The Golden Thread

This is the story of the last gnomes in Britain. They are honest to goodness gnomes, none of your fairy-book, tinsel stuff, and they live by hunting and fishing, like the animals and birds . . .

Those opening sentences of The Little Grey Men by ‘B.B.’ – the mysterious nom de plume of the children’s writer and illustrator Denys Watkins Pitchford – can still thrill me, many decades after I first read them. I was a country child, and the magically described streams, meadows and woodlands in which Dodder, Sneezewort and Baldmoney had their adventures were places of enchantment to me, linked in my imagination to the countryside I knew. It was partly her attachment to another of B.B.’s books – Brendon Chase – that gave Jane Nissen the idea of reissuing classic children’s books that had slipped out of print when she retired from a senior position at Penguin in 1998. She had started out there when her children were young, under the legendary Kaye Webb, creator of the Puffin Club (recalled by Kate Dunn on p.31), determinedly working her way up from freelance reader – ‘sticking myself to the desk with Superglue’ – until she was taken on as a children’s editor. Then, after leaving to spend seven years at Methuen, the tides of publishing carried her back to Penguin again, as editorial director of the Hamish Hamilton children’s list, which Penguin had taken over. Penguin, she remembers, was an exciting place to work, full of interesting, knowledgeable and amusing people, almost as good as a university. In retirement she missed the buzz and ‘just didn’t feel ready to give up publishing’. So when an agent offered her the rights to Brendon Chase, which she had loved as a child, she decided to reissue it. She set herself up, not quite on the kitchen table, but at a desk squeezed between the kitchen and the rest of the family home. Swan House, by the Thames on Chiswick Mall, is a mellow Queen Anne building which, with its evocative name, lush garden and gracious proportions, seems a perfect home for the imprint, straight out of a story by Lucy M. Boston or Elizabeth Goudge. In fact in 2000, when she launched her list, she produced eight books – she says she can’t think how she did it now, but you can’t launch a list with a single book – among them Alison Uttley’s A Country Child and T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose (see SF2 and SF5). Five years on she has now reissued nearly two dozen, by authors many of us over a certain age will recognize, love and often mourn – Noel Streatfeild, Arthur Ransome, Eleanor Farjeon, Joyce Lankester Brisley of Milly Molly Mandy fame, and many more. So what causes once-popular books by authors like these to slip out of print? For some, the world has simply moved on too fast – Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings books, for instance, which I passionately loved as a child, especially when dramatized by the BBC for Children’s Hour, just don’t ring enough of the right bells any more: prep schools – and prep-school language – have changed, and the world of Linbury Court is no longer really believable. Until quite recently, too, an author’s paperback rights were often sold on to another firm, which didn’t have the same interest in keeping the author in print. As virtually a one-woman band, with low overheads, Jane Nissen can give a book more leeway than the big houses. ‘Most publishers review their backlist regularly and have a cut-off point if the book isn’t meeting its targets,’ she says. ‘Unless an editor absolutely goes overboard to keep something in print, they’ll let it go. I’m perfectly happy to start off with two to three thousand copies of a title.’ Often, too, a favourite book will fall by the wayside because it doesn’t quite fit with the rest of an author’s work, or has been overshadowed by a popular series – books like Brendon Chase, which was never quite as well-known as The Little Grey Men (winner of the Carnegie Medal in 1942) and its sequel Down the Bright Stream. ‘As a child I adored Brendon Chase, with B.B.’s wonderful woodcuts,’ Jane says, ‘and I thought to myself that if I, an American girl of 11, liked this book, which is about English boys and is set in the 1930s, then it really must be timeless, and so it has proved to be. It’s done extremely well.’ Another hit has been Dorothy Edwards’s A Strong and Willing Girl, which Jane reissued this year. It’s the story of a 10-year-old sent into domestic service in Queen Victoria’s reign, and is based on the experiences of Dorothy Edwards’s aunt – a less well-known book by the author of the hugely popular My Naughty Little Sister series, but with the same irresistible, down-to-earth humour. Books overflow into every room at Swan House, upstairs and down, and there’s a box of review copies in the sitting-room, waiting to be parcelled up and sent out. It’s certainly time-consuming work when you have to do everything yourself, especially if you are a busy grandmother with children and grandchildren in America – though Jane’s tolerant and supportive husband is, she says, an excellent proofreader and a dab hand at working out the ISBN numbers. ‘Sometimes you do feel it’s all going into a dark hole and costing a lot of money,’ she admits, laughing rather ruefully. But her freelance publicist, Nicky Potter, is full of ideas, and hardly a month goes by when they don’t get some mention in the press. They had a notable coup in 2003, when Eleanor Farjeon’s witty book of poems about Britain’s monarchs Kings and Queens was read on Radio 4, with accolades from writers like Antonia Fraser and John Julius Norwich who had been brought up on it. ‘It was amazing. Sales rocketed.’ Jane also works with a designer, and her books are lovely both to read and to look at. Technology has advanced since the days of dim, dark-printed facsimiles, and modern scanning of the originals produces clear, readable pages. It’s even possible now to correct mistakes that may have gone through several editions. She’s very careful about what she publishes. Friends and acquaintances frequently make suggestions, some of which have proved fruitful, but mostly she follows her nose. ‘Hundreds of people tell me about books they absolutely love, but I have to consider whether they’re just one person’s passion and, more important, whether I like them myself. I look for books which were successes when they were first published, and so are fondly remembered. The “welcome back” factor is vital. They must have an appeal for today’s reader, and there has to be a timeless “classic” feel. I think nostalgia for the English countryside is one thing that makes a book last, and also a kind of clever quirkiness – like My Friend Mr Leakey’ (J. B. S. Haldane’s brilliantly original story of a magician, which she reissued last year). She publishes at the rate of three or four books a year, and she’s got those for the next two years planned. One is Noel Streatfeild’s Circus Shoes (originally published as The Circus Is Coming). Personally, as one of the millions of fans of Ballet Shoes and White Boots, I can’t wait. She’s frank about the fact that most of her books are probably bought by adults – who after all are the main buyers of children’s books. But do children read them? ‘I do have to wonder, quite honestly. But people tell me they read them to their children and grandchildren. That’s certainly what started my love of reading. I can remember my mother reading to me, and it establishes a wonderful connection.’ I can remember being read to as well – particularly Dickens, which I loved but would never have read myself because the language would have defeated me. I also remember reading The Little Grey Men to my daughter, and although she was an urban child hearing the story more than thirty years after it was written, she was enchanted to enter, in her imagination, the country world in which I’d grown up. The book was a link between my past and her present. There is nothing quite like the sharing of a book, and Jane Nissen’s list is part of that golden thread, linking the generations.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 8 © Hazel Wood 2005