Joan Aiken’s Best Advice? Read aloud to your child!

Arabel loves reading aloud to Mortimer, as here in one of Joan Aiken’s own stories – illustrated by Quentin Blake.  In fact Mortimer is busy throwing cherry pips at the horse pulling their holiday caravan, but he does find some facts from her Children’s Encyclopaedia quite amazing – and very useful later on in their adventure…!

Joan Aiken famously (and rather fiercely!) said:

But she had the luck to have an absolutely wonderful and devoted reader-aloud in her own mother Jessie, and wrote about this happy relationship:

“She started from the moment one was able to understand any words at all, and if one was ill she was prepared to go on reading almost all day – having diphtheria at the age of three was a highwater mark of literary experience for me.”

Sadly in those days, after this infectious illness, many of her books had to be burned, but most were replaced as they had become such favourites. Joan remembers  that those first stories read aloud to her had great potency, because of the element of mystery – of only partly being able to understand the language – and in this case as she was ill, and possibly slightly delirious, they remained particularly special for her.

One book, the original Collodi version of Pinocchio was completely hair raising, especially for a two year old,  but she said her favourite scene was when the fox and the cat dressed as assassins jump out on the poor puppet in the forest.

The illustrations were also pretty scary, but I loved them too, and we treasured that book.

As she wrote about another later memory, a particular highlight was Charles Reade’s Gothic historical romance The Cloister and The Hearth – even here you will notice that she is still barely four years old:

(…and she became a terrific reader aloud herself, as mother to myself and my brother – we loved this of course, but I can see my tastes – and my nerves – were not quite as steely as hers…)

Joan Aiken was absolutely right about the relationship that reading aloud builds up in a family.  All those shared stories – especially the slightly hair raising experiences – become markers of family history; familiar quotations which are landmarks in their own right, and then live on in the family memory.

It is one of the great pleasures of having a family, and one of the most enjoyable shared experiences, even when, as with some special favourites, it is the same story you have to read over and over again…

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Read some excerpts from Joan Aiken stories about the power of reading aloud –

A Boy who read to the Sea, and a Girl who read to a Dragon

from the Virago collection The Gift Giving

 

 Joan Aiken bedtime stories that won’t give them nightmares!

A Necklace of Raindrops or Past Eight 0’Clock

Or of course Arabel and Mortimer, now out in TWO wonderful NEW Puffin Compendiums

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More Mortimer! Joan Aiken’s hilarious hero is back – just in time for Christmas

 

Perfect for Christmas, and for (N)evermore?

  Arabel and Mortimer are back in two bumper editions of Joan Aiken’s crazy tales with all the wonderful Quentin Blake illustrations.

First seen on Jackanory read by the wonderful Bernard Cribbins, these stories have not lost any of their humour over the years, but you may have to explain a few odd things to younger readers! Joan Aiken couldn’t resist giving the Joneses some of the 70’s craziest gadgets  for Mortimer to wreak havoc with in their house in Rumbury town London NW3-and-a-half…how about some of these for an alarming Christmas?

When dreadful spoilt cousin Annie comes to stay, Joan Aiken supplies her with radio-controlled tiddlywinks, a solar powered skateboard and a computer guitar that makes up its own music – she was ahead of her time, but not by very much! And of course these terrible toys soon lead to trouble:

You can imagine what happens next!

Struggling with a lot of Christmas baking?  Mrs Jones – while preparing to entertain the Rumbury Ladies’ Kitchen Club to a coffee morning, and frantically busy trying to make an enormous number of prawn fancies and iced macaroons, has seen a mouse!!! And not just any mouse, but the Advance guard and A.A. Scout for an army of starving mice from Cantilever Green who are desperately looking for pastures new, and who has been lured into the Jones kitchen by the delightful smell of all those macaroons:

So Arabel is sent to Mrs Catchpenny’s corner shop to borrow Archibald the cat, known locally as a former cracksman’s mog, and of course Mortimer goes along for the ride. The combination in Mrs Jones’s kitchen of Archibald, Scout F stroke B7, a fantastic amount of ill-fated ‘cordon-blue’ cookery (made with the help of all the Jones household’s trouble saving electrical equipment) and Mortimer, makes a great tale… oh yes, and also there is a certain Professor Glibchick desperate to record Mortimer making his famous one word pronouncement…except this time Mortimer says Nothing.

But when Mortimer confronts Archibald, who is by now happily well fed (he opened the larder door and found the prawns, then slept on the trays of warm macaroons in the airing cupboard and is now covered in crushed macaroon, clotted cream and feathers) he is entranced, and thinking he is a giant owl, starts pursuing him up the stairs:

Did we know Mortimer had a mother? Nevermore!

