“You don’t like it, do you?” she asks, grinning.

“No.” How refreshing to be so certain.

“But why?”

To be honest, it’s hard to say, because it’s hard to pay attention to the story. I find my mind wandering as I read (or as J does), and I end up thinking things like, Isn’t it amazing that we can read without comprehending, the way we can hear without really listening, or look without seeing? 

But I do try to articulate my reasons to N, because I think it’s important to say more than “It isn’t my cup of tea.” I want her to be able to say why something doesn’t work for her, and perhaps even what would make it better. (Just as I love it when she can tell me why she likes her new friend “Snowy” at school: “We both believe in magic. We both like adventure. We’re both anxious to do things — like something’s buzzing inside us.”)

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator picks up where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory left off, with Charlie, Grandpa Joe and chocolatier extraordinaire Willy Wonka arriving at the Bucket house in the Great Glass Elevator to give good news to Charlie’s family: he has inherited the chocolate factory from Willy Wonka, and they are all going to live there happily ever after and never be poor again. But from there the story spirals off in increasingly bizarre directions. The elevator whisks them into the sky as they begin to make their trip back to the factory, but Grandma Josephine panics, grabs the controls, and suddenly they are orbiting the earth at seventeen thousand miles an hour. The brand new Space Hotel USA is out there too, as is a shuttle containing hotel staff and astronauts communicating with the American president, Lancelot R. Gilligrass, and soon enough the government becomes convinced the elevator contains terrorists bent on blowing up the Space Hotel. The story turns strangely convoluted and political, and ridiculous too, with calls to “Premier Yugetoff” in Russia and “Premier How-Yu-Bin” in China. The president asks knock-knock jokes of the people on the other end of the line: “Knock-knock.” “Who-der?” “Ginger.” “Ginger who?” “Ginger yourself when you fell off the Great Wall of China?” It is truly, groaningly horrible.

I can’t help but feel that Dahl was telling a story for children with a lot of nudge-nudge wink-winks for grown-ups, too, a tactic I really dislike — when the President rhymes off the names of famous hotel owners Mr. Hilton, Mr. Ritz, Mr. Astoria and Mr. Waldorf, it means nothing to N. Nor does the knock-knock joke about “Warren Peace.” Sure, you can explain these things (and pausing to explain can be a lovely part of reading with children), but in this case the iota of humour would be lost by then anyway.

This doesn’t feel like a story written with care. It feels tossed off, and largely Charlie-less. It is picking up slightly, now that Wonka et al have arrived back at the factory, and the story is more solidly focused on its characters, but even here I sensed a wrong note. Willy Wonka convinces Charlie’s curmudgeonly, creakingly old grandparents that they should take Wonka-vite, a pill with the power to make them twenty years younger. With a bit of simple math, he’s warned them of the dire consequences of taking too many. Seduced by the desire to be young again, they grab for the pills and begin to fight over them, eventually swallowing four each and turning rapidly into babies. This tiny moment could have been vintage Dahl, but it’s spoiled by a curious switch in perspective. Suddenly we are in Wonka’s thoughts, of all places, though the power and magic of Wonka’s character lies in the fact that he is enigmatic, mysterious, impossible to understand. But here he is, musing for pages on end: “He hated squabbles. He hated it when people got grabby and selfish…. It was an unhappy truth, he told himself, that nearly all people in the world behave badly when there is something really big at stake.”

I keep thinking back to my earlier research about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and how I read that Dahl hated the Gene Wilder movie version so much he refused a film version of The Great Glass Elevator. “Maybe,” I suggested to J this morning, “he’d finally realized how bad the book was, and was doing damage control!”

But all this negativity is bringing me down. Scouring the internet for other opinions of Dahl’s not-so-great glass elevator, I found this simple, perfect quote by moonflygirl, who’s scanned a load of gorgeous old book covers on flickr. “As much as I love Roald Dahl, I think this book taught me that sequels can be disappointing.” Having gone on at length articulating my disappointment, this one spare sentence feels much more dignified. But I’m curious — how do others critique books with their children?

So I was squinting at those stamps when an email came in from Niranjana Iyer, sending news of Royal Mail’s new series of stamps celebrating Roald Dahl’s work. The series features Quentin Blake’s wonderful illustrations: Charlie with his golden ticket, the BFG with Sophie on his palm, a Witch with her wig suspended above her scabby scalp. And I thought, how nice that this would come to me just now, like a special delivery.

We’re nearly done Roald Dahl’s 1975 novel Danny the Champion of the World, but we got off to a difficult start. Danny is four months old when his mother dies, so he’s raised by his father, who owns a filling station, and they live together in a gypsy caravan. Danny adores his father, a marvelous story-teller and an “eye-smiler” (like my own dad). “I’ve learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it,” Danny tells us. “So watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you with his mouth but his eyes stay the same. It’s sure to be phony.”

Danny’s father takes wonderful care of them both and teaches Danny to become an expert mechanic by the age of 7. But late one night, Danny wakes to discover his father is gone, and that “no father is perfect. Grown-ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets. Some have quirkier quirks and deeper secrets than others, but all of them, including one’s own parents, have two or three private habits hidden up their sleeves that would probably make you gasp if you knew about them.”

"Pheasants are beautiful birds, aren't they Mom?"

