BOOKS & ARTS
The rabbit who came to stay
Melanie McDonagh
The Curse of the School Rabbit
by Judith Kerr
Harper Collins, £12.99, pp. 80Is there a more perfect children’s writer for
this generation than Judith Kerr? She started
with a tiger — The Tiger Who Came to Tea,
published in 1968 — and ended with a bunny,
The Curse of the School Rabbit, before she
died three months ago. Both books are pitch-
perfect little masterpieces of their kind.
The tiger was fantastical but also down-
to-earth. The bunny is an entirely plausi-
ble creature: a school rabbit, Snowflake,
kept by Miss Bennet. She uses him to teach
children English (they write about Snow-
flake); maths (they measure Snowflake in
inches and centimetres); and art (they draw
Snowflake). Our narrator doesn’t care for
Snowflake because he peed on his trousers
when he was doing the measuring; but his
little sister Angie has made a party piece out
of him, her Snowflake dance. And it turns
out that when the wretched rabbit comes to
stay, he changes the family’s fortunes.
Snowflake is both the hero and villain of
the story, not least for his capacity to piddle
on important people. But this story about
a bad bunny is also a child’s-eye view of
things: adult unemployment — the narra-
tor’s actor father is ‘out of work, or “rest-
ing” as they call it’; the trials of being the
older, less cute male sibling, who gets given
all the chores; and the precariousness of the
household finances, which has a direct bear-
ing on whether there might be a bicycle for
Christmas. From a boy’s height, we get to see
exactly what’s going on with the grown-ups—
rather as in René Goscinny’s Nicholas
books. It’s funny, because the adult world is
one of actors and film-makers, but poignant,
because it’s about making the best of things.
Miraculously, the drawing style is almost
unchanged from The Tiger Who Came to
Te a: the mother here has lovely familiar
rounded lines, especially in her dressing
gown, and the cast of characters, having
escaped modernity, looks just the same as
in the early books. The picture of our narra-
tor and the rabbit exchanging sour looks is
quite brilliant.
The author was a genius, with an affec-
tionate sensibility. The deceptive simplicity
of her stories and her capacity to see things
from a child’s point of view were very rare
gifts. Thank you, Judith Kerr.Haunted by the
ghosts of Ramallah
Claire Kohda Hazelton
Going Home: A Walk Through
Fifty Years of Occupation
by Raja Shehadeh
Profi le, £14.99, pp. 197
On a rainy day in 1955, four-year-old Raja
Shehadeh left school without putting his
coat on. ‘I will soon be home, I thought,
trailing the coat as it became heavy with
rain.’ The walk was longer than he expect-
ed, or the rain heavier. He arrived back
soaked through and fell ill with pneumo-
nia. The journey home, without protection
from the weather, could have killed him.
Throughout his life in Palestine, Sheha-
deh has been buffeted by events that have
seemed as uncontrollable as the weather.
He was a very young child when his family
were forced out of Jaffa by Israeli soldiers
and moved to Ramallah, and 16 during the
Israeli invasion of the city.
For nearly 30 years, Shehadeh — a law-
yer, activist and writer — has taken a walk
every year on the anniversary of the 1967
war and occupation of Palestine by Israel.
The year of this book is 2017 —the 50th
anniversary — and Shehadeh is 66, plagued
by a recurring dream in which he is lost and
can’t find his home.
The hills are now out of bounds, so
Shehadeh takes a walk through the city
instead. Along the way, he seeks out his
old homes, those of his family and friends
as well as sites of significance to his life and
to the Palestinian resistance. The build-
ings he passes are occupied by ghosts of
his former selves: the 16-year-old Sheha-
deh waits with his anxious mother inside
the old house they lived in during the inva-
sion of Ramallah, his grandmother’s white
underwear ‘billowing on the clothes line
of her kitchen balcony’ as though a flag of
surrender. Shehadeh’s father, a lawyer and
one of the earliest supporters of the two-
state solution, pulls up on the road outside
another house with a gift of baraziq (thin,
crisp, salty sesame cakes), not long before
his murder.
Going Home is about searching for the
meaning of ‘home’ when living in a city
under occupation, where more than half
the population are refugees. For a long
time, the author and his wife Penny didn’t
build their own home and rented instead,
‘for fear of getting too attached to it and
then losing it in this unsettled land of ours’.
Shehadeh has spent his life looking for
homes in different places. He holds on to
old clothes — his wardrobe is ‘a museum
spanning decades’; ‘clothes are like houses,
objects we cover ourselves with,’ he writes.
Home lies in his memories of his mother,
dressed as Santa Claus at Christmas; in his
relationship with Penny; in his memories of
Ramallah and its people; and in his identity
as an activist and now a writer.
He laments the systematic destruc-
tion of Ramallah, and questions how peo-
ple can hold on to their sense of identity
and history when their homes are being
destroyed. The still-Palestinian parts of
Ramallah are marked with a sense of fra-
gility. Twice, Shehadeh describes the plants
that grow in the gardens of Palestinians as
standing guard like ‘sentinels’: but they are
easy to overcome, delicate and imperma-
nent. He watches the movements of two
older men, who wander around the streets
looking lost — one who sits on the curb-
side, ‘directing his gaze to the horizon in
a long vacant stare’, another a hoarder,
rummaging through bins for old furniture
and rubbish — and considers them warn-
ings of what he could become were he to
submit to anger and despondency, and
lose touch with his own identity as well as
his city’s.
As the founder of the human rights
organisation Al-Haq, Shehadeh has felt
the city’s losses and injuries as his own.
His journey through life has been marked
by developments in the conflict between
Palestine and Israel: he has seen the green
spaces in Ramallah shrink and disappear,
Palestinian family houses demolished and
soldiers storm his and others’ homes.
Similarly, Ramallah is forever changed
by the paths Shehadeh has taken in life: the
homes he has made in houses, buildings he
has transformed into offices as a lawyer
and activist, and the clients’ houses he has
prevented from being illegally destroyed.
In this book, the bonds that bind Palestin-
ians to the land are exposed. Personal and
political, human and geographical histories
are beautifully intertwined and preserved.
Shehadeh does eventually seem to find
a resting place. He suggests that a sort of
peace, and therefore a home, can be con-
structed in the mind and carried around,
safe and protected in the self. In a beautiful
passage, on his way back to the house he
shares with his wife, which they did even-tually build together, he quotes Words-
worth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’:...thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies.