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On Wooden Wings, by Rosemary Tonks (1948)

Title page from On Wooden Wings by Rosemary Tonks (1948)
Title page from On Wooden Wings by Rosemary Tonks (1948)

Out of a perhaps questionable quest for completeness, I have been working my way Rosemary Tonks’ oeuvre. Tonks was perhaps one of the better-known of “forgotten” writers — “The Poet Who Vanished,” as a 2009 BBC Radio 4 documentary was titled. As John Hartley Williams wrote in a 1996 piece for The Poetry Review, “She wasn’t just a poet of the sixties — she was a true poet of any era.” According to Williams, Tonks “sent us strange messages from them, alive, fresh and surprising today.”

Fortunately, thanks to the efforts of Neil Astley, Tonks’ cousins and Bloodaxe Books, Tonks’ collected poetry — as well as a selection of her prose — was published shortly after her death in 2014 as Bedouin of the London Evening and is easily available. It’s also one of the rare cases where full advantage of e-publishing possibilities was taken, as the e-versions of the book include quite a number of audio recordings, including an interview from 1963. And having read all but Tonks’ last novel, The Halt During the Chase (1972), I would argue her poetry is far better than her prose.

The flying weather vane, from On Wooden Wings by Rosemary TonksBut I’m not one to give up for purely aesthetic reasons. And so I sought out not only Tonks’ rare adult novels but also her ultra-rare children’s books: On Wooden Wings (1948) and Wild Sea Goose (1951). There are, as far as I can determine, about a dozen copies of either book available worldwide. There are three copies of On Wooden Wings currently for sale, one of Wild Sea Goose. So order your copy now.

I took advantage of my British Library card and scanned in reading copies of both books on a recent visit to London (the same trip that netted me my scan of Kathleen Sully’s Not Tonight). Tonks was just 20 when On Wooden Wings was published, but she’d already had one of her stories, “Miss Bushman-Caldicott” — “the story of a very nice cow” — read on BBC’s Children’s Hour. All the same, On Wooden Wings is best classified as juvenilia.

Black Smith from On Wooden Wings, by Rosemary Tonks
Black Smith
The story is simple: a boy named Webster wanders out of his London house, meets some characters, has some adventures, and comes home. Think of it as Webster Meisters Wanderwoche. Except there is a considerable portion of fantasy certain to appeal to a young reader: a talking dog and talking cat; a good-natured tramp capable of devising whatever gadget the situation requires; and a wooden weather vane that transports Webster off to a magical land. To provide the necessary measure of suspense, there is a villain, one Black Smith, who happens to be a most dastardly blacksmith:

“Are you making shoes? or straightening them?” asked Webster.

Black Smith threw back his head and gave a guffaw of mirthless laughter.

“I’m making them crooked boy, crooked — twisted — and bent about!”

“Whatever for?”

“So that every horse that wears one of my shoes will hobble and fall, and every cart made with one of my wheels will run unevenly, always … ALWAYS!”

Knowing Tonks’ story and her adult work, one cannot read On Wooden Wings without looking for clues. In this case, one needn’t be overly Freudian to find them. Every one of Tonks’ novels features some irregular band of characters that provides, however haphazardly, a substitute for one’s own absent or unreliable family, and so does this one. Webster’s own family takes no notice of his departure. His new friends, on the other hand — every one of them an outcast — travel many miles to find him when the weather vane flies off with him, the tramp, and the dog.

And there are a few moments when we can see the wise-cracking Tonks of the novels — who could, at times, veer too far off course “trying to score points in the parlour game of cleverness,” as a blogger cleverer than I put it. One of Webster’s outcasts is Sebastian, a diminutive fellow who’s been rejected as a waiter. His worst sin, it turns out, was his failure to maintain the proper façade:

“I would write out the menus in English instead of in French, and of course everybody could read them!”

“But aren’t you supposed to read the menu?” asked Webster very surprised.

“Of course not. People can order anything they like, but when it comes to serving, we give them what we like. That is why all menus are in French, then nobody knows what they are getting.”

