse of the landscape is contrasted with the claustophobic setting inside the boats and tents. Here the crew huddle in their boat the  James Caird adrift on the polar sea.

‘All cooking must be done over a single primus stove that needed three men to handle it’.

Shackleton’s Epic Voyage lacks index or glossary or even a contents page. Many of the children I know, raised on a diet of National Literacy Strategy objectives, might not even recognise it as a non-fiction text. But it is a great example of a creative non-fiction book, which must have given many young readers back in the early 70s that particular blend which the best NF books possess: true facts, simply told and ideas to inspire the imagination.

Leaving Book Group

1903 Two women reading (wikkimedia commons)

I’ve been going to my book group for nearly 10 years, so it was quite a big decision when I told them last week that I was going to leave. There was no big reason for leaving, just that I’m about to start studying again and have lots to read for work and, well, if I’m honest, the last book finally put me off- I really couldn’t bring myself to read about The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs when I have my own pile to contemplate (no disrespect to the novel which may be great and I did try honestly but couldn’t get past page 5). On the whole I enjoyed book group- I’m not going to launch into a tirade against book groups in general. My book group was friendly, not too intimidating and relaxed (although I have heard of others which are not). At a time when I didn’t get out much with small children, the monthly meeting was very welcome and helped me get to know people in a new area. I’ve always read books but I suspect like lots of people there have been times when I’ve fallen into old habits and found it hard to select new books or step out of a ‘book comfort zone’. Book group, with its new book every month provided a useful introduction to a different and changing set of reading materials.

So I planned to write a sort of celebratory homage to the many wonderful books my reading group introduced me to, and explain how I read things I wouldn’t otherwise have read etc etc. Except here is the thing- when I started to make a list of them for this blog I realised how few I could remember in any useful detail. All those books, all those months and it’s all a bit of a blur. I can remember, for example, that we read Salmon Fishing in the Yemen and A Short History of Tractors but we must have read them around the same time because the plots of the two seem to have formed a hideous amalgam of fishing and farming in my head. (Perhaps I should explain, we borrowed our books from the library, so I didn’t have my own copies readily available to jolt my memory).

Not quite like my book group, but almost

Yet books I have read not on the book group list have, by and large, remained clear in my mind, so it’s not just my failing memory.  Maybe that is because the books I chose for myself often had a resonance or meaning for me which gave me a purpose for reading them and gave them, in turn, a place to connect to in my mind. Moreover, being told to read  a book is often a reason for suddenly finding yourself  not wanting to read it. I found Life of Pi for example quite tedious in the book group context, but in another I may well have enjoyed it.

Does it make the experience of a book better and deeper when you have discussed and shared it with others? Occasionally our discussions would be interesting and lively (I seem to remember that The Lovely Bones  and The Swan Thieves prompted heated debate)  but quite often I felt as if we were going through the motions before moving on to the snacks and wine. Does a book always need to be discussed? Take for example State of Wonder which I read and enjoyed and thought was well written  but didn’t have anything really to say about it.  And it’s hard to know which novels will inspire good discussions- especially when not everyone in the group wants to read tried and tested classics.

Then there was the problem of recommending something for the group to read. I like lots of books and love quite a few but anything I have suggested or recommended has usually turned out to be unpopular. I suppose I should be more robust about this but, again, if I’m honest, it hurts a bit and it’s hard not to take personally. If someone says a book you like is pretentious, don’t you feel that you too, are similarly culpable? Sometimes it feels better and safer to think of the world inside a book you have enjoyed as existing solely for yourself, private and unexplored by anyone else.

So maybe all of this just means I need to move on from book groups and communal reading at least for a while. Maybe in the end I need the simpler relationship of reader and book, in which even the author has  a peripheral place.  As Virginia Woolf said,  ’the pusuit of reading is carried on by private people’.

From a railway carriage

On holiday recently we travelled on a steam train from Totnes to Buckfastleigh, a really pretty journey. On the way back we had a compartment to ourselves, slid the door closed and enjoyed the privacy.

Travelling in a carriage like that made us think, of course, of travelling on the Hogwarts Express but as we thought a bit more, we remarked on the number of times carriages such as our own featured in children’s literature.

There is this carriage, for instance, where Alice had a most annoying trip with some very confusing fellow-passengers in Through the Looking Glass:

Illustration by John Tenniel for Alice Through the Looking Glass

Our carriage (like the Hogwarts ones) was linked with others by a corridor, Alice’s here is one of the earlier types which was completely closed off with a door straight out on to the platform on either side and with no connection to the rest of the train. According to the Bluebell Railway Line (http://www.bluebell-railway.co.uk/bluebell/car_fs1.html) the internal corridor wasn’t introduced until the 1900s mainly so that more passengers could access the toilets. However the individual ‘closed off’ compartments persisted for much longer (I vaguely remember them in use in the 1970s and early 1980s) on shorter commuter routes. This type of compartment was  eventually deemed too unsafe- as an individual travelling in one is at the mercy of whoever they are sharing a compartment with without escape until the next station.

In Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner, Emil boards one of the closed-compartment carriages on his trip to Berlin to see his grandmother.

