Editorial 163: March 2007
Philippa Pearce was not a prolific writer given that her writing career spanned 47 years from the publication of Minnow on the Say in 1958 to The Little Gentleman in 2005. She was, however, profoundly influential for children’s literature in the unique way that she combined richly imagined events and a strong sense of landscape with inner developmental themes. These elements came together in her second book, the wonderful Tom’s Midnight Garden , truly a modern classic, which won the Carnegie Medal. In this issue of BfK we devote our Classics in Short page to Philippa’s The Battle of Bubble and Squeak while in our Briefing pages Julia Eccleshare pays tribute to her both as a writer and as a ‘gracious, generous and always fascinating’ person.
Failing our children
In his review of Hugh Cunningham and Michael Morpurgo’s The Invention of Childhood (see p.16), Peter Hollindale quotes Morpurgo as saying: ‘If I were to choose a golden age for children, it wouldn’t be now.’
Unicef would agree. A Unicef report published in February (Report Card 7, Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-being in Rich Countries) is the first study of childhood physical and emotional well-being across industrialised countries. It analysed 40 separate indicators based on existing data and placed the UK last in the survey of 21 nations, which included Europe as well as the United States, Canada and Japan. British children came last in three of the six categories analysed, finding themselves in the bottom third for two others. In the second most successful category, education, the UK was ranked 17th, way behind the former eastern bloc countries Poland and the Czech Republic.
It seems that our children experience worst levels of poverty, regard themselves as less happy, drink more alcohol, take more drugs and have more underage sex than children in other industrialised countries. We also have the highest rate of teenage pregnancy. Psychological problems such as depression, eating disorders and self harm were not part of Unicef’s assessment but given that such disturbances go hand in hand with the behaviours described above it would seem likely that they are part of the misery experienced by too many of our children and young people.
What has this to do with children’s literature? The terrain of deprivation, both emotional and material, is the subject matter of many fine books for children and may thus provide a dialogue and context for their own experiences of the world. What our children need above all, however, is loving attention and communication and we can in part provide this through the medium of story, whether it is written in a book that we share or whether it is the child’s own story.