Still, I’m not sure these rare bits make the book as a whole worth reading, unless, as I say, you are a Tonks completist. If, however, you are one of that tiny band, please let me know. Cross your heart and swear to die you only talk like a digital pirate and I will be happy to pass along my amateurishly scanned PDF of the book.


On Wooden Wings, by Rosemary Tonks
London: John Murray, 1948

The Rabbit’s Umbrella, by George Plimpton (1955)

Cover of the first US edition of The Roabbit's Umbrella

The rabbit with the umbrella in George Plimpton’s children’s book, The Rabbit’s Umbrella, is every bit as real as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny: that he might exist matters more than that he actually does. In this case, the rabbit, plus three robbers, shouting parrots, and a giant dog named Lump serve as bait to entice a boy to listen to Plimpton’s story, which is essentially a shaggy dog tale. To give him credit, though, there really is a shaggy dog in this tale:

Mr. Montague brings Lump home
Mr. Montague brings Lump home

The Rabbit’s Umbrella takes place in the town of Adams. And where is Adams? Well, “It’s simple enough to get to Adams once you find the station from which the train leaves.” The main industry of Adams is thimble-making, as is obvious from the sign at the edge of town.

Welcome to Adams
Welcome to Adams

Mr. Montague, who owns the thimble factory, wants only to make his wife and son happy, which is why he buys Lump the dog. He brings Lump home on the town’s one electric streetcar, which is the thing dearest to the heart of Doctor Trimble, the town’s world-traveled scientific expert (Expert in what? Never mind.).

Doctor Trimble
Doctor Trimble

The three robbers — Pease, Punch, and Mr. Bouncely — have one gun among them and plan to use it to steal great fortunes, starting with Mr. Montague’s.

The Three Robbers
The Three Robbers

Unfortunately, they haven’t quite got a clue just how to go about being robbers, so when they do manage to break into Mr. Montague’s house, the only thing they make off with is Lump. This leads to a high-speed chase by Doctor Trimble, Mr. Montague, and the town cop on the electric streetcar — which is probably the last thing you’d want to chase a gang of robbers in (Never mind again). But all ends happily, though the rabbit with the umbrella never does appear.

The rabbit with the umbrella
The rabbit with the umbrella

Still, the boy demands at the end of the book, “I want to know about the rabbit with the umbrella.” And so Plimpton explains:

You want to know about the rabbit with the umbrella. Doctor Trimble would be the one to explain it to you. He has not only seen the rabbits but also chipmunks with parasols and sun helmets and squirrels with small pianos in their houses, and he has seen the mice skate on the frozen lakes in winter. He has seen so many umbrella-carrying rabbits that if he were writing this epilogue it would be as long as the book itself. He told me once he had seen a whole field full of rabbits opening and shutting their umbrellas after a summer rainstorm, the drops shaken off sparkling like diamonds in the new sun. I have never seen one myself, though I think I saw one smelling a petunia when I was a boy your age, playing in my great-grandfather’s garden. But Doctor Trimble tells me the reason dogs roll their tongues out and laugh is that they recall suddenly how funny a rabbit looks, leaping through a hedgerow with an open umbrella bouncing above him.

… Life is full of mysteries, and it’s nice to have a mystery that is a rabbit with an umbrella.

Which is as good an explanation as anyone really needs.

George Plimpton wrote this book, inspired by The Twenty-One Balloons, the Newbery Medal-winning book by William Pène du Bois, then working as the art director for the The Paris Review. Plimpton’s amiably absurd narrative notwithstanding, it’s Pène du Bois’ illustrations that are really the star of the book. Plimpton imagined it as a bedtime story he might tell Lucas Matthiessen, the son of his The Paris Review co-founder Peter Matthiessen — although the Matthiessens had returned to the U.S. by the time the book was published.

After the book was accepted fr publication by Viking, Plimpton wrote his parents, forwarding the latest copy of The Paris Review and apologizing for the angry tone of its stories. “The contents, you’ll be glad to hear, are hardly reflections of my own character, which remains merry enough and full of hope and enthusiasm,” he assured them. He also predicted that, successful or not, The Rabbit’s Umbrella would not be considered “the product of a tormented mind.”

