Anxious about school, the eponymous pigeon states, “What if I learn too much!?! My head might pop off.” (The book itself poses no such risk.) The pigeon’s solution, after many pages of exclamation — he screeches “Whazza-Whazza-WHAA!?!” when he sees the school bus, for example — is to articulate the actual activities he will do at school and to realize that school isn’t some amorphous bogeyman. 

This is classic cognitive behavioral therapy — it’s decatastrophizing, performed on a pigeon. To be fair, this can be a useful technique for anxiety management. But why is it almost all that this book has to offer? There’s no vocabulary my daughter, at age 3, doesn’t know; there’s no syntax she doesn’t already utilize. The book eschews conventional written dialogue for speech bubbles — there’s not even a “the pigeon screeched” following his “Whazza-Whazza-WHAA!?!”  

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We see much of the same in other current best sellers, and in the young-reader books favored by many schools as the new academic year gets underway. The language is colloquial to an extreme. In Dragons Like Tacos (483 weeks on the Times list), a book that was also read at my daughter’s school, the narrator states, “Hey dragon, why do you guys like tacos so much?” In On the First Day of Kindergarten (two weeks on the list), we hear, “On the first day of kindergarten, I thought it was so cool riding the school bus to my school!” In The Smart Cookie (29 weeks on the list), which often reads like a therapist’s version of a child’s inner monologue, the titular cookie states, “I didn’t feel comfortable speaking up or sharing my ideas. I didn’t feel like a smart cookie.”

A few of these titles attempt a poeticism that falls short. “You did this job in your very own way. We needed a tough little truck today,” we read in Time for School, Little Blue Truck (44 weeks on the list). In the Magical Yet (7 weeks on the list), a story about a child attempting to learn a variety of new skills like bike riding (its cadences apparently and notably adopted from Dr. Seuss’s Oh the Places You’ll Go), we hear, “And now you won’t ride. No way. Not never. No riding for you, you’ll walk … forever.” It had seemed that at the end of those ellipses, we might encounter something more … complex. But alas, we don’t. 

Half of the 10 children’s picture books on the current Times list are about going to school. Four of those involve ways of managing the anxiety that might attend school. Five of the titles are focused on boosting the self-esteem of their readers. Even the potentially mythical Dragons Love Tacos is about a commonplace event — a taco party. (This is, in fairness, a source of its humor, lest I begin to sound too cantankerous.)

That is to say, this list, thematically, is extremely narrow. Diction-wise, syntactically, these books are even more so. These are books that meet my 3-year-old right where she is and take her no further. Though seemingly emotional (“And the STUFF!… There is sooooooooo much stuff to learn!” the pigeon wails), they relate, really, to a small fraction of her emotional life. They have very little of beauty, philosophy, morality, or character (unless the expression of anxiety counts). 

There is a particularly extreme counterexample to this to be found in The New England Primer, the primer of choice for more than a century of American teachers. First published in 1690, it was used regularly in classrooms until the mid-19th century. In a 1727 edition, children were marched right from the alphabet to vocabulary lists featuring words like “glory,” “absent,” “drunkenness,” “impudent,” and “fidelity,” and from there onto to the tale of the martyrdom of John Rogers, in which, “his wife, with nine small children, and one at her breast, followed him to the stake; with which sorrowful sight, he was not in the least daunted; but with wonderful patience, died courageously, for the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

With the pressing concern of salvation came high expectations. For their souls’ sake, children needed to distinguish the “abominable” (another vocabulary word) from the beautiful. (“What is God?” the primer states. “God is a Spirit, Infinite, Eternal, and Unchangeable, in his Being, Wisdom, Power, Holiness, Justice, Goodness, and Truth.”)  

I’m not suggesting we return to The New England Primer. But it’s clear that children can and should be introduced to diction, syntax, and concepts far beyond what is in much of our children’s literature today. I believe it is what they want. (My daughter often asks me, “When are we going to die?”)

After The New England Primer, children’s school primers grew increasingly simplified.  In the early 20th century, the rise of the “Look-Say” method, which advocated against phonics and for whole-word memorization using very simple vocabulary lists, culminated in the mind-numbingly repetitive Dick and Jane primers. Kids reared on these texts were forced to endure sentences like: “Jane said, ‘Run, run. Run, Dick, run. Run and see.’” 

In response to the outcry against these primers, William Spaulding, Theodore Geisel’s editor, commissioned the book that would become The Cat in the Hat. “Write me a story that first graders can’t put down,” Spaulding said, supplying Geisel (whose pen name was Dr. Seuss) with a list of the 348 simple words he was allowed to use — the Look-Say method, but fun. And it was. “It is fun to have fun/ But you have to know how,” says the Cat in the Hat. “I can hold up the cup/ And the milk and the cake!” It was more than fun — it was explosively popular. To date, The Cat in the Hat has sold more than 16 million copies; it continues to sell about half a million copies a year. It is often thought of as the quintessential children’s book.  

But we should think of The Cat in the Hat not as the quintessential children’s book, but as the quintessential children’s reader — a book a child can pick up when she begins to read on her own. In this, it is remarkable — energetic and comic and magically formed of the simplest words. Unfortunately, the popularity of Seuss enshrines simplicity as the central virtue of children’s literature, and this behemoth has come to swallow up all other possibilities. We also need a subgenre of children’s literature that feels more like literature.

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In childhood, our minds work differently. Children can learn multiple languages simultaneously without the enormous effort adults must put forth to achieve often worse results. This should also be the period in which they hear elevated language:  beautiful, beguiling, weighty, humorous — a version of adult language. It would be so much more effortlessly and naturally acquired than at any other time, and it, too, could be theirs — if only we’d read them the books that would bring it to them.   

There are books like this, even if they seem too hard to find. One notable example can be found in the works of William Steig, a near-contemporary of Seuss. One of Steig’s classics, Amos and Boris, tells the tale of a mouse on a sea journey: “One night, in a phosphorescent sea, he [Amos] marveled at the sight of some whales spouting luminous water. Lying on the deck of his boat gazing at the immense, starry sky, the tiny mouse Amos, a little speck of a living thing in the vast living universe, felt thoroughly akin to it all. Overwhelmed by the beauty and mystery of everything, he rolled over and over and right off the deck of his boat and into the sea.” 

Like The New England Primer, Steig’s work doesn’t shy away from the ultimate questions of life and of meaning, though here there are no clear answers. Treading water in a deep ocean, we read, Amos “began to wonder what it would be like to drown. Would it take very long? Would it feel just awful? Would his soul go to heaven? Would there be other mice there?” There is characterization and deep emotion. Amos is eager and temperamental; Boris, the whale who arises from deep in the ocean to rescue him, is practical and purposeful. They become fast friends. They cry when the inevitable occurs — Amos must live his life on land, and Boris in the ocean.  

Children are born into a sea of mysterious signals; it is in their nature to decode the strange world before them. Why, when we begin to read to them, do we so often present them with the little they already know? We should trust them, more often, with complexity in their literature. What they can’t yet grasp, they will grow to understand. There should be, off in the distance, at least a few of those luminous whales.

A strong case could be made that children’s literature, which by virtue of its audience often sheds the self-consciousness affecting many British writers, fits the bill perfectly: for what is childhood other than a lost and half-remembered homeland? An inward-looking British nationalism would owe more to the world of Brambly Hedge than the Lusiads or Kalevela: yet even Tolkien’s modern-day national epic, a conscious imitation of European nationalist myths, was explicitly written for children. Even the Edwardian high-summer whimsy of The Wind in the Willows is suddenly interrupted, in the “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” sequence, by a mystical, neo-pagan reverence for the spirits of the land. Tapping into the deeper wellsprings of cultural consciousness, children’s writing perhaps reveals hidden potentialities for such a project.

If we accept this thesis, then a suitable candidate, I would suggest, for such nationalist myth-making would be the postwar writer Rosemary Sutcliff’s series of novels, most of them ostensibly written for children, on Roman Britain and its violent collapse. For as Sutcliff remarked to an American audience, gathered to celebrate her work, “Children should be allowed the great themes, which are also often tragic themes, which they can receive and make use of better than most adults can.” Last year’s 70th anniversary of her most famous novel, that staple of the pre-Blair primary school library The Eagle of the Ninth, saw a modest flurry of appreciative retrospectives. Yet The Eagle, though her breakout book, is not representative of her mature body of work (which, by the way, offers passages of fine writing, particularly terse and beautiful nature-writing, far beyond that currently marketed towards adults). The Eagle is, essentially, a Kipling novel, directly influenced by her literary Sussex neighbor in space, if not time: indeed Puck of Pook’s Hill was Sutcliff’s childhood favorite.

The Eagle’s lead character, a young Roman officer, disguises himself as a native in a Boy’s Own adventure of self-discovery, leading him across the rainy Northwest Frontier to live among Pictland’s untamed frontier tribes, in their smoky mountain huts bedecked in the savage brilliance of “colorful native rugs”. The native tribes, driven to fury by “their holy men” to wage war against “the unbelievers” are, with great difficulty, outwitted by the decent, sensible young Roman subaltern, who then retires, like a good servant of the Raj, to live the quiet life of a Sussex country gentleman on his army pension. An obvious post-imperial novel, though perhaps not fully consciously, The Eagle is most interesting in establishing the mythic framework, and much of the anthropological quality, of her later, more morally and politically complex novels set within the context of the great Saxon migration — we might call it the Vortigernwave — that would carve an England from the land of the unwilling Britons.

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Ultimately, though, Sutcliff’s reputation ought to rest on her great adult Arthurian novel, Sword at Sunset, written in a period of what she described as trancelike “possession”. With the medieval Matter of Britain as her subject, Sutcliff imagines a world where a society that once seemed enduring crumbles into disrepair. Yet the love of Britain, and its strange and ancient insular civilization, drives its hero to a fierce, if doomed, rearguard defense, “that the things worth saving shall not go down into the dark”. Half-Roman and half-Briton — his battle cry is Yr Wydffa, the Welsh name for Snowdon whose official re-adoption is now resented by some Anglophones — her Artorius is torn between two worlds, that of Roman rationality and straight lines, and of native Celtic mysticism and curved and sinuous pattern-making.

