AS IN THE LONG AGO

While I've been reading Carnegie Medal winning books I've found this question popping into my head occasionally. Usually I think about it while I'm digging on the allotment and then decide it's not worth writing about. Or rather, I decide that it's too complicated to write about and I'm not really sure what I think. The allotment. Plenty of digging,  plenty of thinking But in the past few weeks I've read a series of historical novels and one non-fiction history book, and that question has kept nagging at me because the books I've read range from one which is definitely written for children to one which, although marketed to children, seems to me to deal with themes which are almost exclusively adult. I suppose the first thing to say is that, speaking (as Noel Streatfeild might have said) as a children's author, all my own books have been written for children, and the subject-matter, style and vocabulary have been carefully adapted to my target audien...

The Borrowers is a remarkable book. Marcus Crouch called it 'flawless', and I agree with him. He also said that 'by its idea alone, one of the few really original ideas in children's literature, it would have been a landmark.' It is a dark and frightening book which is made bearable only by the brilliance of the characterisation and the precise realisation of the Borrowers' lives. It has atmospheric line illustrations by Diana Stanley and wonderful dialogue, but it would be inaccurate to describe it as 'fun' or 'twee'—words I've seen used to describe film adaptations. If you only know the Borrowers through their screen incarnations I recommend you read the book as soon as possible. The Sunday Times review on the back of my copy sums it up brilliantly: 'Beautifully written, poetic and almost always alarming, The Borrowers books have something very mysterious, sad and exciting about them.' The book is a landmark and also, I think, a c...

70 years ago, in 1950, Elfrida Vipont won the Carnegie Medal with The Lark on the Wing, the second in a series of five books about the musical career of Kit Everard, a young Quaker.  When I came to this book the only thing I knew about its author was that she wrote The Elephant and the Bad Baby, that brilliant collaboration with Raymond Briggs which is still one of my favourite picture books. In many ways The Lark on the Wing is a straightforward story about a girl who wants to become a professional singer (the author is more than a little snobbish about 'amateurs' and, it must be admitted, about lower forms of music, like Gilbert and Sullivan and sentimental popular songs). Kit faces various obstacles in the course of the book which, naturally, she overcomes. It is, as Marcus Crouch observes, a 'serious and deeply moving book.' He goes on to say that 'It matters very much to her (Elfrida Vipont), and to her readers, that Kit should find herself and remain true to h...

My grandson (aged 6) does  not  like writing stories. I was a teacher in primary schools for more than thirty years and I always wondered why such emphasis was placed on the ability of young children to write stories. This relates, I think, to Anne Rooney’s piece last month about the relative values placed on fiction and non-fiction both by schools and by parents.    I am still wondering why we make little children write stories. I suspect it is because, when teaching five- and six-year-olds to do something which they would never need to do if they weren’t at school, (ie writing) you have to think of something—anything—for them to write. For this reason most tasks (‘learning activities’) given to children of this age are highly artificial. They don’t really need to write instructions on making a cup of tea, or a postcard home from a place they have pretended to have gone. They do not need to recount their visit to the safari park in writing, especially if it’s onl...