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And When Did You Last See Your Father?

Fictional child is called upon to display courage, loyalty and maybe moral leadership as a Puritan Government official questions him about his father, whom Cromwell’s officers are pursuing. Family watch anxiously from the left of the picture, while on right, the table, the gentlemen facing back into the room, the wall behind them all put a stop to the narrative continuing. The young boy is at the extreme of the crisis, facing stern authority without his dad. The tearful big sister is going to be next, and the hand of the soldier on her back suggests she is being pushed forward: all rests on the boy.

And yet the father is present, in a way: the firm gaze of the boy confronting his inquisitor, his hands behind his back. He has learned what it is to stand firm.

The awkward irony of this post is that the dads I will be discussing are very much in evidence, and the children are not the immaculately turned-out boy in pale sky blue (or indeed the tearful girl who we might assume to be his [?older] sister), but the children at the heart of the swirling emotions of books by Anthony Browne and Ian Eagleton/Jessica Knight. And they are not firm of purpose, but children in flux. I contend that both families are labile, and face challenges just as the wrong-but-romantic Cavalier family I started with. But while the when-did-you-last-see-your-father brigade propose an image of weak and tearful females as opposed to the firm chin and still form of the boy, the boys and men I want to discuss are survivors becaue of their openness to change.

There is a tangible absence in Ian Eagleton and Jessica Knight’s story of little Rory; his dad has moved out (or mum has moved out), and Rory, his lookalike son, lives with mum and mum’s new boyfriend, Tony. Rory misses his dad, although they meet up for an archetypical Saturdads time together in the park. In Rory’s Room of Rectangles Tony, nervous of the responsibility, takes Rory to an art gallery. They don’t see And When Did You Last See Your Father? or Käthe Kollwitz‘s unbending, grieving Father (I’m rather glad to say) but rooms of art which nevertheless challenge and move the little boy. They find nightmarish pictures, shimmering shapes and bright, loud, fierce art before coming to Tony’s favourite room. Tony is clearly not just joining in with Rory’s delight in painting: he gives something of himself in the room full of vibrant blues. This self-disclosure is key to the narrative: Tony is giving up something here. This is a risky day for all of them.

There is an unwelcome presence (as I see it) in Anthony Browne’s story where the dad – who uncomfortably dominated his family’s trip to the Zoo – similarly tries to assert himself in the hallowed halls of a London art gallery. In The Shape Game, his being there does not make for an easy read. Boorish, ill-at-ease when he is not the centre of attention, Browne seems to me to have created a figure of whom every dad reading the book would ask, anxiously, “Is this me?”

In Rory’s case he does find something new about his dad (does he, in a sense, rediscover his father?) and Tony’s sensitivity hints at a healthy relationship beginning here. What transformations of a father do we see in Anthony Browne’s Dad figure in The Shapes Game?

Here they are at the start of the book: dull tones, and a heavy border indicate a sense of entrapment. Maybe even Mum, leading the way for her birthday treat, senses it, with her three males slouching behind her.

This is not the footie match Dad and older brother are missing: there is little sense that today will be even mildly pleasant, let alone transformative.

Someone is going to have to give something up if today is going to be worth anything.

If he is confronted with motives to change, it is the art he encounters which forces Dad to become more open.

So here they are at the end of their visit. There is no frame to suggest they are trapped; the architecture across the river is transformed; the sky has a cloud-dove (a dove of peace?); Mum and Dad are walking together and the graffiti hints at the eponymous Shape Game the boys will play on the way home. The experience of the gallery has changed them all – and the autobiographical note at the beginning suggests it was this trip to the art gallery “that changed my life forever.” Mum had wanted to go “somewhere different,” and this has a deeper significance than simply a different physical location: the family are moving into a different place, and even home will be different.

Rory, in the Eagleton/Knight story experiences a transformation. But, like the family in Browne’s trip to the art gallery, is it only the little boy? Under Tony’s guidance Rory moves from room to room in the gallery, seeking something in all these forms of art to help him make sense, but outside is were he meets his father again. We get a hint that maybe he is on his mum’s boyfriend’s territory – or at least their common ground – with art, but the adult reader will maybe supply the conversations about how the three adults – mum, mum’s boyfriend, and dad – see Rory’s problems and propose a solution. In other words (to make the comparison between the two books), Dad and the boys in The Shape Game change by exposure to the art they encounter, whereas Rory comes to terms with his emotions in the gallery, while his three parenting figures have transformed their relationship “off-stage.”

What has changed?

Rory’s loyalty to his dad remains unshaken: he is, in this, like the boy who begins this blog post for us. But he has undergone something in the art gallery – and in the rage before it, and the reconciliation that follows it.As two American authors have put it* they – the males in both stories – are seen “developing and reclaiming their own fundamental human capacities.” It was in all four characters confronting their discomfort that they, like Anthony Browne’s family, move to “somewhere different.”

*Di Bianca, M. and Mahalik, J.R. (2022) ‘A relational-cultural framework for promoting healthy masculinities’, American Psychologist, 77(3), pp. 321–332

Some thoughts on picturebooks about death.

In my Twitter bio I often have some mention of my interest in picturebooks along the lines of looking for answers to big questions in small books. The review of Yumoto and Sakai’s The Bear and the Wildcat that I did recently for Just Imagine raised more questions about maybe the biggest of big questions, or at least the biggest in terms of what can be depicted in picturebooks: how do we deal with death?

For me, at any rate, The Bear and the Wildcat stands as one of the greats. Plain text, subdued artwork, and just enough raw emotion to take the reader somewhere uncomfotable. Why is the discomfort important?

Compare the two images here: the little bird from The Bear and the Wildcat and the family saying goodbye to their cat in Viorst and Blegvad’s The Tenth Good Thing About Barney. Both sparse in their own way, but the impact of the image in Barney is more muted because of the lack of the cat. Because Barney is really about the burial and what happens afterwards, Erik Blegvad focuses on the family (and the argument about heaven and decomposition). This is not an easy text, but it is the ideas in the dialogue that stand out for me.