This is a theme running throughout her books, in which the decent, sensible if officious Roman is an obvious stand-in for the modern Englishman, in a world where the Englishman’s actual ancestors are the wild invading barbarians. As she notes in the introduction to her children’s retelling of the Irish Ulster Cycle, “The Cuchulain Saga belongs to the Celts, the people of Ireland and Wales and the Highlands of Scotland, just as the story of Beowulf belongs to the Anglo-Saxons; that is very broadly speaking, to the English, and the Scottish Lowlanders. And neither Celt nor Saxon could have bred the other one’s story, for they belong to two quite different ways of thinking.” Fully adopting Matthew Arnold’s 19th-century distinction between the stolid, dependable Saxon, and the creative but erratic Celt, Sutcliff continues:

“However wild the happenings in the Saxon story, its feet remain firmly on the ground; and Beowulf and his companions are recognizably human beings grown to hero-size. But the Celtic tale leaps off into a world completely of the imagination, and the Red Branch Heroes have the blood of the Gods and the Fairy Kind (almost the same thing in Irish legend) running fiery in their veins. It is worth noticing this difference when reading either story, and remembering that in the main the people of Cuchulain and the people of Beowulf separately or mixed together are the stock that we in Britain are sprung from.”

A children’s writer today would not comfortably write the same thing, in the same way, yet a glance at Puffin novels of the Sixties and Seventies shows a world where the mythology of the British Isles, so bafflingly neglected today, was a common theme in postwar children’s writing. In other circumstances, we would term this, too, a kind of cultural nationalism: the creation of a shared corpus of myth spanning the British Isles, in which the Atlantic Archipelago, though at war with itself, is nevertheless a shared cultural unit.

For however distinct the Britons, or Picts, or Irish are in her novels, the Saxons or Romans are more different still: all the Celtic characters in her novels share a common religious and cultural worldview, and speak an apparently mutually intelligible language. Indeed, across her novels, Sutcliff creates her own pan-Isles vocabulary, gathered together from across dialects and eras with a brisk disregard for accuracy: a world of burns and bairns and kalegarths, where her British Celts say Sláinte as they down their anachronistic “fiery barley spirit”. Hibernicisms, of words and syntax, abound in her writing, whether justified by context or not: Sutcliff observed in her autobiography that her mother, of pure West Country extraction, would adopt a baffling Hiberno-English accent at moments of high emotion, “becoming Irish of the Irish. My father just used to wait patiently for the black mood to depart.”

From her Wessex mother, too, from a family devoted to the Raj and imperial service, Sutcliff claimed to derive a “residual trace of the second sight”. A believer in reincarnation, the increasingly physically disabled author, who chose to spend her life in the deep English countryside, overlaid her love for the land itself, for its “pale and changeful northern skies and the green plover calling”, with an awe-filled sense of its ancient, only partly buried power. Sutcliff’s Britain is an ancient, magical land, from which, at certain times and in certain remote places, great reserves of power can be summoned and drawn from. Magic may or may not be real — her rational, Romanized characters are ambivalent on the question — but, at times, it feels real enough to serve a political purpose.

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In just such a way, in Sword at Sunset, her Artorius, acclaimed as emperor within a circle of standing stones, “felt the great carved stone at the back of my heel, and something in me, in the touch of my heel against the stone, in my very loins that linked me with the earth and the gods and the stones of the Earth…” Britain is, to Sutcliff as many others, an ancient insular civilization unto itself: few other writers capture so succinctly both the natural beauty and the sheer strangeness of Britain, the enchanted weirdness of it, waiting to be drawn upon in time of need.

Though bred in the threatened softness of southern England, Sutcliff’s Late Roman heroes retreat to the upland peripheries of Wales, the Scottish Highlands and Borders, and the bleak moorlands of today’s northern England in search of personal and national renewal. Behind them they leave the great cities of Rome’s once-glorious British civilization, falling into ruin and squalor as the invading Saxons settle them, now “half derelict, the frescoed plaster falling from the walls, the fine Purbeck marble cracked and damp-stained, the gilding blackened”. It is the world, returned to again and again in her novels, of the Saxon poem, “The Ruin”, though told from the perspective of the Romano-British refugee fleeing to the safety of the western hills, and not the squatting interloper. Abandoning the cities, now falling into danger and disrepair, her characters lament the transience of the world that bred them, even as they seek to make their final stand in Deep Britain.

This is precisely the process described by the scholar of cultural nationalism John Hutchinson when he observed that one product of nationalist revivalism, when viewed as a comparative type, “was the unexpected ‘discovery’ of remote areas of natural beauty, or of great cultural significance, that because of their ‘wildness’ and ‘hidden’ quality became mysterious reservoirs of the national spirit.” These wild and untouched peripheries, whether Finland’s lakes and forests or the bleak expanses of Connemara, “became ramparts of the nation to which groups, especially alienated urban educated middle classes, could turn to escape assimilation into foreign values and experience moral regeneration, thereby embedding themselves in the land. The defense of these regions from foreign cultural or political threat galvanized powerful nationalist movements.”

Sutcliff’s heroes, objectively British nationalists, represent one iteration of this ideological current. In today’s nascent British nationalist movement, if the oft-discussed “MythoYookay” X account represents Britain’s current, fallen state, then its counterbalancing ideological colleague is the MythoBritannia account, which centers on Britain’s dramatic landscapes, with an emphasis on the mystical and otherworldly — Glastonbury Tor, holy wells, the last surviving rainforests. The gentle downs and fields of southern England are less often invoked than the bleak and dramatic peaks and valleys of Britain’s highland peripheries: these are wild, untouched landscapes, which through their careful curation speak to a Britain older and more magical than England alone. Consciously in MythoBritannia’s case, and perhaps unconsciously in Sutcliff’s, this retreat to the peripheries represents a reservoir of cultural Britishness, directly analogous to the classical nationalisms of the 19th and early 20th century, from which modern-day political strength can be drawn. Both invoke the spirits of a nation not dead but merely sleeping, ready to be summoned, like Arthur and his knights, in the trials ahead.

Sutcliff’s characters are victims of a once-proud imperial state that can no longer protect them, or their ancient way of life, in their own homeland. All is transience, and irreparable change, the unwanted result of political failure, experienced as a catastrophic loss. “When you thought about it, you realized that you were living in a world that might fall to pieces at any moment,” observes a character in The Lantern Bearers. “Rome is hollow rotten at the heart,” says the British warlord Carausius in The Silver Branch, “and one day she will come crashing down. A hundred years ago, it must have seemed that all this was for ever; a hundred years hence — only the gods know… If I can make this one province strong — strong enough to stand alone when Rome goes down, then something may be saved from the darkness.”

What did Sutcliff, with her claimed second sight, feverishly writing while “possessed” by something greater than herself, mean by returning again and again to this threatened, collapsing civilization, while writing in the very different circumstances of immediate postwar Britain? As she would herself say of Sword at Sunset’s Artorius to a later interviewer, “for me in a way he stands for Britain” at a time when “we’re awfully uncertain of our future. Therefore we feel a kind of kinship for the Dark Ages; and I think for this reason we feel in a way the need for something to back us up, in the same way as Arthur ‘lights up’ the Dark Ages. We have the need for an archetype of some sort to pull us together, to get us through this, to spread light into the darkness until we can get through to a better world.” Sutcliff’s late Roman world, in our increasingly contested transition from one kind of nation to quite another, is perhaps better suited to a 21st century adult audience than a postwar children’s one. Morally complex, startlingly violent, both elegiac and cynical, Sutcliff’s own writing represents a lost land in itself.

It is a sign of how far our self-imposed childishness has gone that grown-ups today are unashamed to express passion for books aimed at teenagers — or, to use the ubiquitous but optimistic American expression — “young adults”. Only the very crustiest resist the trend. Would he ever write a children’s book, the late Martin Amis was once asked. “If I had a serious brain injury,” he is supposed to have replied.

It is not only that grown-ups have failed to put aside children’s books, but that their attitude to grown-up things remains childish. Those whose day jobs (like mine) put them in regular contact with older teenagers have been remarking for a while on the increasing demand that fiction be “relatable”. Rebecca Mead defined the attribute in the New Yorker as one possessed by “a character or a situation in which an ordinary person might see himself reflected”. It has increasingly become a stick with which to beat works, often classic works, featuring characters or situations with whom it’s harder to identify. Anna Karenina, for instance, or Hamlet: who among us is a haunted Danish prince or Russian adulteress?

Childishness, Kant said, is “the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance”, and Mead’s case against relatability echoes him. “To demand that a work be ‘relatable’,” she says, expresses the expectation that “the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer … expects the work to be done for her.” If you can’t relate to Hamlet, in other words, you should be open to the possibility that the fault is yours, not Shakespeare’s.

But might there be a way to read children’s books without reading them childishly? The best case for the defence was made by C.S. Lewis in his apologia for reading fairy tales. “They accuse us of arrested development,” he said, “because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things?” I regularly return to the books of my childhood and find exactly what Lewis describes: “Being now able to put more in, of course I get more out.”

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The book of my adolescence to which I have recently returned is one to which I really oughtn’t to be able to “relate” at all, so socially alien are its setting and characters. Its protagonist and narrator is a 17-year-old English girl, an aspiring novelist and already talented diarist called Cassandra Mortmain, living with her impoverished aristocratic family in a crumbling (and rented) castle.

Her novelist father, who achieved some success with his obscure modernist debut (Jacob Wrestling), is blocked. Her stepmother, an artist’s model absurdly named “Topaz”, spends her evenings running naked through the castle grounds. Her elder sister Rose, desperately lonely, says things like: “It may interest you both to know that for some time now, I’ve been considering selling myself. If necessary, I shall go on the streets.” When Cassandra gently points out to her that she is unlikely to come by much trade in the country lanes of Suffolk, Rose asks their stepmother for “the fare to London and … a few hints”. Alas, her stepmother has none to offer.

I Capture the Castle has long inspired more than enough affection in adult readers to tolerate its whimsy; we see in it merits that can survive the reader’s passage into adulthood. It was written by Dodie Smith, best known as the author of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, another novel that can survive an adult reading — especially if you can turn away from the adorable, imperilled puppies to the fabulously camp creation that is their fur-loving nemesis, Cruella de Vil.