When Danny wakes up alone in the dark, he grows sick with worry. He waits and waits until finally his father returns. “I’m so sorry,” he says, and by way of apology, he lets Danny in on “the deepest, darkest secret of my whole life.” It turns out that Danny’s lovely, gentle, funny, kind father is a poacher. He hasn’t poached since his wife died, but that night, he was driven by an insatiable longing. At first, Danny is horrified by the idea that his father is a thief. And then he finds out that he comes from a long line of “magnificent and splendiferous” poachers. Every decent man in town loves to creep into the wealthy, villainous Mr. Hazell’s woods and steal his overfed pheasants. “Only the very rich can afford to rear pheasants just for the fun of shooting them down when they grow up,” Danny’s father tells him. Before the conversation is done, Danny himself has caught the poaching fever and hangs on his father’s every word about the most ingenious ways to catch pheasants, whose greatest weakness is that they are crazy about raisins:

The 1975 Jonathan Cape release of Danny was illustrated by Jill Bennett

The Horsehair Stopper is a “brilliant method” because it’s completely silent. You stab a plumped-up raisin with a single stiff horsehair so it sticks out on either end. The horsehair makes the raisin stick in the pheasant’s throat, and the feeling of it tickling there, like a crumb, renders the pheasant unable to move. “He becomes absolutely rooted to the spot, and there he stands pumping his silly neck up and down just like a piston, and all you’ve got to do is nip out quickly from the place where you’re hiding and pick him up.” The image of the bird’s neck vibrating gave me the shivers, and I glanced at N, but couldn’t gauge her response, so I continued reading.

Method number two, The Sticky Hat, involves a trail of plump raisins leading to a tiny cone of paper smeared with glue. The last delectable raisins sit inside the cone. “Now, the old pheasant comes pecking along the trail, and when he gets to the hole he pops his head inside to gobble up the raisins and the next thing he knows he’s got a paper hat stuck over his eyes, and he can’t see a thing…. No bird in the world is going to run away once you cover up his eyes.”

At which point N said, very quietly, “Pheasants are beautiful birds, aren’t they Mom?” And then she added, “At least they aren’t killing them with guns. That would be really mean.” But if you’re a good shot, it would also be quick and unexpected. In those early pages, both N and I couldn’t help hoping the girl from The Magic Finger would appear and “see red,” just as she did in that book, when she turned the hunting Gregg family into ducks and the ducks they hunted into hunters.

"'The Magic Finger' is something I have been able to do all my life. I can't tell you just how I do it, because I don't even know myself. But it always happens when I get cross, when I see red..."

“Please don’t shoot!” cried Mr. Gregg.

“Why not?” said one of the ducks. “You are always shooting at us.”

“Oh, but that’s not the same! We are allowed to shoot ducks!”

“Who allows you?” asked the duck.

“We allow each other,” said Mr. Gregg.

“Very nice,” said the duck. “And now we are going to allow each other to shoot you.”

Alas, we are very near the end of Danny and the girl with the magic finger hasn’t arrived. But what has undeniably come, in spite of the cruel tricks and  dead pheasants, is an incredibly touching story about a father and son. This novel isn’t as funny as most of Dahl’s other books — it sometimes has quite a melancholy tone — but it’s rich and moving and complex. The love and admiration Danny feels for his father is there on every page: “I loved the way he moved. He had that long, loping stride all countrymen have who are used to covering great distances on foot. He was wearing an old navy-blue sweater and an even older cap on his head. He turned and waved to me. I waved back. Then he disappeared around a bend in the road.” The chapter closes, and we know, we just know, something bad is about to happen to Danny’s beloved father.

This 1959 edition of The New Yorker carried the seed of Dahl's 1975 novel, Danny the Champion of the World

The more I read of Dahl’s books, the more intrigued I become about the man himself. I’ve mentioned his short stories before, written for adults, and his main focus before switching to children’s literature when his own kids were young. So it was fun to discover that Danny was originally one of these short stories, albeit Danny-less, and first published in The New Yorker in 1959 under the title “The Champion of the World.” How interesting to think that the father-son relationship was not part of the original story, yet forms the very core of the later novel. As a writer, I love it when one project grows into another, or when a story emerges fully formed, but a little bit of it stays inside me, one day becoming a whole new creation. I remember being floored when an agent once tried to dissuade me from writing a story that had come from an earlier story. To me it was fascinating to see how different the story could become by changing the focus. She said, rather bluntly, “People will think you have no imagination.” And I remember quietly deciding that anyone who’d think that mustn’t have much themselves.

I’m sure Dahl must have felt the same way. Bits of his stories pop up in new form again and again. N and I were thrilled to find our favourite Dahl character, the “nice and jumbly” Big Friendly Giant, peering out at us from the pages of Danny, catching dreams and blowing them into children’s bedroom windows. I can just see Dahl, scribbling away on his Danny manuscript, and tucking this magnificent giant into a corner of his mind reserved for stories yet to come.

By the way, since our last post, we’ve also read The Minpins and George’s Marvellous Medicine, so our list is now like this:

The Gremlins
James and the Giant Peach
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
The Magic Finger
Fantastic Mr Fox
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
Danny, the Champion of the World
The Enormous Crocodile
The Twits
George’s Marvellous Medicine
The BFG
The Witches
The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me
Matilda
Esio Trot
The Vicar of Nibbleswicke
The Minpins
Revolting Rhymes
Dirty Beasts
Rhyme Stew

And now … back to my stamps.

When I heard Esta Spalding read Night Cars on the original version of the website Seen Reading, the rhythm of the words was immediately lodged in my head. Night Cars is written by Teddy Jam (who was the novelist Matt Cohen) and illustrated by Eric Beddows. It was late November 2008 when I encountered Spalding’s reading, and I was pregnant. Not long after, I purchased my own copy of the book, inscribing the inside cover: “Merry Christmas in utero to our beloved baby. With love, your Mommy and Daddy(!)”.

The exclamation in parentheses was because our transformation into parents was impossible to imagine. The baby itself I only ever believed in during our appointments at the ultrasound clinic, and for half-hour windows afterwards. What a leap of faith it was to inscribe the book as I did, the whole arrangement still so tentative. I could have as easily written a question mark.

Night Cars begins, “Once there was a baby, who wouldn’t go to sleep…” And this point too was impossible, mostly because I didn’t want to know about it. Who would ever imagine being that parent up in the dark while the world slumbers, baby’s wide-open eyes reflecting light from the streetlamps outside? (One of the first novels I’d read after Harriet was born was Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden, and how I’d identify with its world of night, with the strange clock that was striking thirteen: “Only the clock was left, but the clock was always there, time in, time out.”)

