During a recent family trip to South Africa, there was one book from my holiday reading pile that I simply couldn’t put down. It had everything: suspense, mystery, humour, fantasy, plot twists, heroes, villains and, ultimately, a happy ending. It also contained talking animals, unicorns and fauns. Because this wasn’t the latest bestselling crime or psychological thriller – my usual genres of choice. It was The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, the children’s story by C.S. Lewis that I’d first read almost 40 years earlier.
Given that I have a nine-year-old son who adores books, you might imagine that my motivation for re-reading it was to do so aloud to him. Not so. At the time, the two of us were devouring the latest in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series together at bedtimes. But, at 49 years old, reading children’s books curled up on my own has become my guilty pleasure. As C.S Lewis himself once said: ‘A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.’
Sales of kids’ books continue to soar (how many are purchased by adults for themselves, I wonder?), and the UK’s children’s publishing market is expected to be worth £802 million by the end of this year. Small wonder when, according to the National Literacy Trust, regularly reading to little ones has ‘astonishing benefits for children’ including comfort and reassurance, confidence and security, relaxation, happiness and fun. When I read aloud to my son every evening – as I have done since he was born – it’s all about doing so in silly or characterful voices to enhance whatever mystery or hi-jinks the story requires. It builds the loveliest connection between us, and lines from some of our favourite tales have made it into our family’s lexicon. We chat about the characters and rate the books out of ten as we go along.
But as more and more of us seem to be discovering, reading children’s literature as adults can elicit benefits for us, too. It is said to help boost creativity, reduce stress, promote escapism, unleash our imaginations and reconnect us to our own childhoods. Children’s books are one of life’s great levellers. One friend, Katie, recently confessed that picking up her old collection of Jill Murphy’s The Worst Witch (discovered in her parents’ loft when they downsized) had helped her to cope with a health scare. Another friend, Claire, confided that she is reading her way through Julia Donaldson’s extensive titles as a joyous antidote to a job she loathes. When a third, Sarah, was bereft after her mum’s death, she found comfort in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books which they’d read together when she was a child. It prompted me to order copies of Blyton’s Wishing-Chair and Faraway Tree series, which transported me back to being at primary school, gloriously unbridled by adult woes.
As C.S Lewis once said: ‘A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest’
In Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old And Wise, author and Oxford fellow Katherine Rundell surmises that children’s fiction ‘helps us refind things we may not even know we have lost’, taking us back to a time when ‘new discoveries came daily and when the world was colossal, before the imagination was trimmed and neatened [by adulthood]’.
Dr Louise Joy, an associate professor at Cambridge University, has also spoken and written about the subject, concluding that: ‘Reading children’s books as an adult enables us to retrieve an earlier, original part of ourselves – a way of thinking; a set of thoughts or feelings; a sense of who we are – which lies forgotten, dormant beneath the surface. The discovery that the very same thoughts and emotions can be accessed all over again, with all their original potency, is extraordinary. It is at once an exhilarating return to the familiar and at the same time a disturbance – a momentary alienation from who we have become. Nostalgic and troubling in equal measure, the experience of reading children’s books can be a uniquely affecting source of solace and illumination, one which reaches backwards in time and yet also forwards, reminding us of what it feels like for it all still to lie ahead.’
Reading children’s books for my own pleasure as an adult reminds me that one of my favourite things to do as a little girl was to visit the library in the small market town where I grew up. My parents were avid readers and Mum would take my brother and me there every few weeks. I recall it being hushed and calm all year round, and particularly cool on hot summer days. The chief librarian was a middle-aged woman with a lisp and wiry hairs on her chin, at which Mum always warned we must not point. In those days – the 1970s and 1980s – books were special gifts at Christmas and on birthdays, and in between we relied on those treasure-filled shelves in the children’s section of the library.
My latest purchase for myself is The Wind in the Willows. When it landed on the doormat and I read the opening few pages, I was transported back to reading it as an 11-year-old in my childhood bedroom. There are times I don’t feel like reading the latest thriller by T.M. Logan or Sabine Durrant, or books loaded with wisdom by Michelle Obama or Trevor Moawad (all of them currently in my pile). Sometimes only the simplicity, wonder, hilarity and often bonkers nature of children’s books will cut it. If I need to activate my chuckle muscle (as my son calls it), I’ll read his beloved Oi Dog! series by Kes Gray, or the Mr Men books, and if I need a bit of quintessentially English comfort then Paddington usually does the trick.
Of course, hidden beneath the whimsical titles and bright covers of titles old and new are philosophical quotes from which we can learn whatever our age. During lockdown I re-read Winnie-The-Pooh and printed out a quote from it which I still have on my desk, for those days when I doubt myself: ‘You’re braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.’ Words as wise for adults as for kids.
Another quote which serves me well when life gets stressful and I feel my face permanently set in a scowl is from Roald Dahl’s The Twits: ‘A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly… if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.’
The current furore around some of Dahl’s classics being edited to remove words deemed ‘offensive’ decades after they were written has brought children’s literature to the fore again. Last month the Queen Consort appeared to wade into the debate when speaking at a Clarence House reception to celebrate the second anniversary of her online book club, the Reading Room, encouraging the assembled writers: ‘Please remain true to your calling, unimpeded by those who may wish to curb the freedom of your expression or impose limits on your imagination. Enough said.’
Delving into children’s books is a magical, transformative indulgence, whatever your age. And even though not all of them have happy endings, they are hopeful – which is something we all need in our serious, grown-up state.
