Take a Book Wherever you Go…a letter from Joan Aiken for World book Day…

 Nearly fifty years ago Joan Aiken was asked to write a letter to children for International Children’s Book Day.

Here it is. I’m sure she’d say much the same thing today.

    “If you were going to sail round the world alone in a small boat, and could take only one of these things to amuse you, which would you choose?  A big iced cake, a beautiful picture, a book, a pack of cards, a paint box (and paper!) a pair of knitting needles and wool, a musical box, or a mouth organ…?

It would be a hard choice. Myself, I wouldn’t want the cake. I’d eat it too fast. Nor the cards, they might blow away. Nor the wool, it might just get wet. The mouth organ would be better than the musical box, as you could make up your own tunes. I wouldn’t take the picture – I could look at the sea. Nor the paint box, because in the end I’d use up all the paper. So the last choice would be between the mouth organ and the book. And I’m pretty sure I’d choose the book.

One book! I can hear someone say. But if you were sailing round the world, you’d have read it hundred times before the trip was over. You’d know it by heart.

And I’d answer yes, I might read it a hundred times, yes, I might know it by heart. That wouldn’t matter. You don’t refuse to see your friend, or your mother, or your brother, because you have met them before.

A book you love is like a friend.

It is like home. You meet your friend a hundred times. On the hundred-and-first meeting you can still say, “Well, I never realized you knew that!’ ”

There is always something new to find in a book, however often you read it.

When you read a story you do something that only man can do – you step out of your mind into someone else’s. You are listening to the thoughts of another person and making your own mind work – the most interesting thing there is to do!

So I’d sit in my boat and read my book over and over. First I’d think about the people in the story, why they acted the way they did. Then I’d think about the words the writer used, why he chose them.  Then I’d wonder why he wrote the story and how I’d have done it, if I’d written it. Then I might carry on the story in my mind, after the end of the book. Then I’d go back and read all my favourite bits and wonder why I liked them best. Then I’d read all the other bits and look for things that I hadn’t noticed before. Then I might make a list of the things I’d learned from the book. Then I’d try to imagine what the writer was like, from the way he’d written his story…

It would be like having another person in the boat. A book you love is like a friend, something of your very own, for no two people read the same book in quite the same way.

“If every single person in the world had a book – just one book  –  we’d have a lot less trouble.”

 

How shall we start?

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From the age of five until her eightieth year Joan wrote stories. Whether you like myths, magic, fantasy, history, adventure or romance there are stories here for everyone!
This is her website BOOKS PAGE do come and explore…

What do you like?  

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An Aiken Family Education

      You might imagine that Joan Aiken’s famous writer father, Conrad Aiken, would have been her most formative literary influence, or even her stepfather, British author Martin Armstrong. Hardly ever mentioned, but of huge importance in the development not only of Joan’s writing, but of her whole character and imagination, is her mother, Jessie – who never published a book.
     Jessie MacDonald graduated from McGill University in Quebec, where she grew up, and then as a post graduate, from Radcliffe, where she met Conrad, her first husband, in 1911.  Sadly for this highly educated woman, the life of a poet’s wife was not an easy one, and by 1929 she was divorced and living with her three children on the other side of the Atlantic in Rye, Sussex, where the family had moved just before Joan was born. The two older children were sent away to boarding school, and Jessie became Joan’s sole companion and educator for large stretches of her daughter’s early life, as they lived in a small country village with Jessie’s second husband, Martin Armstrong, until Joan, too, was sent away to school at the age of twelve.

     Luckily Jessie was a formidable instructress in every way. The many, many books she read aloud to Joan as a small child, the songs she sang, and her particular style of teaching and day-to-day upbringing had an enduring effect on her daughter. Joan’s earliest and indelible literary memories were of gripping and sinister scenes not only from traditional children’s fare such as Peter Rabbit but also from Collodi’s original tale of Pinocchio with its terrifying villains, or Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth, which was set amid plague and persecution in fifteenth-century Holland. Before the age of five she knew by heart many of De la Mare’s haunting Peacock Pie poems with their stories of loss and mystery, ghostly visitors and vanished children, and the plaintive ballads of Jessie’s earlier Scottish ancestry in which old ladies are robbed by pedlars, damsels elope with gypsies, and lords are poisoned by their lovers. As a twentieth-century upbringing, this may sound extraordinary, but Joan took these subjects as a matter of course, and their stories and flamboyant styles of writing became the foundation of her literary imagination and formed the common vocabulary of her relationship with her mother, which was perhaps the greatest inspiration of her life.

