My British children's literature, part 4

Read part 1, 2 and 3 of this story. 

 

Yet another unlikely British author, significantly more famous in Russia than in his home country, was Donald Bisset. Bisset was an actor at the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as in a large number of profoundly forgotten movies and some TV shows, including Dr Who. But he also published numerous children's books with self-explanatory titles such as Anytime Stories (1954), Some Time Stories (1957), Next Time Stories (1959), This Time Stories (1961), Another Time Stories (1963), as well as a more imaginative Talks with a Tiger (1967). Bisset's stories are very simple, almost devoid of plots, conflicts or morals. They feature anthropomorphised animals and animated objects and machines, including a minibus, a raisin bun, and a birthday. They are perfect for bedtime reading, and Bisset indeed read them on the radio, as well as adapted them for stage.

Again, I can only guess why several of his books were translated, but the translator was also a legendary editor at the central Children's Literature Publishing in Moscow, who was perhaps in a position to translate and publish what she wanted. We know that Bisset visited Moscow in 1969, so it is likely that the first translation was the result of this visit. Unlike the common practice in Russia, the first publication kept Bisset's original illustrations. Most subsequent editions were illustrated by Russian artists. A dozen tales were made into short animations. Today his stories are available at several sites for downloading or online reading.

In my upper teens, everybody in Russia, old and young, loved Bisset's stories, and one reason may be that they are in a way reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen's tales, tremendously popular in Russia, but without Andersen's dark undertones.

One of the stories is about the rivalry between St Pancrass and King's Cross. I read the story long before I knew that these places were real, and little did I know that King's Cross would one day become my most visited railway station. Not to mention that it would also become world famous thanks to a certain J.K. 

 

The last book in this series of reflections is The Questers, by E. W. Hildick, from 1966, published in Russian in 1969. Again, a book you have hardly heard about, by an author essentially forgotten, although there are very short entries both in the Oxford Companion to Children's Literature and the four-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Children's Literature. E. W. (Edmund Wallace) Hildick (1925-2001) was educated at Leeds Training College and worked as a teacher until he became a full-time writer. Extremely prolific, he wrote several series of school novels, detective and adventure novels, but as far as I know is completely forgotten today. He also wrote a number of books about children’s literature, including Children and Fiction: a critical study in depth of the artistic and psychological factors involved in writing fiction for and about children (1970), to my surprise available at Homerton College Library. (Was it possibly included in the syllabus of one of those early children's literature courses?) The Questers is one of his less known books, followed by two sequels: Calling Questers Four (1967) and The Questers and the Whispering Spy (1968).

Why would this obscure writer be translated into Russian, when so many significantly more famous writers were not? I have not managed to find any relevant information, but my guess is, just as with Leila Berg, that he either visited the Soviet Union some time during mid-1960s or was among the hosts for a visit from Soviet writers. Hildick was a working+class writer, his books set in working-class environments of Yorkshire, Stevenage, and Southern London. Writers with a working-class background who wrote about working-class children were acceptable and therefore attractive in the Soviet Union, unlike suspicious Christian Oxbridge types such as C S Lewis.

In 1969, I was seventeen and entering university, so strictly speaking this book was not part of my childhood reading, but at that point I already knew that I wanted to study children's literature professionally, even though there were no accessible resources. Every translated book was an event, and I still had an illusion that if a book was translated it had to be a masterpiece by a famous writer. There was no way to find any information about the author or to set the book in a context. By that time, I had read Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Pan, Mary Poppins and other genuine classics of British children's literature, and I knew that fantasy rather than realism was its strongest aspect. The Questers puzzled me because I could not understand what made it a great book it was supposed to be.

Unlike The Adventures of Chunky, this book does have a chronological progression and a problem in the beginning, partially solved in the end. It is quite interesting in the light of today's disability studies. The main character, Peter, is bedridden with an unnamed disease – possibly polio – that he has little hope of being cured of. And he isn't, but there is a technological improvement of his situation that must have been truly radical in the mid-60s. The plot revolves around obtaining the technology – a walkie-talkie – that would enable Peter to participate in his friends' outdoor adventures and pastimes. As a side comment, a walkie-talkie was to us something from science fiction and would be considered illegal in the Soviet Union.

While planning for the treasure hunt in the local park that will win them the coveted prize, Peter's friends are also engaged in a number of other activities, including ice-cream eating competition, pet show and talent contest, all with disastrous outcomes. These episodes are not particularly funny or engaging, and the characters quite flat, so I am not surprised that the book has gone into oblivion in the UK, but in Russia, in the absence of hundreds of similar stories, it filled, and probably still fills a gap. Unlike classic Soviet gang books featuring brave and virtuous young communists, The Questers is devoid of any ideology or morals, apart from Peter's friends' genuine desire to support him. There are no lessons learned from disasters and no serious consequences either. All adults are nice, and the overall atmosphere benevolent. Even Peter's disability is presented in a positive light.

