First Page Excerpts for SIGNAL APPROACHES TO CHILDREN'S BOOKS Issue 100, September 2003 [please, note that italics and other formats are not reproduced in this excerpt] ---------------------------------------------------------- What Are Fairy Tales? — Hugh Crago, 8 Defining Edges and Closing Gaps: Structural Features in the Sequential Art of the Picture Book — Jane Doonan, 27 So Many Books, So Little Time: The Patrick Hardy Lecture — Anne Fine, 51 Consolation Prize — Richard Flynn, 66 All the World's a Stage — Peter Hollindale, 84 Translating Dutch into Dutch — Vanessa Joosen, 106 In the Company of Shakespeare — Ishrat Lindblad, 127 The Signal Poetry Award — Jan Mark, 135 Reading Robert — Margaret Meek, 142 A 1960s Scrapbook — Elaine Moss, 163 Consuming Passions; or Why I'm Obsessed with L'Ogresse en Pleurs — Lissa Paul, 173 The Shawl of the Beauty of the World: The Children's Books of Ted Hughes — Neil Philip, 191 The Strange Case of the Invisible Jane Shaw — Sheila Ray, 203 All Her Own Work: Gillian Bell and Black Marigolds — Lance Salway, 212 The Mouse and the Doormat — Alan Tucker, 226 Accepting the Hans Christian Andersen Medal — Aidan Chambers, 247 Endpapers: Brian Alderson's Edward Ardizzone: A Bibliographic Commentary, 251 ---------------------------------------------------------- What Is a Fairy Tale? Hugh Crago ‘Once there was—and twice there wasn’t’ Almost everyone can name a few fairy tales—probably ‘Cinderella’, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, ‘Red Riding Hood’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, and ‘The Three Bears’. Pushed a bit harder, our hypothetical person-in-the-street might add ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘Puss in Boots’, ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ or ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’. Almost everyone can tell you what the adjective ‘fairy-tale’ means: a fairy-tale wedding is one like the late Princess Diana’s. A fairy-tale ending is not one like the late Princess Diana’s. ‘It’s just a fairy tale’ refers to a gratifying illusion. A fairy godmother is someone you don’t expect to meet in your life. Almost everyone will associate fairy tales with children and childhood. However, the reasons most people give for this link will be vague and circular: ‘You like fairy tales when you’re a kid, because they’re all about fairies and that sort of thing’, or, ‘Well, fairy tales are for kids, aren’t they?’ Overwhelmingly, the assumption is that fairy tales have to do with a wish-fulfilling, basically irrational view of life, which we outgrow when we put aside childish things. Educated adults will possess a little more learning—which, as Pope reminds us, can be dangerous. They may know, for instance, that fairy tales are part of a larger category called folk tales, and originated as stories told aloud in peasant communities to both adults and children. They will know that many folk tales involve events and characters that are potentially frightening and cruel rather than simply gratifying. They may know that in the ‘original’ version of ‘Cinderella’, the ugly sisters actually cut off parts of their large feet in order to force them to fit the Prince’s slipper, or that the ‘original’ Red Riding Hood was eaten by the wolf, not saved by the wood-cutter. They will probably know that some of the stories normally categorized as fairy tales (such as ‘The Little Mermaid’ or ‘The Three Bears’) are not orally transmitted stories but were composed by individual, known authors. They will distinguish these from ‘true folk tales’—probably thinking of the Grimm brothers’ tales when they speak of the latter. Adults who have majored in women’s studies or cultural studies may have qualms about the supposed affinity between children and fairy tales, arguing that fairy tales are violent, sexist, classist, and may ... ---------------------------------------------------------- Defining Edges and Closing Gaps: Notes on Structural Features in the Sequential Art of the Picturebook Jane Doonan The question of how best to characterize and categorize the different ways in which words and illustration in picturebooks interact has received a considerable amount of critical attention since the early 1980s, in metaphors taken from weaving, music, dance, geology, biology, and in abstract concepts such as congruency, deviation, and symmetry and irony. However, the dynamics between words and images that carry us through time and space have received less analytical interest. Perhaps this is because the matter appears obvious and there does not seem much to discuss. There are also ready-made prin-ciples to cite, established by G.E. Lessing in Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting (1766), in which he proposed that poetry is an art of time and painting an art of space. Picturebook theorists today, generally speaking, maintain a version of this tradition. The temporal-spatial construction of the picturebook is conceived primarily as being one in which the temporal movement of the story is created by the literary element—a sequence of words—and is interrupted by spatial fixed moments in a sequence of pictures. This is not the only approach, however. The fact that we read the words through time, the signs are uttered or inscribed