The Rabbit’s Umbrella is available in electronic formats on the Open Library: Link.


The Rabbit’s Umbrella, by George Plimpton
New York City: The Viking Press, 1955

Jack the Giant Killer in all his Gory Glory

Jack kills the giant, from Jack the giant killer: a hero celebrated by ancient historians (1820)
Jack kills the giant, from Jack the giant killer: a hero celebrated by ancient historians (1820)

Back in the days when the average lifespan was about 40 years, children’s books could be pretty brutal. Take the story of Jack the giant killer, which now we almost exclusively see in its vegan variant, Jack and the Beanstalk. Here is a sample of some of the violence to be found in the pages of 19th century English and American versions of the story. The illustration above, which could easily date from the 17th century, comes from Jack the giant killer: a hero celebrated by ancient historians, by John Rush Golby, John Lee, and William Marshall Craig, published in 1820 (all links are to the titles in the Internet Archive.)

Jack and the giant, from The history of Jack the giant killer
Jack and the giant, from The history of Jack the giant killer (1830-1835?)

This somewhat medieval illustration comes from a book with a title almost as long as its text: The history of Jack the giant killer: relating how he overcame several huge giants, particularly one with two heads: his marriage with the Duke’s daughter: and other exploits. To which is added, The noble basket maker (there being a disappointing lack of gore in “The noble basket maker”).

Jack and the Giant, from History of Jack the giant killer; containing his birth and parentage (1850?)
Jack and the Giant, from History of Jack the giant killer; containing his birth and parentage (1850?)

Here in this illustration from the History of Jack the giant killer; containing his birth and parentage, the giant appears to date from Roman times — perhaps an indication that author Joseph Crawhall determined something of the giant’s genealogy in addition to Jack’s.

The murdering giant, from The History of Jack the Giant Killer (date unknown)
Jack fools the giant, from The History of Jack the Giant Killer (date unknown)

We know, of course, that the giant was a bad guy, but today’s accounts shy away from the details of his crimes. In The history of Jack the giant killer, published by Walker and Sons of Otley, we learn that the giant (of Welsh origin this time) was a less than adequate host. As we see above, the giant, having invited Jack to spend the night in his castle, sneaks into the bedroom in the middle of the night to hack Jack into tiny bits. Fortunately, cunning Jack has put a log in his place and watches the attack from behind a column.

Jack and the Two Giants, from The history of Jack the giant killer (1860)
Jack and the Two Giants, from The history of Jack the giant killer (1860)

In many of the 19th century accounts, there are more than one giant. Sometimes there are several. Above, from The history of Jack the Giant-Killer by W. S. Fortey, we see Jack subduing two giants at once.

The two-headed giant, from Jack the giant killer (1843?)
The two-headed giant, from Jack the giant killer (1843?)

Sometimes, the giants had two and even three heads. In this version. from Percival Leigh’s Jack the giant killer, the giant hails from Scotland.

Jack and the giant, from Jack the giant killer (between 1865 and 1889)
Jack and the giant, from Jack the giant killer (between 1865 and 1889)

In later versions of the story, the giant grows less gruesome and more human. In the illustration above, from Jack the giant killer, published by George Routledge and Sons, Jack looks a right little prig while the giant could well take his place in a Biblical setting by Michelangelo or Rembrandt.

Jack kills the giant, from Jack the giant killer (1870?)
Jack kills the giant, from Jack the giant killer (1870?)

The taste for blood remained well into the second half of the century, though, as in this illustration of Jack with his nine-pound pickaxe from the McLoughlin Brother’s gore-packed Jack the giant killer from around 1870.

Jack wails on the giant, from Favourite Fairy Tales (1861)
Jack wails on the giant, from Favourite Fairy Tales (1861)

Or this illustration, from John Corner’s Favourite Fairy Tales, of Jack wailing with Stakhanovite fervor on a particularly hideous giant’s head.

