You’ve got to be careful you don’t cross the invisible dividing line and make the
animal do things it couldn’t possibly do—for instance, the idea of animals dressed
up in human clothes, the Rupert Bear concept, that’s absolutely anathema to me
because that’s whimsy. But if somehow you can steer a way between leaving the
animal as an animal and still make it recognisably human, that seems to me to be
the trick.
Powling 1987:13King-Smith achieves this in a large number of his books, notably The Sheep-Pig (1980),
which won the Guardian award, in which a pig becomes a champion sheep herder,
Magnus Powermouse (1982) where a baby mouse emerges as large as a rat through the
use of growth pills and The Hodgeheg (1987), a miniature masterpiece about a hedgehog
who talks backwards after being hit by a lorry.
King-Smith’s work is one of the success stories of recent years, as is that of Colin
Dann whose The Animals of Farthing Wood (1981) spawned a number of sequels and has
more recently achieved worldwide fame through a cartoon version. Another well known
animal hero who also appears in other formats is Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear who
first appeared in A Bear Called Paddington (1958) which uses irony to show an innocent
let loose in a world he takes at face value.
However, the most successful single post-war animal story is probably Richard Adams’s
Watership Down (1972). This book’s publishing history is now legendary. Rejected by
practically every major publisher, it was finally published by the small British
publishing house of Rex Collings. It became a worldwide success, won both the
Guardian award and the Carnegie Medal and is one of those rare books read by both
children and adults. Adams devised the story on long car journeys with his children and
acknowledges his debt to the animal stories of Ernest Thompson Seton. Its intricate
depiction of a rabbit community and the characterisation of its (mainly male)
protagonists have enough contact with realism to make the book seem entirely credible.
One set of animal stories which have their roots in realism but often seem to belong to
a bygone age are pony stories. These began in 1929 with Moorland Mousie, became
established as a genre during the 1930s (Joanna Cannan’s A Pony for Jean (1936) and
Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet (1930) are notable examples) and have continued to be
popular on both sides of the Atlantic. The Whitehead (1977) survey of children’s reading
discovered the reading of this genre was extensive among 10- to 12-year-olds but
dropped at 14+. Authors of this type of book include the Pullein-Thompson sisters,
Monica Edwards, Ruby Ferguson and, of a different type, K.M.Peyton. Mary Cadogan
and Patricia Craig have characterised the main features of these stories as follows:
The stock type of pony story features a central character who longs for a pony but
can’t afford one; usually she is connected with a group of superior girls—relatives
or school-fellows—who do have ponies but are not ‘natural’ riders like the deprived
heroine. She, however, by luck, pluck, or sheer determination, gets hold of a horse,
a seemingly inferior animal which turns out to be a champion.
Cadogan and Craig 1976:353TYPES AND GENRES 289