Page 52
Unhappily
(^) Daily Mail, Friday, August 16, 2019
FRIDAY
BOOK OF
THE WEEK
HELEN BROWN
FIERCE BAD RABBITS
by Clare Pollard
(Fig Tree £14.99, 304pp)
Cowardly massacre of the
PETERLOO was the bloodiest
event on English soil in the
19th century. On August 16, 1819,
more than 40,000 people gathered
in St Peter’s Field, an open
space in central Manchester, to
hear speeches in favour of
parliamentary reform.
Without provocation, they were attacked
by the Manchester Yeomanry and
then ridden down by the troops of the
15th Hussars.
Eighteen people died. Nearly 700 were
injured. One man had his nose sliced
cleanly off by a sabre, another his ear,
which he took home in his pocket.
This was a massacre and, on its
bicentenary, it should be remembered.
Although the earlier chapters of Robert
Poole’s scholarly new book may be too
detailed for the general reader, his descrip-
tion of the events on the actual day is
gripping and deserves a wide readership.
The 1810s were years of great economic
hardship for the workers of Manchester.
They pinned their hopes for improvement
on reform of Parliament, and the man whom
tens of thousands had come to hear that day
was the most famous advocate of reform.
Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt was a gentleman
farmer, but he was also a mesmerising pub-
lic speaker and one of the few men ‘whose
lungs were powerful enough to reach to the
fringes of a large outdoor meeting’.
To many of the workers he was an
inspiration, and his journey through the
Manchester streets to St Peter’s Field was
like a royal progress — but to the local
magistrates he was a nightmare made
flesh. ‘Some alarming insurrection is in
contemplation,’ they had written to the
Home Secretary some days earlier.
The crowd was peaceful and had obeyed
Hunt’s instruction to come ‘armed with no
other weapon but that of a self-approving
conscience’. But the magistrates feared
imminent revolution.
In an act of unbelievable folly, they issued
a warrant for Hunt’s arrest, which was
handed to Joseph Nadin, the brutal, much-
feared deputy-constable of the town. Nadin
NICK RENNISON
PETERLOO: THE ENGLISH UPRISING
by Robert Poole (OUP £25, 480 pp)
HISTORY
holes. He thought of his friend, Herman,
who had experienced near-starvation as
an evacuee, and always felt his capitulation
to the publishers’ request for a punished
caterpillar betrayed him.
In 2005, he admitted he still struggled to
enjoy a good meal, ‘because of thinking
about my father. I am left with a sadness.
It might be psychobabble, but I rehash
that period of my life through my books.
The child I am helping might just be me.’
He’s not alone. According to poet Clare
Pollard’s excellent book, most authors
behind our best-loved picture books were
working through some form of trauma.
Maurice Sendak (Where The Wild Things
Are) had to hide his homosexuality from
his parents. Raymond Briggs lost his
schizophrenic wife to leukaemia shortly
before he wrote The Snowman.
The first picture book written for children
was the Orbis Sensualium Pictus (The
Visible World In Pictures) by Jan
Komensky, published in Nuremberg in
- The Bohemian priest had lost all his
belongings to fire and all his family to the
plague. He wandered as an exile for much
of the Thirty Years’ War and, witnessing
the suffering of the refugee children, wrote
his book to help them learn the alphabet.
The book was so popular it was treasured
a century later by a young Goethe.
All the early children’s books were
instructional, but by the 19th century
writers were exploring the psychology of
childhood, such as Lewis Carroll through
T
HE Very Hungry Caterpillar
by Eric Carle has sold the
equivalent of a copy every
minute since it was first
published in 1969.
Small children and sleepy parents delight
in the tale of the emerald green hero
munching his way through one apple, two
pears, three plums, four strawberries...
Greedy little fingers poke through the
holes in the pages as eyes devour the lurid
watermelon, bright cake, fatty salami and
slippery ice cream.