Grecian Jack and the Pre-Raphaelite Giant, from The Old Fairy Tales Retold (1870)
Grecian Jack and the Pre-Raphaelite Giant, from The Old Fairy Tales Retold (1870)

Still, the overwhelming trend was towards a kinder, gentler Jack and giant — as in the above illustration from James Mason’s revisionist The Old Fairy Tales Retold, where Jack is quite Grecian in his figure while the giant seems merely a troubled, if plus-sized, pre-Raphaelite soul.

By the time Andrew Lang and Kate Wiggins got their hands on them, is it any wonder the last bits of blood lust were wrung from this tale?

The Rat, by G. M. A. Hewett (1904)

An illustration from "the Rat," by G.M. A. Hewett
Mr. Samuel H. T.

It’s something of a guilty pleasure to come across a children’s book that doesn’t exactly seem to have been written with children in mind. Take The Rat, by G. M. A. (George Mottram Arthur) Hewett, the first in a series of “Animal Autobiographies” published by Adam and Charles Black in the early 1900s.

I give due credit to the Reverend Hewett, an Anglican priest who spent his life on the staff of Winchester College, Oxford–first as house master and finally as college chaplain–between 1878 and his death in 1927. Though his narrator, Samuel H. T. (the H. is for the one paw he lost, the T. to that half of tail he lost to a cat), speaks with the graceful and moderated tone of the gentry (“I cannot help feeling that I am a good fellow and a keen sportsman”), he does not pretend to be more than vermin in the eyes of his readers. And he’s willing to acknowledge that there are a few aspects in which rats lack something in refinement:

… fathers count for very little among us. Very few rats ever see their father, and a good thing too, for he is just as likely as not to eat one of his own children if food is scarce, and sometimes his wife helps him. Just fancy how you would feel if your dad strolled into the nursery or schoolroom one day, with his hands in his pockets, whistling a cheerful tune, and then, when you all ran up to him, hoping to be taken out for a nice safe walk, suddenly seized and devoured the tenderest and juiciest of you!

On the other hand, rats do treat the death of their own with a delicacy that can serve as instruction to Samuel H. T.’s young human readers:

We hardly ever use the word dead if we can possibly avoid it. It is too horrid, and so common and vulgar, too. You can always distinguish a really well-bred rat by the way in which he describes an accident. ‘Where’s Jimmy to-day?” asks somebody. “Feeding the hungry” is a nice answer when somebody has gobbled him up. “How’s your wife to-day?” he asks somebody else. “Dancing in the pig-sty” would mean “Caught by the leg in a trap.” “Singing in the larder” is a way of saying “Squeaking in a cage.” “Lying down with a bad pain in her back” can mean either “Killed by a stick” or “Nipped by a dog,” though we generally call the latter accident “Playing with the puppy.” You see, we are hardly ever ill, so that there is very little chance of people failing to understand. Perhaps you could now tell me how to say prettily and politely that your sister was dangling in the air with a noose round her neck, or that Billy was squashed quite flat under a large stone. Mind you make him quite flat. I could do that easily. I must tell you my answer: “Playing at being a pancake.” Now you make a better and politer answer if you can.

An illustration from "the Rat" by G. M. A. Hewett

Indeed, Hewett’s rat doesn’t just teach his readers about manners: he instructs them in an admirable school of philosophy built around the uncertainties inherent in the life of a rat:

What a lot of “perhapses”! I love perhapses: they are so much nicer than knowing for certain. That is partly the reason why it seems to me that a tramp ought to be a happier man than you. You know all about your breakfast to-morrow: porridge, bacon and eggs, muffins and strawberry jam, coffee or tea—you can hardly put “perhaps” in once. But very often the whole of a tramp’s breakfast is “perhaps”; and although I am very fond of perhapses, I should not care to have nothing else for breakfast, however nicely it was cooked, unless they put an awful lot of sauce and trimmings round the side. And a rat is better off still. He never says anything without beginning with “Perhaps.” His whole life is so very perhapsy, though he can generally find something to eat, if only he is alive to eat it. We are really very particular about our food, when we have the chance of being particular, but if it comes to the worst there is hardly anything that will not do, until something nicer turns up.

