First Page Excerpts for SIGNAL APPROACHES TO CHILDREN'S BOOKS Issue 97, Jan. 2002 [please, note that italics and other formats are not reproduced in this excerpt] ---------------------------------------------------------- Book Jackets Michael Harvey 3 Who was Ethel Talbot? David Grugeon 18 Where Poems Come From John Mole 29 Children's Literature in a Brutal World: A Critical Response to Joseph Zornado's Inventing the Child Margaret Mackey 45 Narrative Heaven: The Editor's Tale The Patrick Hardy Lecture David Fickling 54 Endpapers 69 Margaret Clark / Peter Hunt / Hildy Johnson Contributors 75 ---------------------------------------------------------- Book Jackets MICHAEL HARVEY In October 1955 I stopped being an engineering draughtsman and became a letter carver, left the family home in Surrey and moved to Dorset to work with Reynolds Stone. Reynolds needed an assistant to carve inscriptions in slate, I wanted to be Eric Gill. An idealistic and naive twenty-three-year-old, I found Stone's attitude to my hero salutary: he had briefly studied with the Master, as he liked to call him, but although an admirer had not been in thrall as I was. I learned fast. Lesson number one: Gill's way with letters wasn't the only one to follow; lesson number two: carving classic letterforms in stone was, for me, too restrictive; and lesson number three: there was, as Reynolds had said from the start, no money in this. Within a year I had married, so, soon after, when babies arrived, money became important. In our Bridport flat I began to work on designs for book jackets, hoping that I might get commissions from publishers. Alban Graham, a schoolfriend working at Longmans, had commissioned my first jacket design in 1954, Wordsworth: A Re-interpretation by F.W. Bateson. My embarrassingly amateurish effort taught me one thing: when type doesn't fit, the lettering man is hired to condense the title ... ---------------------------------------------------------- Who was Ethel Talbot? DAVID GRUGEON My parents bought and furnished their first house in 1945, having been through London bombing and evacuation during the war, and having lived in flats in London since their marriage in 1932. They had some money and furnishings left them by two favourite remarkable aunts. Aunt Em (Emma Salmon Griffiths), my mother's aunt, had been a Professor of Music at the Royal College and had been taught by Clara Schumann; she had also lived in France for many of the interwar years. Aunt Ettie, my father's aunt (Ethel Talbot), had died in 1944. Family photographs showed her as a sophisticated lady with a cigarette holder and fashionably bobbed hair, or lying in a hammock. She was also an author of books for girls, with titles like Phoebe of the Fourth or Anne of Queen Anne's, some of which were among the books at home. There were also two bear rugs and a Chinese carpet which had come to us. It was many years later, after the deaths of two of Ethel's remaining sisters whom I knew well, Alice in 1973 and Dorothy in 1974, that I took some notice of a dog-eared manuscript that had come to me with other books and furniture. This was Brethren's Child (the major part of which was serialized in Signal 94, 95 and 96 throughout 2001).1 I had thought that, when I retired from the Open University in 2004, it would be interesting to see if I could prepare the manuscript for publication. However, the impetus to get started earlier came from my wife's work in children's literature. Over the last ten years Elizabeth has been teaching children's literature at undergraduate and masters' levels for (what has become) De Montfort University (Bedford), and we have been to a number of relevant conferences at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, and at Roehampton Institute, University of Surrey. It was at a Homerton Conference in 1994 that Jan Mark put me on to a special feature of Ethel Talbot's work in exploring relationships between older and younger girls (for example in 26 Stories for Girls, 1927, a copy of which she kindly lent me). At a major conference on school stories at Roehampton in 1998, From Bunter to Buckeridge, I met Mary Cadogan, who confirmed the view expressed in You're a Brick, Angela!, the ground-breaking book she and Patricia Craig produced in 1976 (Gollancz). She regretted that Ethel Talbot had not published a series, but felt that she was a better author than Elinor ... ---------------------------------------------------------- Where the Poems Come From JOHN MOLE I was born in 1941 just outside Taunton, Somerset, in the village of Staplegrove. The house was called 'Hillmead' and I lived there until I was seven (and my sister was four). The poet Patricia Beer once observed that 'poets really do suffer bright, painful glimpses of the past, on which they then feel they have to work'. I agree absolutely with her on this, and for me those glimpses-which press with a kind of primal urgency-are of early life at 'Hillmead' and in its immediate environs. Sometimes I find myself alone in the garden on its sloping lawn, wondering where my parents have got to, sitting in a ramshackle little pedal car and gazing up at the veranda with its empty wickerwork chairs. Or I'm in the shadow of the cedar tree which my father says needs attention, or hiding from my sister in the shed where the lawn mower and tools are kept. The dark interior smells of old sacking, tarred rope, petrol-soaked rags and a kind of reassuring earthiness. These presences and others like them ('memories' would be the wrong thing to call them ) are summoned up again and again, it seems, by my need to write a poem and they become that poem's location. The poem itself may well be 'about' something far removed from where I am in imagination while writing it but, because its source is the experience of intense emotion, I often find myself in a particular childhood setting where intimations of adult experience-awe, wonder, anxiety, loss etc.