Carle had intended his caterpillar to
proceed directly from his feast to his
transformation into a beautiful butterfly.
‘But,’ said Carle, ‘my editor insisted that
he suffer an episode of nausea first — that
some punishment follow his supposed
overeating. This disgusted me. It ran
entirely contrary to the message of
the book.
‘The caterpillar is, after all, hungry, as
sometimes we all are. He has recognised
an immense appetite within him and the
experience transforms him, betters him.
Including the punitive stomach ache
ruined the effect.’
With a childhood blighted by World
War II, Carle knew all about hunger. His
German parents moved to America after
World War I, where their son led a happy
life in upstate New York until, aged six,
his homesick mother made the
catastrophic decision to take the family
back to Stuttgart.H
IS strict new kindergarten
teachers endeavoured to beat
the free spirit out of the
‘American’ child with bamboo
canes, and the Third Reich drafted his
father into the army. He ended up spending
eight years in a Russian PoW camp,
returning home a broken man.
Young Eric was conscripted to dig
trenches on the Siegfried Line, aged 15.
‘The first day there,’ he recalled, ‘three
people were killed a few feet away. The
nurses came and started crying.’
Carle was left with post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD), which was still twitching
through his fingers when he began playing
with the idea of a book full of bullet-shapedWHATBOOK..?
PHILIPPA
GREGORY
Historical novelist
... are you reading now?
TESSA BOASE’S Mrs Pankhurst’s Purple
Feather. It’s an interesting exploration of
the sort of women who opposed votes
for women, because they believed
women should be influential in suitable
campaigns and not in the wide world
of politics.
It’s a neglected corner of women’s
history and Boase traces it through
the campaign to ban the import of
wild bird plumage, a campaign headed
by a wonderfully formidable woman —
Etta Lemon — who rose to prominence
and was then unjustly expelled from
the Royal Society For The Protection
Of Birds.
It’s fascinating to read what women
felt they could and should do — no to
politics, but yes to social improvement —
and how the male leadership responded
to them: yes to charming requests, no
to demands.
It’s a book about an industry that doesn’t
get much attention (millinery) and about
a group of people who don’t get much
attention (the anti-suffragists).
... would you take to a
desert island?
THERE are authors whose work I
constantly re-read, including Henry
James, Edith
Wharton, Jane
Austen and
E. M. Forster.
All of them
would be top of
the list.
But if it was a
real desert
island and had
only me on it, I
would desper-
ately need
charm, humour
and company,
so I would take
the complete
works of James
Thurber — now
tragically out
of fashion.
His absurdist
humour makes
me giggle as much today as it did when I
first read him aged 11.
... first gave you the reading bug?
ALISON UTTLEY’S Hare And Guy Fawkes,
from her long series called The Little
Grey Rabbit Library.
It was the first book I read alone and I
can still remember the excitement of the
dark blue cover with rocket explosions
on the front.
The series tells of a family of animals
with very human characters in the
remembered countryside of Uttley’s
childhood of cowslip meadows and
woodland copses, so much of which we
have now lost. Hare — leaping and
boastful — was a particular favourite.
... left you cold?
BOOKS rarely leave me cold, but they do
irritate me sometimes when I think the
author has failed to deliver on that
terrific promise to the reader that is
chapter one, the first sentence.
I’ve never got to the end of James
Joyce’s Ulysses.
n Tidelands by Philippa Gregory is
out now, published by simon &
schuster at £20.From The
Very Hungry
Caterpillar
to The Cat In
The Hat, many
of our best
loved children’s
books were
inspired by
deep traumas
in their authors’
personal lives
a favourite: Helena
Bonham Carter and
Julian sands in
the film version of
a Room With a ViewChildhood chums: (Clockwise
from above) The Tiger Who
Came to Tea, The Very
Hungry Caterpillar, The Cat
in the Hat, Peter Rabbit and
Where The Wild Things Are