Five other “animal autobiographies” were published A & C Black after The Rat:

Each book features twelve beautiful color illustrations but appears to have had a different illustrator. The ones in The Rat appear to be signed by an “S. Bagnot De La Berg,” but I can’t find a record of an artist with this name. Hewett must have been quite the jolly old sport, as his other work available on the Internet Archive, The Pedagogue at Play, features a frontispiece photo of himself sitting up in the snow, skies cattywampus in front of him. “There may be many spills” while skiing downhill, he cautions his reader. “I have had as many as fifteen in twenty minutes; not trifling stoppages, but good honest rollings in the snow.”


Animal Autobiographies: The Rat, by G. M. A. Hewett
London: Alan and Charles Black, 1904

Croatian Tales of Long Ago, by Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić (1922)

From the cover of Croatian Tales of Long Ago


One day late, but in keeping with the spirit of Halloween, which reminds us each year of the didactic benefits of scaring the crap out of kids, I want to celebrate a fine example of fairy tales told with the gloves off. As Bruno Bettelheim (perhaps somewhat plagiaristically) reminded us, uniformly pleasant and positive stories have their place in children’s literature, but so do terror, violence, and horrible-looking monsters with sharp teeth: “‘Safe’ stories mention neither death nor aging, the limits to our existence, nor the wish for eternal life. The fairy tale, by contrast, confronts the child squarely with the basic human predicaments.” And while Bettelheim’s argument may have been weakened by the facts of his credentials and practices that have come to light since the publication of The Uses of Enchantment, there is an undeniable edge of terror in many folk tale traditions.

In an article in The Looking Glass: New Perspectives on Children’s Literature, David Boudinot wrote, “Teaching fear through fairy tales is a proven method of helping children learn about safety, and it can help improve a child’s judgement and critical thinking skills.” By this standard, Ivana Brlić-Mažurani&cacute deserves a posthumous plaque from the folks at the National Safety Council for her collection, Croatian Tales of Long Ago available in its English translation by F. S. Copeland on the Internet Archive (link). Here are a few excerpts to demonstrate how these tales can help spice up the endless flow of Paddington pablum:

“Come along, brother, let’s get rid of grandfather. You have weapons. Wait for him by the well and kill him.”

There was the poor little fairy Curlylocks caught in the bowels of the earth! She was buried alive in that vast grave, and perhaps would never again see those golden fields for which she had set out, and all because she would not go straight on by the way they had intended, but would loiter and turn aside to the right and to the left to pry into God’s secrets!

Through fog and twilight ran Reygoch with the children in his arms and the terrified flocks at his heels in frantic flight—all running towards the dyke. And out to meet them flowed the Black Banewater, killing and drowning as it flowed. It is terribly strong, is that water. Stronger than Reygoch? Who knows? Will it sweep away Reygoch, too? Will it drown those poor herd boys and girls also, and must the dear little Fairy Curlylocks die—and she as lovely as a star?

Already the soldiers were battering at the entrance. Heavy clubs hammered on the doors and portals, banging and clanging till all the courts and passages of the soot-blacked house rang again, as though a host from the nethermost Pit were beating on the gates of Oleg the Warden.

Suddenly the Mountain rang with the most awful noise, so that the branches swayed and the leaves trembled on the trees, and the rocks and cliffs re-echoed down to the deepest cavern. It was Belleroo roaring.

So now the Sun thundered forth his anger. All the land fell silent with fear; axes and clubs were dropped in terror as the Sun thundered.

Illustration by Vladimir Kirin from “Croatian Tales of Long Ago”

The Copeland translation, published in 1922 by Frederick A. Stokes Company, is further spiced up with intricate paintings and black-and-white illustrations by Croatian artist Vladimir Kirin. The painting of the lion, bear, and wolf attacking the dragon—speaking of educating through fear and violence—from the book’s cover, however, is by the American illustrator, M. M. Williams (and depicts an event that doesn’t occur in any of the tales).

