Muddle-Headed Storytime

The Muddle-Headed Wombat by Ruth Park with illustrations by Noela Young

Published by Angus & Robertson

Pp. 225

This Australian children’s classic is an utterly delightful tale of a wombat and his adventures with Mouse and Tabby, his second-best friend. The animals live in a little house at the edge of Big Bush which is “green and quiet and airy, and the right place for animals to live.” They go to school, visit the circus, have holidays by the sea and build a treehouse that collapses in a storm. Frequent squabbles punctuate their escapades, as they have many differences, but they always make up as they realise the value of friendship.

Wombat is muddle-headed because he is a Wombat. He mixes up words and can’t count past four – “He runs out of paws, that’s the trouble” – but he likes to be helpful although his favoured solution to a problem is to sit on things. He is thrilled to be going to school where “We’re going to learn things like four and eight make eleventy one and C O W spells cat, and things like that.” Similar to Pooh Bear he is not bright although he has inimitable logic, such as when he eats a packet of chalk but not the green because “it might taste like spinach and I don’t like spinach.” He is good at digging and seeing in the dark and is very loyal and loves his friends, which in turn makes him loveable.

Mouse is fastidious and house proud, always cleaning things, preparing meals (pancakes for Tabby; snails for Wombat; and mosquitoes for itself) and polishing its spectacles. Referred to throughout as ‘it’, Mouse is gender neutral, although this was written in 1962 and Mouse carries its long tail “over its arm as though it were the train on an evening dress” so is possibly meant to be female. Mouse is also sentimental and cares for things and people, particularly the grey tabby cat whom it adopts because “He was skinny and miserable and he had a peaky little face with big ears. He wore a bright red bow tie, but anyone could see it hadn’t been washed and ironed for weeks.”

Like many cats, Tabby is vain and thinks he is handsome, while he also claims to be frail and delicate, mainly to get out of hard work. He is very good at building things, however, such as a caravan and a treehouse and is also remarkably resilient, surviving being sucked into a carpet cleaner, dropped from a great height while performing as a puppet, and accidentally shaken into a stream, not to mention being sat on by Wombat who thinks “if he were sat on once or twice, and flattened out like a bookmark, it would do him the world of good.”

Noela Young’s charming illustrations add to the humour of the stories and caricature the animals highlighting their best and worst traits. They regard themselves as a family and they constantly attempt to adapt to living with each other while retaining their individuality. The tales are equally diverting and reassuring and were loved by both the adults and the children at holiday story-time. 

Friday Five: Children's War Literature

The sad obituary from this week is that Nina Bawden has died, aged 87. She was the author of a fantastic number of books, including Family Money and The Ice House, both of which I thought were excellent when I read them many years ago.

She is probably best known, however, for her children's novel, Carrie's War, which focuses on the plight of two young evacuees during the Second World War as they are sent to a rural world that may as well be alien - it's in Wales. We read it at school, as I think did many people my age, and it left a lasting impression. I loved war stories, and the era in which they were set: the children of the Narnia stories were evacuees and The Famous Five were obssessed with secret passages and food because they were living through the post-war rationing years.

Much is made these days of children needing stories with characters they can relate to. I think this is patronising and doesn't credit the power of childhood imagination or their ability to understand something other than their own immediate environment. Children have amazing war stories now: The Book Thief by Makus Zusak; The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne; and Michael Morpurgo's War Horse spring to mind.

I have since read children's books concerning other wars in China, America, Africa, Canada, India, South America, the Balkan states, and what was once Persia, but up until the early 80s, almost all my reading about war was Euro-centric and (with the notable exceptions of Henry Treece and Rosemary Sutcliffe who wrote thrilling historical fiction) concerned WWII. Because I have already mentioned the highly-influential Carrie's War, I am not including it in this list, although it would otherwise be right up there.

5 Children's Book About War (That I Read When I Was a Child):

1. I Am David - Anne Holme
2. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank
3. The Silver Sword - Ian Serraillier
4. Goodnight Mr Tom - Michelle Magorian
5. The Eagle of the Ninth - Rosemary Sutcliffe

Friday Five: Picture Books

Children's author Margaret Mahy died earlier this week. Her books are beloved by millions, and many are the tributes pouring in, from adults saying how much they had loved her tales when they were young. I'm sure many of them still do. I do.

This led me to think about my favourite picture books from when I was a child. I decided not to include those by Beatrix Potter or Dr Seuss, as they should have a category in their own right. Neither am I including fairy tales. And they have to be the books that I loved then and still do, so recent favourites (such as Hairy Maclary, Jolly Tall, Six Dinner Sid, Winnie the Witch or Wombat Stew) can't count either.

I love the story of Ferdinand the Bull, but this was my brother's favourite, apparently, so to chose that would be cheating. I'm sure my mother will correct me or add any I have missed out that I used to enjoy, although maybe I don't like them so much any more? Some tastes change as we get older, but not all.

5 Favourite Picture Books:

1. A Lion in the Meadow - Margaret Mahy
2. The Tiger Who Came to Tea - Judith Kerr
3. The Story About Ping - Marjorie Flack
4. The Story of Little Black Sambo - Helen Bannerman
5. The Very Humgry Caterpillar - Eric Carle