Belinda Hollyer

I’ve just joined a new web resource called THE AUTHOR HOTLINE, which is a new website that will be launching to UK schools on 4th March, World Book Day. It’s intended to be a nifty children-friendly resource that schools will be able to use whenever they want, and it’s also a welcome new way for authors, illustrators and poets to publicize their work.
 
Anthony Lishak – the writer whose good idea this is – has had a great response from children’s writers and illustrators and so far there are about 200 profiles in place. The site
has teamed up with World Book Day (which will feature the site on their website) and they’ll jointly organize a quiz/competition to all schools from 4th – 31st March, which will run on the site.

I was delighted to be asked to join and I really enjoyed answering the questions that are posed as part of the authors’ profiles. Do have a look at the site – I’d love you to check out my profile, or just browse around from the home page. This is a very encouraging new development for us all, and I’m very happy to support it.

Thursday 5th March – that’s this week! – is World Book Day, but only if you’re in Hackney, or other parts of Britain and Ireland. The rest of the world celebrates World Book Day on 23rd April, which is Shakespeare’s birthday. I don’t know why we do it differently in Britain, but we do lots of things differently in Britain, so I guess this is another proud exception!

I know Hackney pretty well, although I live a bus ride away in Camden. But my favourite bookshop is in Hackney, lots of my friends live there, and I often go to shows at the famous Hackney Empire Theatre. And this coming Thursday I’m going to be performing in Hackney myself, because Victoria Park Books have organised a World Book Day event at the Hackney Museum and Library. It starts at 4.30 pm and goes on to about 6.30 pm.

I’ll be speaking with two other authors, Keith Mansfield and Gaby Halberstam, and we’ll all have to talk fast because we haven’t got much time! I’ll mostly concentrate on my latest book, “Everything I Know About You”, but I hope to say something about my other books, too. (And when I’ve finished, I’ll probably be ready to go on that radio program, ‘Just A Minute’.) Other authors will be there too, doing their thing – Guy Bass, Will Gatti, Carolyn Hink, David Lucas and Kevin Waldron. We’d all love to meet you and talk about books, and our books will be on sale, as well, so we can sign copies for you if you like.

The full address is Hackney Museum & Library, 1 Reading Lane, London E1 1GQ. (That’s just off Mare Street, opposite the Hackney Empire.) It looks like this:

We hope to see you there!

When we were kids, my mother bought my sisters and me two ‘talking books’. They were large format, beautifully illustrated books of pictures related to particular stories. The only words were the ones spoken on the LP record tucked into an envelope at the back of the book. You put the record on and looked at the first picture in the book, and when that part of the story had finished the actor’s voice told you to turn the page to the next picture. 

One of the stories was Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Happy Prince’. I don’t remember the other one at all, and I suspect that it bored me, and that I ignored it after a couple of sessions. But ‘The Happy Prince’ entranced me for hours at a time. I’d put the record on and listen to whomever it was telling the story (a man with an old-fashioned and highly modulated actor’s voice: could it have been Basil Rathbone?) turning the page every time I was told to, completely engaged in the story which is satisfyingly – and achingly – sad, with a triumphantly resolved ending. I can still recite almost all the (abridged) story off by heart, even now, and hear the narrator’s voice in my head, and picture those brightly coloured illustrations. 

High above the city, on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince. He was gilded all over with thin leaves of fine gold. For eyes he had two bright sapphires, and a large red ruby glowed on his sword hilt…

And I was reminded of all this by catching a quote from the late, great New Zealand writer, Janet Frame, at the weekend. Clearly, her family also invested in talking books, and years later she wrote this poem about it. Like Wilde’s story, it’s also achingly sad. 

In the children’s record of the Happy Prince,

before each gold flake is peeled from the Prince’s body,

the voice orders, Turn the Page, Turn the Page,

supposing that children do not know when to turn,

and may live at one line for many years,

sliding and bouncing boisterously along the words,

breaking the closed letters for a warm place to sleep.