But the baby arrived, and Night Cars became our story too. Whose rhythm is really a lullaby, an almost-nonsense verse whose meaning became clearer the less sleep I got: “Someone needs a pillow/ Call a taxi on the phone/ Someone needs a good-night kiss/ Someone’s eyes have fallen down.” When we rocked our daughter, her eyes would start to get heavy, and though she’d fight it, those lids would eventually succumb to the lull.  “Call a taxi,” we’d whisper when it happened, our private shorthand. Though as soon as we laid her in the bassinette, her eyes snapped open again.

In the daytime, I’d go for walks, Harriet strapped to my chest and falling asleep to the rhythm of my feet as they traced the grid of our neighbourhood streets. When she was awake, I was supposed to be narrating the world around us, but I was usually too exhausted so I cheated. It was easier to quote from Night Cars: “Fire engine, fire truck/ Waking everybody up,” I’d murmur as the shiny truck pulled out of the station on Howland Avenue. On Tuesday mornings as I navigated our stroller through a maze of bins:  “Garbage man, garbage man, careful near that dream…” And as the seasons changed and the air grew chilly, “Slow snow falling deep…” It wasn’t the only poem I knew, but in those days, Night Cars seemed the most relevant, and it was the only one I could count on to remember.

It was also a benchmark, how we measured time as our baby grew. The first time Harriet slept through the night, she’d assumed the Night Cars baby’s sleeping pose, lying on her stomach with her bum in the air, and it seemed like a significant milestone. And these days, when she points to the sleeping baby in the book, it’s to repeat the story she’s heard so many times already, that once upon a time she slept like the Night Cars baby did, the unfathomable idea that she was ever so small. How far we all have come together.

These days she has much more in common with the baby at the end of the book, a big head stuck in a stripy shirt, a kid who pulls on big red boots to kick the snow, and heads out to the cafe with Dad for something chocolate. But the world around us is still very much the Night Cars world, trucks and taxis, night-time sirens, dodgy storefronts, sidewalks, stray dogs and donuts.

♦

Kerry Clare lives in Toronto with her husband and daughter. Her essay about new motherhood, “Love is a Let Down,” was awarded an Honourable Mention at the 2011 National Magazine Awards, and also appeared in Best Canadian Essays 2011. Her essays, short fiction and book reviews have appeared in several Canadian magazines, and she writes about books and reading at her blog Pickle Me This.

Henrietta shares her tea

We took Matilda with us to Ottawa last weekend for a little winter getaway, and it was a good thing she was there, since in the middle of the night, the hotel’s alarm went off, ten horrible long hoots followed by a repeatedly repeated emergency announcement that had N wild with anxiety. The “emergency” was quickly resolved, but getting back to sleep was another matter. So out came Matilda. A page or two of this brilliant little girl outsmarting the gruff and grotesque headmistress Trunchbull was the perfect tranquilizer.

Unlike Mr. and Mrs. Twit, you have to love Miss Trunchbull, even while you detest her. Once a formidable athlete, she has a bull-neck, sausagey fingers, and “massive thighs encased in a pair of extraordinary breeches.” She picks children up by their ears and their pig tails and hurls them at will — out classroom windows, over playground fences — and she gets away with it because she knows enough to “make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable.” The parents don’t buy the children’s tales about her, or if they do, and complain about how their kids are treated, the Trunchbull does the same to them. Imagine moms and dads sailing through the air like a discus.

But it’s the Trunchbull’s cruelty that brings out Matilda’s hidden powers — her “first miracle”. She’s so enraged at being falsely accused of slipping a salamander into the Trunchbull’s water glass, that she causes the glass to tip over simply by staring at it. “Little waves of lightning seemed to be flashing out of her eyes. Her eyeballs  were beginning to get hot, as though vast energy was building up somewhere inside them. It was an amazing sensation. She kept her eyes steadily on the glass, and now the power was concentrating itself in one small part of each eye and growing stronger and stronger and it felt as though millions of tiny little invisible arms with hands on them were shooting out of her eyes towards the glass she was staring at. ‘Tip it,’ Matilda whispered. ‘Tip it over!’ ” And so she makes the discovery of her own incredible power. (Oh, how I remember doing this myself! Never actually moving anything, but absolutely convinced that I could. Going dizzy and bug-eyed trying.)

Re power, it seemed fitting, then, that the next day we tromped through the slush to visit the Famous Five and their teacups on Parliament Hill. As we posed with Nellie McClung holding the news that “Women are Persons!” I half-expected N to say, “Well, duh, what else would we be?” because the idea of such an argument was so preposterous to her. So I explained (albeit briefly and simply) about the Persons Case, and how women have had to fight for equal treatment. I could feel N thinking hard about that. Together we stood looking at Henrietta Muir Edwards, holding her tea cup aloft. She had a perfect disc of snowy ice on her head, like an extra little cap or a discus, and when I pointed that out, chuckling, N said very seriously, “I think we should take that off Mom.” So I reached forward and returned Henrietta to her dignified state.

I love N’s sensitivity, and her curiosity too. The way she sees, the questions she asks. We used to call her “our little noticer,” and though the slightly clumsy nickname has fallen away, the noticing has not.

Later that Ottawa day we were in the Byward Market, gobbling Beaver Tails, and a down-and-out man approached us and spoke to N’s dad J, hoping for change. When J returned the greeting, the man said, “Thank you for not making me feel invisible.” And N asked about that too.

“What does he mean, invisible?”

“Well, he feels like no one sees him. Like he’s not even here, because no one notices him.”

“So it’s like he’s a ghost, then,” she decided. “He feels like he’s already died but he hasn’t.”

Like James before entering the magical Giant Peach; like starving Charlie Bucket before finding the Golden Ticket. “Several people went hurrying past him on the sidewalk, their chins sunk deep in the collars of their coats, their feet crunching in the snow … none of them was taking the slightest notice of the small boy crouching in the gutter.”

