Read the first post in this series.
Another
favourite was of a totally different kind: The
Adventures of Chunky, by Leila Berg,
who actually died just a couple of years ago. If I had known that she
was alive when I moved to the UK, I would have contacted her to tell
her how passionately I loved her book. But to a child, all authors
are by definition dead, so it didn't even occur to me that the author
of my childhood favourite could be alive. And again, this wasn't a
name you saw on every syllabus. Why was this book translated? Why
this book, of all English books? By all standards, published in 1950
and translated in 1959,
it was obsolete already. Yet I loved this book for its nice everyday
adventures and pranks, and without reference frames, without the
background of Swallows and Amazons
or Just William,
I didn't see its flaws. Maybe they aren't flaws; maybe it is just one
of many average books that come and go, but for me it was one of the
Great Books, an indispensable book from which I still remember long
passages by heart. For my critical self, this is an episodic
narrative and a middle narrative; it has no logical beginning or end;
it can be read in any order – perfect for bedtime reading. The
stories take place during summer holidays, so there are no
school-related obligations, and the children have, as they had in
those simple times, total freedom of movement around the town,
including riding buses and going into shops. The relationships
between children and adults are idyllic. There is no character
development, no conflicts or confrontations, not even moral lessons.
Chunky, a seven-year-old boy, is scientifically minded and finds
rational explanation to everything, but there isn't any factual
knowledge to extract from the stories, which of course isn't
important for me now, as it wasn't then.
There
were quite a few things that puzzled me in the book. From other
translated books, I knew that the British currency was pounds,
shillings and pence, but I didn't know how many shillings there were
to a pound or how many pence a shilling, therefore the sums Chunky
and his friends do were incomprehensible. I was also puzzled that
Chunky's parents went to meet the king. Kings didn't fit into a
contemporary realistic story. Chunky's parents went to meet the king
because, as I realise now, they worked on a super-secret military
project, but it wasn't spelled out, and for a dislocated reader like
myself it didn't say anything. At one point, a colleague of Chunky's
parents, a certain professor Haldane, is mentioned. J B S Haldane was
professor of biochemistry at Cambridge, and incidentally the author
of a hilarious children's book My Friend
Mr Leakey. He was a good friend of
Leila Berg, but I wonder whether contemporaneous readers were
supposed to recognise the name or whether it was just an internal
joke. Like Berg, Haldane was a Communist and a supporter of the
Soviet Union.
Leila Berg J B S Haldane
With
Chunky, I
was confused because of references to war. I had heard a lot about
war from my parents, but it was obviously beyond my lived experience.
The book mentions that when Chunky was born, his mother had to stay
at home with him, but during the war she hired a housekeeper in order
to continue her work as a scientist. This temporal setting that made
Chunky perhaps fifteen year older that I was, was disturbing. It was
not far back in time enough to be a historical novel, like The
little rugamuffin, but it was not a
diffuse present either. I was puzzled because one of Chunky's friends
didn't know what a refrigerator was. From my upper middle-class
position in the late 1950s, I could not imagine a household without a
refrigerator, although today I wonder whether all my classmates'
families had one. I was puzzled that only Mike's mother had a
linen-cupboard. Why was having a linen-cupboard so remarkable in
Britain in the 1940s? Where did people otherwise keep their linen? I was
totally puzzled by burst water-pipes, because of course in the
Russian climate all plumbing was indoors and well insulated, and it
wasn't until I moved to the UK that I understood this detail.
I
was truly puzzled that when Chunky's friend Mike's father has an
accident and goes to hospital, the boys arrange a performance to
collect money for the family. The story is thus set pre-NHS, that is,
pre-1948, something that young British readers in the early 1950s would
still recognise; but for a Russian young reader in the late 1950s it
sounded more like Dickens. Surely, when you were sick in hospital,
you received sick pay! So wide apart were Chunky's world and mine.
