A Modest Proposal

Two Puffins are in front of me, picked almost at random from my bookcase. And by Puffins I mean Puffin books, represented by that cheerful little bird on the spine which was for my formative reading years pretty well a guarantee of a good read. Eusebius the Phoenician by Christopher Webb was published in Britain by Puffin in 1973, The Dancing Bear by Peter Dickinson in 1974. Both captivated me; both satisfied the story-craving in the way a good dinner settles a hungry stomach.

And both belong to the era when Kaye Webb presided over the Puffin list as editor from 1961 to 1979. The era was a golden age for children’s writing. What do the following conjure up? Rosemary Sutcliff, Penelope Farmer, Gillian Avery, Philippa Pearce, Mary Norton, Lucy M. Boston, William Mayne. Boundless pleasure, that’s what. Or how about Leon Garfield (tried Smith?), Joan Aiken, Alan Garner, Maurice Sendak, Nina Bawden, Penelope Lively, Jill Paton Walsh? What was it in the water in those two decades that gave us a generation of storytellers who spanned the past and the present, reality and fantasy, myth and history, the here and now and the fantastical, the comic and the scary, all in captivating prose? It was Kaye Webb who, more than anyone, brought these genii together. She acquired the paperback rights to any number of greats, but she wanted Puffin originals too. Her first commission was Clive King’s Stig of the Dump, illustrated by Edward Ardizzone, a terrific story about a cave boy who reappears in a chalk pit in modern England. Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, which became a classic of its kind, was another Kaye discovery. Her most valuable author was Roald Dahl, of whom more later. She rejoiced in the pairing of authors and illustrators – her third husband was Ronald Searle (who illustrated for her James Thurber’s sublime The Thirteen Clocks and The Wonderful O). It’s rare to find older children’s books illustrated now; it was routine then. Kaye Webb’s philosophy was simple when it came to Puffins: ‘We spread a wide net, insisting on genuine invention, integrity, quality of writing and an ability to communicate with the young.’ It’s pretty well the perfect formula for books that children don’t so much read as devour. How do my two battered paperbacks fit in? Neither is particularly famous by Puffin standards. Peter Dickinson is the better known of the two. He was enormously versatile; his best-known book, Tulku, set in Tibet during the Boxer Rebellion, won the Carnegie Medal in 1979. Christopher Webb’s Eusebius the Phoenician was initially published in America. But both stories have that quality Kaye Webb called integrity: both create a world which the reader simply inhabits effortlessly; both have characters that are strong and, in some cases, pungent; both present peoples, tribes and nations with no qualms about modern sensitivities. And both are written without seeming in the slightest to bother about whether words, syntax or indeed concepts are too difficult for the reader; in fact the reader, consumed by the story, gallops through the words, however unfamiliar. Both assume that the reader is intelligent enough to catch up. Peter Dickinson’s The Dancing Bear concerns a boy, a girl, a saint and a bear, all but the saint born on the same day. It is set in Byzantium in AD 558 and it begins like this:

Silvester first saw the new slaves down at the Fish Quay, but today was the Lady Ariadne’s betrothal day, so Fat Luke the fish cook had gone himself to buy the choicest of the night’s catch for the betrothal feast, and Silvester had gone with him to steal a few crabs to amuse Bubba, the dancing bear he was supposed to look after. The regulations of the City forbade anyone but members of the Fish Guild to use the Fish Quay, which meant that Fat Luke had to show the Quay-master a pass sealed with the seal of the Lady Ariadne’s father, the Count of the Outhouses. The pass permitted him to set foot on the quay, but he then had to bribe the Quay-master before he could buy fish.

So the reader plunges instantly into the rule-bound, corrupt, civilized world of Byzantium and takes on board at once the necessity of appropriate bribes to get things done. Byzantium isn’t so much explained as inhabited. A few lines on, we meet those slaves:

A lot of slaves, Silvester thought, considering how unpromising they looked for training. Men so squat they seemed almost square; yellow skins; dangling black moustaches and no beards; heads covered by turbans of different colours, but each with a fringe of blue clay beads hanging just above the savage eyes; legs absurdly bowed.

