26 Fruits

Last week came the news that Enid Blyton’s publishers are bringing out new editions of her Famous Five books for children. What’s new? They’ve changed the language “sensitively and carefully” to remove old-fashioned, dated expressions.

So no more “Mercy me!” now replaced by “Oh no!”  I see the exclamation mark survives. But I also feel a loss, an ebbing away of character. Other changes leave me with the same feeling: “fellow” to “old man”, “it’s all very peculiar” to “it’s all very strange”, “swotter” to “bookworm”, “housemistress” to “teacher”, “school tunic” to “uniform”, “she must be jolly lonely all by herself” to “she must get lonely all by herself”.  “?” “!”. I find it a little strange, not to say peculiar.

This is not because I’m a great Enid Blyton fan. She wasn’t part of my childhood but she was very popular when I was growing up. That was much closer than now to the time when the books were published in the 1940s and 1950s. The appeal then was certainly not that these books represented real life – at least not for most of their readers. Where I lived in north London kids didn’t go around exclaiming “Mercy me” and talking about “jolly japes” except as ways to show an early appreciation of irony. The books, and the social settings in which the characters played, described fantasy worlds even though no unusual creatures were harmed in the creation of the stories.

The language was peculiar then. It’s even stranger now. But that’s part of growing up and learning about the world. I remember loving the hymn we sang at school: “There is a green hill far away without a city wall”. I didn’t really understand why the green hill would need a city wall. It was only later that I realised that “without” once meant “outside”. I would never dream of changing those words to “make them more accessible to modern readers”. Through idiosyncracies of language, often from other times, cultures and social backgrounds, we develop a love of language and a broader understanding of life.

I think too of my own early reading experience. I came quite late to reading but once I started and discovered the pleasure in it, I couldn’t stop. The book that did this for me was read out loud by my teacher (not a housemistress) at the end of the school day over a number of weeks. The book was The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, a senior official at the Bank of England in Edwardian days, and written in a language of that time. I sometimes wonder what kind of children’s story Mervyn King might write today.

Anyway I decided to dip into The Wind in the Willows again, picking  a chapter called “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”. I still find it quite beautiful.

“Fastening their boat to a willow, the friends landed in this silent, silver kingdom, and patiently explored the hedges, the hollow trees, the runnels and their little culverts, the ditches and dry waterways. Embarking again and crossing over, they worked their way up the stream in this manner, while the moon, serene and detached in a cloudless sky, did what she could, though so far off, to help them in their quest; till her hour came and she sank earthwards reluctantly, and left them, and mystery once more held field and river.”

The biggest mistake we make is to underestimate the intelligence and the potential of children. It all starts with language. If we expect too little of the language of children, we’ll also expect too little of them as adults.