When I was writing my book From Mythic to Linear, that I still view as my major contribution to scholarship, I considered books such as The Adventures of Chunky and The Questers within my theoretical framework, in which I examined the temporal conditions of children's narratives in three main patterns: prelapsarian, carnivalesque and postlapsarian. Both fit into the first category, since nothing significant happens to the protagonists, and they are not in any way, not even temporarily, introduced to linearity and thus the central aspects of adulthood, such as growing up, death and power hierarchies. It can of course be argued whether it is legitimate to view the temporal structure of realistic stories as mythical, but this will take us to a discussion of the concept of realism and mimesis. Muffin the Mule, although featuring sentient animals, is also an example of Arcadian fiction: a narrative without linear progression, with characters trapped in eternal present. I am not questioning the value of such stories; on the contrary, they are essential to provide young readers with a sense of permanence and stability before they are ready first to explore and interrogate the world through carnival and eventually leave Arcadia in a linear progression toward imminent adulthood. What I find fascinating is that Soviet publishers, at least in the 1950s and '60s, clearly prioritised prelapsarian narratives in their choice of British books to translate. 

I want to conclude this series of blog posts with an event that became a turning point in my career and that most probably eventually brought me to Cambridge. In 1975, after I had finished my undergraduate degree and had a job as far away as imaginable from children's literature, British Council brought a large exhibition of children's books to Moscow. The venue was perhaps odd, a bookstore rather than a library. The nature of my job enabled me to dispose of my time as I saw fit, and for the duration of the exhibition, probably a couple of weeks, I spent day after day there, reading books and taking notes. This was my first encounter with The Borrowers, Tom's Midnight Garden, The Children of Green Knowe, the Narnia Chronicles and many other books that would become central in my research. Then the exhibition was closed and the books gone. And the glossy 12-page exhibition catalogue would for many years remain my only source of information about British children's literature.

The End

My British children's literature, part 3

Read part 1 and part 2 of this story.

While the reason Leila Berg was acceptable in the Soviet Union seems clear, it is less obvious with another favourite: Muffin the Mule. When I started my academic studies of children's literature in Sweden, Muffin the Mule was not a part of children's literature canon, and somehow I lost sight of it, until sometime in mid-90s I was guest lecturing at the University of Edinburgh and visited the Museum of Childhood, where I suddenly saw the puppet of Muffin the Mule in a glass case. This brought back fond childhood memories and kindled by curiosity. 

When I mentioned Muffin the Mule to an elderly Cambridge colleague some years ago, she immediately started singing the signature tune from the television series. Muffin is probably less known to contemporary audience, although BBC Two released a new animated series in 2005, and there are several picturebooks based on this series. However, I don't think Muffin is as famous in the UK today as he is in Russia. I was surprised to find scores of print editions, the most recent from 2017; free digital editions at numerous portals; as well as audio dramatisation from 1972 available both online and on CD. The book is included in the unofficial primary school curriculum. When I was a child, it was presented as one of the most popular children's books in England, and its author, Ann Hogarth, as one of the most important English children's writers. 

 

I could not find any evidence of Ann Hogarth's or her co-author Annette Mills's support of the Soviet Union or the Communist Party of Great Britain, so there must be other factors – as with all translations, extraliterary and frequently serendipitous. I have found information about Hogarth Puppets performing in Moscow, at the famous Obraztsov Puppet Theatre, and indeed the translation from 1958 has a foreword by Sergei Obraztsov, Russia's most celebrated puppeteer. In 1953, a provincial Russian film studio made a puppet animation, featuring crocheted figures and settings. For some reasons, the film was not released until 1974, by which time it was probably only of interest for specialists. I didn't see it then. It's available on YouTube.

The book, which is a collection of Muffin stories, was published in 1958 when I was six. In addition to Muffin stories, it also contained riddles, find five errors, colouring pages, join-the-dots drawings, patterns for cardboard figures and soft toys, and two board games, one a standard snakes-and-ladders game, but the other a child-appropiate version of Monopoly called “Carrots”, played with matches. The reason it is called “Carrots” is that the eponymous protagonist loves carrots. I remember playing it with my friends well in our upper teens. We were not familiar with Monopoly until much later.

But the main attraction was the stories. Anthropomorphic animals are prominent in Russian children's literature, as elsewhere, but Muffin and his friends were particularly attractive because of their exotic English names. I have read on a recent Russian webpage that the author was very clever when she gave her characters interesting English names – no comment! What I didn't know when I was a child, and that most Russian readers probably don't realise still today is that the names in English are alliterations: Muffin the Mule, Peregrine the Penguin, Sally the Seal, Oswald the Ostrich, Peter the Puppy, Grace the Giraffe, Poppy the Parrot, Hubert the Hippo, Louise the Lamb, Willy the Worm, and Katy the Kangaroo. Knowing this now, I wonder whether the translator gave up or simply didn't notice. It would have been difficult, but not impossible to render this wonderful linguistic feature in translation. The Russian Muffin was not a mule, but a donkey, probably because mule doesn't sound particularly nice in Russian. Donkey in Russian sounds even worse, just like “ass”, so Muffin got a diminutive suffix, oslik, little donkey, which is fine.