The tone of I Capture the Castle is less camp than fanciful. Cassandra and Rose find their bohemian, somewhat cut-off lives, transformed when two American brothers move to a nearby house and turn out to be their landlords. Rose falls in love — or so she claims — with one brother; the other brother dismisses her — or so he claims — as a mere “gold-digger”. Meanwhile, Cassandra struggles to reciprocate the affections of her “swain”, the maid’s son, who is “very fair and noble-looking” even if “his expression is just a fraction daft”. No one is saying what they think, and no one is ever fully admitting how they feel.

Are these anxieties “unrelatable” because they are about posh (if penniless) English people? Or, as I found, almost painfully relatable, because they are about the insecurities of adolescence? And because they come from asking those old questions: will I have the good fortune to find a relationship in which I can both love and be loved back, and a career that allows creative expression but also pays the bills?

Dodie Smith’s whimsy, then, is planted into a world where the stakes are real. Rose’s desperate urge to marry well — that is to say, marry wealth — is entirely familiar from the work of the author who must have been her inspiration. All the characters in I Capture the Castle are intensely aware of what W.H. Auden, in his wonderful lines about the world of Jane Austen, had called “the amorous effects of ‘brass’” — a phrase that could only come from a grown-up reader for whom Lizzie Bennett’s love life is now of less interest than the financial security of her impossible mother and sisters.

Likewise, Smith’s awareness of class. Young Stephen, the maid’s son and general dogsbody, is a more economically productive figure than any of the central characters in the book. But at one painful point he reminisces to Cassandra about when his mother told him “never to play with you unless I was invited. And to call you ‘Miss’, and never to presume. She had a hard job explaining what ‘presume’ meant.” What better image is there of the mechanisms of social class than that of a maid to an impoverished aristocrat explaining to a seven-year-old what it means to “presume”? An adequately empathetic child will understand enough to be sorry for Stephen; it may take a grown-up reader to be indignant on his behalf.

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Rereading the book, I was struck by the extent of Cassandra’s moral seriousness in a story that it is tempting to see as purely comic. Nearly every one of her diary entries seems to contain a mention of her feeling guilty or ashamed about one thing or another. Is this the paralysing self-consciousness of the teenager? Or does it reveal an important axis of gender difference? Is it about a girl being trained to put other people’s needs above her own? About growing up in a society that demands more maturity of girls than of boys?

A memorable passage in Rudyard Kipling’s marvellous novel of schoolboy antics, Stalky & Co., has a schoolmaster observing the boys doing a cruel impersonation of him, and responding simply: “It’s not brutality. It’s boy; only boy.” As the American critic Steven Marcus put it in his classic essay on Kipling, “the word is being used here in a metaphysical sense and as descriptive of a metaphysical state”. I Capture the Castle is one of the few classic books I know where “girl” is treated with an equivalent reverence.

Dodie Smith encourages both her characters and her readers to grow up through an acceptance of girlhood, rather than a rejection of it. If growing up means, as the Bible says, putting away childish things, that must include what C.S. Lewis once pointed out was the most childish of things: “the fear of childishness and the desire to appear very grown up.” Cassandra’s sister Rose repeatedly embarrasses herself because both her fear and her desire are so transparent; she is not grown-up enough to know what it looks like when you’re trying too hard. Cassandra, by contrast, allows herself to be naïve.

My favourite passage of the book is the one where Cassandra gives vent to her resentment at her father’s obscure modernist writing: “Why should Father make things so difficult? Why can’t he say what he means plainly?” Her sister’s beau takes her question entirely seriously, and gives her about as good an answer as that question has ever been given: “Because there’s so much that just can’t be said plainly.” Modernists, he says, are all that stands between us and stagnation. “That’s why one ought not to let oneself resent them — though I believe it’s a normal instinct, probably due to subconscious fear of what we don’t understand.”

It’s this passage that distinguishes I Capture the Castle from the sorts of “YA” fiction that would prefer to keep people in a state of nonage. Smith’s wisdom is really the same as Lewis’s: the point is not to replace childish stupidity with adult sophistication, innocence with experience, naïveté with worldliness. As adults know well, adulthood does not mean replacing the vulnerabilities of childhood for invincibility.

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Writing in the Fifties about the modish and self-consciously sophisticated novels of Jean-Paul Sartre, Iris Murdoch observed that English philosophers, unlike their French counterparts, appeared to live in a world where “people play cricket, cook cakes, make simple decisions, remember their childhood and go to the circus; not the world in which they commit sins, fall in love, say prayers or join the Communist Party”. The remark was taken at the time to be a joke at the expense of the English philosophers, but it doesn’t have to be read that way. There is something positively alarming about the idea that the sort of adult seriousness we should be striving for is what Sartre’s novels — emphatically not for children — represent. As if there were anything contemptible about adults doing such things as playing cricket, baking cakes and going to the circus: in a word, about adults playing.

One of Smith’s many contemporary admirers, and an inheritor of her English tradition of clever, self-conscious whimsy, is the scholar and children’s writer Katherine Rundell. In her essay-length book, Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise, she reminds us of just how much grown-ups have in common with the child they once were. Adults too, she writes, need “autonomy, peril, justice, food”. They too need “acknowledgements of fear, love, failure; of the rat that lives within the human heart”.

Of course, not every children’s book can survive its readers growing up. W.H. Auden remarked, in an essay on Lewis Carroll, that “there are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children.” I haven’t met any adults who can get anything out of the Secret Seven, for instance — or, for that matter, any contemporary children, which suggests that they were always just mediocre books. The ones that survive do so because they know how the child lives on in the adult — not as a remnant of something that should have been shed, but as something essential.

Perhaps you’ve already guessed it, readers, but it seems that No More Secrets is not just about lambs, wolves, and sweets. No, it’s also about teachers changing the pronouns and otherwise affirming the gender identities of school children behind parents’ backs. Self-described queer educators are a staple of Libs of TikTok, along with other narcissists filming themselves doing or saying nonsensical things in the name of social justice: transwomen complaining about their non-existent periods, white women castigating other white women for denying they’re racist, drag queens pole dancing for babies, and so on. Raichik offers these snippets up to her 1.9 million followers daily, for general Right-wing mockery and headshaking about moral decline.

Raichik’s enemies loathe her, presenting her as anti-LGBT and far-Right. Whether or not that’s true, based on the evidence available, we at least can say with confidence that she’s no Roald Dahl. Never mind the wise author’s rule of “show, don’t tell” — Raichik can’t even seem to manage “tell, don’t send readers into a coma”. An advertised book extract describes the moment where Rose the lamb breaks down and confides in her parents over a game of Scrabble:

“‘Oh Rose, that’s not good,’ said her father. ‘It’s important you let us know right away if anyone tells you to keep a secret from us.’ So Rose told her parents everything about the candy and Mr. Wooly. Rose’s father put his arm around her and encouraged her, letting her know that she had done the right thing by coming to him. Rose felt very thankful that she was honest and that her parents helped her with this tricky situation.”

Crushing as this style is, Raichik’s book fits squarely within an emerging genre in children’s publishing, whose function is to counter-indoctrinate children from the Right in the most bluntly obvious of ways. Classics of the genre already include Matt Walsh’s Johnny The Walrus, about a small boy who likes dressing up as a walrus, until his mother gets pressured by the “internet people” to take him to the doctor to have his hands and feet surgically turned into flippers. (I think we can all see where Matt is going with this.)

And then there’s The Parrots Go Bananas!, also from Raichik’s publisher, Brave Books — the tale of a band of parrots determined to ruin the reputation of two monkeys, Bongo and Asher. This was written by Sean Spicer, a former White House Press Secretary and Acting Communications Director for Donald Trump, in order to “reveal the danger of spreading lies”. Brave Books has a lot of other titles too: Little Lives Matter, for instance, about the sanctity of early life, and The Island of Free Ice-Cream, about capitalism versus communism. Indeed, for those with some time on their hands, I recommend the Brave Books website as the source of a fun new game — guess the culture war angle, based on book titles alone! Elephants Are Not Birds may be an easy one to begin with (gender again), but how about Paws Off My Cannon? Is this about the perils of excessive masturbation or the importance of the Second Amendment? (Answer: the latter).

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The Right didn’t start this, of course. In 1920, Nikolai Bukharin wrote under Soviet communism that “the salvation of the young mind and the freeing of it from the noxious reactionary beliefs of their parents is one of the highest aims of the proletarian government”.  Back then, the Left-wing preference was for children’s stories about selfless workers versus the evil bourgeoisie. These days it’s all gay penguin dads, mermaids called Julian, and anti-racist babies. But whether from Right or Left, if you strongly disagree with a particular political ideology and yet see it writ large across a hundred texts aimed at children, it can feel imperative to fight back hard. Children are literally the future, after all. To some, it may seem obvious that, where one political side is desperately trying to indoctrinate the young, the other should adopt just as aggressive counter-measures in response. I’m not so sure, though.

For a start, it’s an open question whether any of these books work on kids as intended. Granted, if Facebook is anything to go by, the world is not short of children parroting favoured political attitudes to the delight of their parents — “so proud of this kiddo for coming out to the pro-life/anti-abortion [delete as appropriate] rally with me, and even making her own placard!” etc. — but that hardly establishes anything Freud hasn’t already explained. And we can’t tell for sure to what extent reading one particular book, or a few, actually shapes young minds, given how hard it is generally to associate any single childhood influence with moral development in a particular direction. The combined cultural forces coming at a child are immense and overwhelming, and rarely can be reduced to any single particularly influential factor.

What does seem true is that, in the short term at least, heavy-handed moralising tends to send some contrarian-minded children to the opposite pole out of sheer rebelliousness. Had my junior self been confronted by drippy Rose the lamb and her overbearingly sanctimonious parents, l feel I might well have been tempted to run straight into the arms of the nearest blue-haired, non-binary teaching assistant, begging to be rescued.