A number of writers discuss death in picturebooks. Kelly Swain, for example, in the Lancet Child and Adolescent Health writes of her neice asking rather literally whether Great-Grandma Nancy had gone up to heaven or into the ground. The same question occurs in Barney. In the debtae about whether the cat is in heaven there is real impatience and ambiguity. Not so for the little bird in The Bear and the Wildcat, whose dead body is shown starkly but without sensation: the focus here is grief.

We meet bereavment in Varley’s classic (and in its time quite daring) Badger’s Parting Gifts, and we have also a desctription of death from Badger’s point of view: a “strange yet wonderful dream” yet going down a tunnel (a sort of good place for a Badger to go, and actually not unlike the behaviour of some Badgers).

The book that still feels to me raw and angry as well as deeply felt is the great book by Michael Rosen, his Sad Book, where Quentin Blake’s artwork walks hand-in-hand with Rosen’s pain.The lone figure in the evening rain, hands in pockets; the single candle of a painful solitude. In many ways the turning-point picture in The Bear and the Wildcat seems to me to be much the same: despairing loneliness, and the overarching bleak dark. Painful to read, but beautifully told, and certainly chimes with my own experience. In discussing the Sad Book Maria Popova in the gobsmacking Marginalian blog puts it so well:

What emerges is a breathtaking bow before the central paradox of the human experience — the awareness that the heart’s enormous capacity for love is matched with an equal capacity for pain, and yet we love anyway and somehow find fragments of that love even amid the ruins of loss.

Michael Rosen’s Sad Book: A Beautiful Anatomy of Loss, Illustrated by Quentin Blake https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/08/25/michael-rosens-sad-book-quentin-blake/

Other stories are possible, too. In Maia and What Matters we have a true-to-life complicated story of a grandmother losing her words and mobility, a grandfather dying, and little Maia, caught by all sorts of adult pressures being the one who knows what matters. True-to-life text here stands in tension with dreamy artwork where symbol and tone show Maia growing and loving and getting angry and taking charge in page after page of real days and might-have-beens until we are at the final denouement of grandma beside her husband’s coffin, stroking his hair. (As an aside I decided only to show the cover, because the large format of the book would be given no recognition by a small picture or excerpt of a larger spread)…

I have mentioned the companionship of death in Duck, Death and the Tulip – like The Bear and the Wildcat, another triumph from Gecko Press – and the picture here shows tenderness – and comedy? The incongruity of their friendship [until a cool wind ruffles Duck’s feathers] does allow for a wry smile:

Actually he was nice (if you forgot for a moment who he was). Really quite nice.

Wolf Ehrbruch, Duck, Death and the Tulip.

In The Bear and the Wildcat we look hard at grief; but in Thomas and Egneus’s Fox: a Circle of Life Story it is remarkable in its absence. The vixen is hit by a car, the cubs watch and then go their way. The fox is part of the autmnal decay –

Back to earth, to plants, to air flow the tiny particles that were once a fox.

Isabel Thomas, Daniel Egneus Fox: A Circle of Life Story

And so we come to a couple of books that do not look at grief, or at the possibility of an afterlife, but at a stark reality – only to find that in neither book is it particulartly harsh. The fox dies (quickly: no agony; no hunting horn) and in this last text, Lifetimes by Bryan Mellone and Robert Ingpen,

Nothing that is alive goes on living for ever… Sometimes, living things become ill or they get hurt. Mostly, of course, they get better again but there are times when they are so badly hurt or they are so ill that they die because they can no longer stay alive.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/113067/lifetimes-by-bryan-mellonie/

I might raise an eyebrow at the over-comfortable “Mostly,” but the book is clear about what will happen, and that this is part of they way things live “and that is their lifetime.”

So there seem to me to be ideas here worth disentangling. I have had to cut out for brevity Oliver Jeffers’ wonder The Heart and the Bottle in which grief is the key driver of the narrative – or, if not grief, then the love that engenders sorrow – and Glenn Ringtved’s Cry, Heart, But Never Break where again a personification of death imparts some wisdom, and so many more. But these stories deal with two principal themes: bereavement, and inevitablity/natural cycles. Maybe the “inevitability” books are ones that any child will be intrigued by; the bereavement books may have a particular audience. And this was where I stumbled in my review for Just Imagine. When asked “Who is this book (in this case, The Bear and the Wildcat) for?” it is often hard to pick an age range or educational context. Does this mean, however, that we must restrict children’s reading? Not for me: but it does mean that it is incumbent on educators (including the wonder that is a good school librarian) and parents to approach books with respect and something like humility. There are books for children and among them ones that will move adults to tears as well, and sometimes, even in the heart of their own sad time, the grown up needs to see which book a child might like, be interested in, be comforted by. It’s not easy.

I have met educators and parents who have said, of Duck, Death and the Tulip, that they would “never let a child have that book.” It clearly stirs something in us of a desire to protect children from the ultimate monster under the bed; yet there is even in that book a sense of hope. Death is not something to fear. And in the book that sparked this blog post, the sensitive and beautiful story of a bear who has lost his best friend, there is hope. Not some great afterlife hope – even though we are in Easter Week as I write – but simply that friendship helps, and that life goes on. |It can be painful and crazy as in Sad Book, and it can look like the comfort is illusory as in the discussions around Barney the cat, but there is this: compassion and friendship.

Yes, of course it’s NSFW; it’s about swearing, by all that’s grokely*.

