Objections are raised to a cracking new children’s book on account of a dead German soldier and pictures of frostbite. But the young adore grisly bits, says Robert Gore-Langton
There’s a cracking new children’s book out, Mission Telemark, by the award-winning writer Amanda Mitchison. It is set in the second world war and it’s based on the story of the Norwegian sabotage raid on Hitler’s ‘heavy water’ atomic plant in Telemark. You might remember the film The Heroes of Telemark, starring Kirk Douglas as a most unconvincing Norwegian. Both the film and the book were based on the famous 1942 mission — a tale of great courage, skis and atoms.
In the children’s novel the saboteurs are young teenagers and the foursome are sent to Scotland to be brutally trained in special ops by a peppery British colonel. The Norwegian youngsters are dropped on to the forbidding Hardanger Plateau and eventually blow up the plant, then escape over the freezing mountains into neutral Sweden with the Germans hot on their heels. The book is part thriller, part Ray Mears-style survival guide. It tells you how to live off moss, how to suck the fat from a reindeer’s eye-sockets, how to resist interrogation by the Gestapo. Indeed it tells you how to do things children of 11 to 14 (and I) would dearly like to know. The author, the mother of two boys, was keen to insert plenty of action and grisly bits.
But guess what? The book’s schools distributor won’t touch it, the publisher is keen to eliminate all references to death, and libraries have decided that the book’s illustrations are too grisly for our delicate children. They object, for example, to a photo of frost- bitten toes and a diagram showing how to skin a rabbit. One can only weep. But that’s what libraries are these days: book-censoring, crypto-vegan state crèches run by people whose favourite word is ‘inappropriate’. And to think it was only a generation ago that boy scouts learnt how to catch, kill and cook a rabbit, using now banned things called sheath knives. As for frostbite, what’s the problem? Children love revoltingness. In Pirates of the Caribbean III a frostbitten toe is snapped clean off, to shrieks of delighted young laughter in the cinema.
Authors these days must have a terrible time second-guessing what’s acceptable. In an attempt to make Mission Telemark more palatable, the publisher requested a German soldier be wounded and not killed as written. Surely you can’t have a proper war book or film without a dead German — preferably several. Besides, it was based on a real story and men were killed. The saboteurs didn’t use rolled-up copies of the Guardian — they were armed with lethal weapons of the sort children can go and see at the Imperial War Museum. Nobody, it seems, is allowed to die in children’s fiction any more unless it’s in a fantasy world of elves and daemons.
This prissy lack of robustness is worrying. Social ‘issues’ galore are allowed into novels (as in the right-on works of that perennial library favourite Jacqueline Wilson and Melvin Burgess’s books about kiddies having sex and taking drugs), but little about the basic, inevitable fact of death. Quite apart from it being a useful subject for children to know about, they positively revel in death — the gorier the better. Children have a highly gothic sense of sick. And frankly sick is what a lot of children’s fiction used to be. I imagine that most children’s classics would not be published were they to be written now. Think of Struwwelpeter with Little Suck-a-Thumb dripping blood — it would have had no chance. Grimm’s fairy tales with their cruel and unusual punishments — banned. Even Beatrix Potter. Her rabbits would be fostered by an RSPCA monitoring officer, well away from any threat of being shot and fricasseed. I have never read The Coral Island, R.M. Ballantyne’s classic, but it has recently been voted among Scotland’s best ever novels. With its depictions of the British boys as true gents and the native islanders as a race of baby-eating savages, if it were issued now it would be instantly pulped. Yet it is the book which inspired Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s horrific novel which is these days studied by year nines and up — the same children who apparently aren’t allowed to see a dead rabbit.
Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons is another book, or series, which would, today, be beyond the pale. It contains the now pernicious idea of a world in which child-ren lark about unsupervised. Youngsters are given permission by their father to sail to the lake island by telegram: ‘Better drowned than duffers: if not duffers won’t drown.’ There in that one sentence is a whole philosophy of child-rearing (based on cheery neglect with a wishful dollop of Darwinian natural selection) which has utterly vanished. That’s why the book feels so dated. A child these days can only read in envy at the giddy freedoms it conjures up.
Everyone moans about health and safety, but the concealment of death and the abolition of risk are just as sinister. Of course, there are some terrific authors around who deliver a sense of danger and excitement. I would rather read the outrageous Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (gleeful books featuring serial slaughter) than, say, boring old Biggles. Indeed the last decade will probably be seen as a mini-golden age thanks to Philip Pullman, whose brilliant if humourless novels got children reading again, and of course the lively Harry Potter books, which are really just Jennings plus magic. Everything today seems to pale by contrast with the twisted genius of Roald Dahl, a writer more weirdly in tune with a child’s mind than any other. (The Witches traumatised my children.) He put it all down to a bump on the head.
If books are to become increasingly wet, what hope do they have of luring a child away from the TV? In the virtual world, unsupervised by PC librarians and humourless publishers, anything goes. With an Xbox plugged into the telly you, as a child, can spray live rounds in simulated city centres purely for the gratuitous pleasure of killing and wounding. You can use knives, guns and fists. The blood flows like Niagara. Yes, some violent interactive video games are adult-rated. But young boys have elder brothers and in the end parents don’t know or care enough to ban them from the house. I see friends’ children playing them for hours, honing their trigger fingers in rapt solitude yelling ‘Die!’ If children can play these games, why can’t they read about a dead soldier in a real history book?
Which brings me back to the war. Mitchison’s tale from wartime Norway has its roots in historical fact. (There is living in Norway a 99-year-old survivor of the raid.) But the fascists in a sense have long since won. Correctness and euphemism have spread like a stain through our entire culture to the point where we hardly even notice it any more. There has to be a place for young imaginations to be truly given flight, and that’s better done in books than in front of the box.
Someone recently tipped me off to a wonderful writer now lost in time: Ronald Welch, the headmaster and prolific children’s author, whose action-packed and thoroughly researched historical novels (such as Knight Crusader) were once hugely popular with boys. He never glorified violence (he spent the war inside a tank), but he knew his young audience, which is why he gave them history with all the blood, guts, death and adventure.