The Little Bookroom

how're they gonna keep them down on the farm

The other day a friend asked me if I knew of any good books about farm life in the 1950s. It's an interesting question because, I realized as I thought, there are many great books about farm life, but they tend to be clustered around specific historical moments--and the 1950s isn't one of them. The mid-nineteenth century, the turn on the twentieth century, and the Depression years all feature prominently in books that explore rural life--all moments of historical change, whether hinged on internal migration, technological innovation, or climate change and disaster. And there are great books that evoke the relative timelessness of farm life, the way that it is of necessity tied into the seasonal year.

One of my favorites for children in the early years of school is Georgia Graham's The Strongest Man This Side of Cremona, partly because she's writing about the prairies that I know. I've mentioned it before, but realy must do so again, I love it so. In it, Matthew is helping his dad fix a fence before the cows get loose when he notices a funnel cloud forming behind him. Hand in hand, the two of them run for a culvert, taking shelter in a drainpipe while the tornado rages around them. The family is safe, but faced with the sudden destruction of their careful labors--and with the quiet arrival of their neighbors from adjacent farms, who set to work to repair the damage and restore order. Graham's bold and detailed prints have the heightened clarity of the prairie, where every blade of grass, every stalk of wheat seems to register itself individually on the eye. "Nobody could stop a tornado, not even his dad"--but the dogged persistence of these farmers, their determination to prevail in the face of disaster, their dignity amidst near defeat is powerfully evoked here, and communicates something profoundly true about the strength of those who understand their vulnerability. This is a fantastic book for kids who are ready to go beyond the charm of the farmyard to the challenges of that life, and to understand the debt that urban dwellers owe those who live on the land.

Georgia Graham, The Strongest Man This Side of Cremona (Calgary: Northern Lights Books for Children, 1998).

absence and possibility: fathers in picture books

When I began reading picture books with my then-small son, it seemed to us that fathers were notable only for their absence. Mothers are ubiquitous in the lives of young children—and all the more so in the pages of their books. Mothers can be counted on to feed and clean, to cuddle and scold, to make picnics and to bundle into strollers for trips to the doctor. Fathers are less present. But it’s not the simple lack of fathers that is striking in books for young children—it’s also the constrained representation of fathers. Fathers are often—too often—defined in relation to paid work, whether the father in question works for pay or not. The weight of work, the weightiness of work, rests heavily on the shoulders of these men. Likewise, in the pages of books, fathers exist as full fledged people engaged in relationships with their children less often than mothers or siblings or grandparents. But real  fathers are, of course, like mothers, loving, tired, joyful, busy, pensive, bored, and overwhelmed, trying to get on with the business of living.

What’s at stake in the representation of fathers in picture books? At their core, books about fathers present us with one of the great uncertainties of children’s literature, the question of whether children’s books should reflect the real world that the young child is coming to know day by day, or whether these books should represent an ideal world that we would like the child to one day inhabit, created by and for themselves out of expectations shaped by exposure to these very books (among other influences). Now, if the task of these books is to represent the actual world of the young child, then surely fathers must be largely absent in their pages, not there for the baths and meals and careful studies of snails that compose the lives of young children, real and fictional alike. For despite the fact that our culture is increasingly populated, indeed predominantly populated, by what continue to be termed "non-traditional families", living in an ever more polarized economic circumstances, fathers are in fact often absent from children’s lives, either because they work longer and more profitable hours than mothers, or because they have left their children, or because they were never present in the lives of the children they fathered. But if you believe that children deserve, are in fact owed a more profound vision of what it means to be human, and in this instance of what it means to be a man, than surely they deserve books that show them men who parent children as passionately and as ambivalently, as impatiently and as hopefully as do women.