We bought two more Dahls in Ottawa — The Magic Finger, devoured on the car ride home, and Fantastic Mr. Fox, now nearly done. Thus far, our list looks like this:

The Gremlins
James and the Giant Peach
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
The Magic Finger
Fantastic Mr Fox
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
Danny, the Champion of the World
The Enormous Crocodile
The Twits
George’s Marvellous Medicine
The BFG
The Witches
The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me
Matilda
Esio Trot
The Vicar of Nibbleswicke
The Minpins
Revolting Rhymes
Dirty Beasts
Rhyme Stew

On we go!

William Kilburn's 1777 watercolour shows the dandelion in all its elegance.

I got a note this morning from a friend, telling me that N has been regaling her daughter AW with stories of Harry Potter. And now AW and her family are reading Harry Potter before the lights go out and again at the breakfast table. And it occurred to me that good books are like dandelion seeds that just keep on floating and finding new homes. Not that good books are common, but that they are enduring. N has been asking about the meaning of the word “classic” lately, and dandelion seeds might make a good analogy. (In my mind, dandelions are a classic flower.)

Since I last posted about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we have carried on with our Roald Dahl mission. We’ve made our way through James and the Giant Peach, then The Twits, and are now halfway through Matilda. I remain a loyal Dahl fan, though The Twits disappointed.  It’s about Mr. Twit, a hairy, cruel, crass ex-monkey trainer with bits of tinned sardine and Stilton cheese in his beard, and his wife Mrs. Twit,  who’s grown ugly over the years because of her ugly thoughts. “If a person has ugly thoughts,” Dahl writes, “it begins to show on the face. … A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.” (That part I liked.)

Together, Mr. and Mrs. Twit are “the smelliest, nastiest, ugliest people in the world.” Mrs. Twit walks with a cane, not because she needs supporting but because she likes to hit children and animals with it. Mr. Twit drinks beer at breakfast. They are united by their ugliness — Mr. Twit catches the birds that land on a nearby tree by smearing the branches with glue, and Mrs. Twit cooks the birds into a pie — but they are also ugly to each other. They’re constantly getting each other back for some nasty trick with a trick that is nastier still. Mrs. Twit feeds her husband worms disguised as spaghetti, and so Mr. Twit gradually lengthens Mrs. Twit’s cane to convince her she’s got “the shrinks.”

It is a funny story, though for me (admittedly not for N) it quickly wore thin. I kept asking myself, why isn’t this working? The answer lay more than halfway through the book, when we meet a family of monkeys the Twits keep in a cage outside. The monkeys hate the Twits and long to return to the African jungle, and to escape the people who’ve made their lives so miserable. These monkeys are our Charlie, our James of the Giant Peach, our Harry. They’re the ones we need to attach ourselves to in order to care about the story, and they are absent from the early pages. There isn’t enough time left in the story to really fall for them, though of course we want them to escape, and we are happy when the Roly-Poly Bird and the would-be pie birds help them pull the ultimate prank on the Twits.

Dahl himself wrote that he simply wanted to “do something against beards,” so I suppose I’m taking The Twits far too seriously. But what is so brilliant about Charlie and James and Matilda and the BFG is how quickly and unequivocally we bond with the main characters. Impoverished Charlie trying to share his yearly chocolate bar with his family; James held hostage in the cruel world of Aunts Sponge and Spiker; tiny Matilda forced to put her stupid book away and watch telly with her horribly uncouth family (“Don’t you ever stop reading?”); little Sophie quaking in the dark orphanage, only to be scooped up by a dream-catching giant.

The Twits has none of that. It didn’t diminish N’s enjoyment of the story, but she did ask several times, “Mom, who is more main? Mr. or Mrs.?” Which leads me to believe she was unsure of who was taking us through. I suspect the monkeys were meant to take us through, but arrived too late for the job.

Now Matilda, in more ways than one, is another story. I have a soft spot for Quentin Blake’s depictions of her, since they remind me of my own little N. The similarities stop there: N is smart, funny, and delightful, and Matilda is a genius. By five, she’s read Dickens and Steinbeck, despite the fact that her parents are monstrous and see her as “nothing more than a scab. … Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood looked forward enormously to the time when they could pick their little daughter off and flick her away.”

I wonder if it’s Matilda’s brilliance that has N asking about classics and reciting her multiplication tables to me. On her top bookshelf, she has a row of books written by me. Last night she pulled down Water Wings, my first novel, and began to read, grinning all the while. It’s not a book for children, and I’m sure she’ll lose interest soon.

“Did it feel weird,” she asked, “the first time  you saw your name on a book?”

“Yes,” I said. “But it feels weirder to see you reading it.”

She picked out lines she liked and read them to me. And they were nice ones, if I do say so myself, which is a compliment to both of us. As I pulled her door closed, she called out, “I like your book, Mom. It’s really good.” And though she only got a page in, it was strangely touching. Touching that she thought it was good, yes, but also that she had every confidence that her opinion mattered.

When I was a girl, I sometimes got to watch a children’s movie on TV on Saturday afternoons. The film was different every week, of course, but each was introduced with the same visual “prelude.” A young girl would run out the back door of her home, skirt flapping, and down to a small shed—or was it a treehouse?—at the base of her yard. I’m seeing this through the blur of memory, remember. She must have lived in the country; I seem to recall there were fields all around. Music played; there was no voice-over. Once inside her hideaway, she settled herself among cushions and pulled out a notebook and pen, looked thoughtful for a moment, and began to write.

Then the opening credits would roll, and the film, we were to imagine, was the story the girl was writing.

I loved that opening—the concept of stories within stories. The story of the nameless girl writer (who was she? I wondered), who scribbled stories in her notebook, and the way what she wrote opened up into the story told by the film.

♦

“What did you read when you were a kid?” I ask my husband. We’re drinking coffee in front of the fire in the family room one Saturday morning, he reading the newspaper—or trying to—and me, at the urging of my 15-year-old son, devouring The Hunger Games.