There will be trouble before long, we know, and it comes abruptly and horribly with a massacre at the betrothal feast. The Lady Ariadne is abducted and Silvester and Bubba – accompanied by the house David Smee A hold saint, Holy John, who normally resides on a pillar – set off in pursuit, but also to escape the machinations of a lord who steals the property of the murdered Count and must dispose of Silvester as an inconvenient witness. Inexorable officialdom is put on his trail, terrifyingly. It’s a quest story and a chase story. And while Silvester must make for the lands of the Huns to find Ariadne and escape the empire, Holy John is intent on converting the Huns to Christianity. The boy, the girl and the bear all play their part. And to this impossibly rich mixture of theology, barbarians and bears is added the magic of David Smee’s stylized drawings, reminiscent of manuscript illustrations. It was a style he deployed to great effect in A Wizard of Earthsea. The cover, very different, shows Bubba the Bear with Huns on horseback silhouetted behind: the story summed up. Christopher Webb’s Eusebius the Phoenician is set later, in Viking times, and it concerns a Phoenician who turns up from a ship at the halls of a great Viking lord. He bears a dying Viking warrior and a story of his quest to find the Cup that will give eternal life to whomever drinks from it, and of a man from the people called Israelites who did drink from it and returned from the dead. The Vikings are baffled by Eusebius’s want of shame – he will shoot an enemy with an arrow rather than killing him in manly fashion, sword to sword – and by his uncanny ability to steer a ship and his odd preference for peace over war, but some seize the chance of loot and fighting. So they set off with him for the White Island to the west to find the Cup. On the way to Lyonesse (for so the place is called) they encounter Arthur, old and speaking Latin, who knows all about the Grail, a magic wood and the ancient little people known as the Firbolgs. Eusebius achieves his quest, but he is never the same again. As in The Dancing Bear, nothing is explained. We enter another world, another way of thinking, and are left to catch up as best we can with the remarkable encounter between this highly sophisticated merchant from the Mediterranean and the Northmen whose one ambition is to enter Valhalla after a lifetime’s enjoyable fighting. When they arrive at the ruined Roman villa where Arthur lives, they encounter statues to strange gods without any weapons, and then they find a cross on which

was a figure of a man, nailed and in great pain . . . The Vikings were scandalized that any man should be killed in so ignoble a fashion . . . Eusebius then explained that it was the will of the man that he should be so dispatched. They then understood that the figure was in truth that of Odin, who had wounded himself and hung himself for nine days and nine nights on the tree Yggdrassil to restore his waning youth.

The story is written in an old style, explains Christopher Webb in the preface: ‘Because there wasn’t a great deal of news around, stories were once told in a nice garrulous fashion.’ So we get lots of digressions about interesting things, but not so much as to stop the story making its way inexorably from Lug’s Dun across the plain of the White Horse to Lyonesse. It is a rich tale of adventure, not unlike The Hobbit, with the uncanny knack of making even familiar things seem strange. Neither Eusebius nor The Dancing Bear would, I think, be published by Puffin now as they stand. They are too uncompromisingly themselves. For instance, Eusebius the Phoenician does not contain a single female character. A contemporary commissioning editor would have required that the Viking longship contain at least one girl who is equal in courage and skill to the men. Instead, these Vikings, like the originals, think of manliness as a virtue. When Eusebius says, ‘he lives in peace who looks for war’, the Vikings grin, ‘for they looked not for peace which is tedious to all but women, but for war and the spoils of war’. As for The Dancing Bear, it is situated in an uncompromisingly Christian Byzantium where, as in the actual city, people would argue endlessly about the nature of the Trinity. The Huns are depicted unflatteringly as barbarians who are plainly in need of conversion, and whose way of thinking is very different from ours. At one point poor Silvester, who cannot ride, is led on a bridle by one cross Hun after another. When he asks Holy John, the saint, why they are so sulky, the saint explains that he is riding on a bride’s saddle. And, he adds, ‘These Huns have virtue. Among them to be a lover of boys is a disgrace beyond disgraces.’ Well, that wouldn’t get past a modern editor, would it? We have our taboos. The loss is ours, or rather our children’s, because these books, unremarkable in their quality in the Kaye Webb canon, are so utterly readable as to carry the most reluctant reader with them. Now, of course, there is retrospective editing of problematic children’s books after they’ve been submitted to sensitivity readers, to remove any language, any thought, that might be offensive to modern sensibilities. Worse still, editors steer authors towards following the norms of inclusivity. The most egregious example is Roald Dahl, whom Puffin quietly censored last year. It was only when a journalist, Ed Cummings, read the new edition to his daughter that he found the text differed from the one he remembered. The sensitivity readers – an American import – had ensured that Augustus Gloop is no longer ‘fat’ but ‘enormous’, Mrs Twit no longer ‘ugly’, and the Oompa Loompas have become genderneutral. After the uproar that followed, Puffin announced it would be reissuing the unexpurgated Dahls as Penguin Classics, while Puffins would retain the doctored version. Kaye Webb would have been appalled. Even in her day there were arguments about books being inclusive but for her, as her biographer Valerie Grove put it,

the words authors wrote were their own, and writers like Hugh Lofting [Doctor Dolittle] were writing at a time when the terms racism, sexism and elitism did not yet exist. She was not inclined to alter her criteria just to widen Puffin’s appeal to a multicultural readership. Her evangelism was reserved for books that were written with imagination and subtle characterization and she stuck to that. She cared only that the Puffin name should be ‘impeccable, synonymous with good books’.

So here’s a modest proposal. Let Puffin reissue the best of the Kaye Webb Puffins exactly as they were published. She commissioned or reissued hundreds of books, so it would be easy to find a couple of hundred of the most outstanding. And on that list, The Dancing Bear and Eusebius the Phoenician should be included.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 80 © Melanie Mcdonagh 2023