So if you want to think through experiences with fathers with a child in fruitful ways, whether that child lives with a father or not, where can you turn? Let me share some of the books I’ve liked about fathers and their children with you—books for infants, toddlers and preschoolers. Many of them represent the ideal of the traditional families, father out for the day, mother in, but some do present more complex family situations—and all of them take fathers seriously as important people in the lives of children.

For very little children to the age of two or so, Helen Oxenbury’s Tom & Pippo books are wonderful. No more than four or six sentences long, they capture the simplicity and intensity of feeling experienced by very young children and their caregivers. Tom and Pippo’s Day evokes a child’s joy at the father’s return from work at the end of the long day, as the ever appealing round and rosy figure of Tom rushes into his smiling father’s outstretched arms.

Children who turn to books more for information about the real world than for stories might enjoy Ann Morris’s The Daddy Book, with photos by Ken Heyman. Here are full-color photographic portraits of children and fathers in many countries which suggest the solid sameness of the father-child relationship the world over. In fact, I’d be uncomfortable using this book with children older than three or four, because I think it oversimplifies the cultural complexities of family relationships, but for the very young child these loving pictures could serve as an affirmation of the simple humanity of men and their children. All things considered, though, I think I prefer Adele Aron Greenspun’s Daddies, a book of black-and-white photographs of fathers and children, with its heart-rending introduction for parents about the loss of her own father, its photos of fathers and children of all sizes, shapes, colors and ages, its poetic text that evokes the need of fathers for their children’s love.

Jan Ormerod’s wordless pair of books entitled Sunshine and Moonlight might coax a child unimpressed by narrative into the realm of story. The books illustrate the opening and closing moments of a young girl’s day with stunning visual accuracy, her little body fully engaged in each task before her, utterly recognizable to those who know small children.

But my favorite book about fathers right now is John Coy’s Night Driving. It’s a lovely picture book illustrated with soft smudgy black and white pencil drawings, about a boy and his father who go driving into the night together, and how they pass this time together: they listen to the radio until the signal fades, the boy pours his dad coffee from the thermos to help him stay awake, they change a flat and look at the stars, they fill gas and talk about the boy’s grandfather, they go to a diner for breakfast where the waitress says, “’You’re up early,’” and finally, after pancakes as big as plates, they arrive at the quiet spot where they pitch their tent. The book is about the journey and not the destination, a perfect metaphor for growing and for parenting, a book that speaks to both parent and child.

A wonderful and funny book, utterly different in style from Night Driving, and for a younger audience, is Taro Gomi’s I Lost My Dad. With its bold colors and blocky shapes, it renders the universal story of separation from the parent in a distinctly urban setting. It is narrated in the first person, by a boy who is browsing at the toy counter of a department store with his father when suddenly he realizes, ‘I lost my dad!’ The boy rushes through the store looking for his father and catching glimpses of his clothes everywhere—but at each cleverly cut page, you turn the leaf to discover that it is not in fact his father, not his shoes behind the piano, not his hat on a male mannequin. When finally the boy and his father catch sight of each other on the escalators, each going in the opposite direction, the father is unsurprisingly more worried than his son, who comforts him, and immediately bounces back to ask “’Can we go back to the toys now? I know what I want!’” My fellow readers were sure the answer was no—until we looked at the back cover.

As I said earlier, many, many books about fathers revolve around issues of work—and some of them are fantastic. My current favorite working father book is Anthony Browne’s Gorilla, about a girl whose father is so busy with his work that they never have time to do anything together. Browne’s photorealist watercolors verge on the surreal, and beautifully illuminate Hannah’s sadness, loneliness and isolation—especially the picture in which she sits in the corner of a room empty of all furniture but a television, whose light barely illuminates the wallpaper of the corner in which she miserably sits, wallpaper full of animals and plants that promise the world that lies beyond her reach. Her father’s colorless, lifeless face at the breakfast table, his body hunched at his desk, signal his unavailability. And all she wants is to go to the zoo to see her favorite animal, the gorilla. But the toy gorilla he gives her grows and comes to life in the night and takes Hannah through a city dotted with gorilla images. The picture of Hannah rushing down the stairs to tell her father about her adventures, a blur of red beyond the banisters, captures her excitement and her continuing devotion to the father who can at last ask “Do you want to go to the zoo?” Night Driving, I Lost My Dad, and Gorilla all play on central themes in the lives of young children, on the profound dependence of children, their genuine need for accompaniment into the world, the adventures that only an adult can offer, and their deep pleasure in the company of a beloved parent.

