Puddle Lane: The Magic Box

Written By: Shelia McCullagh

Illustrated by Gavin Rowe

Publisher: Ladybird Books, 1985

Weird books stay in children's imaginations, or so I'm concluding. Associations around feeling slightly afraid seem to impinge harder, more deliberately in the memory. I don't proclaim to know anything about the psychology behind this, 'fight or flight' related I'm tentatively guessing, but from my own experience, when I saw this book in the charity shop last year, I smiled, picked it up, flicked through the pages with trepidation, put it back - should I buy this? It freaked me out as a child...the Griffle, a vanishing green monster, the mice, they come to life, a magic box... 

Puddle Lane was a popular British pre-school reading scheme in second half of the 1980's, that accompanied a part- animated children's television series made by Yorkshire Television in Leeds for ITV. In the television programme the main character, the magician, who lived in the big house at the end of Puddle Lane (see picture above), was played by Monty Python actor and musician, Neil Innes. In the reading scheme, published by Ladybird (but incidentally not adopting the classic 52 page Ladybird standard), the magician comes and goes as a plot device, and is sometimes absent from the stories altogether. 

Now Puddle Lane seemed quite dated, and stiff in style, even back when I was using the scheme to learn to read in the 1980s. The dress sense, toys and townscape were all very Victorian, and certainly the children's expansive right to roam (and walk purposefully into an old man's garden when they know he's away) and talk to strangers and busy-bodies in the street, indeed sat very uneasily with me as a four year old, but I did remember this all, vividly, well. 

Now thirty years later I'm sharing the same small, hardback books with my daughter, and she equally delights in them, holding her breath, worrying where the strange little stories might be going.  

In this particular title, The Magic Box, which was on stage 1 of the scheme (each stage had a different cover colour), the children fend off the unwanted advice of Mrs Pitter-Patter, neighbourhood nosey-parker, and head to the magician's garden to pick up a birthday present left by the magician for Sarah. When Sarah and Davy arrive they find a big box in the hollow of a tree with a message attached saying, 'Don't open the box. Push the red button.' Bizarre indeed!  The children press the button, music plays from the box, and the children uncontrollably dance. The music box is of course magical, and casts a spell on anyone who hears the music to dance along. The children then try out the box on sleepy Mr Gotobed, and then who should return, but interfering Mrs Pitter-Patter. The box plays a further trick on Mrs Pitter Patter, singing a silly rhyme about her, and forcing her to dance despite as she tries to protest. The outcome is as implausible and fantastical as the rest of the story, but funny and unexpected.  

Over the past year I've managed to acquire a good collection of the Puddle Lane series from charity shops, exclusively of the titles I remember, such as The Vanishing Monster, and The Wideawake Mice, and my all time favourite, Puddle Lane at Christmas. My daughter, surprisingly I think, given that this is a generation being taught to read through phonics,loves to try to read (or more appropriately try to remember) the emboldened key words on the right hand page of the double page spread. The reading notes page in each Puddle Lane book seems archaic in some respects, instructing parents to read aloud first following with a finger, but the satisfaction my daughter gets from committing these short sentences to rote, surprises me more. She loves the pictures in the books, especially all the British mammals and birds, such as mice and owls, with their human characteristics. Edie also likes the characters, slightly wayward children, but always doing something kind, helping out animals in crisis, thinking about others. She's captivated by the eeriness, the weirdness of the stories, the fear, just as I was. 

All in all then, Puddle Lane is a nostalgic trip down memory lane, and well worth a revisit. 

And if you like this, you might also like The Tale of the Tooth Fairy, based on a shared eeriness and fear. 

You might also remember the television series (I have only a vague recollection of this myself, though watched a lot of ITV children's programmes as a child!):

Little Red Riding Hood

Retold by: Monica Hughes
Illustrator: Adrienne Salgado
Series: First Readers: Read Together Books for Marks & Spencer
Publisher: Exclusive Editions Ltd, 2007

I like many things about this First Readers book series, which has been carried by high-street retailer Marks & Spencer for the past ten or so years. I like the price of books in this series, as at £3 each (they might have gone up a little recently), this is pocket-money price for literature in the UK. The affordability of modern children's literature truly concerns me. We should be encouraging reading, not needing to incur a huge debt to brighten our children's bookshelf. 
Books for this age range should be cheap, and they should (my other concern in the wake of national library closures), be accessible. Marks and Spencer sell this range in even their smallest of high-street outposts, and I've also seen the older editions of the range on offer in the nationwide M&S outlets.  So First Readers are affordable, very accessible, and usually they are stocked on a nice rotating circular unit, which shows off a nice range of books in the selection- there's plenty of choice in the range.
    

First Readers are all based on traditional fairy-tales (so for example Little Red Riding Hood, as above, The Three Little Pigs, Puss in Boots etc) and they are retold very concisely (this range makes Ladybird seem incredibly wordy!).  On one side of the double page spread there are 5-8 very short sentences for the adult to read aloud, and a reminder sentence (a summary) on the accompanying page for the child to recall. Although the story itself does feel very 'snipped', all the elements of the tale are there, and the story flows appropriately. On this note, some of the tales work better than others; The Three Little Pigs is too condensed (no space for 'and by the hair on my chinny chin chin you can't come in!' catchphrase, but repetitive victor stories such as The Giant Turnip and The GingerBread Man, work well in this format.) The illustrations are okay: they're quite nonchalant but bright enough. 
The series 'follows the National Literacy Strategy'; the featured Little Red Riding Hood for example, credits reading consultants Betty Root and Monica Hughes. Thumbs up again for educational value, and certainly my three year old is managing to memorise and recall the story beautifully and engage in the two reading exercise pages at the back of each book. Edie loves the 'can you read the words?' game, as she has memorised the answers and uses the picture clues, likewise the 'answer questions' reading comprehension exercise, including very simple questions such as 'Where did Granny live?' These books support really good reading practice skills, which could be used, as I do, to help prepare the preschooler for reception year learning to read. 

My usual bugbear with fairy-tale retellings for this age range, is that they are so overly sanitised, but this First Readers Series, manoeuvres well endings that are not graphic but follow the original enough. In this version of Little Red Riding Hood for example, the wolf does swallow granny and red riding hood whole, but they jump out whole once the woodcutter arrives.

In all, a good, educational, affordable, accessible early years reading scheme; adequate choice in the range, authentic to the stories, 'no frills' narratives.