Having thrown out my planned opening speech about blank canvasses and first page-itis, I decided that agonising over what the first recommendation from feasts and treasure should be would be an inefficient use of my time. My time would be much better spent making chicken casserole and rocky road bars with my housemate and proofreading an essay on marine risk management, I thought. Well, I did that. But that left me free to agonise over what to recommend on feasts and treasure while drinking tea and eating rocky road bars.
Hopped up on dark chocolate and marshmallows, therefore, I got thinking about what kind of books I read when I was younger, and, based on the books that I read, the adventures with which I just assumed my holidays would be filled. This came back to me recently, when I was talking about Enid Blyton with the daughter of friends of mine, and I asked her if she enjoyed the mystery stories (The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, The Five Find-Outers etc etc) like I had when I was her age. Connie nodded slowly and said yes, she did, except...and she paused, and I realised I knew exactly what the problem was. She and her friends had never discovered a secret passage, had never stumbled upon a smuggling ring, had never foiled a plot to steal a prize Siamese cat, had never slipped out of the house at dead of night wearing rubber-soled shoes.
It was exactly the same for me, my siblings and my cousins. We were staying with our grandparents and we were the Red Flash Gang. We had wrote messages in code and had secret meetings in our den and we made plans and drew maps. We went round the house, knocking on walls, sure that there must be secret passages somewhere. Surely. We had everything except a mystery to solve. Then, the china shop opposite my grandparents’ house was burgled. A concrete block through the window. A smash and grab. Breakfast consumed at record pace, we were out on the pavement, my brother’s Know-How Book of Detection in hand, looking for clues. Of course, even then, I think we all knew somewhere at the back of our heads that the kind of people who ram raided china shops in the middle of the night were, in reality, not likely to be the kind of people who would lock pesky kids in an attic, leaving the key in the lock on the other side and thus allowing for a break-out*. The real world wasn’t like that really, and even if it was, we weren’t going to try and find out.
It was at about this age that I was introduced to Arthur Ransome’s series of books beginning with Swallows and Amazons, a story about a group of children having exciting and yet strangely plausible adventures on an island in the middle of Lake Windermere. No European Princes or smuggling rings here, just sailing and camping and pemmican (whatever that was). I had little experience of camping and zero experience of sailing, but what made the stories so real to me was the fact that I recognised the children. They were like me and my friends. Some of them were brave and a bit reckless, some of the them wanted to be brave but worried about what the grownups would say and some of them just plain worried.
“It’s awfully cold,” said Dorothea at last. “Standing about like this.” She had been very happy, waking up in this new place, but those children in their boat had somehow spoilt things. What fun thy were having, six of them, all together. A new story began to shape itself in her mind, one that nobody would be able to read without tears ... The Outcasts. By Dorothea Callum. Chapter I. ‘The two children, brother and sister, shared their last few crumbs and looked this way and that along the deserted shore. Was this to be the end?’“Oh well,” said Dick. “We can’t help not having a boat. Let’s go and find a really good place for an observatory.”
Of the rest of the story, there are only two things you really need to know: first, it snows and second, for a reason I won’t spoil, the children find their holiday extended. Not that there’s anything wrong with mysteries (some of the books in Ransome’s series have a lot more in the way of drama and suspense), but there has always been something really pleasing to me about Winter Holiday; the adventures (and they are still adventures, there is no doubt about that) that the children have seemed somehow more realistic to me as a nine year old, and less unattainable than the exploits of the Famous Five.
As I said in my previous post, my intention with feasts and treasure is to put together a collection of book recommendations, tagging and archiving them in a way that makes it possible to search for books for, for instance, an eight year old boy. The problem, however, with recommending books for specific ages (and this subject could and quite probably will fill a blog post all by itself), is that though it’s a great place to start, if you just stick to buying ‘age banded’ books based on what a blog or publisher or bookseller suggests, children could reject books that are actually perfect for their reading ability because they’re “too babyish”, or get demoralised that that the book that is supposedly for their age group is way too hard for them. It can, however, be an excellent place to start, especially if you allow for other factors in your search. I also intend to tag these recommendations by theme, so it would be possible, for example, to come looking for a child who loves adventures stories and astronauts.
*I could totally do this. All I would need would be a piece of newspaper and a length of wire. And for the door to have a gap under it.