Muffin is anthropomorphised so that he sleeps in a bed and eats at a table, bakes a cake and combs his mane with a comb in front of a mirror. But he also eats carrots and walks on all four and wears a saddle and a bridle. In my book, the illustrations were printed in monochrome, alternating between red, yellow, green and blue. This irritated me because I didn't know which was the right colour of Muffin's saddle and bridle. Today, I am irritated that an antropomorphised animal wears a saddle and a bridle at all, and is proud of it. There is something profoundly wrong with it.

Muffin's friends are anthropomorphised in various degrees. Sally the Seal and Hubert the Hippo swim or soak in a pool, Peter the Puppy loves digging up flower beds, while Peregrine the Penguin reads scholarly books on statistics. Unlikely friendships, such as between Oswald the Ostrich and Willy the Worm, did not bother me, and I never wondered what had brought all these exotic animals together. One detail that did bother me was Poppy the Parrot who, on learning that Muffin is baking a cake, contributes an egg that she has just laid. Even to a very young me it sounded like cannibalism. Every time I re-read the book, I tried to get over this episode as quickly as possible.

Something that didn't bother me at all were the two characters who would definitely be expunged from any children's book today: the only two human characters, siblings Wolly and Molly. I presume that in the original puppet show they were golliwogs at a time when golliwogs were still acceptable, but I could not find information on whether they featured in the TV show. They are not listed among the TV characters, so probably not; and they definitely do not appear in the 2005 BBC production. Yet they are quite prominent in several stories, and it is mentioned that they come from Louisiana. Today we would of course object to these children being equalled with exotic animals – just as indigenous people were one time displayed in European zoos. For me, as a child, although I knew that these children were supposed to be human, they were certainly in the same category as the animals and came from similarly exotic countries as Peregrin's Antarctica, Oswald's Africa or Katy's Australia. Moreover, the characters were in line with a large number of black children popular in Soviet children's literature for various reasons, but always as tokens and never as central characters. Soviet publishers in the 1950s would not see any reasons for eradicating these characters.

There are two more human characters in the stories whom I, with my critical eyeglasses on, might call metafictional: Annette and Ann. In the story, at least in Russian, they are presented as little girls, but the names point at the creators of the TV show, Annette Mills and Ann Hogarth. The story they appear in was a disturbing one, and it wasn't until I was grown-up that I realised what was really implied. Muffin wants to write a book for Annette and Ann, with each of his friends contributing a chapter. The purpose is, as the Russian text states, for the girls to remember the animals in case they have to travel away. This statement puzzled me. Why would the animals travel away, “for a long time”, as specified some lines further down?

What strikes me now is the inversion of the toy-animal trope we recognise from Winnie-the-Pooh or Toy Story: the toys' anxiety about the child growing up and abandoning them. Here, the toys – if the characters are indeed toys rather than animals – are anxious that something will happen to them and their humans will forget them. With my today's critical eyes, I don't put high demands on the stories' psychological sophistication, but the fact that it troubled me as a child implies that there was definitely something wrong with the idea.

I was also disturbed by what I probably saw as a breach of genre conventions. I was prepared to accept that animals could talk, but I had problems with Muffin's magical gadgets that enable him to catch a thief and retrieve the stolen objects; or with the magic wish-granting comb. I also had problems with a spider who turns out to be an enchanted fairy.

Considering these stories today, I see them as rather bland, not without humour, but also with a good deal of morals. I am sure they worked well as short puppet shows, but there is very little literary merit in them. However, we all know that children do not necessarily appreciate books for their artistic quality. Also of significance is that the book was published in Russian three years before Winnie-the-Pooh, which doubtless offers a substantially more profound animal/toy narrative. Pooh was quickly incorporated in Russian children's literature, followed by a tremendously popular animated film, as far away from Disney in its aesthetics as can be. Pooh quickly started to function as an independent cultural icon, which I have written about and will not repeat now. Muffin was more of an oddity, and far from all in my generation in Russia still remember him. Yet it is still in print today, in dozens of editions, with various illustrations, and available on various online readers.

To be continued

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

My British children's literature

It so happened that I never gave the talk that was supposed to be my valedictory appearance. But I did finish it, and I think it may be of interest for some people, both those who were coming to listen and those who weren't. Therefore I have taken the liberty to cut it up into smaller chunks, appropriate for blog posts. If you have followed my blog, you may recognise some facts and arguments, but I don't think it matters.

For this talk, I was asked to share my experience of childhood reading – something that our Cambridge children's literature team asks masters students to do for their first assignment. I must admit that when I first came to Cambridge and saw this assignment on the syllabus, I said to myself: Oh dear, what is it, kindergarten? Then I started to supervise the essay and later grade it, and I realised that I was profoundly wrong. It is an immensely challenging assignment if you do it properly (and if you don't, why bother?). If you manage to balance between the authenticity of your childhood experience (and we know that memory is totally unreliable) and your critical self at the moment of writing.

