The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (25 page)

2. J. M. Barrie (1860–1937),
Peter Pan

Peter Pan
, of course, is an Edwardian classic by Scottish author J. M. Barrie, who also wrote
My Lady Nicotine
, a delightful work in praise of smoking, and was a contemporary of Jerome K. Jerome. His
Peter Pan
is a classic study of the desire for freedom and, in common with the best children’s books, features a land free of parental intrusion: there are no authority figures. The book was written in 1904 and Barrie’s intention was to put some fairy magic into the world: ‘Every time a child says, “I don’t believe in fairies,” there is a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead.’

3. William Blake (1757–1827)

It’s never too early for some good old-fashioned English mysticism. George Orwell mentions in his essay ‘Why I Write’ that his first poem, written at the age of five, was
inspired by Blake’s ‘The Tyger’. I now take much pleasure in reading that poem to the children while they are eating their tea. Other poems in
Songs of Innocence
and
Songs of Experience
are simple enough too for children to get something out of, and all the while you feel that you are educating yourself at the same time, allowing the ‘voice of the bard’ to knock around in your consciousness. And of course their primary school teachers will be most impressed if your kids mention their knowledge of Blake at school. Blake was the great English defender of passion, then under attack from the new forces of the Industrial Revolution and its ‘dark satanic mills’.

4. Enid Blyton (1897–1968)

We can forget about Noddy, but the Famous Five books and
The Faraway Tree
have stood the test of time. I think the appeal of the Famous Five lies again in their independence. While Uncle Quentin and Aunt Fanny hover in the background, the Five’s adventures are all unsupervised, unplanned and self-directed: you do not get titles like
Five Get Driven to Chessington World of Adventures in Their Parents’ People Mover
. The Five even help the adults in practical ways on occasion: for example, they foil a plot by some crims to rip off Uncle Quentin by buying his island because they know that there is a secret cache of gold ingots there.
The Faraway Tree
is like a computer game in its inventiveness and number of levels and lands, and its goblins and other strange creatures. Again, these books are available second-hand for virtually nothing. I love the old fifties red hardbacks of the Famous Five. They have the best drawings. Anne actually looks quite fanciable. The words simply poured out of Enid Blyton: she would
supposedly write a 50,000 word Famous Five book in a week.

5. Raymond Briggs (1934–)

One of the few contemporary children’s writers and artists of real genius. I could read
Jim and the Beanstalk, Fungus the Bogeyman, The Snowman
and, of course, the unbearably sad
When the Wind Blows
again and again, particularly
Fungus the Bogeyman
with its Beckettian nihilism. Every time you read it you find something new. Briggs is a source of endless delight and he has something to say, too.

6. Lewis Carroll (1832–98)

Lewis Carroll was the pen-name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who was also a mathematician. Inspired by the young Alice Liddell (a ukulele player) to write the Alice books, he filled them with crazy figments of his fertile imagination. Again there are no parents in Alice’s world – only referred to as a hostile ‘they’ – but the worlds Alice wanders through seem to be a satire on the messed-up logic of adults, with self-important clock-watching bureaucrats and absurd rules that defy reason. The Alice books tell us how ridiculous and confusing the adult world must appear to a bright child. All the adults are ridiculous, vain, cruel, conceited, sentimental, weak, bullying. Add to that some excellent poetry (it’s worthwhile learning ‘Jabberwocky’ off by heart for use in power cuts) and John Tenniel’s illustrations, and you have another work of genius which I could happily read and ponder from
now to eternity. But even better to read them out aloud and practise your funny voices. I particularly like doing the hypocritical walrus:

in hammy RSC tones.

7. Roald Dahl (1916–90)

My friend the writer and critic James Parker does not, in fact, recommend Roald Dahl to the idle parent for reading out loud: ‘Because there’s so much damn SHOUTING in his books – it’s exhausting!’ But – with the exception of the lamentable
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
– I disagree. I’ve loved reading Roald Dahl to the kids, in particular
Danny, the Champion of the World
, although that book does have the downside of making one feel a bit inferior when it comes to being a Good Dad.