In the coming semester, “my” students in the Becoming a Reader** module for Brookes will meet books I have labelled unsuitable. They include texts from another age with explicit racism in them right through to innocuous books of poor quality, and the questions will be around what we might construe as suitability and the judgement of suitability. I have sometimes used Mansbach and Cortes’ Go the Fuck to Sleep, too (the video is here) – I see there is now a boxed set of books – to look at where this is a sort of in-joke, where we all know when a book is not for children. And then we can ask “unsuitable for whom?” and “what makes this unsuitable?” The joke in Go the Fuck to Sleep is in the dislocation between the format – text and illustration – where on the one hand we expect a children’s book and yet we see a text full of irritation, even anger, and one of the “worst” examples of bad language in current English. It’s funny because as a children’s book it is impossible. I am reminded of the apophasis in Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes were Goldilock’s swearing is so disgusting as to be considered unacceptable:

I dare not write it, even hint it

Nobody would ever print it

Dahl, R: Goldilocks

…or the places where the taste for the tasteless is tickled in Raymond Briggs’ depiction of his eponymous hero Fungus reading John Dung (read: Donne). The omissions make the mind boggle – although the original*** too seems to me to be deliberately transgressive.

As a quick sideline, please note that the title of this post refers not to this comic circumlocution or even the earthy originals, but back to the noxious Miss Hardcastle in Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, whose use of “bucking” seems a substitute for “fucking.” She is not alone in using the word – but in Lewis’ 1945 text (thirteen years after Lady Chatterley) I feel it is Lewis controlling the swearing, letting his readers in on what she must have said really. We are discomforted by the ways the bad guys and their associates swear even if we don’t see it in front of us baldly.

But what about the discomfort that we find in YA literature? Where does verisimilitude clash with the gatekeepers – and are they the publishers? Or book buyers? Who makes the decisions?

More Heartstopper, I’m afraid, as the lens through which to look at an aspect of children’s/YA literature. And while I am advertising in the sub-heading above that some of the language and concepts might be NSFW this is in the context of trying to make sense of swearing and not-swearing and a sort of in-between phenomenon that is hinted at in the title. As not-so-much-a reference-list-more-an-indication-of-where-I-went, I’d refer you, for starters, to

• Michael Adams’ 2016 In Praise of Profanity
• Keith Allan and Kate Burridge’s 2006 Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language
• Tony McEnery’s 2005  Bad Language, Purity and Power from 1586 to the Present

…which really only indicates that I have dipped into this complex world in which we might see the discourse of purity, with McEnery, as a discourse of power. Who controls “bad language”(McEnery’s term) in children’s books? To what extent is it controlled? For whom is it controlled? Is the bigger question about whether language alone can denote a book as unsuitable just too big? And if language is a small, measurable aspect of suitability, how is it measured?

I came up with the spectrum below in an attempt to get somewhere with what kind of language might be subject to control. To make it I drew heavily on McEnery’s book, and became engrossed in tables 2.1 and 2.4, which set out the uses of various swear words. It follows my own gut instinct, but draws on the scale of offence (see below). For “religious” I would go for “God,” “Jesus,” &c.; for “body shaming” I would go with “fat” and other similar terms, but also drawing attention to body parts – hence body part 2 . I decided the best way to look at body function was to divide “pee” from “piss,” “poo” from “shit,” but then “bum” and “arse” aren’t so clearly distinguished – except that a child might say they fell in the playground and their supervisor might accept “It hurt my bum” but would raise an eyebrow at “It hurt my arse.” Allen and Burridge have a table (p32, Table 2.1) of orthophemisms (e.g. “toilet”) with an accompanying euphemism (“loo”) and dysphemism (“shithouse”) which reminded me of a child I once taught whose everyday use was what Allen and Burridge classify as dysphemisms. He would, without any sense of incongruity or transgression, tell me he was “just off for a crap,” when a “poo” was the usual word. With the rise in books which discuss poo but don’t explore dysphemisms, at this point I have to say that there looks like a really good study somewhere for someone attempting to regularise a spectrum such as this, and to reconcile it with uses among readers and the texts they encounter…

But other configurations would be possible, and a scale of offence would need to take into account adult ears, context, class. Sampling texts would be a problem, but could be taken historically: the spectrum above would look different in 1973 (“The Dark Is Rising“), different again in 1950 (“The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe“).

It is interesting to note that while the language in Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper world is closer to a recognisable language of secondary boys, the Netflix version has the swearing pruned: no fucks. In one scene, Charlie is being attacked by Ben, a boy with clear sexual intent, and is rescued by Nick; it is a pivotal scene, where Nick’s physicality is matched by the anger in his language. This suggests to me that as with many things to do with language, context is everything, and with this comes what McEnery’s scale of offence (table 2.12) where “prick” is seen as a moderate word, but “fucking” is strong. Ben is dismissed with a push and told to “fuck off;” Netflix has Nick say “piss off.” And off Ben pisses (or, if you’re reading the online version, fucks): at any rate he leaves.

Perhaps most relevant is McEnery’s discussion of age (p38, with table 2.1), which identifies the under 15s and under 25s as having the highest frequency of bad language words per million words. In other words, the consumers of YA literature seem to swear the most. It seems to me that the gatekeepers of YA texts shy away from allowing a real set of bad language usage. Does this have implications for young teen readers? Hmmm: perhaps I would have said so before I watched my granddaughters launch into Manga, even into the school romance of Heartstopper. I wish I were looking at boys of the same age and their reading. I have a sneaky feeling that while Manga and fantasy graphic novels might well be there, Heartstopper would not. Perhaps this is a shame; perhaps I am wrong anyway.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

*The irate Edward the Booble swears like this in the Exploits (Memoirs) of Moominpapa. Given the force for depression that the Groke embodies, and her role as symbol of loneliness in Tove Jansson’s work, “grokely” is not really a way of sidestepping swearing but bad language wholly consistent with the world Jansson has created.

**In case anyone wants to have a hissy fit about this blog being me wasting taxpayers’ money, well, I’m afraid most of the swearing &c won’t be in the taught class. Sorry to disappoint.