I have since supervised and graded scores of these assignments, and I have seen both how students struggle with it and how beneficial it is for them to go back to their childhood reading and consider what was appealing and why. I have also read a number of childhood reading memoirs, including Francis Spufford, Margaret Mackey and Lucy Mangan. This is not really my genre, but I accepted the challenge.

However, I decided to limit my reflections to British children's literature, for a number of reasons. Firstly, at least the context, if not the texts themselves would be familiar to the intended audience (and probably to this blog's readers). Secondly, a valedictory talk is supposed to be entertaining, so I hope you, dear reader, will share the amusement of my critical self in contemplating what British children's books reached my young self behind the Iron Curtain and subsequently what my picture of British children's literature was before I was given the opportunity to study it academically outside the restrictions of my home country.

(If you want to know more about my childhood reading, I wrote several blog posts about it). 

Like Jerusha Abbot says in Daddy Long Legs: “I have never read Mother Goose or David Copperfield or Ivanhoe or Cinderella or Bluebeard or Robinson Crusoe or Jane Eyre or Alice in Wonderland or a word of Rudyard Kipling”. Well, I did read David Copperfield and Robinson Crusoe and Just So Stories, but I never read Beatrix Potter or J M Barrie or Frances Hodgson Burnett or Arthur Ransome or a word of C S Lewis. I read and loved a children's edition of Gulliver’s Travels, purged of all indecencies and politics. And of course I read and loved Alice in Wonderland, and I could go on forever explaining why it was so much loved in Russia where “Off with your head!” was not an empty declaration, but a real threat, and where someone could decide what words mean.

But I chose to talk about British children’s literature that few if any of British children's literature scholars would recognise: British books that got translated into Russian for any number of reasons – of which more in a minute – and that created my image of British children’s literature that is radically different from the established canon. For instance, of all Enid Blyton’s production, the only book translated until recently was Tim the Famous Duckling. 

 

Ever heard of him? Probably not, but a web search yields scores of Russian sites offering various editions of Tim the Famous Duckling, as well as audiobooks, stage versions and animation. There is even a lesson plan for teaching Tim the Famous Duckling to 8-year-olds and a variety of reviews on parenting sites. You need to know your Blyton well to figure out that the original story is The Famous Jimmy, published in 1936 and fetching fancy prices on ebay and online bookstores. How did The Famous Jimmy, with its hugely dubious morals, get translated and published in Russia in 1946 and never stayed out of print? It's just one of many mysteries when a mediocre and totally forgotten book becomes a hit in another culture.

One of my favourite books when I was a child was The true history of a little ruggamuffin, by James Greenwood. It wasn't just my favourite, it was everybody's favourite, a classic, mandatory classroom reading, yet still a favourite, as famous as Alice in Wonderland and Robinson Crusoe and mentioned in every Russian source on world children's literature, British children's literature, children's literature, fullstop. When I got professionally interested in children's literature and started reading Western sources, I was puzzled that this masterpiece wasn't mentioned anywhere. What foreign children's books got translated into Russian was a serendipity; and this one was a very progressive book from the point of view of Soviet ideology, showing the misery of the working classes under capitalism.

When I visited London for the first time, many place names, for instance, Covent Garden, were familiar from The little rugamuffin. I still think of The little rugamuffin these days when I take the Tube and pass Covent Garden.

In my book Children's Literature Comes of Age, I have a chapter on canon and an argument about how books can become more prominent in a foreign culture than in their own. The little rugamuffin was obviously a good example, but I needed at least some information about it. I had asked English and American colleagues, and nobody had heard of this book. I found it eventually in the British National Bibliography for 1866 (this was long before Google). It wasn't even a children's book. The book we all loved during my childhood and that is still loved and cherished by Russian children was a retelling of an obscure penny-dreadful. 

James Greenwood (1833–1929) was an investigative journalist with Pall Mall Gazette and later Daily Telegraph and wrote reports from the lives of the London poor, particularly workhouses. He published several books based on these reports. He also wrote adventure stories for Boy's Own and some children's books, mostly high sea adventures and nature stories. The true history of a little rugamuffinin was published in 1866 and only reprinted once in 1884. It was never marketed for young readers, most probably because it was so radically different from contemporaneous Victorian children's literature. In the 1860s and '70s, Greenwood was tremendously popular in Russia both with his reports and his fiction. The true history was translated two years after it appeared in English and published in a progressive literary magazine. The most prominent Russian working-class writer Maxim Gorky mentions it in his autobiography as influential adolescent reading. It was retranslated and retold several times, and in the Soviet Union it had over fifty editions, with printruns of millions of copies. It was acknowledged as a children's literature classic and is still in print. Several academic works have been written on it.