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And there’s also the fact that, for each of these books to work as they are supposed to, the young reader should already have been exposed to the ideas of the ideological enemy. In reality, though, very few kids are likely to encounter both side of the aisle — and especially not given the sort of parent who would buy these books in the first place. Without insight into the other side, books such as Raichik’s and Walsh’s won’t make much sense to a young reader at all. Without knowing that Walsh’s story about the boy who dresses up as a walrus implicitly critiques the practice of medically transitioning youths, it reads like an inexplicably gruesome horror story – the mother wants to do what to her son? Surgically carve his hands into flippers? Equally, without prior exposure to the Right, children are not going to know there is any special ethical significance to the idea of gay penguin dads. They will probably just assume they are learning facts about the natural world.

But the biggest problem with any of these political forays into children’s publishing is that they are a performative war between two sets of adults that basically hate each other, with young minds as the battle terrain to be won or lost. Apart from anything else, this makes the books in question very boring. The best and most engaging children’s literature captures something about being a child and reflects it back in a way that they can understand. It can be anarchic, dream-like, funny, or sad, but it must talk first and most directly to the child, and only second to any adults eavesdropping. Books written in order to wage culture wars against other adults are unlikely to do this.

In the way that books such as Raichik’s use children’s literacy for adult ends, they are not so far away from a different form of literature-based performance, also happening this week: World Book Day. Once a year, modern parents are expected to dress their kid up as a favourite book character for school, and many take up the call very enthusiastically. For others, it’s an exercise in humiliation. My own days of fishing madly about in a meagre dressing-up box at 8.45am shouting expletives are over, but I remember the feeling. And there was also the embarrassing fact that my children did not really like reading books at all, and certainly not the sort of books that would send the “right” signals to my peers. The high point of my World Book Day career, if you can call it that, was when my 10-year-old son went in clutching the Top Gear Annual, dressed as his favourite fictional character, Jeremy Clarkson. (At the time, I just felt relieved because we already had the cords and a jumper.)

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With occasions such as World Book Day, just as with the parental purchase of books like Raichik’s or their Left-wing equivalent, there is a strong sense of performance for other tribe members, and of children being used as somewhat bemused pawns in adult games. In a world where smartphones and X-Boxes loom distractingly on the horizon for most adolescents, where reading for pleasure is dying out among adults, and where English degrees are disappearing from universities, it probably feels important for the middle-classes to convince themselves that their children still read books and not just TikTok captions.

It’s hard to predict the future of World Book Day, and other such attempts to tell ourselves that valuable things from the past are still safe in our hands. Perhaps the culture wars will eventually result in Rose the conservative lamb squaring up to Julian the progressive mermaid in playgrounds across the nation. More probably though, the whole performance is already on its way out. Though it will cling on for a while as a form of historical re-enactment — kids in strange costumes gingerly holding up books in assembly, pretending they know what to do with them — eventually it will die, along with the desultory habits of reading that were used to rationalise its existence. And helping the whole process along will be books about non-binary giraffes and communist ice-cream sellers, written by axe-grinding political obsessives, killing off childish excitement at the written word one heavily pointed sentence at a time.

This was good-humoured inter-colleague banter but there was a seriousness in my words. Take opera, ballet, classical music, drama, poetry — take almost any medium you like — and you will find unapologetic representations of fairy stories. Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera, Hansel and Gretel, Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird, Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker or The Sleeping Beauty, Spenser’s The Fairy Queen, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci or the many poems about the Sidhe by W. B. Yeats — all admired and respected by adults. So why, then, in the world of novels is it only in children’s literature considered really respectable to speak of fairies or magic?

There are a few allowed exceptions. Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s superb novel about a witch has lately come back into fashion, especially among younger readers. Penelope Fitzgerald’s understated novels often have an element of the other-worldly slipped subtly into the fabric of the more quotidian plot; indeed, this is essential to the ending of her masterpiece, The Gate of Angels, where a supranatural element is brilliantly and suddenly invoked. Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, or her still more original Piranesi, have been rightly lauded. But, for the most part, anything to do with witches, wizards, ghosts, spirits and fairies is considered at best whimsy, at worst tosh.

But why? Why is this subject, which former ages embraced as representing time-honoured intangible aspects of life beyond our everyday experience, now ignored or despised?

My first novel, Miss Garnet’s Angel, drew on the very old tale — part-Jewish, part, very likely, Zoroastrian — of Tobias and the Angel, and I wove it into a contemporary drama in which the Archangel Raphael makes a transforming appearance. The fact that the book was set in Venice threw a camouflaging mist over this element. Since then, and throughout my career as a novelist, following many years working as a Jungian analyst, I have deployed the mythical, fabulous and supernatural in my books. But while readers have apparently warmed to this theme, and indeed ask for more, in reviews, even the most favourable, this aspect is overlooked, as if to even mention the subject is to be somehow tainted with the unrespectable.

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My latest novel, The Gardener, received praise for its psychological rendering of characters and its treatment of post-referendum Britain, but no single review touched on the fact that the ancient landscape, in which the book is set, appears to be the domain of another world and at the heart of the book there is a scene which depends upon this factor. It was as if by politely ignoring the subject they were doing me a favour, sparing me some unliterary egg on my face.

I believe this loss to fiction is part of a larger loss which is concurrent with the undeniable increase of the reign of those grim twin isms, reductionism and materialism. We once inhabited a world that was animate, in which humans were creatures who not only perceived but were themselves perceived. To live in this world meant to live among vital elements that were beyond our human control, that could not be corralled by human will, or predicted or captured by desire.

Whether or not Shakespeare believed in fairies is irrelevant. He had within his repertoire a living concept of fairies with whom, or through whom, he could dramatise the irreducible folly of humankind. “Lord, what fools these mortals be,” Puck observes. When, in the same play, Duke Theseus superciliously pontificates about the spurious nature of the imagination, a faculty which in his view is allied only with poets and madmen — and which he rubbishes since it “bodies forth the form of things unknown” — he does so to an audience who has just been witnessing, in the form of the fairies, the power of the so-called “unknown” to disrupt, disarray and revitalise human life (the joke, set up by his author is that Theseus himself is a creature of myth).

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Earlier cultures were more extrovert than ours, so those invisible realities that we have internalised, and tend to treat as at best poetic metaphors, at worst psychiatric conditions, were habitually expressed as externalised presences, imaginative forms of invisible truths. Shakespeare still lived in a world where “the real” was not confined to the tangible or the testable. A dream, a wish, an impulse, and instinct — these are all “realities” despite their insubstantial nature. We don’t question the reality of a dream — or if we do, we are more likely to be questioning something like the integrity of the reporter of the dream. We might question the dream’s meaning, but that is another matter. Nor do we question the reality of, say, fear, or joy, or embarrassment — we might suggest it is irrational or inappropriate but again, unless the person reporting these emotions is a liar, fear or joy is a potent reality for the subject who experiences it, whatever the cause.

Let us assume, then, that angels, fairies and gods are those traditional aesthetic forms that have traditionally served to stand for the rarer aspects of life that are intuited and are both real and impalpable — reality being only partially confined to what can be empirically verified. The philosopher and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist persuasively argues for a world in which all matter, together with all the multifarious forms of life, is conscious — consciousness not being substantially comparable in degree or effectiveness (as he puts it, the fact that the mountain behind his house doesn’t shop at Sainsbury’s or drink a beer in the evening does not logically make it less conscious than you or me). But nonetheless, in his view, consciousness runs, to use Wordsworth’s terms, “through all things”.

Whether or not fairies, gods and angels exist is not the point. Fairies, gods, and angels can, and should be, thought of as manifestations of the mysterious untold aspects of a world whose multiple facets are not easily apparent to us but nonetheless have salience, responsiveness and place — an argument made enchantingly by the philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart, who shares many of McGilchrist’s ideas. To see the world as made up of dimensions other than ours, and possibly more vital and responsive than ours, is not merely a modest but a quite rational perspective.

It seems to me odd that while we accept, for example, the reality of the Higgs Boson, so far radically unavailable to our ordinary perception, we laugh off the reality of these other invisible forms, which have been convincingly attested to and certainly respected, if only as powerful images, by people of acknowledged genius. At the very least, they represent states of intelligence beyond the ordinary order available to our circumscribed and culturally limited perception. A hidden layer, or layers, of the world responsive to us foolish mortals, that may react and respond surprisingly to us, in ways both beneficent and malign.

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McGilchrist’s originating thesis is that we have allowed the deconstructing, limiting and over-explanatory left hemisphere to overtake and dominate our culture, which has left us lonely and unwitnessed in a seemingly dead world. His claim is that the brain’s right hemisphere, which uncritically absorbs and intuits experience, which doesn’t dismiss or judge but sees out the corner of the eye rather than with a narrowing squint, has had a diminishing influence in our culture, with the result that the culture has lost its way, and we in it.

So that the world that once, for all its many dolours, seemed in Matthew Arnold’s words “so various, so beautiful, so new” is now also in his words “a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight”, not because the nature of the world has changed but because the nature of how we perceive it has changed, and so radically and dispiritingly. And with that shift has died a loss of wonder, a loss not simply of religious awe, but, what might be worse, the range of the aesthetic palette. If, as I passionately do, you believe that the arts expand experience and thereby enlarge meaning, then we need a wider range not a narrower one to work with. There may or may not be fairies at the bottom of my own garden. But they may, by the perspicacious, be found at the bottom of my fictional garden, and I don’t apologise for one moment for that.

With nine books and several prizes to her name — her debut collection, The Language of Cat, was long-listed for the Carnegie Medal — Rooney’s career has been marked by success. But now it is over, following what she describes as “two and a half years of intensive bullying for doing nothing more than telling the truth”: namely, that there’s something deeply concerning about the prevailing orthodoxy around gender identity.

While JK Rowling might be too famous to cancel, those with heterodox views in the foothills of literary fame have two choices: keep quiet or leave. It’s a lesson not only Rooney has been forced to learn: only last year, Gillian Philip, who used to write animal fantasy novels under the name Erin Hunter, was suddenly dropped by her publishers after voicing her support for Rowling’s views on the importance of women-only spaces. She retrained as a lorry driver, noting that “the haulage industry is far more supportive and inclusive — and a lot less misogynistic — than the world of children’s writing”.

Rooney’s path to creative writing is a story in itself. Following a “toxic relationship” and nervous breakdown that led to her being hospitalised, poetry became her “main tool for recovery”. At 49, she won a CLiPPA (a national award for children’s poetry) for her first collection. After years of working as a teacher, she describes being “catapulted into a second career as a children’s writer”; her books were endorsed by everyone from Carol Ann Duffy to David Walliams.