 


Croatian Tales of Long Ago, by Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić, translated by F. S. Copeland
New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1922

The Hepzibah Omnibus, by Olwen Bowen (1936)

Illustration by L. R. Brightwell, from Beetles and Things
Illustration by L. R. Brightwell, from Beetles and Things

Cover of The Hepzibah OmnibusWhen I saw The Hepzibah Omnibus in a bookstore in London a few months ago, I began wondering, “Why do I know the name Olwen Bowen?” A quick glance at the title page cleared up the mystery: “Foreword by Clemence Dane.” Kate Macdonald and I had read and discussed Dane’s massive theatrical saga, Broome Stages, earlier this year, and though neither of us much cared for the book, I did remember a few facts from the author’s life–in particular, that she and Bowen had lived together for nearly forty years.

nb_0640Unlike Dane, who wrote fiction, drama, and nonfiction, Bowen confined herself strictly to writing for children. Although her last book, Tales from the Mabinogion, was a retelling of stories from the King Arthur legends, most of her books were set in worlds inhabited almost exclusively by animals and insects. Her titles were simple and straightforward: Runaway Rabbit; Taddy Tadpole and the Pond Folk; Dog’s Delight; A Terrier’s Tale.

The Hepzibah Omnibus collects four of her animal tales. The first two, “Hepzibah the Hen” and “Hepzibah Again,” take place in the farmyard shared ruled over by the vain Hepzibah and her friend, the equally self-absorbed pig, Gertie Grunter. Most of the Farmyard Folk stick with alliteration when in comes to names: Reginald Rat, Kathleen Cow, Cuthbert Cockerel, etc.. Each chapter is a small object lesson that usually comes as the result of some animal foible–vanity, pride, jealousy–but always ends happily. Rather like Aesop with the edges sanded down. It’s a world where even the rodents loved their most fearsome predator:

And all the Farmyard Folk were very grateful to Barny, the Barndoor Owl. They liked to hear him at night as he flew about among the barns, calling out to himself as he flew, “I see you! I see you!” just out of habit; for they knew that he was a very friendly person really and they all felt much safer when he was about.

yapThe next tale deals with Yap, a young fox with still a bit too much fellow-feeling in his heart to realize that the rabbits might not feel quite comfortable with him crashing their Rabbit Fest in a rabbit suit. In most chapters, though, he proves exceptionally adept at team-building. At different times, he joins causes with a toad, a vole, an otter, three badgers, and a hedgehog. The alliances usually seem to involve getting some kind of food, but I guess we don’t have too feel too much remorse over the sacrifice of eggs, fish, or fruit. And when it does involve something a little closer to home, it’s a roast chicken that Yap’s father, Barker Fox, steals from a circus tent, not a live one.

beetles-bwI found the last tale, “Beetles and Things,” by far the most charming, perhaps because of the illustrations by Harry Rountree (the illustrations for Hepzibah and Yap are by L. R. Brightwell). Montgomery Beetle, in particularly, looks a bit like Harry Langdon. As with the farmyard, the insects exist in a peaceful, alliterative form of coexistence, in which Septimus Spider would never dream of ensnaring Ena Earwig or Bill Blue-Bottle. The only inter-species competition in the book is over a lot of overripe plums (and, of course, that gourmand Thomas Tit gets most of those).

It’s hard to imagine that many kids would enjoy The Hepzibah Omnibus these days. Bowen wrote for children capable of dealing with compound sentences and with a wider vocabulary that the sort of 4-5 years olds who might still go for simple animal stories: “Lena Fly and Bill Blue-Bottle flew quickly away, while Cedric, Ena Earwig, and many of the others spend a cramped and uncomfortable afternoon curled up in any tiny niches and crevices they could find in the tree itself.” And, on the other hand, I’m not sure I would put Hepzibah on a par with The Wind in the Willows as a timeless classic of children’s literature. But I was happy to give up an hour or so of my time to see what Olwen Bowen was up to while her partner was busy hammering away at Broome Stages.