One of my questions in investigating the book further was how much liberty the translator/reteller had taken. This reteller was no other than the Grand Old Man of Soviet children's literature, Kornei Chukovsky, who also gave us Kipling and Doctor Dolittle and many other key texts of British children's literature. But why The little rugamuffin? That we might never know. Maybe the novel reminded him of Dickens. It surely fit in well with other fiction describing the horrors of capitalism that Soviet educationalists viewed as desirable reading for children. On close inspection, Chukovsky was quite faithful to the original, although he deleted episodes of domestic violence, references to wicked Jews and some other minor details. However, he did amend the ending to suit the Soviet ideology. In the original, the protagonist grows up, goes to Australia and makes his fortune there. In the version I know, he becomes a child factory worker, which apparently was a huge improvement for a little boy as compared to being a street urchin. Well, at least he wasn't adopted by a rich lady.

To be continued

African diaries, part 1: Preamble

I haven't blogged for more than a year – not because my life has been totally uneventful, rather the other way round, and I never found time to catch up. But now I have just returned from the best trip ever (says someone who has travelled a lot), and I need not only to share it with friends, but sort and write down my impressions for myself, based on my diary notes, Anton's photos and fragments of memories. I say fragments, because already when I was re-reading my diary halfway through the trip, I noticed that I had forgotten details. There was so much, and such a variety of experience, that it is hard to know where to begin.

So I will begin in the beginning and go on until the end. Then I will stop.

Three years ago, after Madagascar experience, I thought I'd never venture into another long-haul trip, but fortunately strenuous travel is like childbirth: after a while you forget the pain and only remember the joy. About a year ago I saw a picture of the Okavango Delta, and suddenly felt that I was ready for another adventure. I was so much ready for another adventure that I wanted to do it there and then, only of course I need a travel companion, and nobody can go on a long-haul trip at short notice. My sense is always: do things now, what's the point of planning ahead, I may be dead by then; but on the other hand, I may not, and even if it's a year in advance, sooner or later the time will come. (Or not, but then it won't matter).

Anyway, I planted the idea, and Anton and Kory let themselves be persuaded. Kory had never been on a wildlife adventure, but after Anton's pictures and stories from Madagascar she was prepared to give it a try. We investigated various options, and Anton insisted on adding Victoria Falls. I booked the trip and hung it in front of me like a carrot: something to live for, something to look forward to. Eventually, flights had to be arranged, as well as all kinds of other things required for this type of travel, and as it was getting closer it felt less and less real, even though I read the Lonely Planet guidebook for Botswana and Namibia back and forth. Since I had very high expectations before Madagascar and was disappointed, I decided that I wouldn't have any expectations at all, for better and for worse. All I knew was that, unlike Madagascar, we would actually sleep in tents inside national parks, which would hopefully bring us closer to what we were seeking. I didn't want to think about how my back would respond to sleeping in tents; but I exercised every week and walked as much as I could.

Finally one day I had to pack my huge sports bag and my newly purchased backpack, and as I started looking at train timetable, I suddenly remembered carrying this very bag along the tunnels from King's Cross to the Tube, and I decided to go against my habit and take an airport coach. Which turned out to be a serendipitous decision because all trains between Cambridge and London were cancelled that day. Anton and Kory flew from Stockholm to Gatwick (that was my only condition: that we would fly together from London) and transferred to Heathrow, waiting for me and getting more and more nervous as I was stuck on M25, sending anxious texts – even though I, being me, had a wide margin. And then we were on the plane, and I slept peacefully through the night, and we had just about enough time in Johannesburg to run from one gate to the next. We landed in Windhoek, had our pictures taken by a heat-sensitive camera, went through passport control, our luggage didn't get lost, and there was someone to meet us and take us to our hotel. Almost too good to be true.

At that point, Anton and I agreed that we wouldn't compare Namibia to Madagascar, because the comparison wouldn't be fair. Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world. Namibia is one of the wealthiest countries in Africa. Of course we couldn't help comparing, and already the very first impressions were different. Windhoek was a modern city, nice and neat, with well-paved streets and traffic lights (Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, has a population of two million and not one single traffic light). Windhoek's population is 325,000. On the way from the airport we saw some baboons and an ostrich. The driver took us through the city centre, pointing out landmarks. I felt I liked the place.

We decided to stay awake as long as possible, although we were terribly tired, but the rooms were not ready, and the hotel was far away from the centre, with a courtesy shuttle once an hour. It felt completely unreal to sit there on a patio under palm trees, waiting for the shuttle and drinking guava juice. On the way from the airport I spotted a little street market, which we inspected, but didn't buy anything; we strolled along the main street, dropped into some shops; had a late lunch or early dinner; took the shuttle back to the hotel, and by four in the afternoon we were ready to go to bed.

I had read the itinerary, but I had rather vague idea about where we were going and why.

Digression:

I am so ancient that when I went to school the countries were called South West Africa and Bechuanaland and South Rhodesia. I frequently hear from my British friends that they grew up somewhere in Africa, which the first twenty times sounded like they grew up in Narnia before I realised why it was so common. For them, Africa was a real place. But for me, in Moscow, Africa was totally abstract. It wasn't a high priority in our geography lessons, so the only reason I knew about these countries at all was my father's stamp collection. Otherwise “Africa” was in my childhood a magical country – one, homogeneous country – full of adventure and excitement, featured in numerous children's verses:

Dear children,

don't you ever

go to Africa.

