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!):

Snow-White and Rose-Red

Ladybird Well-Loved Tales: Snow-White and Rose-Red

Retold by Vera Southgate

With illustrations by Eric Winter

Publisher: Ladybird Books Ltd, 1969

I loved this book as a child. The illustrations stayed in my memory; fond memories, though I think the pictures have lodged there due to the combination of bizarre, haunting, and quite frightening images. I was given a copy of this 1969 Ladybird classic by a fellow vintage Ladybird fan, and debated whether to share it with the children. On reading it to the boys a year ago ( then 4 and 6), they disliked the story, finding it too long ( the book has that damp, musty hue of 'vintage old' which didn't help the bedtime reading experience). On reading it to my daughter last week, nearly 4, she was captivated. 

The story opens setting the scene on these angelic, well behaved sisters, Snow White and Rose Red, who live with their mother in a cottage in the wood. A rose bush in white and red grow outside. The children spend their days helping their mother ( by arranging flowers in her room) and romping about in the forest. Although the forest is dangerous, the creatures of the forest never hurt the children ( seemingly because they're so good and have a guardian angel protecting them). The children even wake one day to find they've been sleeping by the edge of a cliff, but it's okay, as they're angel looked over them. Bizarre? Truly. And so far removed from any story she's ever heard or been exposed to both, my daughter was fascinated.

The book continues on the classic 50 page Ladybird easy reading format; roughly three short paragraphs per page, and this Ladybird decidedly less pompous and 'wordy' than others in the series. About a fifth of the way into the story, the girls are visited at home by a great brown bear. The mother of the girls instructs her children not to be afraid (biblical angel like), and they rub snow from his fur. The bear and the children become friends, and the bear visits the children every night until spring. Strange so far, but endearing- and then the book takes an even stranger turn. The girls meet an angry dwarf in the forest, with his long white beard trapped in a log. The illustration of this grotesque, angered dwarf is quite scary, it's not like the sanitised Disney of today, more like the surreal age Disney, but a notch up from that. The light pastel pallet of 1960s Ladybird is quite insipid. The dwarf, with no way to escape, is eventually set free by one of the girls snipping his beard off with her convenient pair of scissors, which happen to be on her person. The dwarf is horrified rather than grateful, grabs a nearby bag of gold and scampers away. 

The girls then meet the dwarf twice more, once with his beard tangled in a fishing line, so again they release him by cutting his beard (he's angry and runs off witch a bag of pearls), and finally, they see the dwarf being carried away by a giant bird (a roc?) . The girls pull on the feet of the dwarf to help release him, but again, after he's free he's angered to have been 'manhandled) .No words of thanks. On seeing the dwarf for a final time, the girls stop to admire his spread-out jewels. Just as the dwarf is about to have an almighty tantrum, in bounds the bear, who kills the dwarf. The bear sheds his fur coat and is of course, a prince, trapped under the dwarf's evil spell. With the spell now broken as the dwarf lies dead, the prince brings his friends, Snow-White and Rose-Red home, surprisingly their delighted mother. And to add to all that enchantment, the prince has a brother for the Rose Red to marry! How very convenient!

Yes this book is a bit menacing, if read that way, and yes it's dated, smelly, makes no sense, pushes at the boundaries of 'fairy tale' and farce ( unintentionally), but it's so memorable, so enthralling, so bizarre. Edie has requested this every day this week, , and no doubt it will be laid out ready for me to read tomorrow. Vintage Ladybird at its best.

If you like this book, you might also like another Vintage Ladybird: The Sly Fox and The Little Red Hen

The Tale of the Tooth Fairy

Author: Helen East
Illustrator: Katinka Kew
Publisher: Macdonald Children's Books, 1989

Well it came to pass tonight, finally, that 5 year old Bert lost his front tooth. Off I skedaddled to the bookshelf to find this mainstay of our household tooth loosing experience - a fiction book about the origins of the tooth fairy. 
Yes indeed, the cover illustrations look a bit menacing, and the idea of a 'tooth gang master' called Justice Fang, who recruits trolls and ogres, goblins, witches and hard-up highwaymen to collect teeth in all manner of ways, is a tad on the fearsome side for bedtime, but giving substance to the tooth fairies actions and motivations is so worth it. 

