The Little Bookroom

the absent father

iThe Railway Children. By E. Nesbit. Illustrated by C.E. Brock. London: Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., 1906.

E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children is 101. My edition claims that it has been continuously in print since its publication in 1906. Despite this, the book is remarkably unknown in the United States, where, when you mention it, people generally think you’re referring to The Box Car Children or The Trolley Car Family, both wonderful books in their own ways, but utterly different from The Railway Children, which is as complex a book as you could imagine, one that is ideally read repeatedly over the years in order to glean from it its many meanings.

It concerns three children—Roberta, Peter, and Phyllis—who live an idyllic existence in suburban London until one day, quite abruptly, their father disappears, just after promising to repair Peter’s train engine, which was broken “owing either to Peter’s inexperience or Phyllis’s good intentions.” Well, their father doesn’t disappear so much as he appears to leave the house in the company of two gentlemen callers after a conversation overheard by the children in which “Father’s voice sounded louder and different from the voice he generally used to people who came about testimonials and holiday funds.” After their mother is drawn into this unusual conversation in the library, “the children heard boots go out and down the steps,” and their mother returns to them, her face as white as her collar, to impart the news that their father has been called away on business for some time. Shortly thereafter, they begin to pack for their removal to country, taking all of the useful things and none of the beautiful ones. After a lengthy journey by rail, they arrive at the cottage that is to be their new home, to discover no lights lit, no fire laid, no supper waiting, and rats. And still they have no idea as to what has really happened to their father.

                That evening, they themselves tidy the dining room, and light the fire, and break into their packing-cases to retrieve a supper of Marie biscuits, sardines, preserved ginger, cooking raisins, candied peel and marmalade. But the excitement begins on the next morning, when after laying out the breakfast things as best they can, and putting the kettle on for tea, they begin to explore the area around the cottage. Failing to locate the garden, they observe the railway line below them, and sit down to watch for trains, and fall asleep in the sun on the great grey stones of the hillside. This glimpse of the rail line is the first glimpse of what will sustain them in the months to come: the railway, the trains, the station and the men who work there become their community and their companions, as they embark upon a variety of adventures, adventures at once untrammeled and yet constrained by the need to allow Mother as much quiet and time to write as she needs in order to support them in their new circumstances. And so the book is one of discovery and adventure and many rescues, including their own.

                But really it is about so much more. The Railway Children is about the way in which people organize themselves and their lives around unspeakable information, around absence. It’s about the difficult choices that parents make—to tell the children everything or to keep them in ignorance—and the burden of knowledge that children bear in any event. It’s about coincidences and accidents of timing. Nesbit doesn’t leave her readers alone with these ideas, but interjects herself as a commentator frequently, helping children to sort out the complexities of people’s behavior, and their odd ways of expressing themselves, among other things. It is also profoundly about social class, and what it is to be on the margins of the class system, as these children are for the course of the novel. For, once liberated from their middle-class existence of servants and lessons, too poor for tutors and too middle-class for the village school, they are suddenly free to roam the countryside, free to enter into the lives of station porters and signalmen bargemen, of refugees and boarding school boys and doctors. They are free, therefore, to observe the troubles of these people: the prickly pride of workers who refuse to be objects of pity, the struggles to make ends meet at all levels of the social scale, the grief and despair of dislocation—and free to be liberated from their own unnamed troubles at the same time.

Farley Mowat, Owls in the Family. Illustrated by Robert Frankenberg. New York: Bantam, 1961.

Owls in the Family is a great comic novel, wonderful for reading aloud to children of seven and up, or for reading alone around the age of eight. It’s the story of a boy growing up on the Saskatchewan prairie between the wars who has absolute freedom to explore. In the course of his wanderings, he rescues not one but two orphaned owls, and brings them home, adding them to a backyard menagerie that includes gophers, rats, rabbits, and garter snakes. Based on Mowat’s own childhood, this is considered a Canadian classic, and with good reason.

wanted dead or alive

Sorry about yesterday--things kept getting in the way.

