Home is where the library is - Lily Hyde

For years, like many people I suppose, visiting my parents has also been revisiting childhood landscapes, dreams, hopes – and books.

In one specific way, these are all the same thing. I grew up in Alan Garner country. From the field above our house you could see Shuttlingsloe, Shining Tor, Mow Cop. These were simultaneously the hills my parents dragged me to for boring walks (boring because I’d much rather have been at home reading books) and perilous places of terror and enchantment where the Morrigan rode and Roman legionaries went native far from home – all inside those same Garner books. 

These days I’d rather stomp over the hills than read even a fantastic book. But it’s a tradition that, when visiting my parents, I’ll follow a walk through those semi-mythical landscapes by curling up with the books of my childhood, which my parents have kept in a wonderful library collected over the years. Alongside Garner there’s Diana Wynne Jones, Rosemary Sutcliff, Peter Dickinson, Joan Aiken, Leon Garfield, Susan Cooper, Noel Streatfeild, Elizabeth Goudge, Robert Westall… It is partly a retreat into the voracious reading of childhood, when the world of the book is more real than the real world (Tom and Jan on Mow Cop in Red Shift more immediate and vital than any boring walk there with my parents), partly a salute to these authors who inspired me to start writing myself (when those walks ceased to be boring, as I dreamed up stories to fit the landscapes) and partly an investigation as a writer, always learning, always hoping, always marvelling at how the masters manage it.      

Now my parents are downsizing (isn’t everybody?). There isn’t room for everything, so I spent last week packing up the children’s library to send off to its new home with my brother, in a different county, far from the landscapes of childhood.

One box packed, ten to go...

I also sorted through a drawer of my own adolescent writings. Most of them are awful. I can read them now and identify, paragraph by paragraph, here is Rosemary Sutcliff, here is Diana Wynne Jones, here is Ursula le Guin, Sutcliff again, Peter Dickinson, again Sutcliff… 

But in among the styles and stories lifted wholesale from other authors and legends and fairytales and films, the one thing that rings at all true is the landscape. I knew from Garner that stories as deep as myth could be written about an everyday real place. I took Narnia and Dalemark and Camelot and transposed them to the field above our house, to the hills and moors you can see from there. And in the process, I think I started to find myself as a writer.

I moved away from my parents years ago, and I’ve never written about that landscape since. I don't know if I ever will; I can’t lay claim to Alderley Edge or Shuttlingsloe the way Alan Garner can; though I grew up with them, the roots go no further back. Yet the roots do run deep. I’ll miss the children’s library; in a way it was what made my parents’ house still home. But the landscape, informed as it is by that library, is even more important to me. Those fields and hills are full not only of the dreams and truths I read in The Moon of Gomrath or Red Shift, but of my own dreams of stories and hopes to be a writer.

www.lilyhyde.com

AUGUST'S GUEST ILLUSTRATOR: PATRICE AGGS

Today - the 31st August - we are delighted  to have a Guest Illustrator Post from Patrice Aggs..

Patrice Aggs writes and illustrates children's books. Her latest is Yi Er San, My First Chinese Nursery Rhymes (Frances Lincoln). Right now she's obsessed with kids' comics, and is about to begin her 4th adventure series for The Phoenix. 

Welcome, Patrice!

Thank you - and hello to everyone at An Awfully Big Blog Adventure! 

Let's start a bit of action:

Cut whom? I hear you ask. 


Betty and Susan, who along with brother Tom were the star cast of Ginn Basic Readers in the 1950s and 60s.

If you grew up in the American elementary school system these three were your first reading buddies.

Even if you were an urban black child, Tom, Betty and Susan represented the correct template for the outside world. By the early 1960s, it was surely time for these guys to be hobbled.

Enter Bob and Nancy. They were black children, and were neat, tidy and acceptable. Of course they slid seamlessly into the comfortable world Tom, Betty and Susan lived in.  Never mind that Bob and Nancy probably went to quite separate schools and lived in quite separate neighbourhoods from their white pals.

In Ginn Readerland they were always just around the corner when somebody wanted to ‘see Bunny ride’. Where was this weird part of America in which Nancy cavorted with white kids on ponies wearing cowboy hats? It made no sense to us black city kids.

The imagery was clearly aimed at suburban white children, to soften them up for the possible introduction, sometime in the future, of black classmates or neighbours.

Look! There’s Bob and Nancy! They’re almost just like us, you know…

It made no sense to us. But did it need to? The world of schoolbooks was always one of unreality, as was much of what went on in the classroom. Black kids who grew up in 1950s America finished their daily Pledge of Allegiance with the phrase “with liberty and justice for all – but me.” We were already aware that we were outsiders. Whenever a person of colour appeared in a drawing there were black sticks or crosshatched lines all over their faces. So schoolbook characters being unreal aliens was pretty much what we had come to expect. 

Did these characters need to reflect the real world in order for us to learn to read? No. Were we damaged by being deprived of visual evidence of our existence? Maybe, maybe not. It was a step forward to see ourselves realistically portrayed, but it was also really boring. Nancy’s hairdo is spot on for 1960, and yes, she’s in colour-matched Sears Roebuck playclothes. But she and Bob came along too late. We already knew fictional characters were fundamentally bizarre and different from us. Luckily, that made the world of reading really exciting.

There were benefits to knowing all about unreal aliens. My friends and I devoured the E. Nesbit books found in our superb local library. Mind you, we’d have devoured anything that wasn’t Tom or Betty or Susan. Nowadays I am often asked how on earth we managed to ‘relate’ to stories about Edwardian children. How could we possibly understand norfolks, florins, cook-generals , fire irons or nursery fenders?

Very easily, as it turned out. Challenging language with mysterious references was what we were used to. No, we couldn’t have explained stone gingerbeer bottles or something called ‘shape’ that people had for dessert. But pinafored children in the Kentish Town Road were agreeably exotic, and no more peculiar than Nancy in a cowboy hat.

 

The real pity is that the exchange of exotic words and images couldn’t work the other way round. In a time-travel sequence it would be fun to test out the strength of writing around unfamiliar vocabulary. What would an English child in 1906 have thought of our own black Americanisms?

Okay, do y’all know what she’s talking about?