Life must be filled up

Why? This is what I ask myself when modern authors take it upon themselves to give a modern twist to classic children’s novels. Would you re-write The House at Pooh Corner so that it ends with Christopher Robin giving away Pooh to a jumble sale? Or have Mole and Ratty eaten by predators and Badger gassed in his cosy home in the middle of the Wild Wood? Sequels need not be bad books. Hilary McKay’s Wishing for Tomorrow, a sequel to A Little Princess and Five Children on the Western Front, in which Kate Saunders takes the Psammead into the First World War are both rather good. These writers, as well as Holly Webb, author of Return to the Secret Garden, probably see their work as homage because they genuinely love the originals.

Return to the Secret Garden is set in 1939 and 1940. Modern writers just can’t keep away from World Wars, it seems. Emmie lives in the Craven (Ho!) home for orphans in London when the children are evacuated to the north of England. Evacuated to, of course, Misselthwaite Manor. Emmie is rather like Mary Lennox: thin, sallow, cross. She’s broken hearted because she has to leave behind a stray cat she’s adopted. At first she finds the vast house and the endless moor around it frightening after London. Then she discovers the gardens, one gardener in particular, a robin, and the garden, now tended and full of roses. She loves it and is allowed to help look after it. But the house has its mysteries. Why does Jack, the young son of the house, seem to hate the new inmates? Who cries in the night? Who wrote the diaries which she finds in a drawer in her room? By the end of the book she has learned the true identities of Mr and Mrs Craven and Miss and Mr Sowerby and linked them to the children of the past. There is one real tragedy and a nearly happy ending. The book is a good read but, I ask again, why write it? It’s true that the children of The Secret Garden are the right age to have lived through two World Wars but couldn’t we just leave them in the past?
( Katy )

The Poppy Factory , Liz Trenow
Diamond, Jacqueline Wilson
Dangerous Lover, Sonia Deane
Summer of Love, Katie Fforde
As Berry and I Were Saying, Dornford Yates
Saving Grace , Jane Green
It Started With Paris, Cathy Kelly
( opinions )

I was given Lily Alone as a birthday present and read it the same day. I didn’t mean to! I meant to enjoy it for longer but Dame Jacky writes so compellingly you can’t help yourself. Her latest book is topical in the light of this story about a woman who was cautioned by police and suspended from her job after leaving a fourteen-year-old in charge of a toddler. Lily’s case is rather different, and one to set you bristling with middle class disapproval.

Mum has four children by three different fathers. She doesn’t work. She doesn’t clean the flat or cook much. One of the children, Baxter, is wildly out of control, spending all his time rushing around shouting; he swears, poses in the park with an empty beer can and a fag end and is caught by his sister ‘looking at a girlie magazine’. Mum was fifteen when Lily was born and acts fifteen now. Why should she dress from charity shops? Why not use a ‘bought’ (stolen of course) credit card to buy a £200.00 dress and treat all the children? Why not go off to Spain with her new nineteen-year-old boyfriend and leave the children behind? You get the picture.

Poor Lily sees everything that’s wrong and is torn between loving her mum and hating her for her desertion. Mum doesn’t mean to leave the children alone; more, one feels, because she knows ‘the Social’ will be after her than because she thinks they won’t manage. She phones Mikey, father of two of the children and leaves a message telling him it’s time for fatherhood duties and he’s to come and look after the children. She flies off without waiting for an answer and it’s Lily who gets the call from Mikey saying he’s off to work in Glasgow for two weeks. Lily hates him, so she doesn’t tell him the truth and the children are really left home alone. Even when a kindly teacher calls round Lily won’t admit that she’s looking after the children on her own because she knows the system, too, and fears they will all be put in a home. So she bravely struggles on, feeding, cleaning and entertaining her little brother and sisters as well as she can and trying to keep nosy parkers at bay. I just know that I would be one of the ‘old bags’ who ask if the children are in the park on their own, where their mum is and so on and I bet Jacqueline Wilson would, too.

I won’t give any spoilers but things don’t work out well. And Lily is eleven years old. My hope for her is that one day she will have a good job (she’s bright) and the pristine flat she fantasises about. My fear is that she will be sponged off by her siblings and even her mother, and that she will never trust men. I don’t know how Jacqueline Wilson manages to pack so much social deprivation into a book without making it totally depressing but she does. I was reminded of the Victorian moral tales about poor, neglected children, which I have such a weakness for. In those books the ladies in the park would not have been nosy old bags but kindly Christian souls keen to ‘rescue’ the children. Or a long lost relative or kindly old gentleman would have adopted them. The author would not have stinted her (it was usually ‘her’) condemnation of the mother and the society which produced her. Jacqueline Wilson manages to be entertaining, to show, not tell, and remain authorially non-judgmental, leaving the reader to form her (it’s usually ‘her’) own opinion. She’s very interested in things Victorian herself, as shown by The Lottie Project and Hetty Feather.

The best children’s books can be so much more gripping than adult ones. I enjoyed reading Troubles and admired the writing but I started to feel it was too long. The London Eye Mystery, on the other hand, is a book to be enjoyed and whizzed through. The narrator is Ted, who lives with his parents and sister Kat. There are plenty of arguments but they are basically a close, loving family. The reader soon realizes that Ted is just a little odd. He counts every Shreddie he eats for breakfast. When his mum says their front garden is ‘the size of a postage stamp’, Ted works out that it’s actually the size of 22,300 stamps. It turns out that he knows he has ‘a syndrome’, never named but probably high functioning autism (?) which makes him different from other people. He knows all about weather and many arcane subjects yet can’t understand facial expressions or body language. So instead of saying that someone smiled, he will say that the corners of their mouth turned up, which he understands means they are pleased/friendly.

It can’t be easy, living with Ted but sometimes a brain which works differently can reach conclusions which wouldn’t occur to other people and that’s just what happens in this story. When Ted and Kat’s Aunty Gloria and her son Salim come down from Manchester to stay for a few days, Salim is mad keen to ride on the London Eye. The children are queueing for tickets when a stranger offers them one free ticket. Salim accepts, Ted and Kat watch him go up. But they never see him get off again; he has completely disappeared. Cue acute distress, police everywhere and a tearful television plea from Aunty Glo. Meanwhile though, Ted’s brain is humming and he and Kat set out to solve the mystery.

I loved this book. There are bound to be comparisons with Mark Haddon’s The Curious incident of the Dog in the Night-time but I’d say this was suitable for a younger readership. It’s very sad that the author died young and all royalties go to a charitable trust she set up before she died.

More Kid-Lit: I pre-ordered The Longest Whale Song by Jacqueline Wilson in the Kindle version. Switched on the wireless this morning and it was there in seconds. Talk about instant shopping!

No, not guilt about how much money I've spent on books but about where I've bought them. This is an apology to all small independent booksellers struggling to keep going. W H Smith's are selling the new Jacqueline Wilson book Jacky Daydream at £4.00 off and including it in their 'second book half price' promotion. So I was able to buy Jacky plus Sarah Waters' Night Watch for less than the cover price of the Wilson alone.

Jacky Daydream is an autobiography written for children. It includes many photographs from JW's childhood, very similar to those in fashion in blogging circles at the moment (grin). At the end of each chapter is a question for the reader asking 'in which of my books will you find a character who...?' She really has become a brand. It would be interesting to compare it with Enid Blyton's The Story of my Life, with its many concealments, not to say downright lies. One can't imagine Blyton admitting to having peed on stage whilst reciting. Times change.



Edit. P.S. I now see that Wilson claims to have read The Story of My Life when she was six or seven.