Flight of the Ladybird

Quick: bring something to read to him on the train! This last-minute thought, just before setting the burglar alarm, sends me rushing to the pair of small bookshelves outside the bathroom which contain the old Ladybird books. Which of them shall we take? Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Florence Nightingale, The Princess and the Pea, The Fireman. They’ll do. They fit into the handbag, and I set out knowing that, even if we run out of water and KitKats, and there’s no refreshment trolley, we’ll have enough mental nourishment to keep us going through whatever South West Trains might inflict on us.

Ladybird Books live in my heart and in the hearts of countless members of my generation who spent their pocket money on them in the 1960s and ’70s. (Their price, for twenty-nine years, was unchanged at two shillings and sixpence). The emotions expressed in their illustrations became our lifelong examples. What is yearning? We picture the childless wife in Rapunzel who looks at the salad growing in the witch’s garden and knows she will ‘pine away and die’ if she doesn’t eat some. What is a daunting task? We picture the miller’s daughter being taken into her first roomful of straw by the king and being expected to spin the straw into gold or ‘you shall die’. What is despair and what is hope? We picture the contrasting hospitals in Florence Nightingale: first, the one with straw on the floor and wounded men slumped in agony and neglect; then the one a few pages on, with bandaged men tucked up in cosy beds in rows, the two in the foreground chatting and laughing while the nurses busy themselves in the background. As parents, we long to bequeath these images to our children, so they may be nourished and inspired for life as we have been. To see my 4-year-old (as we pass Andover) transfixed by the picture of Rumpelstiltskin, in his stripy tights, stamping so hard that his foot goes through the floorboards (all childhood tantrums, and perhaps all adult ones as well, are contained in that depiction of uncontrolled rage) is as satisfying as passing on to another person one’s passion for a piece of music. When my first son was born in 1994 I went to the bookshop in search of these Ladybird books. Nowhere could I find them. (Even my prose is Ladybird: that was from Dick Whittington, when Dick arrives in London hoping to find the streets paved with gold.) The new Ladybird story books were dumbed down in both their prose and their pictures. The depth of feeling and of detail in each had gone. Five of these books, with their simplistic language and cartoon-like pictures, might have nourished a child on a journey from Clapham Junction to Esher but no further. From then on I started homing in on the children’s sections of second-hand bookshops in search of the muted, matt spines of the old editions. I had one of the most fruitful mornings of the 1990s at the Children’s Bookshop Number Two in Hay-on-Wye. (This was before I discovered Abe Books.) Hence the outside-the-bathroom collection, which is large but by no means complete. (True collectors pay £250 for a dust-jacketed Cinderella.) Recently I went to the local Waterstone’s to arm myself with examples of how inferior the New were to the Old. When I started looking at the Ladybird story books, I was astonished and more than delighted (to quote from Rumpelstiltskin when the king arrives in the morning to find the straw turned into gold). For the wonderful prose of the original ‘Well Loved Tales’ series, beautifully written by Vera Southgate MA, D. Litt., has been brought back into print again. There the books were, text on the left, illustrations (but new ones) on the right: Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Dick Whittington, The Magic Porridge Pot, Cinderella . . . twenty-four stories, each priced at £2.50, each reduced from the original 56 pages to 48, but all ‘retold by Vera Southgate’. Retold? So Vera Southgate is still alive? I rang Penguin, who own Ladybird, and was told that, no, she is dead. Searching the Internet for details about her life, I found that even the Internet is pleading for information about her. There is one photograph of her, and a tiny paragraph saying she was an ‘educationalist’. Her date of birth is given as ‘0000’ and her date of death is given (tantalizingly and misleadingly) as ‘still with us’. As for Eric Winter and Robert Lumley, creators of the profoundly influential original illustrations to these stories, they get hardly a mention in the Ladybird Book section of the ‘Wee Web’, the website which does its best to tell you everything it can about the history of the books. These great illustrators were, it seems, reclusive and have left behind no trace of themselves other than their work. This bringing back into print of Vera Southgate’s elegant prose (not a word out of place, not a vulgar cadence, not a superfluous phrase) happened in 2005. It was decided at Penguin that today’s young readers might appreciate more classic storytelling, after twenty years of easy-to-read