***Rank sweaty froth thy mistress’ brow defiles,
Like spermatic issue of ripe menstruous boils. https://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/elegy8.htm

Myth and Reality in younger gay fiction

And of course I could start by demanding of myself a definition of “younger,” “gay” and “fiction,” but in reality I’m going to look at two (set of) texts that have crossed my path recently: the Heartstopper books and Ian Eagleton’s reworking of the Snow Queen, The Woodcutter and The Snow Prince. The first world, I’m going to suppose*, sets a boy-meets-boy story in an everyday neighbourhood, somewhere south of the London sprawl (the text almost tells us: Rochester) where unhappy teenagers discuss their issues over social media; in The Woodcutter and The Snow Prince, Woodcutter Kai’s village is the low-tech/high magic setting for a a boy-meets-boy story, too – but seeing both stories side by side, I am struck by the question: what makes the fairy tale world work differently?

The versions at the back of our minds as we read traditional tales/fairy stories have probably got a moral, even if we aren’t wholly aware of it. Cinderella and her glass slipper that is the symbol of her fragile steps into courtly life; the Little Red Hen and her energetic self-reliance; Beauty and the Beast, Puss in Boots and all these others ask the modern adult reader to look deeper and to see quite what models of childhood, and society in general, are being employed. In the selections we have readily available today such as Pullman’s selection of Grimm or most recently Neil Philip’s Watkins Book of English Folktales, messages often seem to me pretty clear: status brings happiness (by and large); marriage makes you happy; a wary eye and an opportunity at the right moment may change your life.

I am joining a debate here about the role of texts in children’s literature that has its roots in the improving books of the early nineteenth century – and earlier – see below – which set the role of the author and the adult choosing the book as fundamentally about instructing children in making choices adult society will approve of. Mercilessly lampooned by Saki in his short story The Storyteller, and by Hilaire Belloc in his Cautionary Tales for Children, understanding where this basic objective sits in relation to gay fiction is important in grasping the reason for the vitriol that seeks to silence gay voices. In addition it also helps to understand why and how we tell stories.

It seems to me that Traditional Tales are rarely unchanged, but are altered in big ways or little. Often telling stories involves retelling old ones, looking at them and saying “how does this apply to my life/the lives of the children with whom I read?”. This can be a blatant reworking where the ‘message’ of an earlier story is skewed (The Little Mermaid would be a case in point, where the mermaid in the earliest story by Hans Cristian Andersen is left working out her salvation across the centuries, unlike Uncle Walt’s version where the mermaid gets her man). Traditional tales have always been subject to the movements of tradition: the contexts in which stories are told are subject to change, just as the vision of the setting changes too. More subtly the ideas and themes are reworked to allow a modern audience access to ideas and characters. Some of this is enlightening, revealing new insights into old stories or telling us something about different audiences. Conjoining myth and reality works, for example, for Joseph Coelho in his poem/novel The Boy Lost in the Maze, as it did in the 1950s for Mary Renault – but this is not what either Ian or Alice are attempting. Indeed, one of the immediate strengths of Ian’s book is that the young man, Kai, is already part of a mythic landscape, The Frozen North. Like his previous reworking of Hans Cristian Andersen, which I discussed here, Ian has set the story so that the principal human character, Kai is involved in a life far away from that of many of the intended readers. This allows the dynamic between the Prince and the Woodcutter to remain absolutely centre stage, as in any true stripped-to-the-bone fairy story.

Of course, this paring down might have come to us from the early collectors. As Angela Carter points out in her introduction to the Virago Book of Fairy Tales, the editorial fingers are already at work as the first collectors transcribe – and, I suppose, before, as people telling stories to collectors might think “I can’t say that” or “they wouldn’t want that one.” Verbatim transcription cannot have been easy, and editing has been seen as like putting tinsel on a dinosaur. Class has been redefined, or become a subtext, sexual content suppressed or been tinselled into symbolism. So we have little glimpses of topography where maybe there was an origin legend or a clear location (see my post here on Tom Tit Tot), but the paring down for outsiders leaves us an unreal city, an any-old-castle, the universal wood. Ian Eagleton and Davide Ortu’s Faraway Forest is the Universal Wood as it stretches up into that other mythic place: The Frozen North.

If I say that among the “immediate strengths” of Woodcutter is this mythic landscape, the same is true in reverse for the Heartstopper books. A different paring down to essentials is required here. An immediate plunge into a world of bullying, of negotiating the safe places in school, or of being late for Maths allows the reader access without the leap of imagination: fountain pens leaking, and who gets to be in the Rugby team are recognisable landmarks. “You know this place” is really where the bare illustrations and text take us. We are less clear about Kai and his world, but that’s because we are on a different path; Eagleton and Ortu take us to the magic Frozen North and again we say “we know this place” – but in a different way of knowing.

Family life, in the traditional tale, no matter whence its provenance, is never more than one step away from disaster, suggests Angela Carter and this is in some ways because the sparseness of the story – narrative, setting, character – is echoed in the death that often sets the principal character at odds with their world (Cinderella) or off to seek their fortune (Puss in Boots). With Kai, it is his community’s own fearful “old wives tales” about the Prince that are the thing he will need to come to terms with. Often the hero or heroine will have a difficulty to conquer: the family collapses, or disperses, but we are rarely given much in the way of description to aid our imagination, and remains hand-crafted. I suspect that this “bring your own furniture” sparseness is what allows the devourer of the traditional tale to say with Phillip Pullman, remembering his childhood reading “I want to be in this story with them.”

So I have to be clear I’m not setting out to compare texts in a crude way: both approaches have strengths. But I am struck by how a reader has to make a different set of strategies work in the two different authorial approaches. Are we actually facing here examples of text-to-life and life-to-text reading? Is this true of traditional tales and “real life” dramas? Are traditional tales “real”? What purpose do they serve?

