published in the same year). Holiday adventures certainly involved families, but in these
books fathers are abroad or invisible and if there are mothers they are merely a source of
supplies. Parents and guardians have a far larger presence in Streatfeild stories, and the
children are in touch with reality. In Ballet Shoes the three Fossil girls (all foundlings,
none of them related) contribute to the household expenses through stage earnings at
an age when the Swallows and Amazons and their kind are still absorbed in a play
world. The happy optimism, the warmth of the home background, the glamour of the
stage world which the author could still see through naïve, teenage eyes, made it an
instant best-seller, the first book about an English family to be popular with American
readers.
Until at least the 1960s a middle-class viewpoint was taken for granted in the English
family story. To the authors it represented normal life; working-class characters
occasionally stray in, but they are a different species. Enid Blyton gave them names like
Sniffer and Nobby and made them exclaim ‘Cor!’ and ‘Coo!’. The three boat-builders’
sons, the ‘Death and Glories’, in Arthur Ransome’s Coot Club (1934) are called Joe, Pete
and Bill which to a 1930s reader would subtly convey their origins (as, for example, the
names Tamzin, Rissa, Roger, Meryon and Diccon would to 1950s readers of Monica
Edwards’s stories about adventures with ponies). Eve Garnett’s The Family from One End
Street (1937) was initially rejected by eight publishers who felt the setting was
unacceptable. It was indeed a new departure to show a happy family where the father
was a dustman and the mother a washerwoman. Seventy years before, there had been a
fashion for street waif stories, such as Jessica’s First Prayer (1867), but these had a
strong religious message and such homes as the waifs knew were certainly not happy.
Garnett did not dwell on the darker aspects of poverty; this is a cheerful book where the
struggles of a chronically hard up family are material for picturesque comedy; it is not
an exercise in realism.
The 1960s saw the beginning of social realism and a new theme, the child alone in the
world. John Rowe Townsend’s Gumble’s Yard (1961), while in effect a watershed, has
curious echoes of the holiday adventure story, though one with an urban setting. Here
are children foiling a criminal gang, and a 15-year-old narrator from the same officer
mould as Arthur Ransome’s John Walker and his kind— articulate, authoritative,
responsible. But these children have been abandoned by the people supposedly in
charge of them, their uncle Walter, a loutish petty criminal, and his feckless, almost
mentally defective girlfriend. To avoid being taken into care, they try to make a home for
themselves in a derelict building. In the new style, the book lacks a happy ending;
Walter comes back, but there is no expectation that he can hold down a job for long. In
the sequel, Widdershins Crescent (1965), Walter returns to crime, and the children are
left to bring themselves up.
There were still to be some books where the family circle was unbroken, and the
parents properly concerned for their young. In Philippa Pearce’s A Dog so Small (1962),
Ben who yearns for a dog with such passion that he creates an invisible one, is
surrounded by a family who are affectionate and anxious for his happiness, but
uncomprehending. Only his grandfather understands a little of the longing that he
conceals. One of the most poignant and deeply felt books of its time, it is also
remarkable for its classlessness. The background in fact is similar to One End Street,
338 THE FAMILY STORY