My Ladybird Story

My Ladybird Story

When we were staying at my mother in law’s last month I picked up one of the books from the small bookcase in the guest room. Those books have been there for the twenty years I’ve been visiting. They’re a random selection, and from them I plucked a Ladybird Book. ‘Richard the Lion Heart’, part of their ‘Adventures from History’ series, written in 1965 by L. Du Garde Peach and illustrated by John Kenney.

            Just the weight of the book in my hands, and the feel of that matte hardback cover was enough to instantly transport me back to childhood. The smell of the pages, the maps in the endpapers, the brightly coloured illustrations... I started reading and I sat still until I’d finished.

            The chair at the end of the bed was a goldish green Lloyd Loom chair. Creaking wickerwork, perfectly built for a reading chair. I was away with the fairies… or rather, the knights and the Saracens and the kings of Europe. I was transported…

            And, as I read about Richard’s travels to the Holy Land and then his fugitive life eluding capture, in disguise, across mainland Europe, I remembered that, when I was a kid of about five, I’d had my own Lloyd Loom reading chair, just like this one, placed in relation to a bookcase, just the same as this. And, in one of those dizzying rabbit holes of memory, I realised I’d once sat there reading about Richard the Lion Heart.

            The chair and the bookcase had arrived together – from an aunty, I think, on my dad’s side. He had sanded down the bookcase and then he’d painted both chair and bookcase glossy white. They were standing on the bare boards of my bedroom, drying in the sun. My books – mostly Ladybirds and Noddy books – were waiting in piles to go into their new home. Stern warning from Alfie: ‘You have to wait till the paint is completely dried out before you can put the books on the shelves, otherwise you’ll damage the books and the paintwork.’

            He left me to watch the paint dry. I read about Richard the Lion Heart, and the Gingerbread Boy and Beauty and the Beast. The paint – was it drying yet? I looked at my books, wondering whether I would put them in series order or random order, or organise them by the colours of their spines? Or maybe put them on the shelves in the order that I’d read them, and keep a special shelf for the books I was yet to read?

            These plans were so exciting I couldn’t help getting ahead of myself and testing out the dryness of the paint with my fingertips. Maybe still a bit tacky? But I was longing to put my books in my own bookcase. My very first bookcase of my own. The top shelf had two sliding windows, have I said? And that meant the books on that shelf had to be special ones. Kept behind glass: that was pride of place.

I decided that the ‘Well-Loved Tales’ would go on that shelf. My fairy tales. The Enormous Turnip, Chicken Licken, The Giant Pancake. My favourites would have to go there.

If only the paint would dry faster, and I could put them all in and line them up… I could already picture how marvellous they would look in there, behind sliding glass panels…

           

*

I’d had my collection for as long as I could remember. My very first books had been these fairy tales. Possibly the Gingerbread Boy was the first. ‘Run run! As fast as you can…!’ And how, at the end, he was snapped up and gobbled up by the fox… no matter how many times you read the story, the tragic outcome was always the same. Oh, but the race to get there! The excitement of the chase! The very idea of being the Gingerbread Boy, running free from everyone and not giving a hoot!

            In those days Dad was away doing police training, and it was just Mam and me at home. We lived in a small, boxed-shaped house on a brand new estate in Peterlee. It was a state-of-the-art New Town in County Durham: hilly and green, with trees and lakes and little box houses set out neatly on the hillsides. The town was a hymn to futuristic modernity and everything was poured concrete and smooth ramps and plate glass.

            There was a little shop quite close to our house when I was about two years old. I’d go with Mam each day to fetch our groceries. She couldn’t afford it, but every time she took me to the shop she would buy me another of the Ladybird Books. With it being just the two of us, we had long hours to fill and she read to me every day and night. We went through Goldilocks and Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Rose Red… until every single illustration was imprinted on my mind forever. Every single expression on those faces. Every anguished look, every beaming grin. Princesses and curious animals and foodstuffs like porridge and pancakes and turnips that grew to incredible proportions – that’s what the world was all about, and these were the people in it. Also, very silly hens. And very wicked wolves.

            I could read by the time I was three years old, and that was the result of Ladybird Books. Simple as that. When I started going to school at five they gently introduced everyone to the famous learning-to-read books about Peter and Jane, each volume getting a little bit more advanced, adding extra elements of vocabulary. But, thanks to Mam and the hours we’d spent with all those fairy tales, I was skipping well ahead of poor old dull Peter and Jane and their soppy suburban lives.

            That’s how and why I was reading about Richard the Lion Heart in my Lloyd Loom chair at five years old, waiting for my new bookcase to be ready.

            I don’t think I waited for it to be quite dry. I got carried away, putting all my books into their new home, keen to admire them. I think there was bother, later, when it turned out I’d made a mess of the new paintwork. Never mind. I’d had the most wonderful afternoon. My head was swimming with paint fumes and that particular excitement and giddiness that comes from absorbing age-old stories that are fresh to you.

            Then, forty-five years later, sitting in another wickerwork chair, reading the same book… I was still utterly delighted by the details picked out by L. Du Garde Peach: Richard lying in a litter carried by his men, approaching Jerusalem. Bloody combat raging all around them… and here comes a messenger from his deadly enemy, Saladin… bringing a platter of fresh fruit, because he has heard that Richard is under the weather.

How could I have failed to fall in love with stories like this?

            Reading it again, all this time later, I love the way the author unfolds the legend and explains so clearly to us: some of these are details from the historical record, others are mythology that has sprung up over time. Other details come from historical novels, like those by Walter Scott. He sets out which bits are more reliable than others, but gives us all the delightful nuggets of story anyway. As he unfurls his tale, the writer is teaching us how history is recorded and compounded from various claims and accounts. As an adult reader, this delights me.

            And starts me off, having a little look at Ebay. Finding out just how many ‘Adventures from History’ there were, published between the 1950s and 1970s. Setting me off building up a little collection… all over again. Parcels arrive in the following weeks. I’m being reunited with old friends, and I’m learning new things every day. I follow the routes marked out across the globe by Alexander the Great and Marco Polo. I marvel at the fact I hadn’t even realised that Ladybird carried on publishing ‘Well-Loved Tales’ after I’d grown and graduated to books for older kids. I look at the lists and feel almost betrayed and left out… and yet, I was the one who stopped collecting, wasn’t I? I was the one who gave my collection away, all that time ago…

            But I was luckier than most. My sister is seventeen years younger than me and so, in the 1990s, when I was in my early twenties, I’d get to visit home and read to her at bedtime. She had her own collection of Ladybirds, which we all bought for her and read to her. Those 1990s ones were more lurid than those I remembered – there were lots of Disneys and cartoony tales. Though, at the same time, she still had the old, old ones that I’d grown up with. She still knew about giant pancakes and the three Billy Goats Gruff… and, of course, she knew all about the Gingerbread Boy.