My six-year-old daughter is reading Dorothy Edwards' My Naughty Little Sister and Bad Harry and something is puzzling her. Her brow furrows as she points to the text:
"Bad Harry lived quite near to us. There were no roads to cross to get to his house, and he and my sister often went round to visit each other without any grown-up person having to take them."
We already know that the narrator is a "little girl" and her sister is "littler": from the dialogue and her behaviour with Bad Harry, she's clearly three at most. "How can she do that? Why can't I do that?" asks my daughter. Then she offers her own reply. "Children can't do that these days, can they?"
With her reading just taking off, my Year Two girl is becoming immersed in children's classics which all have a common thread: their protagonists – existing 40 to 80 years ago - enjoy a far greater freedom than she, as a 21st-century child, does today.
So she loves Joyce Lankester Brisley's Milly-Molly-Mandy books, published from 1928, in which the heroine trots all over the village running errands for her family before progressing to camping out all night with her friends, sledging, and "keeping house" – which involves toasting bread on an open fire and frying bread and dripping – when her family go out one night.
Roald Dahl's 1975 classic Danny the Champion of the World is another favourite, in which nine-year-old Danny heads off in a Baby Austin to rescue his poacher father at two in the morning. Astrid Lindgren's 1945 Pippi Longstocking isn't so revered, but she's intrigued by a heroine who can live alone with a monkey and a horse and later take on a shark and bandits who threaten to kill her by picking them up and tossing them into a boat. Dipping a tentative toe into witchcraft, meanwhile, she is currently enjoying Jill Murphy's The Worst Witch series, first penned in 1974, in which the hapless Mildred Hubble is afforded freedom by being able to fly on a broomstick, perform spells and just be at boarding school. But it is the more prosaic settings that she loves best, such as the urban world of Catherine Storr's 1955 Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf: Polly is able to take the bus and train to her grandmother's on her own, visit the zoo and answer the door when her mother is out, but the familiar domestic setting reassures her when a hungry, talking wolf turns up.
Watching her enjoy these books – and ask why she can't walk to school alone like Milly-Molly-Mandy, or play by herself in the street like My Naughty Little Sister – has made me question whether she loves them precisely because of her more restricted lifestyle.
Like many modern parents I suspect I am overprotective – a trait compounded by having covered stories such as the Soham murders and the murder of Sarah Payne as a former Guardian news reporter. Though I know child abduction by a stranger is extremely rare – the most detailed Home Office figures date back to 2003 when there were 59 successful child abductions, and there is no evidence that the actual incidence, as opposed to reporting, has gone up – I also know that in freak instances little girls can be bundled into white vans when they run away from their older brothers. And I'm not unique in being concerned: a survey conducted in June by the charity Play England, part of the National Children's Bureau, found that only 40% of children play outside today, compared with 72% of their parents. So curtailed is some contemporary children's freedom that according to the survey of 2,000 children and 2,000 parents, a third of six to 15-year-olds had never climbed a tree or made a den.
According to Maria Nikolajeva, professor of education at Cambridge University and a specialist in children's literature, part of the appeal of these classic texts – and the likes of Enid Blyton's Famous Five and Secret Seven series - is precisely the fact that the characters, unlike modern children, have the opportunity to roam free. This "exotic" freedom empowers the protagonists – and by extension the reader.
"Children being empowered is the main premise of all children's literature," she explains. "This idyllic world that once really existed is now like Narnia to a contemporary child. It's a utopia, something that adult readers long for and have nostalgic feelings about and that offers children a freedom they can't have in real life – we would never allow contemporary children the freedom offered by E Nesbit or Arthur Ransome because of the way society is today. These books endure exactly because they offer something that the child doesn't experience or isn't allowed to experience. Through the empowered protagonist, the reader experiences a second-degree vicarious empowerment."
The example of Ransome, whose 1930 Swallows and Amazons charts the adventures of four siblings who sail off alone in a boat to camp on an island one summer holiday, points up just how removed these adventures are from the experience of contemporary children. While their mother stipulates that they eat sufficient green vegetables and mentions not setting their tents on fire, she only asks that they let her know they're alive "every two or three days" and allows them to set sail despite seven-year-old Roger being unable to swim.
In a later book in the series, We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, the quartet drift out from a river outlet on the Norfolk Broads and end up sailing to Holland. As Dr Diane Purkiss, lecturer in English at Keble College, Oxford, explains: "It's very plain, when you read it as an adult, that they are in mortal danger: at one point in mid channel, they're nearly run down by a steamer and at another point they're beating into the wind and nearly get swept under the waves. It's too much for any child." As the physical danger of We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea shows, being given excessive freedom doesn't mean children don't experience danger – but they do have to learn to negotiate it.
For a child of an earlier era, fairy stories provided their characters with this opportunity and so educated their readers. "Think of Red Riding Hood or Snow White," says Purkiss. "In these, little girls go into the woods and encounter various menaces. Once these would have acted as warnings about the sort of people they might meet but now, because we're so bothered about terrifying children, we have watered them down."
One classic that deals with child abduction quite explicitly – and in a way which may now seem shocking to modern parents - is CS Lewis's 1950 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. A classicist drawing on the myth of perpetually priapic fauns kidnapping girls, Lewis has Mr Tumnus lure Lucy to his cave with food that would have seemed particularly lavish to an evacuee (and post-war readers dealing with rationing), and woo her into a Rohypnol-like trance with flute-playing and stories - before admitting to the "rather frightened" little girl who asks to leave: "I'm a kidnapper".
The faun repents and takes Lucy back to the safety of the Wardrobe but the threat – compounded by the White Witch then capturing Lucy's brother Edmund – remains. "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe is a book about adult menace to children – and how to manage that menace," says Purkiss, who runs the children's literature course at Oxford. "The children have long talks about whom they can trust: a robin? A beaver? Tumnus? It's exactly the kind of debate that storytelling can give to a child to allow them to satisfy themselves about who they can trust."
Just as every modern parent faces the dilemma of when and how much they warn their child about strangers (as Purkiss puts it: "Do you scare the pants off them or will that disable them in a crisis?"), so they have to decide how much menace their child will find bearable. Says Purkiss: "Do you pick out books like Milly-Molly-Mandy – in which there's this totally secure world and the biggest problem is an uncomfortable play-date – or Clever Polly, in which there is menace and the girl has to outwit it?"
In fact, children tend to make the decisions themselves, reaching a point when they want more powerful child characters – whether ones who can manoeuvre boats through rocks, or – as in the case of the Secret Seven – foil incredible villains.
And so my six-year-old - who was terrified of trolls, giants and wicked fairies for far longer than many of her peers – is now tiring of Milly-Molly-Mandy's gentle world and delighting in that of Polly, in which a bright little girl subverts conventional fairy tales. The clue as to who will win – I keep reminding her - is in the title. We even managed to read the chapter in which the wolf finally succeeds in abducting Polly and imprisons her in his basement kitchen without hiding under the duvet. Well not too much.
Swallows and Amazons, Alice in Wonderland and Narnia may be some way off. But, with a taste for freedom – and, now, a touch of danger - I might have to steel myself for a run of Enid Blyton.
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