Nuffin’ Like a Puffin

Kaye Webb was a wonderful presence in my childhood, a distant benefactress, like an aunt we never saw but who always remembered to send us intriguing presents for our birthdays. The parcels from her arrived without fail and lent a kind of enchantment to the years I spent in exile when I was growing up. Of course, I never knew her. She was the Editor of the Puffin Club and I was a Founder Member.

In the summer of 1965 my family moved abroad, posted by the RAF to Liège in Belgium. I was desolate at the prospect of leaving England, not because of the umbilical pull of the motherland, although we were keenly patriotic, but because it meant the loss of the hayfield behind our house and no more Wooden Tops or Andy Pandy. There we were, my brother and sister and I, cut loose from Children’s Hour, trammelled in a little flat four floors up with chains on the windows to stop us throwing ourselves out from boredom (though they didn’t prevent us from dropping orange peel on to the hats of Belgian matrons passing underneath). By November that year my mother decided that the only way to keep herself sane was to set about reading all the books Cyril Connolly listed in his Sunday Times Guide to the Modern Movement. Reading proved such solace to her that eighteen months later, as soon as I was old enough to read myself, she signed me up for the Puffin Club. Being a Founder Member meant you were sent a black-and-white enamel badge with silver on it, showing the famous puffin logo – what’s a club without a decent badge? I seem to remember a red plastic wallet as well and a set of gummed bookplates with the words Ex Libris, which ached with possibilities. All at once I was a girl with a library and I had labels to prove it, even if the only books I had at the time were hardback copies of E. Nesbit’s The Phoenix and the Carpet and Five of Us and Madeline which my Mum had loved as a child. These were unyielding, musty volumes, no good for curling up in an armchair with; they didn’t have the friendly squashiness of the brand-new paperbacks that the Puffin Club sent me. A Puffin book fitted between the curve of my arm and my lap; as I write, I can feel the heat of the private space my books and I created; that submersed feeling when I was lost to time, emerging after several hours flushed and glassy-eyed with too much reading. Originally intended as a series of non-fiction picture books for children, the first titles under the Puffin imprint were published by Allen Lane in 1940, though the Puffin Story Books weren’t officially launched until the following year, when the newly appointed Editor, Eleanor Graham, brought out Worzel Gummidge by Barbara Euphan Todd. Wartime imposed its own limitations on the new venture: paper was rationed and public libraries preferred hardbacks to paperbacks. The early Puffin lists consisted of only twelve books a year, but successes like Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild and Professor Branestawm by Norman Hunter meant that Eleanor Graham could afford to expand production, and by the time of her retirement in 1961 there were 151 titles in print. When Kaye Webb ascended the throne, her uncanny instinct for a fabulous story introduced a golden age of children’s literature. During her reign C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series was published, along with Mary Poppins, Stig of the Dump, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Watership Down. In 1967 she launched the Puffin Club to communicate more directly with her young readers, and by the end of the decade no less than 1,213 titles were in print. I like to think that in our own small way my mother and I helped to support this boom. If you were young and a Founder Member of the Puffin Club, with a parent inspired and generous enough to buy you a new book every week, you could have as wild a time in the 1960s as any King’s Road rock star. I was a gluttonous reader, possessive and insatiable. On my desk before me sits a little pile of three-and-sixpenny story books, so freighted with emotion that I can hardly bear to open them. The first one I pick up is Tales of the Greek Heroes by Roger Lancelyn Green. The brown Sellotape splinters as I turn the pages for the first time in nearly forty years. Tucked inside is an order coupon that I forgot to post, with a cross in the box next to Aesop’s Fables and, sure enough, on the title page is a sticker showing a lion and a unicorn, and standing between them is a puffin with his beak buried in a book. ‘From the library of . . .’ underneath which I have written ‘K. S. H. Dunn – MINE’. This was one of my favourites. Now the paper is the colour of nicotine: fitting, because this was my fix. I gave my pre-pubescent heart to Roger Lancelyn Green. He educated and entranced me. Each opening is prefaced with a verse and in this way he introduced me to Matthew Arnold, William Morris, A. E. Housman, Swinburne, Rossetti, Marlowe and Shakespeare. These quotations were small offerings left at the gates of every story and they made me fierce with curiosity. He peopled my world, although I couldn’t pronounce the names of any of his characters – for years Aphrodite was ‘A-proff-o-dit’ to me, and that’s how I still like to think of her. At the back of the book is a list of all the gods and goddesses with their names first in Greek, then in Latin. I’ve put a pencil tick next to my favourites: Aproffodit, of course (she gets two ticks and an underlining), Hera . . . Athena . . . Demeter. I obviously wasn’t too keen on Rhea as she doesn’t get any ticks at all. Looking at the list fills me with old longings, like reading love letters when you know you shouldn’t. Lancelyn Green didn’t simply retell these classic stories, he conjured them into being: the world he gave me was more real than the one in which I lived. I couldn’t bear to leave the stories behind and I used to make my brother and sister act out the adventures of those gossiping, quarrelling, irresistible gods and goddesses, but we never brought them to life in the way that he did. Having devoured Tales of the Greek Heroes I went on to conquer Troy, to sit at the round table with King Arthur and to haunt the glades of Sherwood Forest with Robin Hood, with the bright beam of Lancelyn Green’s imagination to excite me. When I had exhausted all that he could offer, I took up with Geoffrey Trease and demolished The Crown of Violet and Cue for Treason at a sitting. The perceptive suggestions that came from the Puffin Club each month shaped my tastes from the outset, giving me a love of drama and history that informs my work and nourishes my spirit to this very day. Belonging to the Puffin Club made me understand how generous writers are in the gifts they bring and how passionately readers respond to this open-handedness. Roger Lancelyn Green was my first literary date and the intimacy I shared with him kindled a fire that still keeps me warm at night.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 8 © Kate Dunn 2005