International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

set firmly in the child’s environment, or whatever hell the writer believes to be the

child’s environment, but there is some evidence that a rich internal fantasy life is

as good and necessary for a child as healthy soil is for a plant, for much the same

reasons... Like the fairy tales that were its forebears, fantasy need no excuses.

Pratchett 1993:5

Writers have other matters to contemplate, from Paul Jennings’s view that ‘Some
academics and judges on panels consider that a book has more substance if it is
difficult to read’ (Nieuwenhuizen 1991:131) to Nadia Wheatley’s dismissal of the
classification of books as for adults or for children: ‘wouldn’t it be better to stop fussing
about definitions of genre, and simply put a copy of each into two sections of the
library?’ (Nieuwenhuizen 1991:299)
On the whole, they are optimistic about childhood, as is Mary Norton:

Children nowadays are encouraged to invent, but still in ways devised by adults.

‘Clear-up-that-mess’ has destroyed many a secret world. As the Borrowers’ house

was destroyed by Mrs Driver. This particular incident, oddly enough, worries grown-

ups far more than it does children. Children are used to repeated small destructions

—in the name of punctuality or tidiness—and have learned to accept them. If raw

materials are there to hand, they simply build again.

Crouch and Ellis 1977:69

or, like Aidan Chambers, optimistic about the role that adults can take. Having cited
Kafka’s view that ‘a book must be the axe which smashes the frozen seas’ he goes on:

the hands that best wield those axes will belong to sympathetic and knowledgeable

adults who wield for themselves, with enormous pleasure and skill, axes of their

own size and weight.

Chambers 1985:33

Children’s authors have also written a great deal about the act of writing, a topic which
seems to be of perennial interest to those who attend conferences. Interesting as those
accounts can be, they are rarely generally applicable, and the ultimate anti-account, by
William Mayne—might serve for all:

After the idea was there I wrote the book, a statement that, though short, is

completely adequate. There is nothing particularly interesting about writing a book.

In fact, it is rather a bore for everyone, and generally spoils the idea that was there

in the first place.

Crouch and Ellis 1977:95

Indeed, Mayne may be allowed the last word, standing, as he does, for the child before
the adult, and, one suspects, the writer before the critic:

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