in a temporal sequence, and the events described occur in time does not create a literal story time; the words represent literary time, implied time. Similarly, arrangements of lines, shapes and colour can represent objects in space, and by convention they are perceived as existing in three dimensions. But like literary time, graphic space is an illusion. While it is true that words can describe actions occurring through time more easily than pictures, and pictures can show what objects and space look like more easily than words, both words and pictures are able to represent objects and actions in space and time. And both kinds of representation are, in different ways, achieved figuratively. For instance, the image of the eponymous hero of Crispin the Pig Who Had It All running across the room is a sign for a pig in action (fig. 1, page 28). The action exists to the same degree that Crispin exists. Similarly, when, through the signs of language, I read that ‘This Christmas, when he woke up early to peek at his toys Crispin found ... ---------------------------------------------------------- So Many Books, So Little Time: The Patrick Hardy Lecture ANNE FINE It’s always a bit of an anxiety to face an audience and wonder if you’ve quite sussed out what they’re expecting. This was borne out to me quite recently when I received a letter from Beech Hall School, whose eleven-year-olds were reading The Tulip Touch as their set text. The children were apparently writing a short synopsis of my biography, taking their information from the inside cover. The teacher writes: ‘Charlie, inquisitive as ever, asked me if I’d read any of your other books. I said I’d read most of them, as I enjoy your writing immensely.’ The conversation, she says, then went as follows: Charlie. Does Anne Fine write books with lots of blood and gore and violence in them? Teacher. No, Charlie. Not at all. In fact, I don’t recall any violence in any of the books of hers I’ve read. Charlie. Then how come she’s twice been given this Carnage Medal? So let’s hope there are no misunderstandings of this sort here tonight. Every time I open my mouth, it seems to me, I’m accused of being ‘outspoken’ in that way that means ‘too outspoken’. I honestly do believe I haven’t come tonight to bury anyone; but as anyone sitting in the audience will guess, I’m unlikely to have come to pelt everyone with roses either. I could have given a blander, easier talk about my own writing and my own past work. But I did think that, in the circumstances, this would be a bit of a cop-out. So, in spite of the fact that the laureate’s crown Theresa Breslin so kindly sent me on my appointment eighteen months ago has very much withered on my brow—we’re down to one and half last powdery bay leaves here—I’m going to tell you what I think. My title is ‘So Many Books, So Little Time’, and it won’t be hard to show how this little phrase is relevant to all of us in our separate pro ... [This Patrick Hardy Lecture, the fourteenth, was presented under the auspices of the Children’s Book Circle on 19 November 2002 at the Royal Overseas League in London.] ---------------------------------------------------------- Consolation Prize Richard Flynn Near the end of her history of children’s poetry, From the Garden to the Street, Morag Styles asserts, ‘I believe that poetry for children has never been healthier.’ While this may be true for the UK, from my vantage point in the US I would have to say that poetry for children is barely on life support. When I mention to casual acquaintances (or even academic colleagues) that I’m working on children’s poetry, they usually say, ‘Oh, you mean like Shel Silverstein?’ This question is not surprising considering the way the shelves look at my nearest bookstore, Barnes & Noble in Savannah, Georgia, fifty miles from my home. Silverstein and (as I jokingly call him) his evil twin Prelutsky occupy most of the small area allotted to children’s poetry. The remainder of the shelf space is taken up by volumes in the ‘Poetry for Young People’ series (selections of canonical poets including Dickinson, Whitman, Yeats, Browning, Kipling, Sandburg, Longfellow, Lear and Shakespeare), horror writer Dean Koontz’s original verse, The Paper Doorway: Funny Verse and Nothing Worse, a couple of anthologies (including Michael Rosen’s very fine Kingfisher Book of Children’s Poetry), and some picture books of sentimental stuff with even more sentimental illustrations, or silly stuff with even sillier illustrations. My mild dismay in recognizing that most of the children’s verse for sale is either Classic, Comic or Cute was exacerbated recently by my recognition that there is a fourth C: Consoling. Prominently displayed and, it must be added, visually more appealing than most of the other volumes nearby (at least to my adult tastes), with its striking Peter Sis cover illustration, was a volume of children’s poems commemorating September 11 called This Place I Know: Poems of Comfort, edited by Georgia Heard and illustrated by famous children’s book illustrators. While most of the eighteen short poems in this volume are good, none of them appears to be original to the volume. Some well-known children’s poets like Lilian Morrison are included, but there is also work by Langston Hughes, Whitman, Dickinson