And today, I'm sad to say, I can't think of any really good books for children in the upper elementary grades about mothers who are still alive, with the possible of Freaky Friday, but to be honest, it seems so dated to me that I hesitate to suggest it. One might also suggest Little Women, of course, but it was never a huge favorite of mine--more like a rite of passage--I'm glad I read it but can't say I really enjoyed the experience. But really, it seems that in many books for kids of this age, all the good mothers are dead.

So instead, I'm posting a link to a fascinating story on the Guardian website about women choosing to give birth alone: http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/health/story/0,,2075462,00.html

sense of place

Dippers. By Barbara Nichol. Illustrated by Barry Moser. Toronto: Tundra Books, 1997.

This is a beautiful, strange, and atmospheric fiction, narrated as the fragments of a letter. It tells of the heat wave of the summer of 1912, when the dippers came up from the Don River into the neighborhoods of Toronto, the same summer the narrator’s sister fell ill with polio. The story is richly evocative of this mysterious moment when the dippers and the polio coincided, collided, and canceled each other out somehow. Barry Moser’s stunning, subtle illustrations bring the dippers to remarkable life, their heavy furry bodies and leathery wings entirely believable.

a lot of serious things start silly

Natalie Babbit, The Search for Delicious. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1969.

Again the conjunction of politics and food! After the Prime Minister, hard at work on his dictionary, suggests that "Delicious is fried fish," conflict arises among the King (apples), the Queen (Christmas pudding), and the General of the Armies (a mug of beer)--indeed, everyone is inflamed by the debate, since everyone has their own definition. Even the Queen's brother, Hemlock, a friend to none, not even his sister, insists on being heard--before riding off on his big gray horse. The best solution, it seems, is to survey everyone in the kingdom, hold a vote so that whatever gets the most for delicious can be entered into the dictionary. But who will conduct the survey? The Prime Minister is too old for journey--so he sends his adopted son, Gaylen.

Because the kingdom is not a large one, it seems that the poll should take no more than four weeks. And so Gaylen sets off. But when he reaches the first town, it seems that someone has gone on before him, stirring up trouble, talking against the king. And though it takes three days to register all the suggestions for delicious, not one is repeated. And everyone's passions are aroused by the conflict. But it is here that Gaylen first hears of the woldweller--a magical guardian of the forest--from Medley, daughter of the Mayor. She urges him to find it, and ask what it thinks is delicious.

Indeed, everywhere that Gaylen goes, he finds increasing dissension, more magical creatures, and the keys to a mystery whose origins lie deep in the past. The way in which he brings them together, prevents civil war, and oversees the creation of the definition of delicious, forms the rest of this gorgeous story, told in sparkling language.

questing

Olivier Dunrea. Hanne's Quest. New York: Philomel Books, 2006.

Hanne is the smallest and youngest of the Scaldy hens belonging to Mem Pockets, so young that she has not yet begun to lay eggs--far younger than the venerable Old Pegotty. And it is Old Pegotty who tells the other hens, when Mem Pockets discovers that back taxes may consume her farm, that one among them has the power to save the farm by laying three golden eggs. Not just any one of them, of course. The chosen one must have been hatched under the New Moon. She must be the bravest of heart, the purest in thought, and the wisest in the ways of the Great Goddess. And while Hanne does not know if she measures up, she is the only one of the hens to have been born under the New Moon. And so she sets off on her quest.

It takes her far from the farm, to mysterious places she could never have imagined, from barrows to standing stones to the sea itself, and when at last she returns, "she was a different hen than she had been at the beginning of her extraordinary adventure." Unlikely as a hen may seem as an heroic figure, Hanne is a compelling seeker, and a wonderful introduction to the motifs of the quest. And Dunrea's lovely illustrations enrich the story in their dark depths.

the limits of friendship

Angel Square. By Brian Doyle. Toronto: Groundwood Books, 1984.