In Africa

there are sharks.

In Africa

there are gorillas.

In Africa

there are big, angry crocodiles

who will bite you,

hit you and hurt you.

Don't you ever

go to Africa. 

 Illustration by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky for Kornei Chukovsky's verse story Barmalei.

Or, in a Russian version of Dr Dolittle, a plea to come and save African baby animals, with a precise address:

We live in Zanzibar,

in Kalahari

and Sahara

where the hippo

walks along the Limpopo.

No wonder my geography was muddled.

Or, from a later date, my son's childhood:

If you walk along a road far enough

you will get to Africa.

In Africa, mountains are sooooo high.

In Africa, skies are sooooo wide.

Crocodiles, hippos,

monkeys, whales

and a green parrot...

Admit that the image of Africa conveyed through Russian children's literature is a bit skewed.

Since then I have been to South Africa three times, so I do have a more realistic view of that part of the world, and I know that the African continent is huge. But I knew very little – still know very little – about Namibia and Botswana. Here I was in Windhoek, a city I hadn't even heard of until we had to get our flights. It felt unreal. And yet it was happening. The next morning we were going on adventure.

I had decided that for the whole duration of the trip I would be off-line.

To be continued.

Things I don't do anymore: Final reflections

The posts in this series are: kite-flying, skiing, skating, fishing, archery, mushrooming, celebrating New Year, gambling, party games, knitting, baking and traveling by train.

This has been a useful exercise since I had a chance not only to indulge in nostalgia, but reflect on why I stopped doing all these things. I have noticed that most of them have two features in common. Firstly, they are all connected to the place and time of my childhood and youth. We made things that weren't available, and we did things because there were no other options. When I moved to Sweden and things became available, they became less attractive. I have another example: we took incredible efforts to get hold of horoscopes, but when you can read them in any daily paper, what's the point?

Secondly, all the activities I described are things that bring people together; and again, bring together because there are few or no alternatives, of the kind people have now when we spend most of our spare time one-to-one with computers or other devices. I feel frustrated when I see members of my family sitting in the same room, each with a device, often playing the same game or even laughing at the same Facebook joke. We have lost something important, and I am resisting it as much as I can, meeting people in real life, spending quality time with people I love. I'd like to belong to a knitting club, or do Saturday baking for charity, or find someone to play scrabble with. Live scrabble, not virtual scrabble.

Maybe it's my own fault. I haven't been active in finding fishing or skiing companions, and I have recently been consistently choosing solitary pastimes, such as walking or gardening.

Whatever the reason, I don't really regret that I don't do any of these things, because obviously I am doing other things instead. Read my blog if you want to know more. 

Things I don't do anymore: Fishing

Read previous posts in this series: kite-flying, skiing and skating.

I spent all my summers between eleven and nineteen at the Composers' Union resort in Karelia, near the once Finnish town of Sortavala, by the Ladoga lake. The territory was annexed by the Soviet Union after WWII, but all places, villages, rivers, bays, lakes had Finnish names, and in the '60s there were still ruins after burnt-out Finnish houses. The area was so close to the border that you needed a permit; therefore the nature was as pristine as it was under the Finnish government.

The resort had a central building, which was claimed to have been Marshal Mannerheim's hunting lodge. Whether true or not, it was indeed a magnificent manor, with a huge front staircase, elegant sittings rooms and a dining hall with dark roof beams. I have no pictures from my childhood because we didn't have a camera then, and I only found a few pictures on the web. It doesn't match my memory, but it's over forty years ago. 

 

There were some guest rooms in the building, but most families lived in small cottages within easy walking distance, some with direct access to the waterfront. People would rent a rowing boat for the whole season; some people, including my father, had light motors that allowed us to go further away into the archipelago where we had our very own island. We would bring a picnic and stay for the whole day, cooking over open fire, and very frequently cooking our own catch.

The most common catch was pike, but occasionally you got pike perch and, with luck, salmon. The gear was either casting rod or reel, and my job was rowing. If you have never rowed a boat while someone is casting you have no idea how hard it is, especially in windy weather, and what a risk you are taking by sharing the boat with a loved one. I had no choice, because my father simply gave me orders, but he once set off my mother on a tiny cliff in the middle of a vast water span, to untangle a line. With casting, you have to row smoothly and absolutely silently because the b-y fish hear the slightest splash. You need to watch the direction of the wind and the incoming waves. You need to balance the boat so that the caster doesn't fall overboard. You have to watch out for underwater cliffs and floating logs; you need to steer the boat close enough to the reeds where the fish is, but not too close so that you lose the lure. And when there is fish on the hook, you manipulate the net, and the kind of language you hear if you are clumsy and the fish escapes... yes, it would make a sailor blush.