and Gwendolyn Brooks. The illustrators, however, are clearly the stars, each with a substantial contributor’s note explaining how he or she came to illustrate the poem. There are no contributor’s notes for the poets. While this comfort book has the advantage of featuring serious poetry, the poetry itself takes second ---------------------------------------------------------- All the World’s a Stage PETER HOLLINDALE Children now grow up in a world which is permeated by drama. I shall try to indicate the nature of that world, and the need to prepare children to live effectively in it. Among the many encounters with dramatic media that might help them, I shall suggest the continuing strengths of a traditional and much-neglected medium: the playscript. Most children’s education still embraces some experience of plays (though not necessarily of playscripts as a literary form, with its own conventions), but the dramascript itself—scarcely ever read at home and offhandedly attended to by teachers—has acquired a new significance in our age of electronic media. Playscripts are about performance, and the age of electronic media is an age of performance. Jane M. Gangi, in her essay ‘Making sense of drama in an electronic age’, reports the view of medium theorists that history has seen four major revolutions in the technology of communications. First came the appearance of language itself, the source and origins of which are still obscure. Then came the arrival of the phonetic alphabet at some point around the eighth century BC, when the initial ages of orality were overtaken by ‘limited literacy’. The effects of this development were felt by whole societies, not only the privileged few who could actually read and write. The third revolution came in the fifteenth century with the invention of the printing press, making widespread literacy possible for the first time. The fourth, which began with the telegraph in the nineteenth century and has accelerated mind-blowingly in recent decades, was the invention of electronic systems and devices of communication. Gangi continues: Examination of the contrasts between oral, manuscript, literate, and finally, electronic cultures can generate insights into the biases and proclivities of a culture dominated by one form of communication or another . . . When examining these periods several assumptions are made by medium theorists. One is that those living within a culture are rarely aware of its biases. ‘Culture hides more than it reveals’, says Edward Hall, ‘and what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.’ In other words, the effects of communications revolutions tend to be invisible to the very people ... ---------------------------------------------------------- Translating Dutch into . . . Dutch VANESSA JOOSEN One of the things that makes books from other cultures so interesting is that their view of the world is a little different from our own—a different perspective, a different set of assumptions [ . . . ] And it is the difference that matters. This is a primary value, a principal reason for choosing to translate a book. Aidan Chambers 2001, 119 Postcards from No Man’s Land by Aidan Chambers was written in English and first published in Britain in 1999. Set in the Netherlands, the book tells the story of an English adolescent, Jacob Todd, who travels to Amsterdam for the first time to learn more about his family’s past; at the same time he tries to deal with a personal identity crisis. This narrative strand is juxtaposed with a series of manuscript extracts written by an elderly woman, Geertrui. Her part of the book is also set in the Netherlands, during the liberation of Holland at the end of the Second World War, when she was a young girl. In the aftermath of the Battle of Arnhem, Geertrui had a brief affair with Jacob’s grandfather. She later writes this account of what happened between her and his grandfather for young Jacob. In both narrative strands there are many encounters between Dutch and British characters. To portray the conversations between speakers of two different languages as realistically as possible, Chambers includes words and quotes from both English and Dutch, and often refers to the difficulties that characters have in expressing themselves and understanding each other. In 2000 the Dutch translation of Postcards from No Man’s Land was published in Flanders and the Netherlands, under the title Niets Is Wat Het Lijkt (Nothing is what it appears to be). The Dutch version poses peculiar problems since it goes against the assumption that the target audience of a translation is further removed from the culture portrayed in the book than its original readers. Usually British books are set in Britain, and when a book is translated into a different language, the target audience has to deal with a cultural gap. In the case of Postcards, by contrast, the Dutch readers are better acquainted with the names, objects, historical events, streets, customs, that are referred to than the English audience of the original novel. This should mean that the text is easier for the Dutch to understand and interpret; however, in being closer to the culture described, I will ... ---------------------------------------------------------- In the Company of Shakespeare ISHRAT LINDBLAD