retellings. But it was also decided that the old illustrations were too dated and would have to be redone in order to appeal to a generation brought up on reality TV. So now, in Beauty and the Beast (words by Vera Southgate, illustrations by Stephen Player), when Beauty agrees to marry the Beast, he is transformed not into a pale, handsome, old-fashioned prince with a pony-tail wig, but into a hunky Spanish football player. In The Princess and the Pea, when the prince is in search of a real princess whom he can marry, the overweight teenage candidates queuing up at the castle look as if they are, literally, on a reality TV show, hoping to be selected as Maria in The Sound of Music. We who gaze rapturously at Eric Winter and Robert Lumley’s illustrations are bound to find the new pictures less appealing. In the new Dick Whittington (words by Vera Southgate, illustrations by David Kearney) the rats aren’t on Dick’s bed, they are just scuttling about underneath it, which isn’t as scary. When the cat attacks the rats and mice there are no dead ones to be seen, only live fleeing ones. And the portrait of the adult Sir Richard Whittington at the end has gone. But still, these books get ten out of ten for effort, even if original-version snobs like me only give them seven and a half for effectiveness of illustration. At least these are proper, detailed, imaginative paintings, twenty-four of them per book, painstakingly done. Another Ladybird series has fared less well. The old ‘Adventures from History’ books are no longer in print. I used to find them harder to read as a child than the ‘Well-Loved Tales’: they are quite boyish, and 10,000 words long. I used to get bogged down in them, rather as I now do in some of the lengthier articles in the New Yorker. But they were beautifully illustrated by John Kenney, and written by L. du Garde Peach OBE, MA, Ph.D., D. Litt. (Why did Ladybird authors have the letters after their names on the title page? Was it to instil respect in young readers, or to reassure their parents?) Du Garde Peach, the Ladybird page of the Wee Web tells us, lived from 1890 to 1974, was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Göttingen University, and worked for British Intelligence in the First World War. For an excessively girly girl like me, his books contained a daunting number of pitched battles on sea and land. A perfect L. du Garde Peach hero was a man like Sir Francis Drake, who could coolly finish off his game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe ‘and beat the Spaniards too’. We girls loved Florence Nightingale best, not only because of its ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of wounded soldiers, but also because of the enchanting picture of the young Florence putting bandages round her dolls and ‘nursing them back to health’. But now, as the mother of a bow-and-arrow-wielding 4-year-old, I can see how gripping these books can be. Among du Garde Peach and Kenney’s masterly skills was the ability to hook the reader on page 1. So, in Oliver Cromwell, we begin with the story and picture of the baby Oliver being taken on to the roof of his house by the pet monkey. (‘It is impossible to imagine what England would be like today if the monkey had dropped him.’) James I and the Gunpowder Plot begins with a grimacing stuffed Guy being burned at a modern (1960s) bonfire night, with gloved children pointing and laughing. Such beginnings implicitly beckon the reader: now read on. It seems a shame that the whole ‘Adventures from History’ series has gone. Though the books portrayed Britain as the best country in the world – currently an unfashionable view – they did enrich thousands of minds and imaginations. Now there is only a Ladybird Book of Kings and Queens, which runs through the monarchs (quite forgettably) at a page or two each, and most of Britain’s children come across history for the first time in Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories series, in which Queen Elizabeth I is known as Frizzy Lizzy and James I as the Snotty Scot. Lodged for ever in their minds will be a feeling that History was populated not by noble kings and queens but by a bunch of power-crazed weirdos who flirted, farted, burped, dribbled, went bald and lost their teeth. According to Penguin, the market in history books has moved on. Every now and then they consider the possibility of reissuing the series (taking out the politically incorrect bits), but when it comes to predicting how many people would actually buy the books, feasibility slips away. Today’s children and their present-buying parents, it seems, prefer their history in comic, bite-sized chunks, the pages broken up into little squares of fact, easy to reproduce for history topic work. But the surprising success of last year’s reissue of H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story (see Slightly Foxed, No. 9) suggests that there is still a hunger for narrative, hero-centred children’s history books.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 14 © Ysenda Maxtone Graham 2007