depicted in visual metafictions. In 1993 appeared Babette Cole’s Mummy Laid an Egg, a
picture story of two exuberant children who, when told by their parents the traditional
fabled accounts of procreation, turn the tables on them. ‘We don’t think you really know
how babies are made’, they say. ‘So we’re doing some drawings to show you’ (Cole 1993:
np). Adult reactions to illustrations of this topic are always hesitant, despite
contemporary convictions which support the idea of telling children the ‘facts of life’. The
sensitive delicacy of Cole’s presentation of the children’s exact and explicit
understanding puts to rout any suggestion that this is a prurient book. Humour
releases delight and increases children’s confidence in understanding the metaphoric
nature of language. It is also memorably serious.
Despite the attraction and distraction of many different kinds of new books, children
still enjoy and profit from knowing myths, legends, folk and fairy tales. Some of these
texts come in scholarly editions preferred by bibliophiles, but more often the versions
are modern retellings, variable in quality and authenticity. Where the story is ‘refracted’
or told from a different viewpoint, the readers’ sympathetic understanding undergoes a
change. The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs by A.Wolf (Scieszka 1989) caught the
imagination of young readers in just this way. It also lets them see how stories can be
retold because they are something made. Neil Philip’s exploration of the history of
Cinderella (Philip 1989), Jack Zipes’s collection of the versions of Little Red Riding Hood
(Zipes 1983), Leon Garfield’s Shakespeare Stories (1985) and his reworking of the texts of
the plays to accompany animated films devised by Russian puppeteers, all show how
multiple versions of traditional stories are matched by different ways of learning to read
them.
A perceptive suggestion about versions of stories is made by Margaret Mackey. She
points out that adults of a post-war generation have read popular and classic authors
(Beatrix Potter, for example) in reprints of the original forms. Sequentially over time,
they see reproductions of the texts and pictures on plates, mugs, calendars and aprons.
The next generation that reads Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman also encounters
multiple versions of the pictures in different book formats, on video and film, wallpaper
and sweaters simultaneously, and have the skill to choose from a number of versions the
one they prefer. This commodification of children’s literature is examined by Mackey in
the case of Thomas the Tank Engine (1946) and its sequels. Forty years after their first
appearance as books, the BBC produced animations of the stories. This generated ‘a
small industry of toys, games, pyjamas and so forth’ (Mackey 1995:43–44). This is how
one part of the past of children’s literature moves into the future.
Those small children whose first fictional love is Thomas the Tank Engine are
meeting a creation whose roots are deep in the certainties of a bygone era but
whose branches and blossoms are so multifarious as to be confusing to the
uninitiated. One of the striking things about the saga of Thomas the Tank Engine,
as well as about other picture book characters who are the focus of industrial
empires, is that they make it possible for very small toddlers to belong to the ranks
of the initiated, and to know it. Their first approach to fiction is one of coming to
terms with different versions, an experience which makes them experts in the6 INTRODUCTION