Friday, 15 November 2019

My British children's literature, part 2

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

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