Illustration by Walter Trier for Emil and the Detectives

He has an envelope of money to give his Grandmother which he rather nervously keeps fingering. Later in the journey he can’t help himself and falls asleep, only to awake from  a terrible nightmare  to discover that he has been robbed by the sinister Mr Grundeis, ‘ a low, mean chap who offered you chocolate’. It is a scene neatly echoed in Philip Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke when Sally Lockhart falls asleep in a similar railway carriage and has an important diary about the Ruby of Agrapur stolen by a ‘jauntily dressed’ man in a tweed suit.

Kastner neatly sums up something of the narrative potential of railway carriages in one of his cryptic asides:

A railway carriage is a strange place. Complete strangers sit crowded together in it, and within a few hours they may get to know each other as well as if they had been friends for years. That may be pleasant, or it may not. It depends on what kind of people they are.

Closed railway carriages offer plot opportunities to meet and engage with new characters with whom you would not normally speak  and without a good excuse for getting away. Edith Nesbit used them quite frequently for this purpose, such as in The Treasure Seekers when Oswald and Noel meet a ‘lady poet’ on the train who gives them some useful advice and reads them one of her poems.

Illustration by Cecil Leslie to The Treasure Seekers by E. Nesbit.

Once the train gets moving, the carriage becomes its own little environment, cut off from the rest of the world. The sense of isolation features strongly in my favourite carriage example from The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken which comes near the beginning of the book. Sylvia has to travel alone on a very long journey by train (a night and a day) to stay with her cousin and gets into a compartment with the apparently friendly Mr Grimshaw. It is freezing cold and snowy. During the night, in a great dramatic scene, starving wolves mass on to the line and halt the train. They begin to fling themselves at the window in an effort to get inside and one manages to break the glass and enter the carriage, where Mr Grimshaw wrestles it to the ground and stabs it. They then both have to move to another carriage by edging along the outside narrow ledge of the train. It is a great story and worth a read if you are unfamiliar with it.

I never really enjoyed the carriage scenes in the Harry Potter books. They seem to bring out the worst in the characters; the cliques, eavesdropping and gossip, rivalries and superiority, but in them J.K. Rowling was drawing upon a long-standing and well-tried plot device. You can probably think of many other examples that I haven’t included.

… and not one mention of Thomas the Tank Engine!

‘Re-purposed’ Books

How do you feel about ‘re-purposed’ books? If you are unfamiliar with the phrase this refers to art and craft objects made from old books. It is a popular art form at the moment with numerous examples on the internet ranging from small-scale art works such as mobiles, sculptures and pictures; ‘useful’ items such as lamp-bases, pots and gift wrap, to large-scale art installations. Many of these artworks are clever, beautiful and intriguing. I can’t show you many images as they are subject to copyright, but if you look on Etsy (http://www.etsy.com) you can find lots of lovely examples. Some of these objects just aim to recycle books, others seek to make a statement about the value or place of books in society today. Re-purposing books is one way to dispose of old, unwanted, dilapidated or out of date books. I came across the book above: The Repurposed Library by Lisa Occhipinti recently, available from Amazon (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Repurposed-Library-Craft-Projects-Books/dp/1584799099). This is a craft book with 33 projects for making attractive things using old unwanted books. I quite fancy having a go at some of these projects: they look fun to make and are clearly explained and illustrated. The author gives plenty of good advice about how to select books for re-purposing, and how to avoid cutting up a valuable first edition or rare copy (although this must happen on occasion; one person’s valued book is another person’s rubbish). I was a bit concerned that she kept suggesting that anyone in doubt should consult their local librarian, as they might have trouble finding one, but it is a US book and librarians still seem quite plentiful over there.

People feel uncomfortable about throwing books away. It harks back to a time when books were relatively  expensive and the only source of written information. For some, books are still almost revered as depositories of knowledge. Discarding them can seem sacrilegious, somehow disrespectful. When I worked in a schools’ library service many people expressed concern and unhappiness when I talked about ‘weeding’ out old books. They felt that the books should not be thrown away, but given to charities, in particular those abroad. There are a number of charities doing excellent work supporting children’s libraries in developing countries, such as Books Abroad http://www.booksabroad.org.uk/. I investigated some of these on several occasions to see if they would like any of our books. The vast majority only want high quality books of less than ten years old and in good condition, which we would not be discarding anyway (I agree with them by the way- why send old and unattractive stock we don’t want- all children need good books). We were always trying to get rid of old stock through rather unsuccessful book sales, but most of our old books finished up by being sent for recycling.

In the end I feel ambivalent about re-purposed books, which celebrate the book as object rather than what it is about. I can admire the ingenuity of the often amazing creations made from old books, but still find myself absently trying to read the scraps of print still visible, or wondering what they were about.  To me books are like tools, a means to an end and I can’t see them divorced from their content- a bit like admiring a TV set without looking at the picture.

