Moheard's Blog

An invitation to the launch of the 1066 Children’s Book Awards 2011, made me think about children’s reading and the supply of books. Helenswood School has a well-stocked library and a committed librarian in Alison Kingwell. This exciting local book award has been put together by a group of Secondary School Librarians to encourage and promote reading for pleasure and the enjoyment of fiction books by pupils of all ages. Four books have been chosen for 2011 and between January and March 2011 the books will be read by reading groups across the seven 1066 area schools. A winner will then be chosen by the pupils who will vote for their favourite books via video conference between the participating schools. (From: http://www.1066sba.co.uk)

In the audience was a selection of students from these schools, who had some interesting questions for the two past-winning authors there. One was ‘what were your favourite books as a child?’ This made me think about my own reading habits as a child.

At home, we had a small bookcase with sliding glass doors, the shelves containing only a cookery book, the odd reference volume, and for some reason a couple of bibles with fancy clasps. I looked at the books often, knowing that the woman at her new gas stove in the frontispiece photograph of the cookery manual was definitely my own mother. The huge Co-op department store in Lewisham had a small book area where I spent hours browsing, smelling and feeling the books.  I could not resist a lovely thick poetry collection with a red cover, and bought it – or did I nick it perhaps?

Every Christmas my parents always bought me an Odhams book. These were advertised on the bottom right-hand corner of the Daily Herald front page. The Odhams Book of Comics;  The Children’s Wonder Book in Colour; The Children’s Own Wonder Book. Every year, a new title.

The library in my South London grammar school was a serious, dark panelled room full of heavy tomes, some art books I remember, but no fiction to attract our imaginations. In those days there were no ‘teenagers’, so people didn’t write stories for our age group. We were aware of the classic children’s books of course, but we knew nothing of  the gritty adventures of boy detectives, families-in-crisis dramas, or vampires. I think I went from Enid Blyton to Ian Fleming when I was 12. From then on I read mostly adult books – not only fiction such as The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seton, and books by Rumer Godden, but titles such as Seven Years in Tibet, and The Last Days of Pompeii by Bulwer Lytton.

Later I discovered Kerouac and Salinger, probably at the same time that we ‘beatniks’ found underground films and Ingmar Bergman in the cinema (actually, only at the NFT). I still have a programme for the NFT around 1959, called Beat, Square and Cool. John Cassavetes Shadows was the height of with-it culture, or so it seemed.

Now there must be thousands of books for children published every year. And who makes the decisions for which books will be read?

Browsing online for Odhams books, I found the actual cookery book my mum had. Just imagine a child nowadays reading this book avidly – the recipes, the black and white photos of unappetising dishes. I loved it!

As an only child in south London, I spent a lot of time gazing into shop windows, marvelling at the goods on display. There was Vyners of Hollywood with it’s two corner windows crammed to the ceiling with glamorous shoes. These had stupendously high platform soles and were shown in their knobbly snakeskin or red leatherette glory. I even enjoyed examining the beautiful prams in Swaddling’s; why did I as a ten-year old, want to look at baby carriages? One favourite was an art shop with varying size tins of Derwent coloured pencils, boxes of paints, and wondrous wooden lay figures posing in frozen attitudes among the tubes and brushes. Most of the shops where I lived had vibrant window displays – sweets, cigarettes, canned food, fabrics, furniture. The sweet shops were the most deliciously appealing; boxes of Caley’s Chocolates, rows of jars full of colourful confectionery, and at Easter, sugar-spun peep eggs; and the tobacconist shop windows piled high with sturdy pyramids of Players or Craven A cigarettes.

The following contains a Hazard Warning: For Adults Only! (Remember, smoking kills!!)

In the Fifties, cigarette manufacturers employed reps who crossed the country, building advertising towers of packets for the shopkeepers’ windows. I had a holiday job with the Imperial Tobacco Company, counting the numbers of dummy packets each rep had used in their displays. I was given one of the packets – Players I remember – and played a splendid joke on my mum. The fags, which were filled with crepe paper looked absolutely real, and on offering her one, she astonishingly puffed away at half of the dummy then pulled a face and realised there was something a bit off about it!  I probably laughed like a drain. (I had inherited my dad’s childish delight in playing practical jokes.)

Although I haven’t smoked for yonks, I love to reminisce with other reformed smokers about the names of cigarettes – De Reszke (1/10d for twenty), posh red boxes of Du Maurier, Weights in packets of 5, Churchman No 1, Balkan Sobraine (oh those pastel cigs!), and ‘You’re never alone with a Strand’. The last fag I ever smoked was Guards (how could I be so down-market?) I collected the coupons found in each box, and impatiently cashed them in for a dartboard and a mini barbecue consisting of an aluminium foil tray and a tiny bag of coal. I can still remember the tune for the slogan on the Bristol TV commercial. Bright and breezy young things racing along in an open-top car to the words: “Today’s cigarette is a Bristol. Bristol is today’s cigarette! …. Briii-stol.”

Of course, when I was in my ‘Bohemian’ phase, I rolled my own with black licorice papers. Swanky.

Sugar-spun peep eggs bought in

Oxford Street Woolworths in the 1960s

Leo is a fledging collector, and the things he collects appear in some of his adventures. I used to scour junk markets in the 60s and 70s, revelling in spotting and buying paper ephemera, tin toys, seaside souvenirs, cracked alabaster peep eggs, toy film strips, magnetic dogs, cardboard dancing Betty Grables, plastic whistling birds, and plaster pigs pooing long tails of ash from their behinds. For many years all these handsome and desirable objects were displayed around the house; but now everyone has latched on to the kitsch value of all those vanishing remnants of popular culture. (Mine are now stored in boxes in the attic, and when I come across one of my items of desire, I experience a faint tinge of sadness – at its fragility, its essence of the past – and glee that I found it first, before those retro-designers in their Brick Lane studios were born!)

The sugar peep eggs above are still in good condition wrapped in their cellophane, although I bought them forty years ago. In my childhood these eggs were bigger I’m sure. I stared at them with longing through the shop window, but I don’t remember ever, ever getting one. Perhaps today’s collectors were deprived of coveted toys as kids?

I now collect all the books and ephemera I can find and afford (usually on eBay), on certain illustrators and graphic artists of the 30s, 40s and 50s; Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Barbara Jones, Barnett Freedman, Charles Mozley, Harold Jones among them. I suppose that these artists have a style which reminds me of my childhood — perhaps echoes of the Festival of Britain? There are others who were passionate about popular culture long before we knew the term, and many of them wrote splendid articles for The Saturday Book: Olive Cook, Enid Marx, Pearl Binder, Dodie Masterman, George Speaight. They were friends of Marguerite Fawdry who opened the first Pollock’s Toy Museum in Monmouth Street, and who I came to know well. I delight in these few degrees of separation.

See the first chapter where Leo meets Benjamin Pollock in his Hoxton toy shop.