This is a mere ‘taster’ of the delights on offer in this wonderful long lost collection, which also includes Mortimer’s Cross and the fantastic Mortimer’s Portrait on Glass, where Mortimer meets an ancient ancestor in Ireland.  I have to confess these stories still make me laugh  out loud, but these days, something we absolutely need is a bit of craziness….

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Puffin editions also have added Extras –  Like Do You Remember…?

and Much more!

You can still catch some of the Bernard Cribbins Jackanory Episodes on You Tube

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Find  Both the Puffin collections here

 

 

 

 

 

Meet Mortimer – Riotous Raven of Rumbury Town…!

It was a dark and stormy night (of course!) when Mortimer entered the life of Arabel and the Jones family – and Rumbury Town N.W.3 and-a-half would never be the same again.  Arabel’s Raven is the first of the many tales of his adventures told by Joan Aiken and masterfully characterised by Quentin Blake’s illustrations.  The devoted pair appeared on a series of Jackanory readings, and then in books and a puppet series for the BBC which earned them a following of fans of all ages.

It was love at first sight – and forever – for the pair who Joan Aiken rather wickedly described as her version of the relationship between the ego and the id:

Before too long chaos reigns in Rumbury Town, and Mortimer (through no fault of his own of course!) is in the thick of it:

Amazingly he does, with the evil squirrel strapped to his back, and is soon holed up in the gangsters’ hideout – while Arabel goes into a decline, wondering where he can be?  But soon everyone is on his trail…  and now strange things are happening at Rumbury Tube station, but no one can solve the mystery?Pretty soon everyone is going round the bend, and it is up to Arabel to keep her wits about her and unravel the hilarious trail of chaos that leads her back to Mortimer…will she ever be parted from him again? 

“Nevermore!” says Mortimer.

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Read more about Arabel & Mortimer and the BBC Puppet Series

on the Joan Aiken Website

NEW EDITIONS  coming from Puffin Books

Buy Now! Bumper edition with Six Hilarious Stories!

Trick or Treat? Life with Joan Aiken’s Mortimer the Raven…

A typical day for the Jones Family – mayhem with Mortimer, or occasionally miracles; although Joan Aiken described him as the personification of a wonderfully childish ID to the sensible Arabel’s Ego, his wilful mischief which severely tried their patience was just as likely to turn up lost treasure and bring delight to his weary but ever-loving family!

As a couple of Mortimer fans have observed, ravens have a long and significant history in legends and literature, there is much fascinating material to be found about them, whether as ‘tricksters’ or all knowing clowns, or prophets of doom; Joan Aiken would have been familiar with many of these myths and stories. She was also an early reader of Edgar Allan Poe, and even won a china bust of the writer as an award for one of her own mysteries – and Poe is obviously responsible for Mortimer’s one and only utterance of ‘Nevermore!’ taken from his poem The Raven.

In fact Joan Aiken’s raven is as much a parody of Poe’s aggravating night time visitor, as he is a figment of Aiken’s own imagination; but he also owes a good deal of his insouciant character and the wicked twinkle of his eye to his artist creator, Quentin Blake who drew the characters of the Jones family and their ‘great awful bird’ for the first Jackanory stories where he appeared.

In this one, ‘Mortimer’s Portrait on Glass’ which has luckily been preserved, he is also given voice (as, charmingly is Arabel too) by the great Bernard Cribbins in a fantastic tale of a typical Jones family holiday which includes the gleeful destruction of a glass factory and the discovery of a dinosaur…

Joan Aiken had an enormous amount of fun incorporating the worst disasters that could occur in or out of the family home in a way that is deeply cathartic to the parents of small children, and which all can enjoy sharing at any reading aloud session.

Thanks are also due to the amazing puppet team led by Francis Wright,  with designs by Malcolm James for the BBC who brought several series of the stories to life on CBBC, and built wonderful sets that even took Mortimer back to his ancestral home at The Tower of London.

These delightful puppet films are now available to download here, although sadly the BBC store itself will be closing down soon. (Or even more fun – in Spanish here! )

So if you are out Trick or Treating over the Hallowe’en season, one door you should perhaps not knock at is that of the Jones Family in Rainwater Crescent, London NW3 and a half…like the burglar from that story above coming back for his sock…?

You are likely to get more of a trick than you bargained for!

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Other recommended reading for Mortimer fans:

a lovely blog on Three Sets of Ravens  by Nick Swarbrick,

and  posts from the always erudite Calmgrove

Quentin Blake can also be seen here talking about working with Joan Aiken