The Hepzibah Omnibus, by Olwen Bowen [Davies]
London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1936

Dear Rat, by Julia Cunningham (1961)

Cover of paperback edition of "Dear Rat"I’m a great believer in the miracle of serendipity. For me, it usually takes the form of the thing that appears in my path while I’m looking for something else. In this case, it was a children’s book that fate had arranged to have misplaced in a shelf of literary fiction in a bookstore in Ellensburg, Washington. I was rapid losing interest in browsing any further, since it was obvious that the store’s stock was almost entirely made up of recent trade paperbacks, when I pulled out a rare hardback, a thin volume titled Dear Rat. I quickly twigged that it was a children’s book from the illustrations, but there was something so likable about the book’s opening lines that I had to buy it: “I am a rat. I’m tough and I’m tender. I know my way around, thanks to having been bounced off the hard surfaces of the world.”

Dear Rat is narrated by Andrew, a rat from Humpton, Wyoming who finds himself in Chartres, France, having smuggled his way onto a freighter and then hopped a train from Le Havre. He quickly runs into the worst and the best that France has to offer. The worst is a thug named Gorge, a local rat gangster whose henchmen dust up Andrew before he manages to get away.

The best is a great building that confronts him when he scurries out of the cellar where he’s gone in search of food: “My brain searches around in my head like a squirrel for a name for this great, wonderful thing. It comes up with ‘cathedral’ and then quiets down again into blank astonishment.” He’s stumbled onto the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres . Wandering inside, he is struck speechless by a statue of a lady on a pillar wearing a crown of gold studded with jewels.

The worst and the best becoming intertwined in a caper that leads Andrew to the court of King Depuis Longtemps the IV, ruler of the Paris sewers and into a romance with the King’s daughter, Angelique Rocqueville de Chenonceau de Tournevallance de Mistraille de Chauminceparcyne de Lot (which is just a big mouthful of French nonsense), or Angie for short. Andrew discovers there’s a rat (sorry) in the court in the form of the Prime Minister, who subjects him to a battle of wits–or, as Andrew puts it, “plays checkers” with him. An upstanding character and a little American ingenuity, however, and, as you might expect, the hero gets the girl.

Dear Rat was Julia Cunningham’s second book, and shared many elements with her first, The Vision of François the Fox (1960), which was also set in France and told the story of a scavenging critter who tries to become a saint after being moved by something he sees in a cathedral. Cunningham had spent a year living in France, and French themes would make their way into a number of her books.

Cunningham’s best-known book, Dorp Dead (1965), about a boy who finds himself trapped as the ward of an abusive grandfather, was one of the first modern works for children to treat a dark subject openly and deliberately, and is now considered a fore-runner of the Young Adult genre. It was reissued back in 2002 but is out of print once again.

Cunningham knew something about grim childhoods. Her father abandoned his family when Julia was six and never returned. Her mother struggled to raise two children on her own, which became even harder when the Depression hit and what was left of the family’s money was wiped out. She made her way through a series of low-paid jobs for nearly twenty years before she saved up enough for her trip to France. In the late 1950s, she moved to Santa Barbara, California, where she worked in a bookstore and continued to send manuscripts to publishers until she sold The Vision of François the Fox Houghton Mifflin.

Cunningham had considerable success as a children’s author. Burnish Me Bright (1970) was selected as a New York Times Outstanding Book for the year, The Treasure Is the Rose (1973) was a National Book Award Finalist, Come to the Edge (1977) won a Christopher Award, and Flight of the Sparrow (1980) won a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor. But then, in 1986, her publisher, Pantheon, dropped its children’s book line and her contract along with it. She kept writing and submitting manuscripts, but it was not until 2001, when Susan Hirschmann of Greenwillow Books brought her back in print with The Stable Rat and Other Christmas Poems. Cunningham never married, but was close friends with a fellow children’s author in Santa Barbara, Clyde Bulla, and mentored other writers in her community. Her brother John Cunningham was also a writer, mostly working in Westerns. His story, “Tin Star,” was the basis of the movie High Noon. I highly recommend reading her obituary in the Santa Barbara Independent website.