My reading has prompted my question. The popular dystopian adventure, which immediately pulls me in, reminds me of how much I enjoyed the escape offered by fantasies and sci-fi novels when I was younger. But Hans, my husband, was born in Amsterdam and grew up speaking and reading mostly Dutch. He didn’t move to Canada till age 10. What books were special to him?

“Oh,” he replies. “I don’t recall anything in particular.”

Hans, I should mention, approaches memory the same way he approaches locating an item in the refrigerator. He opens the door, gives the shelves a cursory glance, and closes the door again, convinced whatever he was after isn’t there. Until I look and find it, quite readily, a few minutes later.

“Did you read Dutch stories?” I persist. “English stories translated into Dutch?”

“Dutch.”

“Like …?”

“Well, I remember we read a lot of fairy tales …”

“Like Grimms’?”

“Mm-hmm. That sort of thing.” He rattles his paper purposefully and holds it up between us.

“You don’t remember ANY particular books?”

He lowers the paper again and gives me that look. “Nope.”

But then, seeing that I’m wearing my look (the determined, yes-it-is-so-in-the-refrigerator one), he pauses and sighs. “Well, there were these stories …”

“Yes?”

“… about two brothers. They got hold of a boat and had adventures on the canals. I read a few of those and really liked them.”

“They were Dutch books?”

“Yeah. They were set in Holland. I doubt they were translated into English.”

“What were they called?”

“Hmm, I don’t know.”

“Author?”

“Don’t know. But”—now he’s smiling—“the boat, I remember, was called the Kameleon. Dutch for ‘chameleon.’”

Growing up in Holland, he told me, the canals and the boats that plied them were a big part of his life. “We were always hanging around the canals … riding our bikes along them … dropping bricks in them …”

“Bricks?”

He shrugs. “They made a great splash.”

Boys, I think.

“And for a while, someone we knew had a dingy and we used to row around in it.”

“Just you kids? Wasn’t that dangerous?” I thought of the first time my family visited Chaffey’s Locks on the Rideau Canal and my mother just about had a coronary. Stay away from the sides, children! Stop running, you’ll trip and fall in!

“Things were different then. We were off on our own most of the day. Our parents had no idea what we were getting into.”

“So who introduced you to those books?” I ask.

“I don’t recall,” he says. “We went to the library a lot. I probably found them there.”

“What was it you liked about them?”

“That boat,” he says, a distant look in his eyes. “It had a special motor and no one but the brothers knew it could go that fast. It was their secret. They were always getting into trouble, having adventures. That boat was very cool.”

By now he’s grinning broadly.

I knew I’d get something out of him, eventually.

♦

Kluitman started out in the 1860s, with printing, bookbinding, and bookselling happening under a single roof.

I’m fascinated by authors and the background of their writing, so that afternoon I sit at the computer and begin searching.

The Kameleon books, I discover, were part of a series written by Hotze de Roos (1909–1991) and released by the Dutch company Kluitman. The books are still being published and the series is the most popular and longest running in Dutch publishing history.

De Roos was born in 1909 in the village of Langezwaag, in Friesland, in northern Holland. He was the third of five children, and his father owned a small construction company. As a child, de Roos dreamed of owning a sailboat, but the family couldn’t afford one. After graduating from technical school at age 17, he became a carpenter, but he also wrote regularly for the local newspaper, mostly about a construction project on which he worked for several years. His way with words was noticed and encouraged by some local writers. He later moved to Krommenie, also in northern Holland, and married, but there’s no mention of the couple having children. Yet during the Second World War he began writing tales for youngsters.

Hotze de Roos

One day in 1948, so the story goes, he got on his bike with his first full manuscript—the English translation of the title would have been Sietse and Hielke: The Ringleaders of the Village Blacksmith—and rode the 14-plus kilometres to the Kluitman offices in Alkmaar. After delivering the package, he returned home to await word, and a few weeks later was rewarded with the good news that his book had been accepted.

Kluitman changed the title to De Schippers van de Kameleon (The Skippers of the Kameleon), and that illustrated novel became the first of more than 60 published over the next half century.

The stories feature twelve-year-old identical twins, Hielke and Sietse Klinkhamer, trouble-divining sons of the blacksmith in the fictional village of Lenten. They dream of owning a boat of their own, and their father eventually buys them an old one. The boys lovingly restore it with bits of leftover paint of various colours, and they christen it the Kameleon. When a man the boys have rescued rewards them with a car motor, they install it in their boat. And with this revved-up Kameleon, their adventures take off.

De Roos wrote other children’s stories early on, but none were as popular as the ones about the twins and their speedy craft. He went on to write a total of 59 books in the series, which also includes a few titles added by other writers after his death. Since 1949, books in the Kameleon series have sold more than 13 million copies.

The Klinkhamer twins have also been featured on the big screen in two films, De Schippers van de Kameleon (The Skippers of the Kameleon) (2003) and Kameleon 2 (2005), directed by actor/director Steven de Jong and Marc Willard.  (Watch the trailer of the first here and the second here.) De Jong and Jean Ummels co-wrote the screenplay.

A still from the first Kameleon film

Intrigued, I emailed producer Sjef Scholte, former owner and CEO of Bridge Entertainment (he sold the company five years ago), to ask a few questions. De Schippers van de Kameleon, he tells me, was his first of many productions. He and actor/director de Jong had read the books as kids and had worked on other projects together. Because of the books’ popularity, they were fairly sure the first film would find a receptive audience, and they were right. De Schippers sold 84,000 tickets in its first five days, according to Screen Daily, setting an opening weekend record for a Dutch family/children’s title.

The filmmakers made every effort to keep the look and feel of the 1950s. “The [film] was warm, no violence, funny, family-oriented, traditional … back to the old days,” says Scholte. “[And we had] a director who lives in the country and knows the area pretty well.” The filming was done in Friesland, “famous for its lakes and old villages and beautiful landscapes.”

