It’s special to me when I discover that one of my favourite childhood books was also a favourite of my mum’s. This was the case with Rabbit And His Friends, which I posted about here, and with the book I’m posting about today: A Little House of Your Own.

Everyone has to have a little house of his own.
Every boy has to have his own little house.
Every girl should have a little house all to herself.

In this book a ‘house’ is a metaphor for a space of one’s own – it doesn’t need to have a roof and four walls – it can be a cardboard box or a treehouse or the space under a dining table. No matter what place you find, it is important for every person to have a space that they can create and retreat to. As a child or an adult, it is an incredibly affirming idea.

The copy mum has is a 1961 reprint of the original 1957 publication, written by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers and illustrated by Irene Haas. The endpapers are stained and at one point the jacket became so damaged that mum resorted to cutting a portion of it and sticking it to the front.

My childhood memories focus mostly on the illustrations of the book – which evoked so strongly in my imagination possible scenarios for creating new cubby houses and hiding places. The detail is exquisite and even now I can’t help but look at these pictures in awe of the simplicity of the form – black and white, pen and ink with incredible detail and variation in light and dark rendered on each page.

I loved the book’s message when I was little – and the very empowering feeling it gave me. It validated the desire for even a small child to have some place of their very own. This message has the same power, and a different significance as an adult. The following passage resonates particularly now:

Your papa is in his own little house when he is behind his newspaper.
He wants everyone to leave him alone. He doesn’t want anyone to bother him.
No children.
No grownups.

When your mama takes a nap it is just as though she has gone into her own little house and shut the doors and the windows.
She wants everyone to leave her alone. She doesn’t want anyone to talk to her or to ask her questions.
If you tickle her she will wake up -
and then she won’t be in her own little secret house anymore.
But that really isn’t fair, is it?

Too true!!

I’ve just discovered that cocoon couture also blogged about this book, just a couple of weeks ago… You can see the post (with more internal images and a scan of our original cover) here.

A guest post by Nicci D, mum to Nuwan aged 2.

Whenever I asked my dad to read me a bedtime story, he often chose Badjelly the Witch by Spike Milligan. I remember feeling delighted and anxious, both at once, at his choice: delighted because I knew Daddy would soon be chuckling once again at Milligan’s dark humour, and anxious because I found the story quite frightening – enough to give me nightmares.

Badjelly is a fairy story about Tim and Rose, who lived with their Mummy and Daddy in a big log cabin made from wood trees. When Lucy their cow went missing, Tim and Rose went looking for her, even though this meant heading into the dark forest, braving the trouser robbers and, ultimately, being captured by Badjelly the baddest witch in the world. In the end, they all lived happily ever after (except Badjelly, of course), but I was always relieved to hear this, no matter how many times I heard the story.

Milligan includes all the details that were important to the six-year-old me: what colour Rose’s hair was; how thick the trees were in the forest (as thick as Tim and Rose’s teacher’s legs at school); and what sort of wallpaper was in the bedrooms of Binkle-bonk the goblin’s house. At the same time, his pen-and-ink illustrations leave enough space for a child’s imagination to run wild – which mine did for several days and nights after each reading.

Milligan wrote Badjelly in 1973 (my lovely hardback copy still carries its price-tag of $3.20!) for his own children. Although quite long for a picture book, it is handwritten by the author, and I was as fascinated by the quirky lettering as by the illustrations. When the tin lion says ‘Roar! Roar!’ (then ‘Squeak!’ because he’s rusty from sleeping in the rain), Milligan’s lettering really seems to Rooarr. And when Dingle the mouse warns Tim and Rose to run away if they see Badjelly, even the word ‘her’, underlined and annotated, still sends chills down my spine.

Badjelly’s significance in my world seemed to be heightened by the fact that it mentioned God (‘just then God came along’). This occurred in such a different context to most ‘God’ references that I wasn’t sure what to think, but it provided the opportunity for some wide-ranging discussions with my dad! (When an audio version of Badjelly was made in 1975, the BBC removed God from the story because God appeared to have been placed on the same level as goblins.)

My childhood wouldn’t have been quite the same without Badjelly, and I’m planning on introducing it to my son once he’s at school. Perhaps we’ll read it first in the afternoon, before it gets ‘very dark-and-night-time’.

(By the way, for dedicated Playschool watchers like me, Spike Milligan also wrote the poem ‘On the Ning Nang Nong’…)

||Badjelly is still available from Amazon||