Dear Rat is available through OpenLibrary.org (link), as is Dorp Dead (link), Macaroon, Onion Journey, a lovely little Christmas fable (link), Macaroon (link), The Treasure Is the Rose (link), and several others. Although the site has a link for The Vision of François the Fox as well, it’s an error and leads to a Spanish encyclopedia from the 1800s.


Dear Rat, by Julia Cunningham
New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1961

If Everybody Did, by Jo Ann Stover

I vividly remember a few of the first books I encountered as a child. Though I never knew the names of their authors until I had kids of my own and started taking them to the library, I know I was fascinated by Ingri and Edgar d’Aulaire’s George Washington and Norse Myths. I don’t know if it was Wotan or Odin, but one of those Norse gods set in my mind as the father in “Our Father, who art in heaven,” and I never could quite accept what they taught us in Sunday School about God being Love. I thought Jesus was the nice, gentle guy who protected the little children from getting smote by God, all wrathful over something we did wrong.

Fortunately, the image that stuck with me the most was something a lot funnier:
Squeezed Cat
My family had one or more cats pretty much the whole time I was growing up, and a few of them endured hours of being picked up by the middle and lugged around by one of us adoring little boys–the way it seems all little kids carry cats:
Squeeze the Cat
After having this book read to me and looking through it over and over, I started to consider if maybe there were gentler ways to pick up the cat. See, the message of the book, as I understood it at least, was that if everybody did something like pick the cat up by the stomach and carry them all around the house, well, then, kitties would end up all pinched up in the middle. Which does look pretty uncomfortable, though funny.

Every once in a while in recent years, the image of that pinched kitty would come to me again and I would rack my brain to try to remember what the name of that book was. But I always drew a blank. I know I never came across it in trips to the library with my own kids, so it struck me recently that whatever it was, it might be a candidate for a mention on this site.

Out of the blue, it occurred to me to do a search on “What If Everybody Did?” It came up blank. So I tried, “If Everybody Did”, and lo and behold, there it was on Amazon:
Squeeze the Cat
And it was in print.

If Everybody Did is nothing more than a collection of illustrations of what might happen if everybody did what kids often tend to do: track in mud, leave toys on the staircase, leave water running in the sink, or wipe dirty hands on the wall or window. Some of the extreme results are pretty comical, but in my view, nothing tops the pinched kitty.

Jo Ann Stover wrote and illustrated a few other children’s books, including They Didn’t Use Their Heads, which, like If Everybody Did, has been brought back in print by Bob Jones University Press. Yes, the fundamentalist Christian college that seems from the outside, at least, a little Stepford Wives-like. Apparently these two books are popular with home schoolers.

Still, I’d highly recommend If Everybody Did for any parent trying to foster some manners in a two-to-five year old. At least one of their bad habits is in here, and I can offer personal testimony that seeing the exaggerated consequences is a good way to turn it around. I know there are a few kitties lounging around Cat Heaven now who owe Jo Ann Stover a bit of gratitude for not having to walk around our house looking like an hourglass.

If Everybody Did, by Jo Ann Stover
New York City: David McKay, 1960
Greenville, South Carolina: Journey Forth Press, 1989

“Rediscover some of the underappreciated children’s classics of the past,” by Karen MacPherson

Source: “Rediscover some of the underappreciated children’s classics of the past,” by Karen MacPherson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Tuesday, May 30, 2000

“Every once in a while, however, it’s good to take a step back and rediscover some of the underappreciated classics of the past. It’s a bit like finding buried treasure. Two such treasures are Thimble Summer by Elizabeth Enright (Dell, $4.50) and Meet the Austins by Madeleine L’Engle (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16). Thimble Summer won a Newbery Medal, the most prestigious children’s book award, while Meet the Austins successfully challenged a publishing taboo.”