How Vaccine Truthers Like Jenny McCarthy Are Obscuring Some Of The Actual Causes Of Autism

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How Vaccine Truthers Like Jenny McCarthy Are Obscuring Some Of The Actual Causes Of Autism

Jenny Davidson: Boy, 8, writes amusing non-apology note to brother

The award for the cutest note of the week goes to eight-year-old Zachary, for this amusing non-apology letter to his brother Ben.

It explains how he meant to actually hit a poor boy named Chris with a pair of flying scissors and also features an imaginative see-saw graph to show how much he actually loves Ben.

The classic note was recently posted on Facebook by Zachary’s mother, Jenny Davidson, who found it during a clear out, according to the Huffington Post.

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Jenny Davidson: Boy, 8, writes amusing non-apology note to brother

Children"s book illustrations depict a glorious, dangerous world | Jenny Colgan

Book illustrations give young readers a chance to explore imaginatively what parents strive to protect them from in real life

Readers are made in childhood (or debilitating illness, or prison, but for the sake of argument let’s stick with childhood). And a huge part of early reading is, of course, the illustrations. Some embed themselves so deep into the imagination they can never be forgotten – Arthur Rackham‘s twisted branches and glowering Mittel-European woods are lodged deep, even among people who have never read those editions of the Brothers Grimm.

Disney’s concept of Winnie the Pooh appears as an offence against nature when compared with the casual charm of EH Shephard. Likewise, I suspect everyone’s internal concept of a crocodile is based on Quentin Blake‘s iconic shape (he obviously loves drawing them, as they pop up everywhere).

For me, it is that image of Lucy and Mr Tumnus, heads bent together in conversation as they walk, with armfuls of brown paper parcels, onwards, past the lamppost, to a place I can never go, which is seared on my heart.

The wonderful new exhibition at the British Library, Picture This: Children’s Illustrated Classics, traces the development of illustrations for children through 10 pivotal texts, including The Railway Children and the Paddington Bear books. Mr and Mrs Brown are, apparently, clearly Michael Bond‘s real parents, though any recent purchasers will know that something has been tweaked in Paddington, in a mysterious fashion that makes him both more and less himself (there are updated electronic signs at the station, for example). To the generation reading the books aloud, this is a discombobulating experience.

There is Peter Pan and Wendy, the cruel boy dressed in leaves, so closely described in the novel that he varies little over the decades. Conversely, there is Willy Wonka, who looms more or less terrifyingly depending on the mood of the day – the first edition, illustrated by Joseph Schindelman in 1964, depicts a frankly horrifying elf sitting on Charlie’s arm. And there is The Iron Man – it was a surprise to me to learn that what I had always thought of as the definitive sombre robot wasn’t drawn (by Andrew Davidson) until nearly 20 years after the book was published with artwork by George Adamson.

Alas, missing is that deep wellspring of fantasy for girls of a certain age: the classic Ladybird Well-Loved Tales series, with its immaculately oil-painted 1960s hair; the Elves and the Shoemaker’s dainty shoes; the three shiny dresses of Cinderella; the bewitching tresses of Snow White and Rose Red. These books currently start at about £20 a pop on eBay, their appeal never quite matched by the cheaper, faster line drawings of recent editions.

The curator of the exhibition, Matthew Eve, has pointed out how few of the illustrators were married or had families of their own. It is a truism to talk of how many people in children’s literature are not particularly fond of the blighters, and equally difficult not to speculate that the success of their work has a lot to do with their refusal to pander. They simply do not care about not frightening children or wanting to keep them too safe, in the way that parents must.

By ignoring this, by creating their own towering worlds, they give children the space and freedom they truly crave for their imaginations to roam, before they come home to be fretted and worried over. Children will always risk a nightmare as long as there is somebody there to soothe them when they wake.

For after all, every child knows – certainly by the 10th, 20th, 100th reading – that there are dangers aplenty in Narnia, in Middle Earth, in Neverland, in the Chocolate Factory. And yet every child (and every invalid, and every captive) would still go, would vanish into that book, in a heartbeat, in a second

• Children and teenagers


• Illustration


• Design


• Children

Jenny Colgan

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Children"s book illustrations depict a glorious, dangerous world | Jenny Colgan