Turn the Page, Turn the Page.

By the time the Happy Prince has lost his eyes,

and his melted heart is given to the poor,

and his body taken from the market-place and burned,

there is no need to order, Turn the Page,

for the children have grown up, and know when to turn,

and knowing when, will never again know where.

I’ve just caught up with a recent New Yorker article about my favourite children’s book – ‘Stuart Little’ by E.B. White. Apparently, it took EB White more than seven years to write the book, although the article suggests he’d been working towards writing it for most his life. (“He’d had a pet mouse as a child; he thought he looked a little mousy himself. In 1909, when he was nine, he won a prize for a poem about a mouse.” And sometime in the 1920s, White fell asleep on a train and “dreamed of a small character who had the features of a mouse, was nicely dressed, courageous, and questing.” White started writing about his ‘mouse-child’ soon after that, and named him Stuart – but he didn’t get down to it seriously for ages. The book wasn’t finished until 1945 and first published later that year.)

As you’ll know if you’ve read this excellent book, Stuart Little is a mouse who’s born to the Little family in America. The book is the story of his development into a kind of Don Quixote character, and it ends in a unusually abrupt and unresolved way. The article cites this as a possibly distressing characteristic, although as someone who’s read both this book and EB White’s later and more famous ‘Charlotte’s Web’ to many children, I’d say that the latter is the more obviously distressing. (I’m not saying that the distress is inappropriate in ‘Charlotte’s Web’: I think quite the opposite, in fact. But it’s certainly there.)

“Stuart Little’ was banned (banned!! that wonderful mouse!!) in some American libraries for a time because the powerful children’s librarian at the New York Public Library took against it – perhaps because of its unresolved ending (which I find curiously satisfying) or because of Stuart’s unconventional arrival as a child in a human household (but more of that later). Or maybe she had no taste for true genius.

But here’s my point – well, three of them, actually. Number One: It’s perfectly OK to leave children in doubt about how a story might end. My own favourite books are often those where you know the story goes on after the book ends, but you’re not sure exactly how it’ll develop – and there’s no reason on earth that books for young people shouldn’t do that, too.

Number Two: I finally understand why I love books about quests! It’s undoubtedly because, when I was ten years old, I read a book where a courageous mouse sets off on a quest, believing against the odds that he was heading in the right direction to find his heart’s desire. And that set a benchmark for my future reading.

Number Three: The fuss about Stuart, as a mouse, being born to the human Little family strikes me as weirdly incongruous. Where will you stop, if you once start looking for simple reality in a story based on imaginative fantasy? The article says that in the original editions, Stuart was ‘born’ to the Little family, but in later ones EB White made a tiny change. “Mrs Frederick C. Little’s second son is no longer born. He arrives.” I am delighted and proud to say that my battered old copy – bought for me in New Zealand towards the end of the 1950s – is one of the ‘born’ originals.

Ignore the recent film. Read the book: it’s still proudly in print after 63 years.

Here’s the link to the article:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/21/080721fa_fact_lepore/

Two wonderful quotations about childhood have been tugging at my mind in the past couple of weeks. They’ve been important to me for a long time, although I’ve no idea why they’re both running through my head right now. Anyway, I want to share them.

The first is from Abraham Lincoln – born almost two hundred years ago, so you have to forgive or ignore or just plain old tolerate his use of the male pronoun throughout. Listen to this:-

A child is a person who is going to carry on what you have started. He is going to sit where you are sitting, and when you are gone, attend to those things which you think are important.

You may adopt all the policies you please, but how they are carried out depends on him. He will assume control of your cities, states and nations. He is going to move in and take over your schools, churches, universities and corporations. 

The fate of humanity lies in his hands.

 It reminds me of that great Ewan MacColl song about young people, with the line: “We are the writing on your wall”. I must try to track the rest of it down – I don’t even remember the title, but as far as I can recall, the lyrics are terrific.

And the other quote is from Graham Greene: it’s become an important key in my writing. This is it.

“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”

 Real food for thought.