In the debate between Dawkins (who has claimed Fairy Tales have a pernicious effect) and Pullman, the creator of one of the most beautiful, complex sets of fantasy worlds remembers that when he was playing out his fantasies, his mind

…was feeling a little scrap – a tiny, fluttering, tattered, cheaply printed, torn-off scrap – of heroism…Exhilaration, heroism, despair, resolution, triumph, noble renunciation, sacrifice: in acting these out, we experience them in miniature or, as it were, in safety.

Philip Pullman “Imaginary Friends” in Daemon Voices

Is this the effect story has on childhood imagination? That it teaches by inviting experience-at-a-distance, by getting the audience to enter into its world? That there is a long standing thread of moral didacticism in children’s literature is uncontested. John Newberry’s Pretty Little Pocket Book (cited in extenso in Patricia Demers’ From Instruction to Delight), has incidents in a child’s life followed by a “rule ” or a “moral:” learn to capture every moment as you play marbles; play at being king and reflect on your own imperfections. Similarly we see a thread of this with Cinderella. What do Cinders and her fairy godmother/ghostly mother allow us to learn in a text-to-life connection that really works? Not how to get your Prince or even how to better your abusive family. It is not a handbook of rules for interaction, but has a more general message: if Red Riding Hood says keep your wits about you, Cinderella tells us persistence wins through. Stories need looking at critically as well as with joy and awe. To do that we can employ the tools of retelling. As Angela Carter expresses a desire to validate my claim to a fair share of the future by staking my claim to my share of the past, we need, like the early tellers and audiences of fairy tales, to know the power and the limits of the tale. LGBTQ+ retellings have their own place in staking a claim for part of the community of readers, and Ian Eagleton’s Kai comes up with his own.

Literacy, Margaret Meek proposes in “On Being Literate” helps us to think about something by giving us the words to do it with and a wider range of examples, in stories especially, of how people behave…” (p47) and Kai’s encounter with the magic of his Snow Prince raises a question that is in some ways the queerest question of all:

“Perhaps his grandmother’s stories weren’t entirely true after all?”

No, Ian, Kai, Nen and the rest: perhaps the wrath of Pelagios stirring up a storm in the sea is unfounded; perhaps the grandmother’s warnings too need consigning to history; perhaps there is companionship, and love and trust and affection, a place where “old wives tales” do not have currency. The doubt Kai experiences turns the whole magic realm on its head… He is in a fairy story and in his story he even manages to turn fairy stories on their heads. This is what I mean by the “different way of knowing:” the independent life of the traditional tale allows the teller – such Ian, such as Disney – to edit and reshape. The transmission gives the teller that license, and to challenge the reader to think and think again. Are all stories valid?

Writers want readers who are prepared to engage with their ideas and to adventure with them in their writing. Habitual readers go to writers for reading lessons as ways of reflecting on experience. together they keep on creating texts, confident that they will, together, solve the puzzle of how should this go…How do writers deflect cynicism and ignorance?

Margaret Meek: On Being Literate, pp163-4.

And all of a sudden I am back in the world of teenage boys texting into the small hours, a world of who is in and who’s out in the small jealousies and hatreds of school life. Like Ian Eagleton and Davide Ortu, Alice Oseman has turned school romance and school friendship stories on their heads, with happy endings rather than tragedy. She tells a story set in the every day, but maybe the two worlds aren’t so different after all. Angela Carter at one point suggests that the domestic situation is often at the heart of the fairy story – but as Neil Philip in his The Cinderella Story suggests, we often need

to recover the sense of surprise and the sense of danger in a tale with which we may be wearily familiar…a way of understanding and confronting our profoundest desires and fears…

The Cinderella Story, Introduction: p2

With Ian and Davide, we find, if we read carefully enough, that the profound desire for love and affection can even pull the rug from under the storyteller.

*I do have some misgivings about the narrative of the various love stories in Heartstopper, which, despite dealing with complexities of acceptance and love and mental health, seem sometimes limited. Not to say I didn’t enjoy them, but they have their own sparseness, or maybe coyness about the realities of adolescent males.

Thoughts on Noxious Twitter

Now, I wouldn’t want to play down the monstrosity of Chemical Warfare railed against by Adrian Mitchell, or indeed to connect modern notions of mental health with the now threadbare ideas of irrational destruction in his use of the word madness, but ideas in this poem struck me as a good allegory on how Augist went for me with a smaller engagement with Twitter. While I will acknowledge (see below) some of its benefits, I also need to be clear that some of what I see is akin to what Mitchell calls bottled madness.

We all really hate manufacturing madness

But if we didn’t make madness in bottles

We wouldn’t know how to be sane.

Adrian Mitchell: Open Day at Porton

Twitter is very often a useful tool, a support for learning, a source of inspiration, and I’m not going to indulge in a game* of Ain’t It Awful? In this month where at least to start off with I limited myself (more or less) to hearts and maybe a Tweet or two in open Twitter once a day, I have had time to read and appreciate: this account of a mountain thunderstorm is one of those exemplary pieces. But this is not the whole content of Twitter. James Durran talks at one point about “sneery, in-crowd obnoxiousness,” and it only takes a few clicks to move beyond this into much nastier in-fighting. I’ve seen some appalling behaviour that to my mind should at the very least call into question whether the Teachers Standards should be invoked against people belittling or bullying other professionals: if you wouldn’t allow that behaviour to go unchallenged or unrebuked in a staff room, it has no place in professional dialogue on social media. It is as if we seek the global brainquake, as if the seeking of it affirms our place in the world.

