This children’s poetry collection put a match to my imagination
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Version 0 of 1. The dust jacket, if there ever was one, is long gone. And the grubby cloth boards, scribbled on in red crayon, hang by a thread from the spine. On the endpapers, my mother has written my name and the address of the house we lived in when I was six, but then my little sister has crossed it all out and written her own name in wobbly blue felt-tip. Did she steal it? Or did I hand it over, buying her silence in some naughtiness or other? All I know is, in our playroom, Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses had leverage. It’s a collection of poems, but to me back then who’d never heard of poetry, it was a storybook, hectic and cacophonous and bulging with ideas and observations that could set a six-year-old’s head on fire. “In winter I get up at night and dress by yellow candlelight”; “A birdie with a yellow bill hopped upon the window sill”. I loved the energetic optimism of the rhymes, with their warm curiosity and occasional flashes of priggish certainty: “the friendly cow all red and white” who “gives me cream with all her might” – and am amazed at how many of them have continued to echo through my adult life. Related: Nursery rhymes from all over the world – a gallery to share with children But it was also the pictures, with their glowing embers and summer skies, cosy nurseries, bedrooms and landings, pinks and blues and glassy river greens. A whole world was here. The Whole World, in fact. Not just Mapperley Park, Nottingham (where I lived), but a glorious global mish-mash of autumn bonfires, cricket balls, haylofts, suns rising and setting in far-off lands, ticking grandfather clocks and candles sputtering, summers fading into winters, children asleep while troops of soldiers and fairies and elephant caravans moved over their safe and homely counterpanes. Here was all the magic and possibility of imagination. “I have just to shut my eyes,” says the mousy-haired little girl who, in her mauve dress, white knickers and black Start-Rites, looked quite a lot like me, “to go sailing through the skies”. Might a child have it in them to break free of the shackles of parental discipline and nursery routine and escape any time they wanted into daydream? The idea was a dizzying one. Some of the dreams were more alluring than others. The bed that becomes a boat steering “across the dark”. The swing that goes higher and higher until you can see right across the countryside. I remember being half-impressed and half-horrified by the The Land of Story-Books, with its picture of the extremely daring boy creeping along behind the sofa with a gun on his way to shoot lions and tigers in a starlit jungle, while his parents sat by the hearth consigned to grown-up obliviousness. But one or two upset or even terrified me. In Good and Bad Children the “unkind and the unruly” grow up to be “geese and gabies”, and I could not bear the picture of the grey-faced man (presumably a gaby?) alone in his slippers in his chair, “hated” as his age “increases” by his nephews and nieces. I always quickly turned that page. I didn’t so much read this book as live within its pages And what about The Unseen Playmate who “comes out of the wood” when “children are happy and lonely and good” and who, though he plays with you, will also play with your toys once you go to bed. And perhaps worst of all, the poor Dumb Soldier, buried in a hole in the garden and left there, rigid and helpless, while the grass grows up over him only to be recovered at the end of winter after he “has seen the starry hours and the springing of the flowers”. I knew I should be glad for the soldier, exhilarated even, but the idea of all those hours staring into the lonely darkness felt far too much like death for comfort. It’s no coincidence that it’s my mother’s handwriting at the front of this book. Both she and my father had grown up in bookless homes; both left school, largely uneducated, at 15. And yet, barely in her mid-20s and already with three small children, she took herself off to the local library and proceeded to read her way through it. Thanks to that epiphany, my sisters and I grew up with story firmly planted in our lives: Ladybirds at pottytime, Mary Poppins and The Treasure Seekers at bedtime, Enid Blyton and Noel Streatfeild as soon as I could read myself. This book seems to offer a line straight back to those days. The stories that its poems contain are uniquely circular, ongoing, continuous. I didn’t so much read this book as live within its pages. And yes, the childish viewpoints feel bright, unforced, happily spontaneous, but the overwhelming sense is that of a cool artistic impulse, chipping and honing and squeezing, trawling for ideas and then gobbling them up and shaping them into something that amounts to far more than the sum of its parts. |