Every day we would also set up a longline, with live bait, for eel and burbot. It had to be checked and re-baited twice a day, early in the morning before breakfast, and late in the evening. Summer evenings are long and light in Karelia; water surface would be like a mirror, and every sound was carried around for miles.

I miss those days with my father in a boat.

On rare occasions, I was allowed to cast a couple of times, just to practice, and I did catch fish when I had a chance. My father kept a log, giving all fish funny names. 

 

It was my job to gut and cook the fish. There were several cooking methods which I learned very early, all over open fire, since we didn't have a kitchen. For clear triple fish soup, you first cooked small fry with spices, then strained, added pieces of larger fish, cooked until it fell apart, strained again, and for the last round you only added burbot, particularly the liver, a delicacy to share around (and all the foul language I heard from my father when I wasn't careful enough with the liver and spilled the gall). The soup was thick as glue, and a small cup was enough to make you full. But the best way was to smoke the fish, particularly eel, and as soon as I could be trusted with an axe, I would cleave young alder to line the smoking box, fill it with fish, close the box tight, make an even fire under it, knowing the exact time for every kind and size of fish. Serve it steaming hot, without plates.

I miss those evenings by the fire.

The irony is that Staffan also used to be passionate about fishing, but we never pursued this passion together, although Stockholm archipelago was no worse than Sortavala and very similar. I have asked Staffan repeatedly, and he cannot give a proper answer. It just didn't happen.

We once went shark fishing in Morocco, and we went deep-sea fishing in San Diego when I got terribly seasick; and I had the thrill of fishing piranhas in Brazil, but all that was tourist fishing.

Why do you stop doing something that used to be the gist of life?

Childhood reading, part 6: Misery books

 Read the previous posts, 1   2    3   4   5

One very distinct category of books that I liked, although I cannot find any scholarly term for it, were books about utter poverty. I have already written about The little ruggamuffin, which isn't a children's book but was launched as one in the Soviet Union and became an indispensible part of the children's literature canon. I am sure I would have loved Jessica's First Prayer, but any mention of religion outruled books in my atheistic Motherland.

There were, however, books from the satellite states, such as Bulgaria and Romania, and I am not even sure they were children's books, but books about childhood, perhaps with autobiographical traits. I have found one. The title, One boy's miseries, says it all. Oliver Twist is an idyll in comparison. 

Another book that I remember well I could not find because the title keeps hitting a business company, and I don't remember the author. In one episode, the main character's baby sister gets sick, and the poverty-stricken mother calls a wise woman, who shoves the baby into the oven. The baby wails, and the boy screams at his mother that she will burn to death, but the wise woman just says it is the sickness getting out. Then the baby is quiet. End of chapter. In the next chapter, the mother buys a little coffin. I was terrified by this story, but as all children terrified by stories I kept re-reading it. I don't think I cried over it as I did over stories about cruelty to animals, but they surely touched something in my heart. I grew up in relative wealth, in a loving family. If the purpose of the misery stories was to evoke compassion they were successful.

The absolute favourite in this genre was Mottel, the Cantor's Son, by the great Sholom Aleichem. I didn't know anything about the author, and I didn't know anything about the Jewish culture or the Pale, where the story takes place. For me, it was just another wonderful misery book, and just like the other misery books, it had a lot of naughty-boy pranks and a lot of joy and humour right in the middle of all misery. I was puzzled that the family moved to America in the end of the book, because it brought the story into reality from a completely imaginary world and therefore made it less credible. In re-reading, I ignored the ending.

Dandelion wine

I guess for most people Ray Bradbury is Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 and "a master of science fiction". I love all these and have read them over and over again. But among my ten desert island books, I would choose Dandelion Wine, and I would also claim that it is the best book ever written about childhood. About all the anguish of being a child and first discovering that you are alive and, as a consequence, that you are mortal. Wondering over the strangeness of adult life in which a ninety-five-year-old woman and a forty-year-old man recognise each other from a previous life and hope to meet in the future (no, I don't believe in reincarnation).

I fist read Dandelion Wine when was sixteen. It was disturbing - just as disturbing as a book should be. It changed my life. It changed my whole worldview. All right, let me spell it out: it is the single most important book of my life.

I didn't know and didn't care - still don't care - whether it was an autobiography. It is a beautiful piece of literature. I introduced all my friends to the book. It was a touchstone. If they were indifferent, they weren't really my friends.

I cannot imagine how you can remain indifferent to this book.

I was sixteen and was in love with, or thought I was in love with someone who was sixty. Dandelion Wine provided an answer. (This person has been dead for thirty years now. Miss Loomis would have urged me to die young. I am afraid it's too late).

"I dare say death will be a lobster, too, and I can come to terms with it".This makea more sense now than when I was sixteen.

By the way, I didn't know that lime-vanilla ice actually existed (or dandelion wine, for that matter).

I re-read the book recently, and it still goes right into my heart, every bit of it.

The copy in the picture comes from the Los Angeles Book Fair 2000. Staffan had journalist accreditation and therefore received a precious ticket to Bradbury's talk. He gave it to me.