The twins were played by real-life identical twins Koen van der Donk (Hielke Klinkhamer) and Jos van der Donk (Sietse Klinkhamer). “It took some time to find the twins,” he says, “but we succeeded, and it was their first movie so Steven trained them for a couple of months to become actors.”

“To produce it was hard because of the weather, which is never guaranteed in Holland—when you need sun there is rain and storm—but we were very creative.” But the boat and action scenes weren’t a problem because “in Holland we are experienced in storms, boats and water, so we managed.”

The first Kameleon film became the most-viewed Dutch film of 2003, and it sequel, Kameleon 2, was also well received.

De Roos, centre, receives the Silver Pen award

Despite the remarkable popularity of the books, de Roos received no formal recognition of his literary success during his lifetime. But in 1980, students in a primary school in the Friesian village of Terherne, who felt the author should be honoured, invited him to visit. When he did, they presented him with a carefully chosen prize: the Sulveren Pinne (Silver Pen). This touching act set in motion plans for a theme park to be established in Terherne based on the Kameleon books.

De Roos died in 1991 at age 81 and, sadly, did not live to see the park bring to life his fictional village and its characters. But in 2001, a statue of him was unveiled there, and just six years ago, the ashes of this much-loved Dutch author were laid to rest in Kameleon Terherne, the “Chameleon Village.”

♦

“You even contacted the producer?” Hans sounds only mildly surprised. He’s used to my curiosity by now.

“Wonders of the Internet,” I say.

He reads what I’ve found about Hotze de Roos and watches the film trailer. “I hadn’t thought of those books in a long, long time,” he says.

I’m sure I don’t imagine the nostalgia in his eyes.

What I’ve learned has rendered more vivid, for me, the world in which he grew up—one that usually feels very distant, both in time and space.

Stories within stories. Like the prelude to those children’s movies I used to watch on Saturday afternoons. The story of carpenter-turned-author Hotze de Roos and his writing. The 59 stories of the Klinkhamer twins that flowed from his pen. The story of the children of Terherne whose gift led to a park that keeps the memory of de Roos’s life and his writing alive.

And the individual stories of the millions of Dutch children who read his books, and who rode their bikes along the canals and dropped bricks in to watch the splash and dreamed of fast boats.

And one of them even grew up to be part of my story.

♦

Allyson Latta is a Canadian freelance writer and an editor of literary fiction and creative nonfiction books, many of which have gone on to win national and international awards. She also edits for the University of the West Indies Press in Jamaica. Allyson teaches memoir writing for the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies in partnership with the New York Times Knowledge Network, and has led writers’ retreats in Canada, the U.S., Chile and Costa Rica. She fell for a Dutch boy she met in journalism school and they now live with their two sons in the Toronto area. Visit her website: allysonlatta.com

"Twice a day, on his way to and from school, little Charlie Bucket had to walk right past the gates of the factory. And every time he went by, he would begin to walk very, very slowly, and he would hold his nose high in the air and take long deep sniffs of the gorgeous chocolatey smell all around him. Oh, how he loved that smell!"

After my last post, in which I talked about “practice in disappointment,” I had a note from a friend, whose daughters are young women now. She wrote that she, too, used to want to fix every little thing that went wrong in her girls’ lives. “To act on every emotional vent that they had about life, people, you name it. What they have taught me though, was that when I rushed in too quickly to help them up or to try and fix it for them (and I went to insane lengths to fix things looking back), it made them feel that I didn’t believe they could cope, that I didn’t have the confidence in their ability to get through it…. So I think I have finally learned to listen with a wrenching twist in my gut to their heartaches, encourage them, and rejoice with them when they get through a difficult time.”

I told her I would like to fold up that piece of wisdom and keep it in my pocket always.

And then late last night, after N had gone to bed, I found myself hovering over her piano homework, a picture that she was supposed to colour according to the musical notes placed on different parts of the image. C was orange, D was pink. But the pink she’d chosen looked almost exactly like the orange, and I was actually standing there considering going over it with a pinker pink! Because I knew she’d got it right — the cap was pinker than the lousy marker, but her teacher couldn’t know that. And so on, and so on. Of course, I stopped myself, and even laughed at myself for the impulse. But it’s a sign of this very issue — practice in disappointment — and I’m sure it will keep cropping up in different ways in the years to come.

This past week we’ve been reading Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which brims with disappointment for the first ten chapters. Charlie Bucket lives “in a small wooden house on the edge of a great town.” Stuffed into the place with him are his dad, who works in a toothpaste factory but soon loses his job; his mom; and his two sets of shriveled, skeletal grandparents, George and Georgina and Joe and Josephine, all in their nineties, and so given the only bed in the house. The J’s sleep at one end, and the G’s at the other, while Mr and Mrs Bucket and little Charlie sleep on the floor. They live on boiled potatoes and cabbage, and on Sundays they each get a second helping. “The Buckets, of course, didn’t starve, but every one of them … went about from morning till night with a horrible empty feeling in their tummies.”

The eyebrows, the hair brush, and the raised pinkie: signs of wealth?

Even before we started Charlie, N was mulling rich and poor. She often asks if Selena Gomez, JK Rowling, or her own school principal are rich. Was Judy Garland? Was Charles Dickens? Sometimes at night she announces that, the next day, she’s not going to eat a speck of food, “Just to feel what it feels like to have nothing in my tummy.” But by morning, when the toast or the cereal or the yoghurt-with-a-swirl-of-honey appears before her, she seems to have forgotten, or at least pushed the curiosity aside for another day.

I can tell she’s impressed by Charlie, who refuses a share of his mother’s portion of food when she offers, and who tries to share his birthday chocolate bar (the only one he gets for the whole year) with the other members of his family. The largest and most fantastic chocolate factory in the world stands within sight of Charlie’s rickety little house, but for a long while its owner, genius Willy Wonka, ceased operations because other chocolate makers were stealing his wonderful ideas. Now, he’s offering a tour of his factory to a select few: the five lucky children who happen upon chocolate bars that contain a golden ticket.

Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka terrified me as a child. I was very confused about whether or not I was supposed to like him. I haven't seen Johnny Depp's performance, but it would fun to compare the two movies.

N has known this story for some time. She saw the 1971 movie when she was little (Dahl despised the film, apparently, and refused to give over rights to the book’s sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator), and we’ve been listening to the abridged audio version over Christmas, featuring Dahl himself with his delicious accent. But I often wonder, remembering the way she cursed JK  (“I wish she would just write the story the way I have it in my head!”), how she would have responded to the book without knowing what’s to come.  I suspect it would have infuriated her to see gluttonous Augustus Gloop, spoiled rotten Veruca Salt, gum-smacking Violet Beauregarde, and TV-addicted Mike Teavee winning golden tickets while poor Charlie shrinks to skin and bone without an ounce of self-pity. In the first 45 pages, a few chocolate bars miraculously come his way, and he can’t help but think that “however small the chance might be of striking lucky, the chance was there.” I admire Dahl’s restraint here, making us peel open the bars time and again, only to find nothing but chocolate inside.

But, of course, Charlie does find a golden ticket, and he and Grandpa Joe go off to tour the factory with the four rotten children and their parents. There was a sixth rotten child in Dahl’s early drafts — Miranda Piker, who Dahl described as “a horrid little girl who was disgustingly rude to her parents and also thoroughly disobedient,” but apparently her death in the Spotty Powder room was considered too grim for young readers. Dahl loved to go almost too far. The loathsome giants of The BFG actually eat children; and the witches of The Witches actually do snatch children and cause them to disappear forever. And in The Magic Finger, a girl puts a curse on her cruel teacher, which causes her to grow whiskers and a bushy tail. “If any of you are wondering whether Mrs. Winter is quite all right again now,” Dahl writes, “the answer is No. And she never will be.”

More of Dahl’s children’s books to come in the next while, by the way. We have a new goal in mind: we’re going to try to read all of them.

"There's a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly ... survives without sun, water, and seemingly without earth. It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it."

I read a passage that made me weep last night. Just for a moment, with my mouth stretched open in a silent sob. Luckily I was reading to myself and not N, from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. I had come to the part when the main character Francie Nolan is born, and her mother Katie asks her own mother for advice on how to escape the vicious cycle of poverty.

“What must I do to make a different world for her? How do I start?”

Mary, a working-class, illiterate Austrian immigrant, tells her, “The secret lies in the reading and the writing. You are able to read. Every day you must read one page from some good book to your child. Every day this must be until the child learns to read. Then she must read every day. I know this is the secret.”

That’s good. But that’s not the part that made me cry. Mary goes on to say that Katie must teach Francie the legends of the old country, and tell of “those not of this earth who live forever in the hearts of people—fairies, elves, dwarfs and such,” as well as ghosts and Kris Kringle. When Katie protests, and asks why she should teach her child “foolish lies,” Mary answers:

“The child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things that are not of this world. To first believe with all your heart, and then not to believe, is good too. It fattens the emotions and makes them to stretch. When as a woman life and people disappoint her, she will have had practice in disappointment and it will not come so hard. In teaching your child, do not forget that suffering is good too. It makes a person rich in character.”

N is obsessed with belief, and is always asking me do I believe in god, do I believe in Santa, do I believe in fairies, and so on. I tell her I believe in the connections between people; the power of kindness; the necessity of stories that help us see from different perspectives. It doesn’t wash. Yes or no, Mom, do you believe in God/fairies/Santa? I can’t say yes. But “no” doesn’t seem honest either. I do believe.  But what I believe in is difficult to put into words – almost as if it is not meant to be put into words. And yet I know it needs to be taught and shared; it feels like my duty to teach and share it, just as it is my duty to clothe and feed her. And read with her.

Grandpa Stan ready to ski in 1941, 100-ish years after Dickens penned his Christmas tale, ten years before Alastair Sim played Scrooge, and two years before Betty Smith wrote about the Tree of Heaven.

The film is black and white, full of Victorian English, but this movie completely captivates the great granddaughter Stan  never knew. She can even recite passages aloud, and giggles when Scrooge suggests Marley’s ghost may be nothing more than “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.” I have to wonder — did Stan love that part too?

Marley's Ghost, illustrated by John Leech, 1843

Last year we read aloud snippets of the book as well, just to give her a taste of Charles Dickens, but this year she asked if we could read the whole thing. “Let’s make it a goal,” she said, “to finish it before Christmas Eve.” And last night we achieved our goal. I thought it would be hard-going, but it wasn’t at all. Whereas in the Harry Potter series we saved the movie until we had read the book, this time the reverse worked well for us. N knew the story well enough that she was able to follow the old-fashioned language easily. And I knew she was following, because she often pointed out parts that hadn’t been included in the movie, such as when — much to her delight! — Scrooge tries to smother the brightly glowing first spirit in a cone-shaped extinguisher cap. He seizes the thing, presses it down upon the little spirit with all his force, but the light still streams from it in an unbroken flood, and finally Scrooge gives up, flings himself into bed, and falls into a deep sleep.

N adores Scrooge’s meanness, his bitter, pigheadedness; his horror at seeing himself for what he’s truly become; and finally his utter joy in making amends — in giving . A Grade 2 schoolmate of N’s recently wrote about what happens when he gives: “I feel joyful, in a strange way.” So too, Ebenezer Scrooge. Upon discovering his chance to better himself, he laughs and cries in the same breath. “I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A Merry Christmas to everybody! A happy new year to all the world! … Whoop!”

Was this joy and generosity what resonated so well with N? I wondered about that this morning, as I accompanied her class to sing carols at a mission. The kids brought hats and mitts to leave behind for any who needed them, and they sang their hearts out to the staff and the visitors alike. I glanced around and saw people smiling. Some sang along, and it helped the kids sing louder. I made a note to tell N a little more about Dickens sometime soon.