But things began to change when Rooney felt compelled to investigate why so many autistic teenagers were identifying as the opposite sex. “I was once a gender non-conforming autistic child,” she tells me. “I know how it is to be uncomfortable in your own skin, to hate what society tells you it is to be female. It felt strange to realise that my growing reservations around the simplistic idea that children can be ‘born in the wrong body’ would be seen as being bigoted and hateful. I had always been progressive, even ‘woke’.”

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Rooney, undeterred by the hostility she knew might follow, started to gently question whether our understanding of gender identity has become warped — only to find herself unfriended and blocked by a number of children’s authors. Many, she explains, did “get in touch privately and admitted to being too scared to speak out — others said they had been warned off from engaging with the topic”.

But Rooney was determined not to be intimidated. So rather than back down, she decided to write a book to “counter the explosion in titles which told children they might be trapped in the wrong body if they don’t conform to stereotypes”. Through 2018 she worked on what was to become My Body is Me! with the illustrator Jessica Ahlberg. Published a year later by Transgender Trend, a well-established group of parents and professionals “who are concerned about the current trend to diagnose children as transgender”, it challenges sexist stereotypes and promotes a positive self-image.

“It’s a proudly inclusive book,” she says. “We talked in depth about the celebratory message we wanted to get across: we aimed to show a diverse range of personalities, body types and family set-ups.”

Of course, Rooney suspected she would face a backlash — but nothing could prepare her for what happened next. Ahlberg, whose parents Janet and Allan Ahlberg wrote and illustrated a number of best-selling children’s books including The Jolly Postman and Peepo, was for the most part ignored. Rooney, however, continues to be monstered and hounded more than two years later.

She explains that “a core of around a dozen authors, librarians, book bloggers and illustrators” — some of whom have allegedly been encouraged by “committee members in the Society of Authors (SoA)” — have repeatedly “smeared” her online in “an attempt to drum her out of publishing”. She recalls: “Fellow authors discussed my ‘hateful world view’, my ‘transphobia’, my bigoted, exclusionary nature and even my autism.”

Take Clara Vulliamy, creator of the Dotty Detective series and daughter of the acclaimed children’s author Shirley Hughes, described Rooney as representing “an extreme ideology that explicitly targets children”. Vulliamy even went so far as to compare Rooney to Tommy Robinson.

“In her post,” Rooney explains, “Vulliamy tagged an agency that employed me to do school visits, warning them about my views and saying ‘ideologically driven school visits could see us all in deep water’. I don’t think she’d even read My Body is Me and thankfully I had a good reputation at the schools I worked in, so kept that work. Ultimately, all I did was speak out on issues around education, literature, child development, safeguarding and more specifically, the female, autistic perspective. I did so because I care.”

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There is, however, only so much vitriol a person can endure. And soon Rooney started to struggle with bouts of debilitating anxiety. “It was exhausting. The thought of socialising with people in publishing made me feel physically sick. Poetry was not only my livelihood; it was how I stayed sane. But after the abuse from others in my profession I began to associate it with trauma.”

Then, towards the end of last year, Rooney received an urgent call from her agent to inform her that the publisher of her children’s books was unhappy with her outspoken questioning of gender identity. “I was told that my stance could be considered offensive and that people had been complaining. Two independent bookshops had refused to stock my latest picture book, The Problem with Problems, even though it was entirely unrelated to gender ideology.

“I was told I needed to stop tweeting about the risks to children from gender identity ideology and to remove posts on social media. But I was never offensive, I just told the truth as I see it.” When she refused to be silenced, Rooney was told that her Twitter account would not be copied into any online publicity “in case it sent traffic my way where people might learn of my ‘offensive’ views.”

Soon the campaign to vilify Rooney ratcheted up. Save the Children were bullied by activists into taking down from social media a charity video of Gillian Anderson reading The Problem with Problems. Waterstones was targeted after it posted a video of Tom Hardy reading the same book, though didn’t back down.

But the harassment against gender-critical authors hasn’t stopped. Last week, author Jay Hulme, who identifies as transgender, posted a tweet accusing an unnamed author who “hates that I’m trans and write for kids” of preventing the publication of one of his books. Hulme was supported by Vulliamy, who added: “People within children’s publishing, you KNOW who Jay is talking about.” Rooney wasn’t named, but is confident she was the subject of these posts.

I contacted several of those making accusations against the “unnamed author”. The only person who responded was Hulme, who told me: “I didn’t name the author for a reason — because I don’t believe in pile ons or digital attacks, and so I cannot and will not confirm any names or comment further. Had I wished to expand, I would have done already.”

The SoA also appeared to close ranks. Rather than responding to my enquiry, a press officer directed me to a link to a statement from August which outlined the SoA’s stance on inclusivity. Remarkably, their policy states that SoA will ensure “individuals are supported and able to speak out”.

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No doubt Rooney would beg to differ. The repeated smears, sly insinuations and cowardice of the professional bodies have all taken their toll, not least on how her work is received. “People often talk of cancel culture. But there is a more insidious technique at play — one that’s harder to prove but palpable to the receiver; that of ‘Ghosting Culture’. It’s when your book is left off reading lists; when it doesn’t get reviewed; when you are not invited on a panel to discuss it. It’s where organisations you’ve worked with and even long-time friends suddenly avoid sharing publicity about it.”

And yet despite everything — the abuse, the betrayal, the attempts to silence her — Rooney says she has no regrets. She has one more book due in 2022, The Fears you Fear, but it will be her last.

“I can’t work in an industry that purports to care for children yet polices and punishes those who raise safeguarding concerns,” she says. “Regardless of what anyone believes, we should always be free to talk about what’s in the best interests of children.”

However, given her venomous treatment, and that of her fellow authors, it seems unlikely she will be the last victim of the publishing purges. Her story, of overcoming barriers and reaching success in middle-age, is surely impressive; it ought to serve as an inspiration to aspiring writers. But thanks to the stunted vision of those who hold sway in children’s writing, the moral of Rooney’s tale is entirely different: “publish and be damned”.

The Owl Service is what I think of as a Burning Book — as opposed to book-burning, which has always been popular at certain stages of civilisational breakdown. When I think of re-reading it — as with Brighton Rock or Ladder To the Sky — I feel something which is almost fear. This, for me, is the sign not of a good book, but of a great book which will never become familiar, giving the reader both the thrill of revelation and the comfort of recognition — surely one of the most peculiar combinations of emotions.

When I first saw the 1969 Granada television adaptation at the age of ten — class war and sexual awakening played out over a long hot summer in a remote Welsh valley — I had never been involved in a love triangle. I was not yet aware that my working-class background would put me at a disadvantage, or that I would soon become obsessed with making paper owls by tracing the pattern on some manky old teacups.

But a part of me realised that the incidents in the book would somehow pertain to the adult life which I was already impatient to begin. I was obsessed with Wales; growing up in Bristol, just across the Severn Bridge, we often went there and I developed a crush on the whole country.

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Full of castles and mountains, as opposed to palaces and hills, everything seemed bigger and better in Wales — despite its shocking subjugation by England, despite all the valleys flooded to make reservoirs for the English. In an age of nations jostling for victim status, Wales remains a country that does not seek to be understood too quickly, if at all. And at a time when countries clamour for historical apologies, it’s easy to imagine Wales viewing one from England with disdain. Too much has been done. As the quote from the poet R.S Thomas says at the start of the book:

“The owls are restless. People have died here. Good men for bad reasons, better forgotten.”

When I saw the TV show, I was stimulated — probably in a not altogether wholesome manner, due to the extreme beauty of the 19-year-old actor Michael Holden, brought up in a shepherd’s cottage in Snowdonia — but when I read the book I was spellbound. Alan Garner, now 86, is a character as fascinating as any of his creations. From a working-class Cheshire family he survived several life-threatening illnesses as a child; at the age of six, he was punished for speaking in his native accent when a teacher washed his mouth out with soap. The first member of his family to go to university, Oxford led him to the familiar situation of working-class children removed from their culture: “My family could not cope with me, and I could not cope with them… I soon learned that it was not a good idea to come home excited over irregular verbs.”

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The Owl Service was his fourth novel, published in 1967, influenced by a legend from The Mabinogion — the earliest prose stories in the literature of the British Isles, compiled in Welsh in the 12th century. The theme of a woman torn — literally, towards the end, as owls and flowers compete to take over her body — between two men was as relevant in the Swinging Sixties as it is now in the Tremulous Twenties.

But it’s striking that our culture has in some ways moved back towards the Medieval origin of the book’s inspiration compared to when it was published. In some ways, this is good. There is the emergence of Wales as a proudly independent nation once more, setting an example of how it is perfectly possible for a people to vote both for Labour and for Brexit.

Then there is the revival of the Welsh language; with the Act of Union in 1536, Welsh was all but banned, with a parliamentary report describing it as “a manifold barrier to the moral progress of the people”. Yet in 2008 Welsh was used at a meeting of the European Union’s Council of Ministers for the first time; in 2018 it was debuted in Parliament.

But other reversals are not so pleasing. The Owl Service is, at heart, a book about how even the most ordinary middle-class youngsters will likely lead far more interesting and rewarding lives than the most exceptional working-class kids. The savagery of class divisions, helpfully obscured these days by the liberal establishment’s obsession with race, has led to the grotesque situation where social mobility is reversing rather than improving, as it appeared to be in the Sixties.

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Garner spent four years on the book, learning Welsh “in order not to use it” — now that’s a writer. The writing is as plain as only a genius dares; the very first exchange between the housekeeper’s son Gwyn and the house’s heiress Alison — “How’s the bellyache?” “A bore” — tells us exactly which social class they are from.

In the local shop, two ordinary women discuss quite matter-of-factly how the ancient myth of the love triangle which saw two men dead and a woman turned into an owl is about to happen again. “There’s no escaping, is there? I’ll have a packet of snow flakes.”

Re-reading it, I thought most of all of the awful plight of today’s teenagers under the pandemic — grounded for what should be the most exciting time of discovery in their lives. Already having less sex than my generation, the plague (and pornography) has made the sexes even more foreign to each other, echoing the simmering chastity which torments the trio of teenagers whose trials make up the plot of this book.