Some of the best books about fathers show them as unsurprising presences, mere backdrops in the lives of children caught up in their own momentous changes, as in Robert McCloskey’s One Morning in Maine; as caretakers who do what needs to be done even when out of patience, as in Patricia MacLachan’s The Sick Day; as pillars of support during times of dramatic change, as in Miriam Cohen’s Will I Have a Friend? and Laurence and Catherine Anholt’s Sophie and the New Baby, in which Sophie’s father trudges through the snow to gather his weeping daughter into his arms to hold her close. “’I know it’s hard, Sophie,’ he said. ‘Everything’s changed for you.’” These are the fathers we want in the lives of children, men who can wipe snotty noses and teary eyes, who work with their children at their sides, who walk through city streets and country snow holding little hands, always affirming the importance of children and their changing needs, men who can acknowledge the smallness of children and the courage inside of them.

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.

my father's dragon

I heard My Father’s Dragon before I could read it for myself, and indeed, with its short, episodic chapters, crisply drawn characters and naïve illustrations, it an ideal choice for a first chapter book. The plot is compelling: in return for his kindness in sheltering her, an old alley cat tells a boy by the name of Elmer Elevator how he might achieve his ambition to fly. In her travels, the cat tells Elmer, she once encountered a baby dragon, a beautiful creature with yellow and blue stripes, and golden wings. It had had the misfortune to fall from a cloud onto Wild Island, bruising a wing, and had henceforth become the miserable captive of the local inhabitants, condemned to fly them back and forth across the river that split the island almost in two. If the dragon could be rescued, then surely he would let Elmer fly on his back. But the island is populated only by animals—very wild animals. Elmer, unafraid, embarks upon a journey to rescue the baby dragon.

The exchanges of aid between cat and boy, boy and dragon, make sense to children concerned with fair treatment in relationships. So too does the necessity of the boy’s action; the adults of his acquaintance would never believe the cat’s story. Motivated by selfish desire and sincere compassion, the unflappable Elmer Elevator is an entirely believable hero. He makes his way through his adventure by the exercise of those attributes that define him as a child: his small size, his invisibility to those in power, his appreciation of a good joke, his sense of hope.

As a child, even more than the drama of the plot, I was compelled by the verisimilitude of this book. It was the map, I think, that convinced me of its truth. Long before I knew how to read it, I knew that the map on the endpapers showed a real place, a place that you could get to too, if you had the help of an old alley cat. The specificity of the writing also lent credence to the tale: the names of the islands, the numbers of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to be consumed, of bags of wheat to be delivered, and of tangerine peels to be concealed, and most importantly, the extraordinary contents of Elmer’s knapsack: “…chewing gum, two dozen pink lollipops, a package of rubber bands, black rubber boots, a compass, a tooth brush and a tube of tooth paste, six magnifying glasses, a very sharp jackknife, a comb and a hairbrush, seven hair ribbons of different colors, an empty grain bag with a label saying ‘Cranberry,’ some clean clothes, and enough food…” The plays on language entered into my private store of phrases to ponder. The image of a dormouse shaking its tiny fist at the sky, and shouting, “Bum cack! Bum cack! We dreed our nagon!,” was for years enough to reduce me to giggles.

