Was Little Grey Rabbit genned up on swine flu?
What were your favourite children’s books? That’s the question five of the UK’s finest writers of children’s books have answered today.
Quentin Blake, Michael Morpurgo, Jacqueline Wilson, Michael Rosen and Anne Fine are announcing their lists at a lunch today for 100 10-year-olds.
Mine? The Children of the New Forest, by Captain Marryat. An optimistic book about self-sufficiency under fire. An unapologetically royalist book, it depicts the family of a cavalry officer in the English civil war, whose country house is burned to the ground by the Roundheads.
The children flee to a gamekeeper’s cottage in the New Forest. What appealed to me was not the politics but the day-to-day struggle for rural survival: hunting, gathering, making things and protecting each other from the “enemy”.
I was injudicious enough to browse my old copy of the book the other day. I had obviously read far more into it than it warranted. How on earth could I have sat so comfortably on the side of class and privilege?
So I decided it might be easier to think about the book that scared me most as a child. Absolutely no contest – it was Allison Uttley’s Hare Joins The Home Guard. A terrifying tale of how Hare’s army strode in long columns to a very lifelike first world war kind of a battle.
He and his fellow rabbits and hares were adorned with saucepans on their heads to repel the sticks and stones hurled by the loathsome stoats and weasels. I have hated weasels ever since.
And as for sexual stereotypes? You have it – Squirrel stayed home knitting long, woolly socks for her men at war, and Little Grey Rabbit donned her Red Cross apron and scuttled about with her basket of ointments and lollies.
I hope she was genned up on swine flu.
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This whole exercise has been great as I have been reminded of so many books I really enjoyed but which I had forgotten about completely. I can now get them for my children and reread them myself.
I’m not sure I had a favourite childrens book or if it was my parents favourite, but Tootles the Taxi, from the Ladybird series, was the one that was read most often when I was a child…
Strange then that the book I liked least at the time was Thomas the Tank Engine, because of the deathly grey faces on the front of the engines.
The deathly faces were quite appropriate actually, as steam was being killed off at the time.
These days, I find Thomas the Tank Engine stories are great to read/watch with my neices and nephews, but I still get a chill down my spine sometimes, because of the faces…
I didn’t discover my favourite children’s book until I had children of my own. Leo the Late Bloomer is a wonderful story, with great illustrations and has a lesson for all parents. And kids love it.
The media should stop scaring people and talking about ‘deadly’ flu and millions dying in 1918.
In fact, the total number of deaths in Manchester from flu in 1918/1919 was 3,000. And, as one expert put it recently ‘this is not 1918′.
However millions did die in third world countries such as India.
My favourite books as a young child tended towards the depressing and the absurd:
An illustrated collection of Edward Lear’s poems
Would you rather… by John Burningham.
Dogger by Shirley Hughes.
The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams.
And the absurdly named,
The Sad Story of Veronica Who Played the Violin: Being an Explanation of Why the Streets Are Not Full of Happy Dancing People by David McKee.