It would be odd of me to use social media to say social media is a Bad Thing – after all this blog relies on Twitter for traffic on items like my piece on Nen and the Lonely Fisherman. If I felt Twitter was not for me I hope I would simply, quietly, close my accounts and go away. I’m not sure. I have tried the “Look at me I’m leaving Twitter” only to find that, when I wanted it, coming back (during Lent, for example) I simply felt foolish. FOMO seems a major driver for why I am on Twitter and why little by little this month I have come back: a comment here, all the photos of the lovely Jeff (here’s another) who has been with us. I launched off on a rant on the 20th about the Guardian’s adverts for private schools and then thought: Why am I playing this game? And then on 24th August I start a hare about school uniforms and then think What on earth will this add to anybody’s life? Drip by drip from the bottle of madness, or, to change metaphor, I wobble along the tricky line between joining in and attention-seeking. I feel like I am back in the playground of my Junior Phase in Essex: will you play with me? Maybe I am better off posting photos of a trip to London or Lyme Regis, or commenting on the soapwort at the site of a Victorian laundry at the head of the Lye Valley. One thing I am realising is that I would not be missed here, or on Twitter or Facebook or Goodreads, and that’s mostly because people who actually are interested in the same things as I am, or even are interested in what I have to say, often contact me in other ways too. Old-fashioned it might be, but they ‘phone me up, or in more recent style email or WhatsApp me to attract my attention. Who knows? Maybe in September and October I will get to see some Real People! That’s not to say that Twitter is false or utterly shallow, just that the authenticity of reactions and relationships is differently calibrated on Facebook and Twitter, the internet’s version of sticking a post-it on a a noticeboard in the hopes that someone special will see it. Do you know who retweeted me yesterday? To misuse an image of Thomas Merton we are – I am – shooting, round after round into the dark.

So do I give it up? Or how might I fit a valve to my using the media at my disposal?

That reminds me: I have a postcard to send that I picked up at the British Museum Becket exhibition.

*I do find the characterisation of some forms of adult activity described by Eric Berne illuminating as I read Twitter, Ain’t It Awful being one of them, Let’s You And Him Fight being another. This website has a good, brief categorisation.

Here we are at the start of September, the start of the English academic year. “You only have three days left at Nursery,” I overheard a mum say last weekend, “and then you’ll be at big school.” Perhaps that deserves capitals and I should have put Big School: the large institution, the institution for people who are grown up enough. In common parlance it means Primary School, and for most children hearing that term it will mean the Reception Class in that school. If they are lucky – and it shouldn’t be a matter of luck – those four or a year five year olds will experience a curriculum in which the demands of year one impinge but do not dominate. The experience of Big School will reflect previous Foundation Stage learning, but may also have elements of adult-framed learning (including socialisation) that will continue for many years.

Many years? Well, this weekend sees the (COVID-delayed) doctoral degree ceremony for my friend and mentor Julie Fisher. I am pretty sure she will be remembered in the history of education for the book Starting from the Child, which lays out principles for learning and teaching the the early years which have been adopted by so many. The book I am turning to, however, is her illuminating celebration on the Oxfordshire Adult-Child Interaction Project, Interacting or Interfering. In it she makes an impassioned plea for communication skills to be seen as the heart of good early years practice. She explains that interactions need to matter to practitioners as they:

• Build warm relationships
• Get to know and understand children better
• Model language
• Model thinking
• Scaffold, affirm and consolidate children’s learning
• Extend children’s knowledge and understanding.

This is the heart of the research findings and at the heart of what one might expect to see the adults engaged in whatever kind of setting you visit, but I find myself pondering, as I revisit this book to start my year teaching in Higher Education (and my work as a governor at a local school), how far these criterai can be applied outside the precious time of the Foundation Stage. In other words, when I read the chapter Questions that Work and Questions that Don’t, how can I challenge myself about questions and discussion in the classroom in which I am working with those whose course will take them into practice in the early years.

How do we build relationships with students from their first days in University? How do we model rather than correct language and thinking, so as to consolidate learning rather than prepare for assignments?

One of the problems is that of the position of the lecturer; the very word carries with it a history of teacher-as-expert, something that can both open up effective thinking about a topic and close it down. Guess what’s in my head is something that can feel unavoidable when the tutor has read the texts, been in the practice of an early years classroom, taught this before. Questions can be what Julie Fisher (and others) categorise as “known questions.” The challenge her take-down of pointless questioning is answered as she discusses listening to children’s answers.

Considering how many questions educators ask, one would think they would be very practiced at listening to answers. Bt research has shown that the hardest thing for someone asking a question to do is to listen to the answer they receive. It seems to be particularly difficult for educators, who all too often ask a question with the answer they want to hear already in their mind. This closes them to the range of possible answers they might hear, or stops them from receiving an unexpected answer with interest…

Fisher, Interacting or Interfering? p153

I think the key here is interest. If we look at the Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage in England, the four Overarching Principles seem clearly to me to point to a relationship, and I cannot conceive of a genuine relationship in which an Early Years practitioner values a child as

• Unique;
• Learning to be strong through positive relationships;
• In enabling environments with support from adults;
• Allowed/supported to develop at an appropriate rate [My precis],

without a genuine interest in what the child is thinking. Did you like that book? How can we make sure that tower doesn’t fall over? “in response to their fascinations” is how Development Matters puts it.

Let’s move then from what one Secretary of State patronisingly called the happy chaos of sandpit and water tray to the business of Higher Education. It must be more important, more cerebral, less involved with experimentation and more with doing the work and understanding it, right?

Clearly this isn’t a question, and the answer I expect is obvious. I think the Foundation Stage practitioner and the university tutor (and workplace managers and coworkers, I think) can step up to their role with the list Julie Fisher proposes (excerpted here, with learner’s substituting for child’s: read the book if you want to go further into this!). Here she asks that the practitioner:

• Shows a desire to get to know the [learner] better…
• Is attentive both physically and mentally;
• Is respectful of and responsive to the [learner’s] ideas and opinions;
• Takes a pleasurable interest in the [learner’s] thinking and ideas;
• Is sensitive to the [learner’s] level of interest and involvement.

I really want to sell the undergraduate project, the work they will be involved in for the next three or more years, to this year’s cohort of entrants – but I wonder if the repair to the teaching and learning contract is yet in place. How can we teach in response to the “fascinations” of Early Years, when part of our job is to talk deadlines and reading lists, and for some students the need to complete the school/college based requirements has dominated their previous learning? And when we think, not of the day-to-day negotiation of the lecturer/student relationship, but of the first few weeks, that first gateway of hope, a second of bewilderment, a third of socialisation, leaving home, attachments, and in here where is the lecturer (not to mention pastoral staff) in this?

This view crystallises for me the walk I took when I was pondering leaving my post as Programme Lead in the Oxford Brookes School of Education. I walked down through Raleigh Park to catch the bus on Westminster Way. In that respect it felt like an ending – but an ending that was also a beginning.

Our graduands for Saturday are beginning something new. To change the metaphor from gate to building (in line with the Foundaion Stage), what we have given the undergraduate students is simply a foundation. And as Julie encouragingly writes in another of her books:

Foundations take longer to create than buildings… The higher the building , the firmer the foundations have to be.

Julie Fisher (ed) Foundations of Learning

Patience. Attentiveness. Professional judgement. I hope this is what we have given our students leaving Brookes; I hope this what we can offer those joining us at the end of this month. But it is hope? No: this is what I plan to do, not some vague hope.

“He was a Primitive, and he lived cavily in a Cave…”

Pithecanthropus, Homo Erectus, Eoanthropus: they have a call almost as sharp as the names of dinosaurs so beloved of four year-olds in the sandpit, and as Chris Stringer points out the names largely arise from the intellectual history of the last two centuries: Colin Renfrew skillfully traces these in terms of the technologies available to early archaeologists and tells us the story of the names and their importance..

Alongside the adult histories are the books and other media trying either to explain these scientific discoveries, or to use Early Man [hold on: I’m coming to this] as a lens to look at something in our own time: there’s list at the end of this blog, with some links. I exclude my favourite of this genre – at least, my favourite until I met Rosemary Sutcliff’s Warrior Scarlet – Clive King’s great The 22 Letters, because it is set even closer to our own time, but again the thread is technological advances (navigation; horse riding, the beginnings of simple alphabet) saving society.

Like many of my generation, my first exposure to “the Stone Age” must have been the Flintstones, where the characters showed us an idealised American society with its 1960s technology and its (largely white) working class society where the material culture represented both the current US but with Stone Age adaptation – the record player where the needle was a bird was one of my favourites. A Stone Age as the lens for exploring the follies of our own age has been visited a number of times: Mitchell and Webb’s Bronze Orientation training is a personal favourite, and uses modern language to great effect. The puns in the Flintstones fulfilled a similar purpose and were, as one source puts it, relentless.

When it came out I was not allowed to see One Million Years B.C. – the B.C. says it all for me – although it seems to me now to be both ridiculous and at the same time the foundation text for Clan of the Cave Bear.

I’ve just finished the important – but to my mind flawed – blockbuster by Jean M Auel. She has done her homework to a remarkable degree, and uses insights from present day hunter-gatherer cultures (or the remnants of them) to reconstruct a possible way of living and believing for the Clan of the Cave Bear, the bow-legged, brow-ridged people with whom Ayla, the straight-legged, blonde and linguistically agile Homo Sapiens lives for most of the book,. We must, I think, identify the Clan as Homo Neanderthalensis – but this is where I stumble. There is a not-so-hidden ideology in so resolutely emphasising the whiteness of the principal character, the orphaned so very white. Of course, Auel is working with presuppositions of her time, and trying, too, to emphasise that this is just the beginning of the dominance of Homo Sapiens over (a loaded word, too?) Neanderthals, seen here as Ayla outclassing her Neantherthal foster family. The race to what Steven Mithen refers to as “cognitive fluidity” is won by Sapiens, and using the tools for the job are part of a set of use and tool development and (Mithen would argue) abilities to read and exploit diverse environments and social situations.

“The Neanderthals were a proto-species, an embryonic light that flickered in evolutionary time, but was not strong enough to stand across epochs,” as Adam Rutherford puts it, and the Shaman, the Mog-Ur of the Clan of the Cave Bear, is led to foresee a similar end to his people. So fair enough: taller, smarter (her language games and abstract mathematics show us this, but we see it also in her intuition and, because of the stance of the author, a certain moral primacy in her standing up to the abusive male Broud, a truly hateful character): but does she need to be so white?

Auel is making a number of points about personal development, liberation, belonging. So much so, in many ways, that the story is interwoven with descriptions of tribal customs, technological practices, herbal medicine. Although we are a long stretch of time from Elaine Morgan’s “nothing to do with apples” vision of the Fall, Clan of the Cave Bear does explore the complex interplay between assumed or observed experience and religion; the ways in which reproduction and the role of men are explored as Ayla figures out that conception and childbirth are less about the spiritual power of a totem and more about mating is intriguing, (sort of) believable… although it did remind me of the conversations about birth control when the sukebind is in bloom in Cold Comfort Farm.

And this brings me to the first real point in this rambling: just as Stella Gibbons is exploring the follies of her own time by setting her novel in a “near future,” Jean Auel is exploring her own time by looking to a time when Homo Sapiens – “the Others” – are making inroads into the lands and cultures of the Neanderthals. How will mixed Sapiens/Neanderthals be accepted? How will the power struggle play out? What part will technological innovation play?

To turn to a book on a similar theme – less well-known these days – Kathleen Fidler’s 1968 novel The Boy with the Bronze Axe – we find the incomer Tenko and his superior technology (including boat-handling) a source of triumph (the graphic whale-hunt which ends with a final blow from the bronze axe Tenko carries) and facing crises of acceptance and ecological peril. Though this is set later than Auel, we meet here a recurrent theme: the interplay of culture and technology as a society faces new challenges.

