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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 16, 2005
Formative reading
One of several reasons I have been thought mad by my contemporaries is that I have persisted in believing that when I was three years old I was reading Pookie books about a little white rabbit with tiny flimsy insect-like wings who would: 1. make himself unpopular by being a little different from other rabbits and get teased over the wings 2. wander off on journeys into the woodland with a sack of his belongings on a stick over his shoulder 3. refuse to take anything on faith such as Santa Claus and persist in discovering the truth for himself 4. demonstrate imperfect ideas about capitalism for instance despairing because the little shop he opened in the woodland had too many customers 5. indulge in fanciful schemes for putting the world right such as banishing winter. Who moreover: 6. had a delightful little camp follower named Belinda and 7. eventually learned to fly. I asked several booksellers and children's librarians about the Pookie series over time; and all so far as I recall assured me sometimes after a little searching that no such books ever existed. One expert friend suggested my imagining this series (to the point of claiming I learned to read from it) was an interesting psychological phenomenon -- the back-projection of my own personal qualities onto some hallucinated rabbit. Well. From web-searching in places like eBay I have now established that the books did exist and were written in the 1940s by a lady named Ivy Wallace. Moreover they are being reissued in paperback with what appear to be the original watercolour illustrations by HarperCollins in England. A friend and I once had a semi-public discussion about character-formation through books read in early childhood. I attributed my own moral outlook to Rudyard Kipling via Just So Stories and then Kim. He attributed his to Kenneth Grahame via The Wind in the Willows. I now realize that the Kipling influence which began as late as age five could only have been superficial. The Pookie books are the true source of my Weltanschauung. Nothing against Wind in the Willows. I didn't read it until aloud as a parent at the bedside of a child. I was of course joking when I suggested that an early exposure to it might explain my friend's liberal propensities. As an adult I found it finely written clever and sentimental but lacking in the quality of nobility; one of those "empathy books" with elements of stand-up comedy. It's probably just a coincidence that the people who have told me Wind in the Willows was their formative book have all been gliberals leftoids and sex perverts. As teenagers they all read Catcher in the Rye a book I believe to have been written by J.D. Salinger under direct demonic possession. Asking around this last week about the "formative books of childhood" I was answered by an old friend raised in Ireland. She read exclusively cowboy books and was a little rootin' tootin' cowboy running wild around her Irish village. Now there's nobility in that. At that age I lived in Lahore Pakistan. A certain Jenny was the wild Anglo-Indian girl who read cowboys cowboys cowboys and dressed up as one. (I doted upon her but she beat me up.) She passed along Kit Carson books I think they were -- I'm afraid they didn't make much of an impression. The stuff that was knocking me over at the time was by Jules Verne: especially Journey to the Centre of Earth and his 1865 moon voyage. I had a child's version of Robinson Crusoe a book of Sherlock Holmes stories and an illustrated Aesop's Fables. And more Kipling: Jungle Books Puck stories etc. I was a child of the ghost of the British Empire in India; there were no books available except classics. Plus D.H. Lawrence Women in Love. I got through about 100 pages of this in the small type of the Penguin edition. Couldn't make much sense of it; but my mother had been reading it and seemed to be hiding it from me. So I became curious stole it from on top of a cupboard and hid it in my bedding so I could take it out at night. Unfortunately one day I failed to make my bed before going to school and I gather my mother retrieved it. As sometimes happens it is one of those books one returns to in later life and finds terribly disappointing. But the rest have stood up. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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