Angel Square is one of a group of novels by Brian Doyle, collectively entitled The Low Life, that explore life in Ontario between 1890 and 1950. Tommy, the narrator, is determined to discover the identity of the man who beat up his best friend Sammy’s father. “It was because he’s Jewish. Some people around here don’t like you if you’re Jewish,” says his aunt Dottie. With the help of his best friends Coco and Gerald, Tommy negotiates the rigid ethnic boundaries of his neighborhood in the guise of The Shadow, pursuing his love for a schoolgirl, and trying to buy the right Christmas presents for his family all at the same time. This mystery takes on religious hatred without ever losing either its comic tone or the genuine menace that lurks in the Ottawa of the 1940s, nor does it compromise by offering an unmitigatedly happy ending. It is absolutely brilliant, and you must not miss it.

no one was with her when she died

We read Charlotte's Web aloud again. It is, of course, one of the great classics of U.S. children's literature in part because of the delicacy with which it handles the problems of social relationships: what it is to be alone and what it is to be a friend. But more than ever before, it struck me on this reading as a profound introduction to American culture. The riffs on boxing (as Charlotte recounts the story of her cousin catching the fly), and on religion (when Mr. Arable goes to tell the minister about the miracle of the web), on the dreariness of scientific authority (when Dr. Dorian muses to Mrs. Arable about the likelihood of animal speech) and the canniness of observation (when Mrs. Zuckerman observes that it is Charlotte rather than Wilbur who is extraordinary), the peculiar combination of the comic and the lyrical--all of these share some self-mocking quality that is intrinsic to the best of American culture, a refusal to take entirely seriously those things that we embrace, an awareness of their rootedness in a particular time and place.

My daughter claimed never to have heard it before, though I was sure I had already read it with her--and sure enough, there were passages that had her laughing, and saying, "Oh. I remember this part!" But there were things she had forgotten, too, big things--like the death of Charlotte. "Last Day," the chapter in which she dies, makes it very clear that Charlotte will not survive--Charlotte herself says so. But rather than allow her death to become the focus of the chapter, White redirects the readers' attention to the Wilbur's determination to do something for the friend he adores, and to the manner of her death: "No one was with her when she died." So the genius of this book, it seems to me, is that the death of the heroine is not the end of the story. And as a result, children are allowed to grieve her death in the context of a life that goes on, in the context of the life she was so determined to save--in the context of Wilbur's life. Their grief is therefore, the grief we feel for the loss of a beloved friend, not the grief and terror we may feel in the face of death itself. The specificity of Charlotte's death allows children to see that death is indeed a part of life, and that life goes on--not uncaringly or callously, but that it goes on nonetheless, and that we can continue to feel joy in it.

And then a few days later, I read this op-ed in the New York Times on hog farming and the appalling conditions in which pigs are currently raised, and the specter of death that hangs over Wilbur seemed so much less terrifying than the lives these pigs lead. See it for yourself here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/opinion/14niman.html?em&ex=1174190400&en=9c89521e6d388787&ei=5070

And then I went looking for humanely raised pork. So if you eat meat, as we do on occasion, you might want to know about Eat Wild, where you can locate producers of pastured-raised animals. Look here: http://www.eatwild.com/index.html

thinking

The Dragon of Og. By Rumer Godden.  Illustrated by Pauline Baynes. New York: Viking Press, 1981.

An origin tale concerning a shy and lonely dragon confined to a small pool in the stretch of a river by his mother, and the new lord of the manor, who determines that the dragon shall no longer devour its customary pair of bullocks each month. The true protagonist is the lady of the manor, who transforms the rough castle and takes to walking in countryside. “Most people think when someone walks slowly, not talking, but feeling the wind, watching birds and flowers—at night, stars—he or she is being plain idle, whereas what they are doing is most important of all: thinking.” A slight story, but satisfying in its language, with lovely full-color plates that are indeed reminiscent of medieval manuscripts.

saints and dragons

Saint George and the Dragon. By Margaret Hodges. Illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984.

A wonderful book for children drawn to lush, romantic tales. Hodges’ retelling of the legend is at once dramatic in its battle of good and evil, and folkloric in its emphasis on the healing powers of the land. But it is Hyman’s illustrations that really capture the reader’s imagination, not only the full page ones, but the marvelous borders of the text with their lovely indigenous plants and their symbolic representations of the progression of the tale in the figure of a tiny ship.