Of
more mundane issues, I didn't know what a sandwich was, and it was
probably wrong of the translator to transliterate it as exotic
“sandwich” rather than a familiar bread-and-butter. Chunky's
mother leaves him interesting lunches that fascinated me as a child.
The standard Russian lunch was, and still is, a starter, a soup, a
main and a dessert. So when Chunky had condensed milk-and-apple
sandwiches for lunch it was as outlandish as it could get. But then
of course Chunky's parents were scientists. I was also spellbound
when Chunky drank milk through a straw. I wasn't familiar with
plastic drinking straws. I tried to drink my milk through a real
straw when we were staying in a summer cottage – it didn't work too
well. Drinking straws first entered my life, tentatively, as a rare
and exotic object, in the 1970s. We would save and rinse them for
re-use.
Pocket
money was an unfamiliar phenomenon in Russia, and the fact that you
could save pocket money to buy a watch was inconceivable, but again,
it was part of the exoticism, as was chewing gum, that I had
encountered in other translated books, but had no idea of what it
was. Neither did the translator, particularly when Chunky asks his
parents to bring him bubblegum from London, a recent and still rare
product unavailable in his little town. The translator was at a loss
and had to invent an explanation: in Russian, Chunky says: “Not
chewing gum, but bubblegum, to blow soap bubbles with”. It didn't
make the episode clearer for me.
I
obviously did not recognise the songs featuring in the book, such as
Oranges and Lemons
or Good King Wenceslas.
The latter, incidentally, was presented as New Year song, since
Christmas was banned as a phenomenon and a word in the Soviet Union.
Progressive boys in England would not celebrate Christmas. I didn't
understand rhyming slang, even though it sounded funny. I didn't
understand the implication of “running away to sea”; I thought it
meant going to the seaside for a holiday, but I had no idea how close
or how far away seaside was. I am not sure I had seen a map of the
British Isles by that time, and if I had, I did not understand the
scale. I also missed the implication of having to turn twenty-one
before you could do certain things, because in Russia the coming of
age was eighteen.
On
the other hand, there were things in the book that didn't puzzle me
that would probably puzzle today's young reader: cod-liver oil. Every
Russian child had to endure it after lunch. You would hardly find
ether in an average British bathroom today, but you could in a
Russian bathroom in the '50s. I could absolutely relate to a queue
for oranges that were just as as scarce in the late 1950s in Moscow
as in the late 1940s in Britain. If I was dislocated in space, I was
to a certain extent synchronised in time.
But
none of these puzzling details put me off the book, possibly the
other way round. Using my critical toolkit of today, I didn't
identify with Chunky; instead I was curious about his otherness. I
read a lot of books about children in diverse chronotopes, but
generally I do not remember ever identifying with fictional
characters, not even when their experience was close enough to mine.
Instead, it was the unfamiliar experience I cherished. Whether it
makes me a sophisticated reader I will not speculate about.
Back
to the question of why this book was translated. There was a quota on
translated books per country; the central children's publisher that
more or less had monopoly on children's books, would publish a
translation from English maybe once every third year. Chunky
thus effectively blocked any other British book that was perhaps more
worth to be available for Russian young readers. But publishers had
their guidelines. In the late 1950s, imaginative fiction was out of
favour; both Russian and foreign books should be realistic and
reflect lives of real children, preferably from working classes.
Chunky didn't quite fit into the latter category, his parents being
high-rank academics fraternising with royalty; but Leila Berg matched
the criteria for acceptable Western authors. As already mentioned,
she sympathised with the Soviet Union, was a member of the Communist
Party of Great Britain and wrote for the party newspaper The Daily
Worker. I could not find any information about her possible
visits to the USSR, but as a member of the
Communist Party she would probably be among the British
writers hosting Soviet visitors. Casual exchange of books would be
enough to justify a publication. It might be
interesting to find out whether any Russian children's
book was translated in the UK at the same time.
Once
again, I deeply regret that I wasn't aware that Berg was still alive
when I moved to Cambridge, or indeed when I started visiting the UK
for academic purposes: it would have been interesting to hear her
story.
To be continued
