is too old for fairy stories’ (Ransome 1916/1984: 7). In his stories wise fools succeed and
innocents outwit the witch Baba Yaga the Terrible with her iron teeth and appetite for
children’s flesh. The two child listeners move with their uncle Peter in to the forested
landscape of the tales: they share the peasants’ preoccupations and, at the end, enjoy a
christening.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991) shares some of that territory in his Yiddish stories.
As journalist and writer Singer has achieved the most varied and expressive portrayal of
Jewish life in modern fiction, drawing on the singularity and perversity of what he has
observed. Fascinated by the process of translation, he has published four volumes of
stories for children and an essay ‘Are children the ultimate literary critics?’ Like Ransome
he writes for the ‘serious’ children—the adults—as well as for younger readers, often re-
working medieval superstition with dark humour and tragic vision. Many of his adult
stories employ a dangerously unreliable devil-narrator, while in ‘Gimpel the fool’ (Singer
1982:3–14) his fables centre on the shabby shtetl which dominates so much modern
Yiddish literature. The combined spirituality and vulgarity of the shtetl are at odds with
modern technology and Western materialist individualism. In his Preface to Stories for
Children Singer observes that children see through ‘the hype and judge the text on the
criteria of clarity, logic and narrative impact’ (Singer 1984:332). Among the reworked
biblical tales, the witches and festivals, the animal fables, letters, oaths, recipes, verses
and prayers as well as Yiddish provide the multiple voices of Polish peasant
communities and Jewish culture.
Among the wide-ranging dramas, novels, travel and autobiographical works of Graham
Greene (1904–1991), his children’s books appear uncharacteristically conventional,
though the dangerous edge is present in the notion of the venture into the unknown.
The Little Train, fist published in 1946 and followed by three similar books, depicts an
adventure allowing the child-reader release from the familiar. Adventure is then reined
in to guarantee a calm closure, or peaceful bedtime. The rural retreat is privileged above
the city, where the main station like a ‘terrible cave of demons’ appals the little train; a
castle glimpsed en route is identified as one where a king was put to death.
Of the same period, the poet Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972) translator, editor and
Establishment figure after early membership of the Left Book Club, became Poet
Laureate in 1968 after occupying the Chair of Poetry at Oxford from 1951– 1956; of his
two fictions for children, Dick Willoughby (1933) and The Otterbury Incident (1948), the
latter proved more enduring. In 1944 he wrote Poetry for You to popularise poetry among
children, a book which maintains a strong sense of the young reader in its relaxed style
and its reiterated appeal: ‘older people tell you ...’ and ‘have you made up your mind?’
Recommending de la Mare’s collection Come Hither (1923) for the ‘lucky ones who do’
like poetry, he also advises children to compile their own anthologies by copying
favourite poems into a ‘smart-looking manuscript book’ (Lewis 1944:110).
Another Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes (1930–) preoccupied with nature, later with
legends of creation, writes plays, poems and fiction for children, reworking the fable in
two significant forms, Meet My Folks (1961) and What Is The Truth? (1984), a ‘farmyard
fable for the young’. He derives amusement in Meet My Folks from the close
identification of human characters with specific creatures. The collection ends
hauntingly with a vision of a more symbiotic relationship between the rising generation
414 MAJOR AUTHORS’ WORK FOR CHILDREN