Penelope Farmer wrote: “I doubt if you could find any piece of realistic fiction for adolescents that says a quarter as much about adolescence as Alan Garner’s The Owl Service.” Over the past year, we have all been Alison, Gwyn and Roger, hog-tied by history, mired in hysteria and caught up in a blindfolded paranoia which makes us see our fellow citizens as harbingers of death. We are all trapped in the valley now, wondering where all the flowers have gone and whether we will be the next prey of the parliament of owls.

Their faces drop if I decide to pull out the story of Little Nutbrown Hare and all that “I love you as high as I can hop” stuff. They want mayhem, murder and destruction. And diggers, of course. Lots of diggers.

Which is why I don’t suppose there will be much of an audience in the Fraser household for the Duchess of Sussex’s new offering, The Bench, out next week — a book about the relationship between a father and his son, as seen from a mother’s perspective, all illustrated with some very gentle watercolour images.

Some have argued that it is a bit rich for Meghan to publish a book purporting to extol the virtues of the parent-child relationship when she doesn’t speak to her own father, while her husband has such a massively dysfunctional relationship with his. But I’m not convinced. Philip Larkin was wrong: misery does not cascade down the family tree as some kind of historical inevitability. Children of bad parents can make good parents themselves.

The problem I have with the book is the same I suspect my boys will have. It all looks just a bit too saccharine, too tediously nice. In fact, it doesn’t look like a children’s book at all, but more like an adult fantasy about what childhood should be like. Perhaps it is a work of kitsch make-believe about the kind of perfect childhood the princess wished for herself.

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But the mind of the child is often darker and more troubled than adults find comfortable. And the stories we tell them should help them negotiate what is disturbing about the world, not push it away as though it doesn’t exist.

In 1315, a volcano in New Zealand erupted, spewing millions of tonnes of dirt and debris into the atmosphere. In the years that followed, agriculture in Europe and elsewhere was devastated. The city chronicles in Bristol described it as “a great Famine of Dearth with such mortality that the living could scarce suffice to bury the dead, horse flesh and dog’s flesh was accounted good meat, and some ate their own Children”.

It was from such conditions that terrifying stories like that of Hansel and Gretel were born. Abandoned in the forest by their parents, the young siblings fall into the clutches of a cannibalistic witch who is eventually forced into an oven by Gretel where she burns. The children then escape with her money.

The Brothers Grimm are famous for their 1812 collection of dark fairy tales, the origin of so many of our children’s stories. As well as Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, their collection also includes Godfather Death, The Devil and His Grandmother, The Jew Among Thorns — and yes, they are as bad as they sound. Children’s literature often has a barely concealed dark side; they are horror stories covered in candy floss.

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By Giles Fraser

It’s no surprise, then, that many children’s authors have reached for much safer, more gentle territory. After all, what child could be reasonably expected to sleep well after a unsanitised rendition of Hansel and Gretel? Yet many children do love the darker tales. When Where The Wild Things Are was first published in 1963, libraries refused to stock it, believing its images to be nightmarish and disturbing. But parents soon discovered that children couldn’t get enough of it.

It was much the same with The Tiger Who Came to Tea. I read it to my boys in Hebrew. And though they are too young to understand why that makes the story twice as scary, the idea that some huge terrifying beast arrives at the door, demanding everything that you have, is nonetheless disturbing enough.

But childhood is itself inherently disturbing. And if the Freudians are right, we spend a lifetime in recovery from it. My four-year-old asked us the other day, over breakfast, who was going to look after him when we die. Of course, comfort and reassurance are the right response; Little Nut Brown Hare has a role to play, even though my boys would never admit it.

But the darkness needs to be represented, as much as anything to show them that it can be faced and defeated. That is why they sleep well at night, even after stories of Tigers taking their tea or Max finding friendship among the beasts. Naming these fears shows children how they can be spoken about without crippling terror. Nietzsche said we use art as a lens through which we are able to look at the truth without it destroying us. And nowhere is that more the case than in children’s stories.

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Children don't need woke stories

By Dominic Sandbrook

Perhaps this seems a more dangerous truth for those of us who had dysfunctional childhoods, where cold, distant or absent parenting failed to lead us through our own fears — and so, as a result, we still find the darkness overwhelming and terrifying.

In cases such as these, it’s all too easy to imagine how a sentimental Hollywood tale of a princess who grows up to find her prince is preferred to Hansel and Gretel. Which is why I suspect that, even though Meghan has claimed that The Bench was inspired by her son’s relationship with her husband, the book will say a lot more about the Duchess than either of her boys.

In a boarding school near the Kentish coast, a ruffian sneaks along the corridor, hunting for the rare stamp that will make him rich. In a Home Counties village, a tousled-haired schoolboy lies awake, putting the finishing touches to his scheme that will win the war for the Allies. Many miles to the north, a boat pulls away from Wildcat Island, bound for fortune and glory. And far across the oceans, a group of schoolboys tremble in terror, as their South Sea captors prepare to sacrifice them to their idol …

Such is the world of the classic British children’s story: the world of Billy Bunter and his Greyfriars chums, William Brown and his fellow Outlaws, Titty, Roger and the rest of the Swallows and Amazons, Jennings, Molesworth and the Secret Seven. For more than half a century, such stories dominated the imagination of millions of readers. You can still buy second-hand editions of Richmal Crompton’s Guillermo el Detective, and wonder what on earth readers in General Franco’s Spain made of them.

When I was growing up, the books of Frank Richards, Arthur Ransome and Richmal Crompton were still everywhere, just about. Our local library groaned with stories in which middle-class British children spent their weekends in the barn across the fields and their weeknights sneaking out of the dormitory for some stolen tuck. Raised on the virtues of teamwork and courage, the boys grew up to become hunters, naval commanders and Spitfire pilots. I never found out what happened to the girls. For a boy in the early Eighties, to have been caught reading Mallory Towers would have been social suicide.

I thought of these splendid and now largely forgotten books when I read that a new star is about to join the constellation of children’s writers. Marcus Rashford, footballer and saint, has written a book, or at least put his name on a book by his collaborator Carl Anka. I don’t want to be rude about it: if it encourages football-crazed children to read, so much the better.

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Books won't save you

By Sarah Ditum

I’ll be as rude as you like, though, about Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’s forthcoming children’s book The Bench. Catchy title! According to the publishers, it aims to evoke a “deep sense of warmth, connection and compassion”. It sounds ghastly. What sane child wants to read about connection and compassion, when they could read Billy Bunter Butts In instead?

My own defiantly non-compassionate copy of Billy Bunter Butts In, first bought for my mother in 1951, is beside me right now. As far as I remember, it’s the first book that I read after lights-out, under the covers with a torch. I was risking my pocket money, but I simply couldn’t contain myself. Would the Fat Owl of the Remove be caned for failing to do his Georgic? Would Stephen Price of the Fifth manage to get his bet on for the two-thirty? And who would win the titanic showdown between plucky form captain Harry Wharton, the colonel’s son, and Herbert Vernon-Smith, cocky son of a millionaire stockbroker, the legendary “Bounder”? (Don’t worry: I won’t give the result away.)

Purveyors of Californian compassion might think this a dreadful book for a boy to be reading in the early Eighties. But I was in good company. In their heyday between 1910 and 1940, Frank Richards’s Greyfriars stories, which ran in the Magnet magazine, were the single most popular narrative in all British fiction. Then as now, some people deplored them. When V. S. Pritchett’s father discovered his son’s stash of Magnets, he burned them in the fireplace and told him to read John Ruskin instead. But Pritchett could not help himself. “One page and I was entranced,” he remembered. “I gobbled these stories as if I were eating pie or stuffing.”

Later, recalling his days teaching the sons of “shopkeepers, office employees and small business and professional men”, George Orwell reported that almost all read the Greyfriars stories and “were still taking them fairly seriously when they were fifteen or even sixteen”.

And in his book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, the historian Jonathan Rose quotes a colliery winder’s son, a Camberwell labourer’s son and the disabled son of two Yorkshire millworkers, all of whom loved the stories. On the South Wales coalfield, a butcher’s boy called Aneurin Bevan made a weekly pilgrimage to the newsagent’s for the latest Magnet. Like many other parents, Bevan’s father, a miner, banned them from the house. But the NHS’s founding father bought them anyway and hid them underneath a local bridge.

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You can't silence D.H. Lawrence

By Frances Wilson

In his famous essay “Boys’ Weeklies”, Orwell argued that these stories formed one of the great bulwarks of British conservatism:

“The year is 1910 — or 1940, but it is all the same. You are at Greyfriars, a rosy-cheeked boy of fourteen in posh tailor-made clothes, sitting down to tea in your study on the Remove passage after an exciting game of football which was won by an odd goal in the last half-minute. There is a cosy fire in the study, and outside the wind is whistling. The ivy clusters thickly round the old grey stones. The King is on his throne and the pound is worth a pound. Over in Europe the comic foreigners are jabbering and gesticulating, but the grim grey battleships of the British Fleet are steaming up the Channel and at the outposts of Empire the monocled Englishmen are holding the niggers at bay…”

Actually, they’re not quite as reactionary as you might think. The working-class scholarship boys are far brighter and more likeable than the aristocrats and stockbrokers’ sons, and they all go out of their way to shield their Indian chum Hurree Jamset Ram Singh (er, “Inky”) from the “colour prejudice” of their American classmate Fisher T. Fish.

But in essence Orwell was right. Greyfriars is a deeply conservative place, unchanging and hierarchical, menaced by an endless stream of loafers, ruffians, footpads and foreigners. I bow to nobody in my love of Billy Bunter, the “schoolboy Falstaff”, the jam-sodden embodiment of greed, laziness, stupidity and cowardice. Though when I was looking for a bedtime story for my son, even I drew the line at Billy Bunter Among the Cannibals.

Bunter wasn’t my only favourite. The first story I ever wrote as a boy was an illustrated sequel to Swallows and Amazons, rather undermining the innocence of Arthur Ransome’s original by equipping the characters with automatic weapons. But today I would give the gold medal to Richmal Crompton, the shy, unmarried invalid whose William Brown stories sold some 12 million copies between 1919 and 1969.

Originally written for middle-class mothers and published in women’s magazines, they chronicled the adventures of a mischievous 11-year-schoolboy in a Home Counties village. And if you’re looking for an antidote to connection and compassion, a repudiation of everything Meghan and Harry stand for, they are perfect.

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By Dominic Sandbrook

For generations of readers, William and his fellow Outlaws Ginger, Henry and Douglas were as familiar as their own friends and family. Then there was the supreme villain for any 11-year-old boy, the terrifying, invincible Violet Elizabeth Bott, a monster of narcissistic self-pity. ‘I’ll thcream and thcream until I’m thick.’ That would make a good motto for somebody.

William himself is an inveterate culture warrior, an unashamed lover of flags and statues, the personification of the anti-woke spirit. Although he chafes under parental authority, he reserves his greatest contempt for idealists, do-gooders, artists and intellectuals. In one story, a League of Nations enthusiast arrives in the village and implores the boys to give up their weapons as a first step towards world peace. William pretends to go along with it, tricks his enemies into disarming, and then seizes their catapults and air rifles and turns them on his foes. Connection and compassion are definitely not his thing.

In another story, with a general election looming in 1929, the children organise their own mock election. Henry, the gang’s brainbox, lays out the position:

“There’s four sorts of people tryin’ to get to be rulers. They all want to make things better, but they want to make ’em better in different ways. There’s Conservatives an’ they want to make things better by keepin’ ’em jus’ like what they are now. An’ there’s Lib’rals an’ they want to make things better by alterin’ them jus’ a bit, but not so’s anyone’d notice, an’ there’s Socialists, an’ they want to make things better by takin’ everyone’s money off ’em, an’ there’s Communists an’ they want to make things better by killin’ everyone but themselves.’

No political scientist could put it better.

At first, attracted by the thought of so much violence, William flirts with the idea of Communism. But eventually he stands as a Conservative, influenced by his father’s friend, a big game hunter from the African veldt. The day of the election comes. Addressing the other children, William simply lists the man’s kills: buffalos, lions, elephants, even hippopotamuses. At last, slowly, grandly, he reaches his peroration: ‘An’ this man is a Conservative. He votes Conservatism at gen’ral elections.’

He wins in a landslide.

Crompton’s best stories date from the war. In one story, William half-hears his family discussing Norway’s Nazi puppet Vidkun Quisling at breakfast, and becomes convinced that a man called “ole Grissel” is at large in the village, preparing the ground for ole Hitler’s invasion. Later, he arms his friends with an air gun, bows and catapults, and scours the lanes for enemy parachutists. An actor appears, dressed for an entertainment at the local aerodrome. The Outlaws knock him senseless and call the police. The man denies everything. But William has a crushing, unanswerable riposte: “If you aren’t a parachutist, why are you dressed up as a woman?”

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By Dominic Sandbrook

Is there any hope for such stories today? Probably not. Given the ultra-woke instincts of most children’s publishers, I suspect they’re sunk forever. There is too much stoicism and not enough self-pity, too much pluck and not enough diversity. I certainly can’t see Meghan enjoying Billy Bunter’s outings to Egypt, China and the South Seas. As for William Brown, his attitude to anti-racism campaigners, curriculum decolonisers and mental health professionals doesn’t bear thinking about. Sad to say, the only reason Richmal Crompton hasn’t been cancelled is that so few people still read her.

For me, though, her stories will live forever. Bunter and William will be charging around my imagination till the day I die, or at least until I lose my marbles. And when I think of Orwell’s imitation, I can’t help smiling in recognition:

“Lord Mauleverer has just got another fiver and we are all settling down to a tremendous tea of sausages, sardines, crumpets, potted meat, jam and doughnuts. After tea we shall sit round the study fire having a good laugh at Billy Bunter and discussing the team for next week’s match against Rookwood. Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever…”

The irony, of course, is that Orwell loved them as much as anybody. He’d have had no time for The Bench, would ole George.

The stories were propaganda, in the most benevolent sense — designed to promote a system of values that should be imparted onto children. The Jesuit saying, “give me a child until seven and I will give you the man”, reflects the importance of shaping values at an early age.

I haven’t been so diligent in bringing my own children to church, and I’m pretty sure they couldn’t tell their St Catherine of Alexandria from their St Catherine of Sienna, but that’s not to say they aren’t being indoctrinated in the values of the ruling class’s faith.

When my daughters were around six and seven, they started French classes at a children’s library in our borough; I had been to our local library countless times but had mainly confined myself to the infant section, and older children’s books were something of a revelation. The entire front desk area was made up of hagiographies of Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela.

And hagiography is the most accurate term: these books were just like the ones I used to read in church. Here Blessed Nelson forgave his jailors, here St Barack healed America of its racial sins – and these are just a couple of examples.

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Why are children's books so ugly?

By Mary Harrington

It was a bit of a surprise, learning just how much the tone of kids’ books had changed and how much progressive politics is now ever-present. Which is fine, if you’re a believer; but if you’re a conservative, you’re faced with raising your children in a culture which is filled with messages you disagree with — sometimes misleading, sometimes anecdotally true but not representative, often just anti-wisdom, giving children the worst possible advice in life. And it’s becoming worse: since about 2016, children’s books have grown way more explicitly political.

The children’s literature section at Tate Modern

Last month, a friend went to Tate Modern and took a picture of the young children’s section. Among the books on display are biographies of Greta Thunberg, something called Queer Heroes, another work called The Rainbow Flag, books about refugees, the bestselling Good Night Book for Rebel Girls — and its countless imitators. Whether you support it or not, this is propaganda; the aim is to raise a generation of progressives just as those Lives of the Saints were designed to bring forth young Christians.

And it works. Conservative ideas are very much in retreat, the subject of a brilliant new book I recently read (which, admittedly, I also wrote).

From a very young age, children are read books and shown films that teach them the core progressive messages: that we are all basically good and only behave badly because of circumstances; that borders and barriers are bad, stereotypes are wrong and girls ought to adopt traditional male gender roles if they want to be respected.

Stereotype inaccuracy is a popular idea — and a false one; in so many kids’ stories the unusual stranger or alien or wild animal who turns up in the neighbourhood will defy the small-minded pessimist who expects the worst. When it comes to gender politics, no self-respecting children’s book in the 21^st century has girls aspiring towards being a princess and living happily ever after; to the post-ironic upper-middle-class parents who are the publishers’ main audience, that would just be lame.

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There’s nothing wrong with all this, of course — and as a parent, it’s a relief when daughters move on from the pinky-princess-fairy stage of cartoons and onto the more thoughtful stuff that questions gender stereotypes. That questioning is a natural part of growing up and books open their minds to potentially endless possibilities — before they reach maturity and realise that gender identity matches biological sex in the vast majority of cases. Unfortunately, our culture has become stuck in this adolescent stage of late.

My in-laws kept dozens of books from the 1970s and early ’80s, which we read to our kids along with more recent ones. The general difference in tone was noticeable, progressive themes being almost totally absent in the older books. My Naughty Little Sister is naughty simply because she’s a bloody nuisance, and it’s not really celebrated either as some non-conforming, high-status trait; she’s not a ‘rebel girl’, she’s just annoying.

Of course, the Talmud of progressive children’s literature is the Harry Potter series, preaching of a boy born to freedom-fighter parents who has the bad luck to be brought up in a stultifying, conservative Surrey suburb by his dully conventional uncle and aunt.After the geeky, open-minded protagonist is allowed to go to wizard school, what follows is a battle between two worldviews: that of the snake-like Slytherin house, which favours the pure-blooded and aristocratic, and the inclusive Gryffindor house, kind-hearted and welcoming to people of all backgrounds.

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By Giles Fraser

The values in children’s books have changed over the past few decades because society has undergone a revolution in values. But as with previous revolutions, in France and Russia — and with the earlier Protestant Reformation, too — the process has sped up with its own momentum. The revolutions of 1789 and February 1917 are followed by more extreme jolts; Luther is followed by Calvin and Munster.

So after decades of accelerating social change, during the 2010s there was a marked and radical shift, especially among the English-speaking upper-middle-class, christened “the Great Awokening”. The term is a play on the Great Awakening, the 18^th century religious revival in the United States — and the name is apt, since the movement has an obviously religious feel, sacralising victim groups and inspiring extreme hostility towards non-believers, heretics and apostates. Indeed poor old J.K. Rowling has herself been partly eaten by the revolution, after revealing herself to be a gender-critical feminist.

And so, with this great movement, there has been a proliferation of books for young children that aim to install progressive politics — and promote those most sacred of issues, women’s empowerment and racial equality, and to a lesser extent gay and trans rights.

There are now children’s books in the States with such names as A Is for Activists, D Is for Dreamers and W Is for Welcome: A Celebration of America’s Diversity, as well as large numbers pushing the gender-is-a-social-construct narrative, such as One of a Kind, Like Me/Unico Como Yo, about a boy who wants to dress up as a princess.

Britain is embroiled in the revolution, too. I remember two Christmas’s ago, almost every girl between 8 and 13 in my part of north London received a copy of that bestselling Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls from some well-meaning relative (my elder daughter received two). The publishing industry has since cashed in on telling stories of heroic (often overlooked) females.

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Children's literature has lost the plot

By Polly Mackenzie

Parents can feel good that they are raising their offspring to be firm believers, Woke Babies who will “raise their fists in the air… cry out for justice” and “grow up to change the world.” The book A is for Activist promises it is “written and illustrated for the next generation of progressives: families who want their kids to grow up in a space that is unapologetic about activism, environmental justice, civil rights, LGBTQ rights and everything else that activists believe in and fight for.”

There has also been a proliferation of political biographies for young children, including picture books about not only Obama or Mandela but Latino judge Sonia Sotomayor and even Elizabeth Warren. Likewise, over here there’s a book about Remainer pin-up Lady Hale, called Equal to Everything: Judge Brenda and the Supreme Court.

It’s not that I oppose children reading about Lady Hale or Elizabeth Warren; it’s more that I couldn’t even comprehend why anyone would wish for their children to do so. Unless they were true believers of a progressive new religion of kick-ass women, boys-who-want-to-be-girls and visionaries who heal people of their racism sickness.