-were felt most keenly for the first time. Sometimes the poem will turn out to be wholly accessible to children but it's just as likely that the glimpse will become the core of more exclusively adult concerns. The child is father of the man and the man remains for ever in the presence of that child. The two of them have grown into a poet together. One of my earliest memories is of standing with my mother and watching American GIs marching past the bottom of our lane on the way to a nearby camp at Norton Fitzwarren. I think now that they must have been putting on a bit of a show for our benefit because the marching was a kind of rather glamorous jazzy shuffle. I can recall being excited, even a little frightened, at seeing such a vigorous, strangely dressed ensemble. These were the men who would introduce chewing gum to our area and become great favourites with the local girls. I was too young, of course, to grasp the implications and complications of the latter, but I do remember an occasion when my... ---------------------------------------------------------- Children's Literature in a Brutal World: A Critical Response to Joseph Zornado's 'Inventing the Child' MARGARET MACKEY The singular makes me nervous. Confident assertions about 'the' reader and his (often his) conclusions leave me grasping for pluralities and uncertainties and tentativeness. Consequently, when I saw the singularity, reinforced in title and subtitle, of Joseph Zornado's new book, I was uneasy. Inventing the Child: Culture, Ideology, and the Story of Childhood: a singular child with a singular story struck me as being potentially too restrictive to be useful. The reductionism of many parts of this book about the ideological impact of children's literature is undeniable, yet Zornado also succeeds in raising significant questions about the role of children's literature as cultural mirror and cultural agent. While I do not subscribe to much of his analysis, I'm glad I read the book. His picture of children's literature is freighted with psychological, social and political consequences, an idea that is not always adequately addressed in our anti-didactic times. Far from accepting the pervasive feel-good notion that children's literature is always a positive force, he argues that it often reflects and promotes evil. This is a radical notion, and takes a bit of getting used to-even after the events of 11 September 2001, which have prompted much new discussion of the ubiquitousness of evil. Zornado's examples are chilling: he draws links between the Puritans of New England and the development of slavery, between the Brothers Grimm and the rise of fascism, between those activities of Lewis Carroll that would now be deemed child pornography and the deep exploitation of the British Empire. The idea that children's books, conventionally associated with the purest forms of tenderness and enlightenment, are players in the creation of such viciousness is unnerving. Even as I acknowledged the persuasive power of such a radical theme, I resisted many of the detailed arguments in this book. Zornado's historical and psychological perspectives are narrow and highly selective. He talks of adults being all-powerful in the lives of children but makes little room for any idea that children also affect the adults in their lives; it is not a one-way street. I found myself ... ---------------------------------------------------------- Narrative Heaven - The Editor's Tale DAVID FICKLING Good evening, Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin. Well . . . this is how it goes . . . usually I think vaguely off and on for days about what I am going to say Sometimes this is a calm process, sometimes it is last-minute and panicky Always it has a level of constant anxiety, like a background hiss. You have to live with that. Nobody wants to make a jerk of himself in public . . . and everybody does. You don't question yourself too closely as to why you are doing this. By the time it gets to the day of the talk, with any luck I have in my mind a simple structure. It's down on paper. The structure has things I want to say Often they are things I've said or thought before. That saves time. Attached to the headings are little anecdotes that illustrate the points, little stories and examples. The best ones I can find. At the last minute, sometimes the very last minute, I might still be fiddling with the order of things. If it's a conference, trying to respond to something some other speaker has only just said-which has just demolished my whole talk-or, even worse, trying to adapt if another speaker has just given my entire talk. Or I might be trying to be funny Can be a bad mistake, that. This process of refining, simplifying, making more understandable or involving, making the narrative `better', is called editing. Anyway that's what I mean by editing. By this I want to show that we are all editors. All human beings, we do it all the time. And notice, communicating with other people is the reason for the process. Sometimes my talk goes OK and sometimes the talk is not so good. I always blame the audience. When the talk is not so good, that's usually because I haven't become anxious enough and haven't done enough editing. It always ends up in the same way-me standing on my feet spouting with just a few notes. Today is different. In this talk I have bitten off far more than I can chew And I have, much to my own wonderment, written the whole thing down. Help! Editors are never supposed to write things down. Editors are supposed to stay in the background, avoid the limelight, A shortened version of the Patrick Hardy Lecture presented under the auspices of the Children's Book Circle on 19 November 2001 at the Royal Overseas League, London. ... ---------------------------------------------------------- COPYING SIGNAL The material published in Signal is protected by copyright law. This means that multiple copies may only be made with permission and on payment of an appropriate fee. 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