An early memory

Last Tuesday there was an award ceremony for a student poetry competition at Homerton. I am on the jury and thus participated also in agreeing on the theme, which this year was “An early memory”. If you are around twenty, which the students are, their early memories are still quite fresh, and we deliberately made it “An early memory” rather than “The earliest memory”. The earliest memory may not be the one you'd like to extract form the dark cellars of your mind.

My earliest memory is very easy to identify in time and space: summer when I was two, in a vast Kazakhstan steppe where we went to visit our deported relatives. I have a photo of me, running around naked except for a little cap to protect my head from the sun (I guess nobody had heard about skin cancer at that time). I don't remember it, but I was told afterwards how I tried to escape and run as fast as I could right toward the faraway horizon, accompanied by the dog of unidentifiable race, Kutka. To catch me was hopeless, so Granny would call Kutka instead, and he would turn and run back, and I followed. That's what they told me later, I have no memory of it.

What I do remember is me and another little girl playing in a shallow rivulet beside a large river, while the grownups chatted nearby or perhaps prepared a picnic. “Now let's run into the big river”, my companion challenged me. We held hands and ran. She let my hand go. I kept on running.

This is a typical out-of-the-body memory, because I remember running and then I saw the scene from outside and above, Granny jumping into the river with her clothes on, a light silk dress with small flowers, groping frantically in the water below the floating white cap.

I don't remember any spanking for being a bad girl.

As I am writing now, I suddenly realise why I have never learned to swim and have always been terrified by deep water.

Musical memories

“I am very fond of Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto”, she said. “And from now on, this piece will for me always be connected with you, and for you with me, yes?” And so it is. Every time I hear Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto, which apparently is number one favourite at Classic FM that I listen to in my car; every time I hear it, I remember her.

I was eleven, and she was fifty, and we were at the composers' holiday home in Karelia. I ran wild with other kids. We made model boats and sailed them in the huge, dangerous Ladoga Lake. Maria Pavlovna, a fifty-year-old librarian from Leningrad, watched us. She told me about the book by Alexander Grin, Scarlet Sails, which became a great favourite for many years to follow. Her association was merely that we played with boats.

For the next year, we corresponded. Looking back, I wonder why MP bothered to write and receive letters from an eleven-year-old. She wasn't married and had no relatives. I wrote to her because I was a passionate letter-writer. I told her about what happened at school, who my friends were and what we did, what books I read, what concerts I went to and what art exhibitions I saw. I sent her my poetry which I normally didn't share with anyone. She wrote about her work and her friends, and about her childhood. She called me Little Grasshopper after a nursery song.

Next summer we met again, and I was adopted by four ladies who hiked, rowed, played party games and treated me as an equal. One evening we listened to Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto on an old record player in the music room. Then another year of correspondence, and another summer. She only came for four weeks of her summer leave, I stayed for the whole summer. I cried when she left. My father scolded me. “When a stranger leaves, you cry. When you mother comes, you don't care”. It speaks volumes about my complicated relationship with my mother. You needn't be a Freud.

Once I went to Leningrad with my father, and we were invited to MP's tiny room in the huge communal apartment. I felt awkward. Once she came to Moscow and was suddenly sitting in my bed sofa. I wanted to hug her, but didn't dare. My father's opera was performed in Leningrad, and I insisted on MP being invited. I was showing off and felt bad about it.

When I was fourteen I had, as I realise now, a very bad depression. There is nothing unusual about a fourteen-year-old having a depression, but looking back I wonder why nobody paid attention. In my letters to MP I was suicidal. She must have been torn between loyalty to me and her duty to alarm my parents. I don't know whether she actually contacted them, but if she did, it had no effect.

Then she told me a story that sounded like a Hollywood movie. When she was young, she had a suitor, but nothing came out of it. Not that she wasn't interested, but sometimes things just don't happen. He had moved to Siberia, she had lost track of him, but then somehow she found out where he was and sent him a card for his 60^th birthday. Like herself, he was all alone in the world. They started a correspondence. I was allowed to follow the development of this incredible plot, and finally MP told me that they were going on a holiday together, meeting for the first time in twenty years. I was fascinated. I was perplexed that these old people, ancient people had feelings. I was fifteen, bursting with feelings and confiding in MP just as she confided in me. Why did she confide in a fifteen-year-old? No one else to share her belated happiness with? So sad.

For winter holiday I was allowed to go to Leningrad on my own. Accommodation was arranged with family friends, and I called MP to tell her I was coming. An indifferent voice informed me that she had died. I only had had a letter from her a couple of weeks before. At that time I didn't find it strange that an old, ancient person died, but she was merely fifty-four, far too young to die. I didn't bother to find out whether she had been hit by a car or had had a stroke. It didn't matter. And I knew no one who had known her, she had been all alone in the world apart from me and her friend somewhere in Siberia of whom I only knew his first name. I would have liked to write to him, but there was no way.

I had a bundle of letters left, which I eventually burned together with many other relics of my childhood. I have a photo. And I have Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto.