It's not just outdoor play that's gone – so has a whole genre of children's fiction
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Version 0 of 1. Bill Oddie has told the Radio Times that he wants to see children once again straying into gardens and orchards to scrump apples. "When I was a kid," added his colleague Chris Packham, "there would be other kids out in the woods, making camps, starting fires, catching grass snakes – and they're not there any more." He even suggested children should be encouraged to light fires and trespass a little. This shrinking of the child's world has had numbers put on it by the filmmaker David Bond. His mother, he calculates, roamed across 50 square miles at the age of 11, but as a boy in the 1970s he was confined to just one. Today, his son and daughter do not leave the garden unaccompanied. Books for children reflect this narrowing. Where adventure stories used to depict a landscape alive with youngsters finding buried treasure, thwarting robbers and rounding up Nazi spies, the constraints on modern children mean authors must now invent whole fantastic worlds before their young heroes can enjoy any freedom. It's not just outdoor play that has disappeared: a whole school of literature has died with it. Oddie and Packham are not advocating a return to 1940s childhoods, but people are bound to make comparisons with the stern headmistress of the Enid Blyton school. Her characters were wooden, her plots slapdash and her settings – generic ruined castles and spooky old houses – were like a Hollywood set; look round the back and you could see the struts holding up the painted hardboard. To make something interesting of her tales you had to read between the lines. In the Adventure series, for instance, the children are constantly left in peril far from home because Mrs Mannering is clearly having an affair with the shadowy policeman Bill Cunningham and wants them out of the way. Blyton was not helped by the illustrator of her most popular series. The Famous Five were made to resemble enthusiastic members of the Hitler Youth. Julian, in particular, looked capable of ordering the burning of the entire village if the tea he and his chums were offered did not come up to scratch. Somewhere behind this unfortunate artwork may stand recognition that children's freedom to roam has always been determined by social and economic factors. Though generations of country children had known the game laws made it unwise to be found on someone else's land, middle-class campers, the critic Victor Watson has argued, were turned into a welcome source of income by the agricultural slump of the interwar years. On this analysis, it was the Common Agricultural Policy that did for the children's adventure story. But if Blyton failed to reflect the children of the 1940s very accurately, other writers were available. For a couple of decades after he published his first story in 1943, Malcolm Saville represented the strongest challenge to the Blyton supremacy. Mystery at Witchend tells how the young members of the Lone Pine Club bring to justice a gang of saboteurs hoping, perhaps optimistically, to cripple the Allied war effort by blowing up a dam in the Shropshire hills. Though he wrote other series and set books in other places, it is the Lone Pine stories and their Shropshire landscapes for which Saville is best remembered. Quite why so many criminals used this backwater as their base for operations was never wholly clear, but one of the best things about his books was that they were set in "real places you can explore for yourself", as he always said in his forewords. Many readers did just that, discovering Bishop's Castle, the Long Mynd and the Stiperstones for themselves. Saville voted Labour in 1945, but was essentially a one-nation Conservative and his politics were more civilised than Blyton's. Their very different treatment of gypsies shows this. They are villains in her books: in Saville's, not only are the gypsies good characters, but people who are prejudiced against them generally turn out to be no good. As they were writing only a few years after gypsies had been victims of an attempted genocide, this is no trivial point. And, unlike the Famous Five – stranded for ever in a sexless world of buns and fizzy pop – the Lone Piners were allowed to grow up. Two even get engaged in the final book.If children of Saville's era had to overcome cloying assumptions, then so do their modern counterparts. And there are signs they may have allies beyond Packham and Oddie – the goody and the Goodie. David Bond's film Project Wild Thing has raised awareness of their lack of freedom, 20's Plenty is taming cars in town and the Playing Out movement has rediscovered the idea of the play street, where they are banished altogether – if only for a short, magical time. The Leicester Mercury wrote of one scheme: "Dozens of youngsters … filled the road, drawing with chalk, playing giant snakes and ladders, hopscotch or table tennis and generally enjoying the freedom of the thoroughfare, which is normally a busy cut-through used by motorists." While we wait for the spirit of the children's adventure story to seep back into modern society, those of us who grew up on Malcolm Saville's books will remain convinced of his superiority, no matter what Enid Blyton fans say. One day we will challenge them to a picnic and drink them under the table with ginger beer. |