The device of identifying the boy-hero as “my father,” drew the story most deeply into my consciousness, at the same time as it was puzzling. I can remember lying in my bed, the pillowcase warming and softening and wrinkling under my head, listening to my mother as she read, and wondering in a half-conscious way: whose father was Elmer Elevator? Her father, since she said the words, or my father, since I heard them? There were no other meaningful possibilities, since the narrator of the story is never named or otherwise identified. There were only the two of us, and the story, and the lamplight. But I knew that if such adventures had occurred to my father, surely they awaited me. Never before had I encountered a book that suggested that the border between stories and life was blade thin, and that with a map and a knapsack and a guide, you could go anywhere. I was particularly nice to cats afterwards.

There are two sequels, though neither is nearly as good as this. If you have children under six, find this book and read it with them. It will give them a taste of adventure and a sense of possibility. And if you can find an old edition, with the map in colors of sky blue and coral and sand on the endpapers, so much the better.         

the child is father to the man

Charlotte Pomerantz, Posy. Illustrated Catherine Stock. (New York: Greenwillow, 1983).

This is a book of four stories, each a reminiscence shared, a memory built with words, between Posy and her father, as Posy prepares for bed. They recall the time that Posy’s father ordered sheets, all pink, because Posy told him to; the time Posy learned where her parents go at night when they go out, and what they do when they come home; the day Posy’s mother gave her a pocketbook and three dimes that she and her father spent on her first chocolate bar; and the wishing game Posy played in the country, wishing for three grandmas and a hundred balloons. It’s a lovely book, with soft drawings, in which Posy’s father serves to support Posy’s memories of herself, recalling her into the present moment, parenting her with little reference to his own life outside of hers—a book, in other words, that is true to a child’s existence, egocentric in the most satisfying way, for what parent has an existence without a child—the child makes the parent, and this truth is one rarely reflected in stories of fathers, who are forever busy with their own lives. “Of course,” said Posy. “I just needed to be reminded.”

house and home

Frank Endersby. Man's Work. Child's Play Press, 1986.

This little board book is a wordless journey through the house, as a little boy and his father do the cleaning. The cover shows us the father filling a bucket at the sink, the little boy holding the mop and smiling up at him. Together, they mop the kitchen, dust the dining table, clean the glass panels of the back door, dust the living room, vacuum, clean the bathroom, and fold the laundry. It's the kind of detailed examination that is fascinating for toddlers, as you discuss together the similarities and differences between the house in the story and your house. It's simple enough that there's still room to interject your own story, your own comments. And it communicates the deep pleasure we all take in working together. It's not always easy to find, but when you find it, bring it home to share

whether the weather be cold...

The Strongest Man This Side of Cremona.

By Georgia Graham. Calgary: Northern Lights Books for Children, 1998.

Weather looms large in Canadian books, even for the youngest of children. The coming of the rain, an early frost, and in this book, a tornado, serve as reminders of the power of nature. Matthew is helping his dad fix a fence on their farm before the cows get loose, when he notices a funnel forming just behind them. They run for a culvert, taking shelter in a drainpipe, while the tornado slices through power lines, pulling out telephone poles, and tearing the doors off the new barn. The family is faced with the wreckage of their farm—and with the arrival of their neighbors, who set to work to repair the damage and restore order. Georgia Graham’s bold and detailed prints have the heightened clarity of the prairie, where every blade of grass, every stalk of wheat seems to register itself individually on the eye. “Nobody could stop a tornado, not even his dad,” but the persistence of the farming community, the dignity of those who make their livings and put food on our tables in the face of potential ruin is starkly evoked here.

Want more? Look for Marilynn Reynolds’s Belle’s Journey, about a girl caught in a blizzard with her pony on her way home from her piano lesson; W.D. Valgardson’s Thor (published in the United States as Winter Rescue), about a boy and his grandfather who come upon a man who has fallen through the ice; or, on a more comic note, Lois Simmie’s Mister Got to Go, the true story of a stray cat that made his way into Vancouver’s Sylvia Hotel from the rain, and stayed and stayed and stayed.