Charles Dickens, painted in 1842 by Francis Alexander, not long before A Christmas Carol was published

In 1843, when A Christmas Carol was published, he was in his early thirties, and already carving out  a body of work that focused on the poor and the oppressed. When Dickens was a boy, his bankrupt father was sent to Marshalsea debtors’ prison, just around the corner from where my own family lived in “the Borough.” The rest of the family (minus Charles, who went to work in a factory) was held in prison too, and it is often written that these events scarred him deeply, and led him to his own form of social commentary, in which the lowest classes took the starring roles.

I know these are the things that appeal to my husband about Dickens — along with the humour, and the vivid descriptions. A while back when he was sick for a couple of days, he laid in our room reading Oliver Twist, and I could hear him chuckling away to himself. He often said, during our Harry Potter readings, “I bet JK Rowling likes Dickens.” But I was curious to know what N’s reasons were — at least, how she would articulate them. So when we closed the book last night after reaching our goal, I said to her, “Why do you like this story so much?” and waited for her brilliant answer.

She gave me a slightly incredulous look, glanced at her like-minded dad, and turned back to me with a shrug.

“Because it’s good.”

“They [children] accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly.” E.B. White

I was never concerned with logic or reason. I didn’t speculate if a plot, or setting, was realistic before choosing a book. That was irrelevant. I was interested in the originality of a story and if its characters were memorable. Good books would stay with me. The ones I enjoyed most were the ones I revisited often. Even though the ending was no longer a surprise, and I knew the dialogue by heart, my level of pleasure only increased with each reading.

On the cover of my Bantam Books 1978 edition of Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl, Mr. Fox is shown standing upright, dressed in green trousers, and a red blazer. He’s holding a wooden walking stick. Both in the picture and the story, Mr. Fox was more man than fox. It’s absurd and impossible. But as White predicted, I willingly accepted it. Fantastic Mr. Fox is a story of risk taking, adventure and survival. It’s the story of the cunning fox, his family and animal friends versus the evil farmers who attempt to dig them out of their underground burrow. It was my favourite. I read it over and over. In my family we all did. Even my parents.

What made Fantastic Mr. Fox even more enthralling was our proximity to the natural world. I lived on a farm. We had chickens, and ducks. We had an apple orchard and lush vegetable gardens. It was just like the story. I could walk outside post-reading and re-enact everything. Typically I played alone and cast myself as Mr. Fox. Occasionally, we would even be visited by a skinny fox. His scruffy fur was a burnt orange except for his legs and paws which were a charcoal black. He looked like he was wearing dress socks but had forgotten his shoes.

I don’t think my parents have seen many foxes around lately. Most of the neighboring fields, once home to cattle, crops and wild flowers, have been sold to developers. Construction had been delayed for over a year. Last week mom sent an email saying work had started. Large diggers arrived. She attached a few photos with the caption, “Thinking of Mr. Fox again…today we feel like the fox family being dug out.”

_________

Iain Reid’s work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Reader’s Digest, on CBC Radio and NPR. He is also a frequent contributor to The National Post. One Bird’s Choice is his first book. Iain studied history and philosophy at Queen’s University and now lives in Kingston.

To N from Z: Have a happy birthday and float away!

To N (left with black shoes) from AW (right with blue shoes)

Watching N with her drawings, her homemade books, her modelling clay lizards and zebras and “coccinelles” that she whips up for school projects, I envy the way she creates without getting in her own way. Her friends do the same. This weekend was her eighth birthday, so we had a gaggle of girls over, squealing and giggling throughout the house on their treasure hunt, then blind-folded as they stuck a lightning bolt or a moustache or — squeals again — a kiss on Harry Potter (a literary alternative to pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey). And afterwards as we opened the presents, I noticed that most of the cards were homemade.  AJ based hers around the Wizard of Oz, with Dorothy saying “I have a feeling we’re going to a partie, Toto.” AF painstakingly taped tiny bits of torn paper (snow?) all over the back of hers. T drew a picture of herself with N, standing beside a flaming cake as tall as them. And M wrote a lengthy missive embellished with dots and swirls and the wish that “you have a good time being 8.”

I think it becomes harder and harder for us to create spontaneously as we get older, just as it gets harder to jump on beds and pretend to be spies or fairies or teachers teaching a room full of stuffed-animal pupils. Yet it’s oh so important. It clears out cobwebs and calls up a near-forgotten language. So this week I stood aside and let myself play with wood, paper and scissors, just to see what would happen. And what emerged (from the influence of reading with N and writing about it here) was L.M. Montgomery, Anne, and the mouse that fell into the pudding.

Diana, fancy if you can my extreme horror at finding a mouse drowned in that pudding sauce! I lifted the mouse out with a spoon and threw it out in the yard and then I washed the spoon in three waters.

Now N has been inspired by me and wants to make her own collages. It’s what she wants to be, she says. An artist. But as soon as she’s said it she isn’t quite sure. Does it rule out better things? The other night at dinner she asked what we thought she should be, and gave us choices: “An artist, a writer, a farmer, a teacher, or a vet?”

We asked what the appeal was for each one, and she told us:

“If I was an artist I could make pictures with A.”

“If I was a writer, I could write books with T.”

“If I was a teacher, I could be just like Madame.”

“If I was a farmer, I could feed people who are hungry. Just with milk, though, or vegetables. I don’t want to kill any animals.”

“If I was a vet, I could help the poor little animals who are sick and need me!”

The writer-mother and the artist-teacher-father glanced at each other. Whatever you choose, we told her, it has to come from inside you. Right now it sounds like you should be a farmer or a vet. But you have lots of time to decide.

She thought about that a bit. And then she rhymed off different answers. “So,” she asked us. “Now what do you think I should be?”

Hmmmm. So many choices. To be or not to be?