A unique long-term project to introduce Shakespeare in English to Swedish schoolchildren began tentatively under the leadership of the director and choreographer Donya Feuer in September 1990, reached a climax in 1998 when Stockholm was cultural capital of Europe, and continues at the present time as a joint project of the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden (Dramaten), the Culture House (Kulturhuset) in Stockholm, and the Stockholm Institute of Education (Lärarhögskolan). In her own account of this project, Donya Feuer traces her inspiration back to the moment of reading Ted Hughes’s introduction to The Essential Shakespeare, his selection of Shakespeare’s verse, in 1976. This prompted her to stage Soundings, an adaptation based on this selection. Her work on this production, a solo performance with the eminent Swedish actress Karin Kavli, established a longstanding professional relationship and friendship with Ted Hughes. Soundings became the basic text for her subsequent work with children, which arose out of a startling experience while improvising in a workshop [in 1989] with two ten-year-olds on ‘Take, O take those lips away, / That so sweetly were forsworn’: beginning with just the physical effort of saying the words in English, then over to their own rough Swedish translations, enabling them to return to and ‘use’ the original text. Unforgettable . . . Shakespeare, and the voices of those two children. (Feuer, 119 ) One of the results of this ‘epiphanic’ moment was her agreement to enter into a collaboration with a class of science students at Brännkryka High School (Class N3B) in response to the suggestion of their English teacher, Ulla Al-Fakir. The class met twice weekly to read, translate and commit to memory stanzas in English of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis as a way of preparing for a performance of extracts from Soundings. For this purpose they were given access to a rehearsal room at the Royal Theatre and had the added privilege of being able, during the preparatory stages of their project, to work with the text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream especially edited for ... ---------------------------------------------------------- The Signal Poetry Award JAN MARK The Signal Poetry Award announced itself in the September issue of 1978. It would be an annual recognition of particular excellence in one of four categories: a single-poet collection, an anthology, a body of work by a contemporary poet, or an educational or critical activity which enhanced the cause of poetry. In all cases the work would be for children. The first selectors were John Wain, then Oxford Professor of Poetry, Alan Tucker, bookseller, and Aidan Chambers, publisher of Signal. Its then-undeclared intent was to ensure that once a year an issue of the magazine would provide space for a serious discussion of children’s poetry. In the event, only the first two categories survived, the annual element went into abeyance almost immediately, and the first winner, Moon-Bells by Ted Hughes, drew the comment from Wain: ‘None of this is exactly poetry for children.’ What, exactly, constituted poetry for children was a question that was to exercise future judges down to the final award in 2001, but in the early days there was not a great deal to go on. The milestone works of Stevenson, Belloc, Milne, of Walter de la Mare and Eleanor Farjeon were far in the past; anthologies were usually issued as textbooks in which the same standards appeared with predictable regularity. Outstanding exceptions—the Penguin Voices, Raymond O’Malley and Denys Thompson’s The Key of the Kingdom quartet—came out in the 1960s. Even Eleanor Graham’s 1950s collection, A Puffin Book of Verse, still then in print, comprised poems chosen for children rather than written for them. Plenty of fiction writers would say that they write about childhood rather than for children, but poetry does not work in the same way as prose fiction. How it does work was another debate which continued through the years; what in fact is poetry, what is verse? what is a child? Alan Tucker was the first of many to comment on illustration, layout and production values; Aidan Chambers summed up the situation glumly: ‘If 1978’s output of poetry books that qualify for the award is typical, then poetry published for children is in a poor state’, an opinion Sophie Hannah was to reiterate in respect of 1999’s output, ‘contemporary poetry is in deep trouble’, although for different reasons. At the time, however, it looked as if the award might be so ... ---------------------------------------------------------- Reading Robert Margaret Meek In the course of putting together some papers from European sources on the topic of children’s literature and national identity, I was struck by a conviction, common to most of the writers, that narrative fiction offers young readers a distinctive way of coming to understand the otherness of others. At about the same time my preoccupation with what children take from what they read alerted me to a short, favourable review in Books for Keeps of Where Were You, Robert? by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, translated from German by Anthea Bell and published by Hamish Hamilton in 2000. The reviewer, Adrian Jackson, wrote that ‘the great strength of the book is the particularity of each of the times and places, which is history come to life, sharply and vividly catching some of the everyday quality and difference of their geography, politics and beliefs’. He concluded, ‘I am left wanting to see what all this experience and knowledge adds up to for Robert.’ At this point I had only the BfK review summary of the contents of the book to go by. The narrative seemed to involve the hero in a series of boundary crossings of various kinds. As this chimed in with my recent preoccupations about national identity and books in translation, I was curious to pursue Robert in his time slips. A copy of Where Were You, Robert? proved difficult to find, so I went in search of information about the author. In the British Library catalogue there were forty-five titles for Hans Magnus Enzensberger, continuous in date from 1973, but no indication that any of these were written for the young. (A later search produced Allerlei Rauh, a collection of 777 nursery rhymes with 391 antique woodcuts collected by Enzensberger, who acknowledges and follows the example of the Opies’ Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes and Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book.)The titles announce poetry, philosophy and politics. Selected Poems were published by Bloodaxe in 1994. From a more recent collection I copied out a poem, identitätsnachweis (evidence of identity), in which most lines begin with Ich; a self-portrait without national reference. (Robert hadn’t yet reached the British Library shelves.) Then, after I had begun to write a short biographical note, I found in the special supplement of Le Monde, 27 September 2001, a collection of essays by ‘great intellectuals’ on ‘The New World Disor-... ---------------------------------------------------------- A 1960s Scrapbook Elaine Moss There could have been no better introduction to the new age of children’s book publishing that was dawning in England after the long years of war and its attendant paper shortages than Grace Hogarth, for whom I worked as personal-assistant-cum-secretary in the early 1950s. She was at the time the London representative for the adult departments of four American publishers, but Grace had been in the USA during the War—an editor in the children’s department of the Oxford University Press, New York—so for her the UK, with its proud but idiosyncratic tradition of publishing for children, was a ploughed land waiting to be sowed anew. Constable Young Books, which she was to found, was still a few years in the future, but Grace’s enthusiasm for children’s publishing even while most of her time was then necessarily spent in the adult field, was infectious. Though pressed to do so, I did not, for family reasons, join Grace Hogarth’s staff when Constable Young Books came into being in 1956. But I did read and report on many of the submissions that arrived in her office—and in the offices of other embryonic children’s book departments that were then springing up. The practice of an editor in a publishing house, such as Alan Maclean at Macmillan, simply taking an interest in children’s books as an ‘extra’, was, in the early sixties, giving way to fully fledged children’s book departments, staffed mainly by women like Grace herself, Marni Hodgkin at Hart-Davis (later at Macmillan) and Kaye Webb, the redoubtable and innovative editor of the Puffin list who succeeded Eleanor Graham at Penguin. The sixties saw a further burgeoning of children’s book publishing in the wake of the fifties pioneer departments, and this gave rise to journalistic interest in the developing phenomenon. As a freelance, enthusiastic and informed (I had taken a paper in children’s literature as part of my librarian’s qualifications in the late forties), I was by good fortune in the right place at the right time. And commissions, I see from my scrapbook, came thick and fast from a bewildering range of outlets. How representative this experience was I can’t tell since I have only my own cuttings book to go by. It seems that one commission led to another—a sign that literary editors were unsure where to go ... ---------------------------------------------------------- Consuming Passions: Or why I’m obsessed with L’Ogresse en Pleurs LISSA PAUL Every so often a children’s book comes along that sticks in the mind, disturbs, eludes comfortable readings and defeats satisfactory analysis by people who are supposed to be experts. One of my current consuming passions is that kind of book: L’Ogresse en Pleurs in French and Die Menschenfresserin in German, by French author Valérie Dayre with pictures by the German illustrator Wolf Erlbruch. There is no English version, and it is unlikely that one will appear, at least not in the near future. A friend, Claas Kazzer, sent the German edition of L’Ogresse en Pleurs to me in 1998 (with his own elegant translation). Because of our shared interest in Ted Hughes’s mythic works for children, he knew I’d like it. When the book wouldn’t settle into the landscape of my mind, I bought the French edition to see if it made sense in a more familiar language. It didn’t, so I decided to get help by presenting it (using slides and Claas’s translation) in talks to groups