 

 

A spiffing time at Morcove School

I love the illustrations in my copy of the Schoolgirls’ Own Annual of 1929. These were contributed by a number of minimally acknowledged illustrators (the mysterious ‘BNC’,  Saville Lumley, Ben Hutchinson, J R Burgess and ‘others’). They are in different styles but  are all lively and animated and I particularly enjoy the clothes and the glimpses of interiors and details in the background. However I decided recently that it was time to read the stories as well as look at the pictures.

The girls admire some fabrics bought by Fay

The book itself is made up of a variety of different kinds of stories- adventure, girl guiding, historical and of course school stories- and some shorter ‘articles’  on worthwhile tasks ranging from Economy Cookery to Spring Cleaning your bicycle (I wrote about one of these in the post on Making Things with Children in May). Some of the stories are moralistic in tone and some just rather dull, but although there are a number of stories about different schools, in my opinion the best ones are by Marjorie Stanton about Morcove, a fictional girls’ boarding school in Devon and the antics of the ’gels’ in the fourth form. Morcove first made its appearance in the Schoolgirls’ Own Magazine in 1923 and continued until 1938. The Morcove stories seem more engaging than the other school stories in the book mainly because the school and its ways are described in great detail and the girls are strongly characterised with some familiar types: the capable one (Betty), the mean one (Cora), the ‘madcap’ one (Polly) and the dopey but basically nice one (Paula).

Relaxing in the fourth form common room

Parallels with Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers and Harry Potter come to mind: as with most classic children’s fiction parents are conveniently absent; food features prominently and school work plays a minor role in the greater affairs of school life. The detailed descriptions of school routines and traditions is reminiscent of Hogwarts, however the world of Morcove is much sunnier and more enclosed  and there is little venturing out into the wide world other than to the village Pageant or local draper’s shop. The girls are a largely supportive team and there is a strong moral tone; the miscreants get their just desserts but if you say sorry you are forgiven and accepted back into the fold. And of course the language is different: ‘rather!’ ‘by jove!’ ‘beastly’ ‘rot’ ‘jolly good sort’ ‘chums’ ‘mater’ and ‘brekker’ feature repeatedly and remind us of how ‘youthspeak’ has been common for a long time, helping to set young people apart from their elders and those in authority, even if limited to the confines of the fourth form common room. It seems strange that such words could ever have been considered rebellious, but interestingly Angela Brazil’s use of schoolgirl slang in her books led to some of them being banned in some girls schools in the early part of the 20th Century.

Naomer: ‘Morcove’s Royal Scholar from Africa’

Now all this is all very well, but when I started reading about the Schoolgirls Own Annual I made an awful discovery, and I cannot break it gently to you dear reader, Marjorie Stanton WAS A MAN! Horace Phillips in fact, a victorian gent who made a habit of impersonating female writers of similar stories according to Dennis Bird (http://www.friardale.co.uk/Morcove/Morcove%20Musings.pdf).

In fact, as explained elsewhere in the same website, most of the (apparently all female) authors of the stories written in Amalgamated Press titles were probably really men (which must have been an odd occupation for a man in the 1920s). Wasn’t this  just a reflection of the typically male-dominated workforce in that era? But female authors such as Angela Brazil, Elsie Oxenham and Dorita Fairlie Bruce were writing prolifically at the same time. I confess to feeling rather dismayed and let down by this discovery. Horace Phillips was never a pupil, or even a teacher at a girls’ boarding school. He didn’t know what he was writing about!  But then many of the female writers of girls’ boarding school stories didn’t have that experience either. Which leaves me wondering…did boarding school life like that ever really exist?  Somehow now I know the author was a man I can’t read the stories without inferring sinister or at least patriarchal motives into the tales of midnight pranks, fallings-out and jolly japes. I bet that boarding school life at Morcove was really beastly.

The End

Ben’s Book

I’m always really interested in what makes children select certain books over others. I had my assumptions challenged yet again when I was helping out in a school library earlier this week. I had talked to the pupil librarians about how to select books to go on display and I thought that we’d had a useful conversation and set some criteria for selecting visually appealing books, which usually means the newer books in the library. So when I asked two boys to choose some books to go on display, they went off enthusiastically and came back with piles of books. One boy, I’ll call him James, came back with several huge Readers’ Digest books on local wildife, because he was interested in local wildlife. Fair enough, and at least the books were new, clean and shiny. The other boy, I’ll call him Ben, came back with just one book, an old and dog-eared copy of a 1979 book on Rocks with only black and white pictures inside. I should point out that we also had a new book on rocks, this one, available at the time:

 ’Why have you chosen this old one?’ I asked him. It was actually a book I had thought of weeding out the week before, but had kept because there were so few  books on rocks in the library. He said that he liked the picture on the front cover, so we paused for a moment and looked at it together. This is the book he chose:

Actually it is a great photo. We talked about the little figure of the man in the distance and imagined walking through the craggy landscape and underneath those impressive natural arches. We imagined what you might see over the horizon and the arid heat of the summer’s day. I was lucky to have that convsersation, if I’d been teaching I am sure I would not have had the time. But it served to remind me of how important that first arresting image is- for Ben the age and condition of the book were irrelevant compared to the picture which made him want to pick it up- and having picked it up he wanted to look inside. Rocks by Tony Crisp will be staying on the shelves for a bit longer.