8. Daniel Defoe (1660–1731)

Rousseau, the anti-book man, makes an exception for
Robinson Crusoe
, written in 1719. He hates
Aesop’s Fables
and any tales that attempt moral instruction. But Crusoe, he thinks, sets a good example to Emile: ‘It will serve to test our progress towards a right judgement, and it will always be read with delight, so long as our taste is unspoilt.’ Rousseau considers that
Robinson Crusoe
will stimulate a desire for practical
knowledge: ‘The child who wants to build a storehouse on his desert island will be more eager to learn than the master to teach. He will want to know all sorts of useful things and nothing else…’ Rousseau, rather worryingly, does not praise the literary merit of the book; he is only really a fan of it as some sort of spur to useful activity, whereas the idle parent has a more ‘art for art’s sake’ attitude. It’s also worth pointing out that
Robinson Crusoe
is very much the story of a loner: how does the isolated individual cope in a hostile world? Rousseau also, we remember, isolated Emile. But the idle parent, on the other hand, wishes to surround his offspring with people. We believe in community. The more, the merrier. Having said all that, this is a wonderful book and a pleasure for adults too.

9. Charles Dickens (1812–70)
, A Christmas Carol

Kids can be introduced to Dickens at quite a young age, and
A Christmas Carol
, the classic attack on greed, is clearly the one to start with, read by the fire at Christmas time with all the kids arranged on the armchair of a kindly paterfamilias. Reading
A Christmas Carol
can also help the parents develop their own appreciation of Dickens (another example of a genius who didn’t really go to school). What a fluid, sympathetic, imaginative and, of course, humane writer he was.

10. Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
, Sherlock Holmes mysteries

While Conan Doyle always felt that the huge success of his Holmes books rather deflected attention from what he
considered to be his more important work on theosophy and spiritualism, we thank him heartily for providing us with so many good reads. Children’s writer Michael Morpurgo reckons that
The Hound of the Baskervilles
makes the best introduction to Holmes. But all are great fun to read aloud, largely because the language is so clean and precise and there is a lovely vein of humour running through the tales. Again there is fun to be had with the voices: can you get Holmes’ thin reedy voice? And shouldn’t Watson be portrayed as less bluff and daft than the Watson of popular imagination?

11. Kenneth Grahame (1859–1932)

The Wind in the Willows
combines magic with a superb satirical denunciation of the capitalist-futurist-neophyte figure in the shape of Mr Toad. Toad today would be a computer addict, constantly upgrading and telling his friends about the latest social-networking site. Rat and Mole and Badger represent a more old-fashioned, providential approach to life, where ease and pleasure and plenty come to those who wait for it. Toad’s addiction to motoring can also be seen as a metaphor for alcoholism. The attempts Badger and the authorities make to wean him off it and his wily escapes have all the hallmarks of the addiction process: Toad is a kind of Doherty or Winehouse.

12. The Brothers Grimm (1785–1863, 1786–1859)

Although
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
are occasionally a shade too moralistic (‘and that’s what happens to naughty boys’), I still
enjoy reading them a great deal. I splashed out on a giant hardback with colour plates by the ghoulish Arthur Rackham. There are plenty of bloodthirsty scenes: ‘Hansel and Gretel’ still shocks and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is fantastically gruesome. (Avoid at all costs the sanitized modern Ladybird versions of these tales.) Again, fairy tales were a nineteenth-century phenomenon, first published in the UK in 1823 under the title
German Popular Stories
. Maybe their appearance at that time was all part of a Victorian plot to communicate pious morality to children, and as such we ‘art for art’s sake’ readers should reject them. But I don’t think actually that children learn moral ideas from such tales, however crudely the moral is shoved down their throats. I think they simply appreciate them on the level of a story. Therefore it does not really matter whether or not the story has some kind of moral purpose. Grimm’s tales are clearly classics and there is the sense that they have existed in one form or another for centuries.

