One of the nicest memories from my childhood is sitting beside my mother as she read my brother and I a story before we went to sleep. She had an excellent ear for the nuances of the written word along with the skill of changing her voice to suit different characters. Nigel and I would wander the lanes of a bygone era as we listened to The Wind in the Willows. We would join Peter Rabbit and his friends in their adventures and misadventures. Although the one about the frog always terrified me. I adored Little Grey Rabbit who lived with Hare and Squirrel more than any other character when I was very young. She was a loving, kind, funny, good friend to the two creatures with whom she lived even when they were conceited, unkind and sometimes plain stupid - in my humble opinion.
Along with Mole, Ratty and Toad I traveled by boat, footpath, road through the imagined landscape of Kenneth Graham. My mother knew the area where it was said that Graham had set the book so she assured us that you could well imagine the friends engaging in their adventures among the hedgerows and on the river bank. For an extremely practical woman my mother had a great love of the delicate formed childhood literature from her homeland. I think that when she read the stories she was carried back to the rural landscape of England and Wales where she had been a child. The harsh realities of adult life faded away leaving her with a belief in the possibility of fairies, elves and rats and moles in rowing boats. Certainly weasels, stouts, Mr. McGregor and others were villains but their role of dimming the golden light only added to the tales as we knew that rarely would any of the main characters be done in by a foul deed.
As a young adult I began to read the works of Solzhenitsyn, Hardy, Steinbeck and others. I loved Thomas Hardy. Closely followed by Steinbeck and Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy, Lawrence and others that were added to the list as I discovered the wonders of world literature. I read a lot. I read widely. I read with the intent of finding out why some writers managed to make me devour their works whilst others were one hit wonders on my reading list. I came to realise that is often as much about the reader as it is about the writer. The magic of literature is the participation of the reader. Time, place, personal memories, age and all that makes one an individual have an important role in why we enjoy reading a book. The pages of a book guide us but we are the travelers.
Which brings me to today. The mail was delivered and among the window envelopes there was a brown package about the size of an A4 sheet of paper. It was clearly a book. Ripping open the package I removed my very own "Treasury of Little Grey Rabbit".
Sitting in the library I turned the pages with almost as much care as if I was holding a copy of an ancient document. There were the lovely little coloured drawings that I remembered from over fifty years ago. There was Little Grey Rabbit talking to Hedgehog, the milk man. Hare wearing his red coat and Squirrel combing her gorgeous tail while she stands before a mirror. The English countryside of my mother's childhood is alive and well if only on the pages of a now little known and currently out of print series.
Eight robins were chattering in a tree as they snacked on berries. Snow covered trees stood sentinel alongside the veranda. I could hear Brandon and his grandfather laughing as they threw snowballs at each other. I could have been in the England that my mother loved - of course then there would have been no snow blower to use to clear the driveway, no cars in the garage, the list is very long. As I looked at the pictures I doubted that anyone else would be as thrilled by the little book as I am. They might find it cute. It might make them feel a momentary nostalgia for a bygone era that now seems more peaceful than it really was but the call of fresh mincemeat pies will distract them even as I tenderly turn a page whilst telling them some sentimental moment from my childhood. For me the book is the door that my mother held open and through which I have wondered for five decades. My daughters, and grandchildren, have benefited from the imagination that my mother developed during her childhood. I can only guess that my grandmother was a source for at least some of that magic. I think that Little Grey Rabbit is for me a testimony to all those who have allowed children to explore the woods, streams, hills, and world that lay just beyond the edge of the garden all the way to the far reaches of the imagination.
The world that Little Grey Rabbit inhabits is certainly rose-tinted. The reality for many millions of children then and now is a harsh life living close to, or suffering, starvation, poverty, illness, abuse and the tragedies of lives lived away from any form of privilege. I remember my mother telling me that depriving a child of imagination is an act of cruelty. She was right. With my father listening to at least four BBC news broadcasts a day I was not unaware of the world beyond the pages of my favourite book. Yet when I sat on our veranda with my stuffed toys and told my mother that Little Grey Rabbit had just been to ask me for some lavender to dry and use among Squirrel's dresses she would say she was sorry to have missed her, perhaps next time I would ask the rabbit to wait while I called her to come outside. The stories were the foundation of a delightful fantasy world. Having experiences the pleasure of listening, and reading, those stories, and the others like them, gave me has given me the ability to sit with my grandchildren watching a little bird house we have hung in the woods sway in the wind and agree that the movement is because fairies are dancing inside. When ever a child thinks they hear a fairy, the bells of from Santa Claus' sleigh, opens a story about a rabbit that became real through love and magic and finds himself a special companion in the form of a toy rabbit that will never disappoint him, or when a mature, sometimes sensible, woman rereads the tales of her childhood a great gift has been received.
Great literature some of the stories may not be, at least in terms of literary criticism, but in terms of magic they are the fountain at which we can still drink if we permit ourselves before we turn away to once again open the window envelopes that hold the adult world.
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