The book tells the story of an average fairy with no remarkable attributes, so her fairy visitors name her 'Nothing'. However, Nothing amounts to so very much as she discovers her first pearly white tooth to take to Justice Fang, and gifts the sleeping child before her, with a bright new shiny coin. Nothing then revisits the child to find a note requesting she returns for the next tooth, and could she please visit and leave coins for the child's gappy-mouthed friends? Meanwhile the story-in-the-story tells of sceptical Jack, a boy who, like my son Bert, awaits the tooth fairy with many questions, such as, 'how can one fairy visit all the children in one night?' 
This is a magical read helping to 'inform' and so fuel the excitement of a tooth-loss evening. It's an old book, and possibly out of issue (I found it in a charity shop a few years ago) so it might be difficult to acquire. I would also suggest it is suitable for the over fives and not preschoolers, as the illustrations are just a bit too creepy to share with children any younger. The head-shot pictures in particular, show shallow, sunken faces, and they're very ghoulish and haunting. The 'baddies' in the book are depicted as plentiful, thriving and sinister. The story captures a sense of foreboding for poor doomed fairy Nothing, but there's an underdog-victor outcome, a message of hope. Children who like books about legends and myths will enjoy this; it's very macabre and in all, one of those books that lodges in the memory well, balancing on that fear/pleasure binary.  

The Pied Piper of Hamelin

Adapted by: Unknown
Illustrated by: John Holder
Publisher:  Ladybird Books Ltd, 1998

From Ladybird's famous 'Read it Yourself' series, we enjoy Ladybird Level 4 The Pied Piper of Hamelin, mainly due to John Holder's very eerie, spindly-legged depiction of rats, but also because the ending of this version of the adaptation, it's very creepy ( and memorable).  In the ending of this adaptation the Mayor is continuing to look for the children lost in the mountainside 'for years and years and years. He is still looking for them now.' Lack of text closure isn't so common in modern children's lit in the UK I think, and hence this ending feels quite haunting and memorable. The detailed hatching on the aged and wandering mayor is almost ethereal; Bert (5) always asks many hypotheticals in response to this image: 'will the major find the children one day?', 'what does the major eat now?', 'Is he sad about the rats and not paying the Pied Piper.' This endpage really surmises 'regret' as a theme, such an interesting concept to bring to young children. 

While Ladybird level 4 is designed as 'longer stories for more fluent readers', children's reading schemes today seem to press more on the vocabulary building rather than length of story, so emerging readers today might find this long winded. As a bedtime book, read by an adult, or fluent reader, it's enchanting. The rats are quite frightening, both in size, as the illustrator experiments well with perspective, getting some rat close ups in the foreground. 

The story is very moralistic, the mayor doing wrong by his people by not paying the Pied Piper and keeping to his promise. This mistake brings about sorrow and loss for a whole town, having their children taken from them, lead away as the rats were. In terms of folklore and fairytales, The Pied Piper is perhaps one of the most alarming, as there is no fantastical beast or mythical creature casting the spells or doing the capturing, but instead, something very everyday and immediate, a man. Fear is,  by its nature enthralling, and as such my children are captivated by this book. 

The Sly Fox and the Little Red Hen

Retold by Vera Southgate
Illutrations: Robert Lumely
Publisher: Ladybird Books ltd, 1968

I am a huge fan of Ladybird books, as, I imagine, are most children's literature fans of my generation (I had many books from the 1960s, which would have been 'nostalgic' for my own parents). Now here I am trying to share these books with my own children, to mixed effect. Some titles just haven't worked, so for example, my favourite, 'Snow White and Rose Red', the children just won't tolerate, 'it's too long and too weird' seven year old Alf says. (I can't argue with that, I also agree, only I liked that it was long and rather than weird, I found it thrilling because it was darn right scary). I'll try again when they're older.

However, this title, from the Well-loved Tales Ladybird series, 'The Sly Fox and the Little Red Hen', the children do like, in fact they really get on board when this is our chosen book at bedtime. The illustrations are incredibly detailed compared to the illustrations they are used to and familiar with today. The fine lines and detail of the pictures muster a sort of realism, that the children are just not used to. This contrasts with the story itself which turns the fox into a caricature, he is sly, he is cunning and he desperately wants to eat the little red hen. The hen looks silly, flapping around, getting put in a sack, but she's clever, and in a brutal way (putting stones in the sack so when the foxes put the 'hen' in the boiling pot of water, the heavy and big stones cause the boiling water to spill out and scold the foxes to death) she kills the foxes. Understandably this version of the fairytale has more sanitised ending these days, but the shock and victorious ending for the little red hen in this version, with foxes dead not just walking away distantly in the woods, rouses cheers with the children. It's the same fear- filled curiosity feeling I think I had as a child when reading these books, the same fear- enjoyment binary that enabled me to remember 'Snow White and Rose Red' so well.

I also like that my children refer to this book as an 'olden days book' . The yellowy look of the book and feel of the pages interests Bert (5) , but mainly it's because the book is tattered and torn, has a lighter palette of colours than their modern story books. The storytelling itself in The Sly Red Fox', with roughly three lines a page, still works so well. I wonder how far removed the next generation will find these books, or whether in some respects, thanks to their newfound place in marketplaces such as EBay as 'retro, vintage and chic' they will remain timeless.