13. Joel Chandler Harris (1845–1908)
, Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings

Harris, a journalist in America’s Deep South, developed a love of the tales told by the black slaves in the plantations and wrote them down. The stories are centred around the trickster character Brer (short for ‘brother’) Rabbit. There is a nice retelling of the tales in a modern edition by storyteller Karima Amin. Talking animals, tricks and games, and a general outwitting of adults: wonderful stuff.

14. Charles Kingsley (1819–75)

The Water Babies
used to enchant me as a child, partly, I think, because the hero’s name is Tom, a poor oppressed chimney sweep who turns into a little cherub with fins and joins a magical underwater world. Other worlds are clearly of great fascination to kids: think of Narnia,
His Dark Materials, Peter Pan, Mr Benn
… I remember fancying, in a vague way, Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby. She was gorgeous. The gentle Kingsley, a radical Christian socialist, may be attempting to teach some ethics here. But I took not one whit of moral instruction from the book. I suppose it could be accused of sentimentality, like Dickens and many other Victorian works. But then Victorian literary sentimentality around childhood was no more than a horrified reaction to the Industrial system and what it did to kids. No previous age had had to cope with such suffering imposed on such a wide scale and with such methodical cruelty. This sort of radical proclamation of innocence starts with Blake, and I see Kingsley as following in his tradition.

15. Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)
, The Jungle Book

Together with Oscar Wilde, we have decided that we are in favour of good writing rather than good morals. So we are free to love Kipling’s
The Jungle Book
, written in 1894. As the above-mentioned (
page 201
) James Parker writes: ‘The fight scenes are tremendous and readily apprehensible in their vigour even by the kid who is somewhat bamboozled by the lingo.’

Choosing books of quality has the happy result of making you more well read. Through story time, you will become a fount of knowledge: your friends will ask advice on kids’ stories and you will begin to develop views and theories. To make kids’ books interesting, you simply need to take an interest in kids’ books. So you can no longer complain that as a result of having kids you have no time to read. Twenty minutes a night with the children will get you through a huge amount of literature.

16. Edward Lear (1812–88)

What fun we’ve had with ‘The Jumblies’, ‘The Pobble Who Had No Toes’, ‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose’ and ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’. Children are fascinated by the fact that Lear was one of twenty-one children (his father was a bankrupt banker). I read these poems out to the kids while we are eating tea, and through repetition they start to recite bits by heart, a good skill to encourage as it both trains the memory and teaches rhythm and rhyme. Even little Henry can join in at points:

Lear’s poems appeal greatly to adults as well, because really they deal with adult themes: love, loss, yearning and the desire to run away to a distant land. Think, too, about ‘The Jumblies’: it’s a celebration of single-minded eccentricity.
When the Jumblies sail away all the people at home predict disaster:

But when the Jumblies return home and the land-locked Victorian doubters see how tall they’ve grown they change their minds:

Lear is unsurpassed in rhythm and rhyme. He is the best, and, again, you can pick up a paperback of
A Book of Bosh
for practically nothing.

17. C. S. Lewis (1893–1963)

The great charm of the Narnia stories, apart from the obvious attraction of Narnia being 100% parent-free, is that C. S. Lewis essentially recreates a medieval landscape, where virtues such as honour, virtue, chivalry and courtesy are paramount, and where dignity and beauty are central values. (Lewis was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University from 1954 until his death.) The Middle Ages are tremendously appealing to children, quite instinctively so, perhaps because of the drama, passion and splendour of the age: they are all over Disney films, and films like
Shrek
, for example. And there is plenty in Lewis’s books to amuse and delight parents. We’ve now read the whole lot. What I
particularly love about C. S. Lewis is that, like Roald Dahl, he is completely unashamed about using his books to express his own prejudices. He is particularly opposed to progressive, non-religious schooling, which he sees as taking the magic out of life. Remember that one pair of children go to school at a bully-ridden establishment called Experiment House, where books about dragons are banned and the parents are vegetarian.