 

Collodi’s Pinocchio

     Lessons were learned in the morning. Joan might be instructed by Jessie to re-write the Bible as Shakespeare, or produce a poem in the style of Wordsworth or Chaucer; to write a sonnet or a villanelle or take down dictation from The Oxford Book of English Verse. Learning poetry by heart helped keep her mind busy while Joan helped Jessie work about the house, which in the 1920s had no running water or electricity (water was pumped from a well, and oil lamps and fires had to be prepared daily). Jessie was an excellent cook, and all the family food was produced by her, including preserves made from their garden fruit and vegetables. There was only a small shop in the village, so most supplies were fetched from the nearest town once a week by a carter with a horse. During their work, or while going for walks in the afternoons, they would hold long conversations, and Jessie continued to read aloud from a wide range of literature: from the Brontës to the Bible, Dickens to Dumas, or even stories by the Comtesse de Segur in French. In the evenings Joan would do her own work; from the age of five, she kept a writer’s notebook.

     Jessie was strong minded and set high standards for herself and others in every area of life. Joan quoted her as saying, “Use your wits! Think about what you are doing. You must learn to use your mind all the time.” However, Jessie’s critical nature was leavened by her reckless energy and enormous charm and creativity, and she was the living embodiment of her principles. She produced exquisite embroidery, knitting, tatting, and handmade clothes. She sketched, played the piano and sang, gardened, chopped wood, bicycled around the countryside as a social worker assisting with evacuated children during the war, and lectured on modern drama to the local Women’s Institute. She continued to read widely and concern herself with current affairs. The only thing she didn’t do, having been the wife of two struggling poets, was try to publish her own books.

     The real difficulties in the lives of my grandmother and mother spurred them on, not just to find self-reliant role models in literature but to use the very medium of language and literature to assuage the difficulties and loneliness of their lives, and to pass on this ability to their children. One of our family phrases is “comfort reading”—meaning one’s personal store of fictional friends to whom one can always go for uplift or distraction, to escape from some unhappiness or find a way to deal with it. Joan Aiken took it a step further: being aware of the power of stories to heal or distract, to uplift and encourage, she used her gift to pass them on and eventually, to her own immense joy, to write them as a means of earning her own living and supporting her family.

     Apart from my mother’s books, which for me are a treasury of family memories,  my lasting legacy from my mother, and from my grandmother, too, is the voice in my head saying, “Use your mind.” 

     By reading aloud to me as a child, they taught me that the greatest gift is our imagination, and our ability to remember, foresee, imitate – in short, to see how life works out in stories,  and try to re-use them – as a blueprint or model  – to create our own best outcome. In the tales of heroes and witches, or heroines and monsters, there are wonderful examples of triumph over adversity, whether in fact, or in the imagination. Care of others and kindness along the way is rewarded in your time of need, even if not in the way you expect.

     Some of these stories may be very scary indeed, but then so is real life, and if you have been able to imagine total loss, then you are able to face the fear and deal with it when it happens: a tough lesson, but one I haven’t forgotten.

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This comes from an article by Lizza Aiken first published in The HornBook in 2009. The photograph shows Joan with daughter Lizza, son John and her mother Jessie.

Re-posted & updated from 2014

 

Imagination, Hope, and our children

Joan Aiken believed that encouraging the development of imagination in our children would be the key to the survival of the human race, and the surest way to create hope for the future; perhaps this is the reason why we must now rely on our young people to lead the way for us on climate action.

“How can we cultivate this faculty in our children?”  she wrote, and went on to imagine that perhaps in every school there could be special classes which would:

“Teach children to use their own wits, to amuse themselves, to keep themselves hopeful, to solve apparently insoluble problems, to try and get inside other people’s personalities, to envisage other periods of time, other places, other states of being…”

…and of course her own way of passing on these ideas would eventually be by writing and sharing her stories, but this was something she realised that she too had to learn. Taught at home in an isolated village until the age of twelve, she found relating to the world of other people extremely difficult and threatening when she first arrived at a small boarding school:

“Training the imagination takes time and energy. Most adults keep their imagination at low level voltage a lot of the time – we have to; otherwise life would be too grim.  We are so bombarded with news from outside; unlike our ancestors who knew only what was happening in their own villages or cities, we know, all the time, what is happening in the whole world. Nevertheless we need to help children retain their early curiosity, their urge to explore.”

The picture of the small girl above, proudly displaying her own statement amongst hundreds of others expressing themselves in a sea of placards during a recent demonstration, seemed to be a perfect expression of the kind of encouragement we can and must show our children; she is being encouraged to express her own self and allowed to be proud of it.

In Joan Aiken’s writing on imagination, and ways of teaching our children to be hopeful and positive in their contribution to the challenges of life, she concluded that patience, and indeed our own hope for the future are very much a part of the process:

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Joan Aiken was often asked to speak about education and writing for children; she was a huge advocate of reading aloud to children and encouraging discussion, and many of her ideas about reading and writing for children can be found in a short book called

The Way to Write for Children

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