As children’s literature mourns Raymond Briggs’ recent death, I cannot ignore Ug, the stone-age boy whose imagination challenges the comic status quo of stone trousers and bedclothes, &c. He is a divergent thinker (a bit like [but oh! so unlike!] Auel’s Ayla), suggesting “what if” improvements to his family’s life: fields to stop the animals running away when you hunt them, fruit juice… Just as his stone-dominated life frustrates Ug – tennis played with stone bats, a game of football where the goal looks rather like Stonehenge – the technology of modern youth puzzles Ug’s parents, his mother in particular, – and the humour of this is also a satire on present day shifts in technology and problem solving. The narrator’s comment as Ug and his dad drag a dead dinosaur back to the cave is worth pondering:

No one living in the stone age would know he was living in the stone age. He would believe he has living in the modern age. Today we believe we are living in the modern age. Time will tell.

Time does tell, too. Auel and Fidler create technologically competent cultures, and using indicators of technology helps mark a time-span for a narrative, as in the fight over the iron dagger in Rosemary Sutcliff’s Warrior Scarlet, or (later in human history) the arrival of changes in material design in Sun Horse Moon Horse. Ug and his dad are figuring out that soft trousers need backs as well as fronts, and Steven Mithen makes the real life comment about the shaping of flints, and how what looks like a crude way of shaping lumps of rock, is actually a unique set of problem-solving activities for every flint knapped*.

The knowingness of the Flintstones and Clan of the Cave Bear is the disjuncture between the lives we live, and the lives lived then (whenever “then” was). For Fred, Wilma and the gang, an incongruous dinosaur is used as a quarry digger, they have foot-powered cars, and the problematic social situations that they encounter are used as satire mirror the society of post war suburban America. While the tone and context for Ayla is different, there is a similarity in that her struggles with sexism, with power, with belonging and identity are more solemn, the Clan of the Cave Bear asks the audience to think about our current society, and the social and technological aspects of progress.

Why does this way of looking at The Past have such power?

I think the technology serves a number of purposes, in the wide spread of the genre of historical fiction: it fixes the time scale, and gives a flavour of the past. When Rudyard Kipling looks at the first alphabet in his wildly inaccurate comic Just So story How the First Letter was Written, he gives a flavour of his own vision of society: a loving dad taking pains to indulge his daughter.

ONCE upon a most early time was a Neolithic man. He was not a Jute or an Angle, or even a Dravidian, which he might well have been, Best Beloved, but never mind why. He was a Primitive, and he lived cavily in a Cave, and he wore very few clothes, and he couldn’t read and he couldn’t write and he didn’t want to… 

Kipling’s characters – I suspect underpinned with his view of “primitive” cultures elsewhere in the world – are described by their shortcomings. Even the pictograms the little girl sends go horribly, violently (comically?) wrong. Advance is prophesied, and in the sequel to the the first letter, “How the Alphabet was Made” Taffimai does make progress, and in the poem/parallel with Kipling’s time is described with great tenderness. However, it is worth remembering that her tribe are comic characters like Ug’s people; in the story of How the First Letter was Written the “silly primitives” are really all about misunderstanding and slapstick in the mud. The Dawn Men are stumbling around in the half-light.

Three sets of texts that stand out against this running theme of technological advance would be the great disquisition on place and story that is Boneland, the brilliant adventures of Torak in Michelle Paver’s Wolf Brother sequence and Peter Dickinson’s The Kin. In the first, we do not need to understand all at once the refugium in which the Palaeolithic (?) Man lives – in fact, our distance from understanding deepens the mystery of The Man and his relationship to Colin – and in the second there seems to me a skilful avoidance of any sense of the clans “going somewhere” with their fish traps, or boats. The third, while dealing with the issues of progress and human development looks honestly at the young people finding their place in a world after their own lives have been shattered. The last of these is so complex it would deserve its own post: suffice to say that Dickinson’s view of human development admits the shadows of moral corruption but looks at linguistic and psychological (and spiritual) development far more keenly that it does at what tool is used and by whom.

But there is often some sense of progress in these technological markers in stories set so far back in time, and in Briggs’ Ug, the eponymous boy genius is in opposition to his parents, notably his mother. Is this a reworking of Briggs’ own childhood? Again, it is language that provides much of the comedy: Ug’s mother objecting to “nice” and “soft” is telling. The parallel with our present time challenges us: is imagination leading us as adults to say, with Ug’s parents, that progress is all very well but. The ending is particularly telling: the child with imagination has grown up and after the death of his parents (their graves are in a corner of the cave) he is a painter on the walls of his cave, the artist with vision but frustrated and alone. He ends with this querulous speech:

I wish it wasn’t the Stone Age. I wish the Stone Age would end. Things must get better…It can’t always be like this…People will have nice, soft, warm trousers…one day…perhaps…in the future. Things will get better.. Won’t they?

Perhaps this is about hope, and the struggle for development, and the characters at the centre of all these books stand for a human urge to use the imagination. Ayla is seeing, dimly, a world where personal liberation is possible; Torak is looking for freedom, for belonging in the face of hatred and evil; the Man finds acceptance as his stories are passed on – and Ug? The ending of Ug’s story is ambiguous, maybe even tragic: things will get better as ideas are listened to. But the last image, of adult Ug alone in his cave does not afford more than a glimmer of hope: do people listen?

To finish, and as a sort of answer, I’m staying with The Puddleman, another Briggs book from the early 2000s, Tom – very much in change of his grandfather – gets a ride in his grandfather’s shoulders:

“I can see for you,” he claims – but the last thing the boy Tom says is in criticism of the older generation: “You can’t see anything. “

I can see for you.

+++

Please note, as some reviewers have failed to do, that Briggs’ Ug Boy Genius of the Stone Age and His Search for Soft Trousers is a comic look at technology… Perhaps it doesn’t fit with the other books; it certainly leads me off into the Briggs digression.

___

Appendix: Not so much a list of books consulted (although they all were!) as a note to self of where I might take this next. More from Elaine Morgan than a quick quotation; a look at Stig of the Dump; Dickinson’s The Kin. The last of these certainly.