of people working in children’s literature in Toronto, Boston, State College Pennsylvania, London—and at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, where I first used the book as part of the Lois Lenski Lecture I gave in the spring of 2000. The initial reaction was the same everywhere: a dismayed intake of breath, a shiver of horror, instinctive recoil. I felt it every time. The message was clear: keep this book away from children. Once the talk began, responses were remarkably consistent: compelling book, not for children, at least not without careful discussion. No one could say exactly what the nature of this hypothetical discussion might be, but a sense of the importance of the book was palpable. The fact that the responses were uniform across time and distance confirmed my view that a deeply held taboo was being broken: L’Ogresse en Pleurs is about a mother who eats her own son, then cries about her loss. There. I’ve said it. The forbidden thing is cannibalism of the most unspeakable sort: a mother eating her child. The book reveals a conflicted agenda, a dark shadow beneath adult/child relations. Our socially approved adult desire to produce and protect perfect children struggles against a desire to consume them, to take them back into ourselves, to make them us. .... ---------------------------------------------------------- The Shawl of the Beauty of the World: The Children’s Books of Ted Hughes NEIL PHILIP I own a number of critical works on the work of the poet Ted Hughes, representing a range of opinions on its worth and meaning. One thing they all have in common is that they have almost nothing to say about Hughes as a writer for children. Where his children’s books are mentioned, it is usually with a kind of superior sniff. For instance, in The Laughter of Foxes, the critic Keith Sagar writes that, Whereas in his works for children he was prepared to fabricate an up-beat ending—determined on principle to do so—he would never write a poem for adults that was not authenticated by his own experience. In the collection of essays The Epic Poise, Martin Booth writes of his surprise at discovering the prose stories in Wodwo: It was a shock. Truly. I remember the feeling now, opening the book again to write this little memoir. Apart from the kiddies’ books, a mannerless monster and neatly crafted Kiplingesque creation tales, I’d no idea Ted wrote—could write—adult prose. From the dismissive tone of such remarks, it would seem reasonable to assume that, while Hughes was evidently an important poet, his ‘kiddies’ books’ were rather an embarrassment. I intend in this essay to argue the opposite. I believe that Ted Hughes was a great children’s writer, whose work for children is an important and coherent part of his total achievement. For me, no writer since Kipling has left such a rich and evenly balanced legacy for both adults and children, in verse and prose. Like Kipling, Hughes seems to have felt free in his children’s writing to explore a playful and tender side of his personality that is sometimes masked in the harsher adult work. Yet this is not the same, in either writer, as fabricating an upbeat ending. Their children’s writing is, as it were, a brighter shadow of their work for adults, echoing the same concerns. The child readers of both Hughes and Kipling will often find themselves echoing the words of Mowgli at ... ---------------------------------------------------------- The Strange Case of the Invisible Jane Shaw Sheila Ray In 2002 I attended three children’s literature conferences, all of which were concerned with the work of Elinor Brent-Dyer, who, between 1925 and 1970, published fifty-eight books about the Chalet School plus a number of other books for girls. It was at the first of these, in March, that I heard a paper on Jane Shaw by Alison Lindsay, editor of Susan and Friends: The Jane Shaw Companion, which was launched at the conference. When I was eleven or twelve, Elinor Brent-Dyer was undoubtedly my favourite author, and although it was wartime and books were in short supply, I managed to borrow or buy the sixteen Chalet School books that had been published by the time I grew out of them. Fortunately, I had access to what I now realize was a very good public library and, as a keen reader, I read widely. One book, which stuck in my mind because of its title, The House of the Glimmering Light, even inspired me to write an adventure story (also influenced by Arthur Ransome, whose books I was enjoying about the same time) but it’s only in the last decade or so that I’ve discovered that this was written by Jane Shaw, published in 1943, and that my memory of it as a wartime story set in Scotland was correct. I can understand why Jane Shaw’s name made little impact on me as a child. Whereas Brent-Dyer’s first book appeared in 1922, so that there were plenty of her titles around by the time I was ten, Shaw’s first book didn’t come out until 1939. Her name became familiar to me after I began working with school and children’s libraries in 1958, but her work was not highly regarded in the library circles in which I moved—not condemned as were books by Enid Blyton, W.E. Johns, Frank Richards or Richmal Crompton, each of whom had a bad press from time to time, but certainly not up there with Alan Garner, William Mayne, Leon Garfield and the other bright lights that began to twinkle in the late 1950s and 1960s. During the decade, 1958-68, when I was buying stock for libraries, Jane Shaw published sixteen books that I might have bought and probably did, and I would have inherited whatever Shaw titles were purchased before 1958. I remember particularly the six books about Penny, because of their striking titles, Penny Foolish, Twopence Coloured ... ---------------------------------------------------------- All Her Own Work: Gillian Bell and Black Marigolds LANCE SALWAY The novelist Joanna Trollope once remarked that while ‘you can’t be too old to be a writer, you can definitely be too young.’ This is not a sentiment that would have gone down at all well with the readers of Collins Magazine for Boys and Girls, most of whom, if their own contributions to the magazine are anything to go by, made no secret of their ambition to be authors. Collins had always been aimed at bookish children whose interests were not best served by the lurid comics that were its competitors, but they proved to be a demanding readership, not easily impressed by the eminence of the writers whose stories and articles graced the elegant, well-designed pages of the magazine. ‘In the play by Kitty Barne there are some rather awful mistakes about dates,’ a Sussex reader complained in the May 1948 issue, while P. Wasserman (12) of Hampstead was ‘disgusted’ by a story in the July issue of that year: I think that if J. Jefferson Farjeon is going to go on writing stories like this he ought to be thrown out of the magazine. Any child reading this story sees the hero, Bob Sugg, fighting against a “Nigger” as the author gently puts it, and they get a very distorted view of a Negro. The author ought to be pulled up about it very severely. Although they may have been sticklers for historical detail and political correctness, the articulate readers of Collins Magazine were always careful to give credit where it was due. Gillian Tindall, then aged nine and one of the many eminent writers whose early work first appeared in Collins, wrote in to say that ‘the magazine is lovely. It is a pity that you put so many advertisements in it. The cover has got a ripping picture on it.’ From the first issue in January 1948, the ‘ripping picture’ each month had been the work of John Verney, and his colourful cover paintings and witty line drawings were to set the visual style of the magazine in much the same way as Jill McDonald’s work became synonymous with Puffin Post twenty years later. But the eager readers of Collins were to receive a shock when the July 1951 issue arrived on the newsstands. Instead of the familiar Verney cover, they were confronted by a plain typographical design against a lurid ... ---------------------------------------------------------- The Mouse and the Doormat ALAN TUCKER Two books by Ted Hughes, Five Autumn Songs for Children’s Voices (1968) for younger children and What Is the Truth? (1984) for, say, twelve-year-olds, stand out as incomparably the best collections of children’s poetry of the last forty years. They are perfect realizations of a view of poetry with which, however, some of the best poets of the next generation, Thomas A. Clark, for example, have little sym-pathy. Undoubtedly the Hughes and Heaney view of poetry is accepted by most of the reading public and seems to be almost universally taught. After two thousand years of a literary tradition, what can poets do next? Hughes wrote in the direct line of the Romantics, a wonderfully skilful balance of description and explanation. The tradition works through narrative, every poem tells a story, all too often with a moral. How does this relate, for example, to concrete poetry? Or given recent investigations into the nature of language, what connections are there between Hughes and the ‘language poets’, for whom poetry is exemplary verbal structure, not explication? And what rele-vance does this have to children’s reading? To mark the last Signal and welcome Lissa Paul’s determination to continue the Signal Poetry Award [see note about the new US poetry award on page 80 of Richard Flynn’s article, ed.] I have been puzzling through the alternative answers offered by contemporary avant-garde poets to Hughes’s rhetorical question, ‘What is the truth?’ Their answers seem based on the nature of language rather than on anecdotal experience. According to Hughes, ‘“We will speak to the people,” said God. “We will ask them a few simple questions. Then you shall hear. In their sleep they will say what they truly know”.’ Fair enough, but what has Newton to say when he’s awake? What do we really know about how poetry works? We are at least sure it is a matter of words and as basic as the alphabet. We should make an imaginative leap from children’s language to the language poets, and to the other new poets who are such a refreshing pleasure to read. Everyone should know about them. The trouble is that we teach narrative so remorselessly that it becomes difficult to break out of the bondage of the story line. Yet look at the way modern art flourishes. ... ---------------------------------------------------------- Accepting the Hans Christian Andersen Award 2002 AIDAN CHAMBERS I wonder if you are as intrigued as I am by coincidence? I mean those apparently unconnected occurrences in life that you cannot always believe are merely accidental. In English there is a phrase for them. We talk about the ‘long arm of coincidence’. When I began to prepare this speech, I thought I’d find out who coined the phrase. I was amused to discover that it was first used by a nineteenth-century writer I’d never heard of whose name was Charles Haddon Chambers. There are several coincidences that appeal to me today. To begin with, the very first Hans Christian Andersen Award was given to the English writer Eleanor Farjeon in 1956, and it is a happy coincidence that I am the first English writer to receive the honour since then. To which we can add the coincidence that another Englishman, Quentin Blake, receives the illustrator’s award today. And a third coincidence: that these are made on the occasion of IBBY’s fiftieth-birthday celebrations, which somehow adds even more lustre to this bright honour. However, the strange laws of coincidence are not done with Eleanor Farjeon and me yet. For it happens that in 1955, the year before she received the Andersen Award, Eleanor was given the Carnegie Medal, Britain’s oldest and highest recognition for writers for young people. I received the Carnegie Medal in 1999, and like her, now receive, as immediately afterwards as can be, the coveted Andersen. And there’s still more, because it happens that in 1982, exactly twenty years ago, I received, jointly with my wife, Nancy, the British honour for services to children’s books, which happens to be called the Eleanor Farjeon Award. As I am sixty-eight, an age at which Death peeps at you over the horizon, and as Eleanor Farjeon died a few years ago, I am beginning to wonder what the long arm of coin ... ---------------------------------------------------------- Alderson’s Ardizzone In 1970, Signal’s first year, we marked the seventieth birthday of Edward Ardizzone by reprinting his article, ‘The Born Illustrator’, and inviting him to select a few of his own illustrations to accompany it. Now, at final-proof stage of our final volume, there has arrived from the British Library a review copy of Edward Ardizzone: A Bibliographic Commentary (309pp., BL sbn 0 7123 4759 3, Private Libraries Association / British Library / Oak Knoll Press, £45). We asked its author, Brian Alderson, for a few words about this summation of a life’s work. * * * O woodman, spare that block O gash not anyhow; It took ten days by clock, I’d fain protect it now. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s plea to Dalziel’s wood engravers is now so well known as to count as hackneyed, but it is a succinct reminder of how dependent the illustrator is on those whose job it is to reproduce his work. And to that hazard must be added his vulnerability to his publishers. Whether he is entrepreneur for his own work or hired hand commissioned to illustrate somebody else’s, he will often enough find his free spirit trammelled by the demands of technology and commerce. (The full freedom from control enjoyed by a few artists—outstandingly by William Blake—is likely to be achieved at great cost and perhaps great obscurity.) Such problems hardly affect the makers of written texts, whatever form their reproduction: conventional print, disk or txt msg (:-c). For the critic of such things, once the editorial principles are known, a judgement may be formulated. But, in fairness to the artist, judging illustration requires the critic at the very least to be aware of the kinds of technical or production constraint that may have undermined the illustrator’s labours. (‘Ministers of wrath’ said Rossetti of the Dalziels and their work.) Such cogitations contributed in part to my attempt at a ‘bibliographical commentary’—we couldn’t think of a less cumbersome phrase—on the work of Edward Ardizzone. The project had its inception in 1970 with what turned out to be a belated checklist of his books published in the journal of the Private Libraries Association to celebrate his seventieth birthday, and the PLA hoped that a continuation might follow when, alas, the artist ceased to illustrate. Eventually, though, the proposed supplement was expanded to become a more fully articulated examination of his complete oeuvre, which was to be issued as a monograph, one of the biennial freebies given to members of the Association. All the illustrated books would be there, along with as much of the commercial and ephemeral work as could be managed, but, fortunately for me, the very tricky area of the artist’s prints was the subject of a separate study by Ardizzone’s younger son, Nicholas.* When I tackled the books in 1970 I had the huge advantage of, literally, sitting at the Master’s feet. Since he had retained copies of most of his work, I spent much time hunkered down on the floor of his living-room-cum-studio making my annotations—greatly assisted in this dryasdust avocation by liberal quantities of alcohol. (By three o’clock in the afternoon I could hardly tell a hardback from a paperback, but the Master sat peaceably at his drawing-board penning out the pages of Tim’s Last Voyage.) .... *Edward Ardizzone’s World; the etchings and lithographs. An introduction and catalogue raissonné. Unicorn Press and Wolseley Fine Arts, 2000.