I’m not, and seeing children’s books being turned into a sort of religion, I feel like a ten-year-old again, wishing I could be reading The X-Men rather than sat in church.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History is published by Constable

I like the Beano, but I approve of iconoclasm always: I had him read School for Dads, in which useless Dads are re-educated. I would be worried if he was still reading the Beano in his forties but, in a way, I know he will be. He already covets his father’s Viz.

I want him to be a reader almost more than anything else. I want him to imagine the edges of the universe. Books are powerful enough to be dangerous: they can ruin or save you. I am very careful about his reading, because he is so open to it.

He has maps, history and fiction, and some dubious books from my husband’s childhood, which all the counsel the perfect happiness of slotting into a Protestant ethic by the age of seven without faltering. Due to this, he technically knows how to manage a sawmill. But how can I complain? I was so drugged by Enid Blyton’s suburban politesse that I am still undoing the damage. The class system is everywhere is children’s fiction. It is all over Harry Potter. At least Dennis is an antidote to that.

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In praise of uncynical children's books

By Tom Chivers

But as with adults, so with children: there is poison. I hate the Usborne That’s Not My… series. That’s not my fairy, reads one; the fairy is then subjected to a blunt, and very unfair critique: “that’s not my fairy, her wings are too fluffy. That’s not my fairy, her hair too frizzy. That’s not my fairy, her crown is too smooth”. Her crown is too smooth? Others discuss the inadequacies of mermaids, unicorns, elves and even witches, as in ‘that’s not my witch, she isn’t hereto-normative enough?’

Young readers find no ecstasy, then, in these stories — what’s wrong with the fairy? — but only a nagging absence of something. It is the interior monologue of an unhappily married but prosperous woman, which is possibly why so many people buy them. It is literature to incite lack, and it is worse than advertising, because they are not buying a fairy, although if you read too many books like this, you will probably try. Books at least should have ambition, but these don’t; they are infant reading for tiny, soon-to-be unhappy capitalists.

Then there is the superhero genre, which was invented to make nerdy Jews feel better. It’s a genre of denial, a poke of an unhappy man with a stick. I disapprove, but I can’t hide them from him; there is just too much marketing. Every third child in our village is Iron Man, who should really be in psychoanalysis, and the rest are Spiderman, who I can’t bear to analyse for obvious reasons. (He spurts things).

My objections are stylistic, too: a punch is not a sentence. They make him violent and silent — like them — and it’s depressing when a book is completely outdone in characterisation and feeling by a film starring Lego people. Everyone, I tell him, knows that Bruce Wayne is Batman. They just don’t tell him because they feel sorry for him because he doesn’t have any parents.

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By Tanya Gold

There are, among the dross, glorious things; but I worry that I appreciate them more than he does. Two of Julia Donaldson’s books are masterpieces: Charlie Cook’s Favourite Book and Tiddler, who single-handedly stopped my husband from eating (Little) Johnny Dory: such is the power of the word.

Charlie Cook tumbles into books. He reads a book in which a character reads a book; and in that book a character reads a book; and so on and on, and all back to Charlie Cook. Tiddler is — perhaps I had post-natal madness but I am sure that I am right — both a sophisticated rumination on the art of the novelist and a warning of the dangers of a life that is only lived in the imagination: a small, grey fish, a story-teller — a sort of fish Hilary Mantel — is so “trapped inside his story” he risks his life for dreaming. I adore Tiddler. I see him.

I really want him to read is fairy tales because of their protective magic. They prepare a child for a world of murder, cannibalism and cruelty: surely nothing can frighten a child who has imagined himself inside the gingerbread cottage? Fairy tales are older than gods we invented to protect ourselves from the very fears that they describe; and if you read fairy tales, I suspect, not much can harm you.

But something has happened to fairy tales since I read them. Their marketing has been polluted by the Disney genre: it plagiarised, painted pink, and destroyed. Fairy tale books look like Disney books and my son resists reading them because he thinks they are for girls; he sneers at Cinderella like an ugly sister in a Dennis wig. Gender-specific marketing is awful and profitable and it’s everywhere. It’s like Saudi Arabia in the children’s department. The violence he is offered — dinosaurs and trucks, and most horribly, a splicing of the two into dinotrucks (what?) — seems almost less awful.

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He is willing to read subversions of fairy tales, which miss the point: why be something as dull as cynical at six, when you could travel into myth? He has The Three Little Superpigs and The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig and a Goldilocks parody whose title is too long to type but, since he does not know what he is supposed to be laughing at, how can he get the joke? I will try the Brothers Grimm on him. If I have to tear off the cover off, no matter.

Two things make me hopeful. I made him watch The Princess Bride and was pleased that, like the boy in the film hearing the story of the princess bride, he was initially repulsed by the kissing, but he stayed for the torture, and he loved it.

The other cause for hope is that we live in west Cornwall. There is a very specific mythology here, and it is celebrated in the stories we buy at the Edge of the World bookshop in Penzance, which has a Cornish myth section. We bought the story of Tom Bawcock, a legendary Mousehole man who went to fish in a storm because the village children were starving, and his cat Mouser, who subdued the storm with song.

If he can see the harbour in Mousehole where the village folk stood in the wind, lighting Tom Bawcock home, he will know the depth of the myths below and around him, all the way to the edges of the universe, and he will, perhaps, write his own myths; just dressed, for now, as Dennis the Menace.

The only downside is a horrific book we foolishly withdrew from the library, called Pirate Pete’s Potty. We should have known it would be bad: it has a button on the front; press it and a tinny, echoey sort of cheer emerges from somewhere within the cardboard. All books with electronic sound effects should be banned, I’ve come to conclude.

But Pirate Pete’s Potty offends me for another reason. It’s horrifically literal. It might as well be an instruction leaflet from IKEA. Here’s a sample: “‘The potty is for doing your wees and poos in, instead of your nappy,’ explains Mummy.”

Wow. Thanks Mummy Pirate. I really needed this information to be printed onto dead trees and bundled up with a battery and plastic speaker so that it can never be recycled. I’d never have been able to explain this to my child alone. Here was me thinking that books were supposed to have stories in — to use narrative and creativity to explore the emotional reality of childhood experiences. More fool me.

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Fortunately, there is one really great piece of literature about potty training: the 1986 classic by Tony Ross, I Want My Potty. In this book, a small princess navigates the ups and downs of life without nappies. It seems absurd to summarise the plot of a 12-page book for toddlers, comprising perhaps 100 words in total, so I won’t. What matters is the book has a plot. It has ambition and despair, admiration and shame, jeopardy and disaster. And it’s funny. It’s even funny for parents, as the adults of this peculiar fictional kingdom (king, queen, admiral, prime minister) move heaven and earth to cater to the needs of their tiny overlord, only to fail. Every parent has felt like that.

A great children’s book goes far beyond the words on the page. It pulls you in. You can talk to your child about every aspect of it. You can make things up. You can imagine more. And you can spot little things that are perhaps only for you, the parents: something to help you feel you’re not alone as you struggle through the days of dirty knees and runny noses.

One of my favourites is The Baby’s Catalogue, by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. At first glance you’d think it’s just one of those “baby’s first word” books: lots of pictures to point at and practice saying the words. It is certainly useful and fun for that. But it’s also an intimate portrait of life for exhausted parents.

Among the pictures are: a little girl bringing her dad a cup of tea as he turns off the bedside alarm with an expression of despair; a mum and dad asleep on the sofa in front of the TV; a mum washing her hair in the sink. The kids won’t notice, but the parents will smile, and feel understood.

And The Baby’s Catalogue is political, too. It’s more than 30 years old but it’s a more compelling vision of liberalism than most contemporary naked attempts at propaganda — a celebration of some quieter kinds of diversity. Five families feature — including breastfed babies and bottle fed babies, working mums and stay-at-home mums, of different ethnicities. There’s a dad changing a nappy and another at the park on the swings. They eat different food and wear different clothes and have different pets and have different accidents, but the comforting sensation is that they are all the same. All caught up in the story of surviving daily life.

So my children and I have read through The Baby’s Catalogue a hundred times, and none of us is bored, because you can’t be bored when life is in the pages.

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By Polly Mackenzie

All our favourite books are old. Peepo — another one by the Ahlbergs — is truly extraordinary. It’s a little rhyme about a baby who looks around him; on every other page is a little porthole to peep through to the next picture. My younger son still thinks it’s a book about a baby called Peepo. I, by contrast, think it’s a portrait of wartime life to rival Tolstoy. A father, home from leave. Granny takes the children to the park so the parents can be alone. A mother so shattered she “dozes in the easy chair”. At the end, Father is in uniform again, his helmet ready. Will he return? We don’t know.

My son doesn’t notice any of this, he just likes the rhythm and the pictures and the little portholes to put his fingers through. But both stories are there; there are as many stories as you want to find.

Maybe I’m just sentimental about the books of my childhood, but it seems so rare to find a modern children’s book that has that kind of multi-layered narrative. The Gruffalo is perfectly nice but it’s about how small people can be powerful, and, well, that’s it, isn’t it? Of course, it’s a message that goes down well with small people but is there anything else to it? The Snail and the Whale is a different story with the same meaning, and so is What The Ladybird Heard and half the rest of Julia Donaldson’s oeuvre.

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But at least it’s a better message than the one put forward in Guess How Much I Love You, in which a narcissistic and hyper-competitive sociopath of a father repeatedly belittles his son’s attempts to communicate his love.

Fed this sort of mono-dimensional, humdrum literature, how are our children supposed to grow up into fully-rounded adults? Are we trying to create obedient drones or independent-minded human beings? These saccharine books are now handed out in their millions by well-meaning charities, as if any book will do when it comes to child development. We’re obsessed with helping them learn to read when we should be focused on helping them learn to think.

If our children are to have a hope of thriving in our increasingly complicated world, they need more than the narrative equivalent of instruction manuals. They need to get beyond the Aesop’s fable kind of story which has one meaning, one moral, and one message. To develop a really first class understanding of the world, and their places in it, children need complexity. They need something to talk about with their grown ups. They need books that can keep on giving as you get older, and be rediscovered at a different depth in adulthood.

So goodbye Pirate Pete. You’re going back to the library where you belong. We’ll see off the nappies with our imaginations, and be all the better for it.