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Published on September 26th, 2014 | by Booknotes Administrator

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Truth telling – children’s writers on the power of war books

After reading Glyn Harper‘s Jim’s Letters to her daughter, the New Zealand Book Council’s Catherine Cradwick was spurred to ask a selection of top Kiwi children’s authors about their approach to the difficult subject of World War One.

The book sat for weeks at the bottom of a pile of library books on my daughter’s bedroom floor. First she devoured the fairy books, the books about girls ‘just like me’, the Secret Seven… Until there it lay, uncovered, a picture book about a young Kiwi boy whose brother had fought at Gallipoli.

There was nothing off-putting about the book itself – Jim’s Letters by Glyn Harper was beautifully illustrated and published with care – but still we both hesitated. What would my six-year-old daughter make of the war events depicted? She is empathic to the extreme and feels things strongly. And yet, something in the cover caught her eye and she opened the book.

There has been much debate recently about the suitability of difficult subject matter in children’s books. Earlier this year the prestigious Carnegie medal, the UK’s top children’s book prize, went to a book described as ‘a uniquely sickening read’ and it horrified many adult readers and commentators.[1] The book in question, Kevin Brooks’ The Bunker Diary, is, according to Independent writer Amanda Craig, ‘depressing both in its nature and in its lack of redemption’ and many believed it did not deserve to win a prize that champions literature for children.[2] In response to this, the Guardian children’s fiction prize, which was announced not long after, declared that its longlist moved ‘beyond the confines of the current fad for teenage misery lit’[3].

Closer to home, New Zealand young adults’ author Ted Dawe experienced a similar outcry from some concerned parents and teachers last year. His fourth book, Into the River, won the 2013 New Zealand Post Margaret Mahy Book of the Year and the award for Best Young Adult Fiction. He and the judges were then accused of ‘setting out to “pollute the moral innocence of children”[4]’ with a book that included explicit sex scenes and drug taking. It sparked such controversy that the book was reviewed by the Office of Film and Literature Classification and copies in bookshops were stickered with parental advisory warnings.

The parental impulse to protect your child from harm is strong and, as I found with my own daughter, can extend – consciously or unconsciously – to censoring their reading matter. As adults we are comfortable with the idea of reading as cathartic but we seem to trust books less when it comes to our children. Can they rise above the disturbing events they might relate and transform them into something children can cope with? To what extent should our impressionable young be exposed to or protected from reading about horrors such as World War One?

New Zealand author Philippa Werry, whose recent award-winning book Best Mates (2014) is about Gallipoli, points out that we don’t always know how children are going to react to events that adults might find disturbing. ‘We might assume that death and bullets are the most frightening things, but sometimes it is quite different fears that give children nightmares – characters in fairy tales, ogres, wolves or shadows on the walls.’

For many writers, the importance of telling children about this founding chapter in New Zealand’s history outweighs any tentativeness we might feel about relating the events of World War One. War is part of the human experience, reminds author and academic Glyn Harper, ‘and we can’t ignore that’. The subject should however be approached with care.

David Hill, whose books for children and young adults include My Brother’s War (2012), believes ‘there’s always responsibility on writers for young readers, in the sense that your audience are impressionable, vulnerable, experiencing certain ideas for the first time.’ He says that ‘writing for this age group means you’re judged by both literary and moral standards.’ Glyn Harper, who has written numerous history books and children’s books on war, agrees that ‘because we are dealing with such unpleasant subject matter, it needs careful handling.’ He says children’s writers can be criticised for sanitising the war: ‘I think it is an unfair criticism. We are, after all, writing our stories for children.’

For many children, their foremost ‘experience’ of World War One will be through movies and books. Few will have grandparents or great-grandparents able to relate events first hand. This gives children’s writers an added responsibility to approach the topic in a sensitive way – their book may be the first time a young child has ever heard of war. Many popular picture books about the war use animals or innocent bystanders as an approachable way into the events. Through these observers, children can glimpse a small part of the World War One experience. Glyn Harper wrote the picture book The Donkey Man (2004) about a medical corps soldier who used a donkey to carry the injured from the battlefield. ‘Children love animals and relate to them. They are a great device to link children to the story.’ Using a youthful protagonist gives writers another accessible way to explore war at a level that children can relate to.

A number of children’s writers weave positivity into their stories by focusing on the enduring human spirit. The concepts of ‘friendship and memory’ form the basis of Philippa Werry’s book Best Mates. Jennifer Beck, author of award-winning picture book The Bantam and the Soldier (1996), says ‘Although stories may be set in wartime, I tend to focus not on weapons and destruction but to highlight human aspects such as courage, comradeship and retaining hope for the future throughout difficult times.’ She also has been ‘fortunate in collaborating with skilled illustrators’, whose images can explore emotion and add humour in subtle ways.

Illustrations are an important way for picture books to communicate with their young readers. ‘They must do more than reflect a story. They must be integral to it and actually help drive the story along,’ says Glyn Harper. Letters and diary entries are other effective mediums through which these hundred-year-old events can be brought to life. The authentic voice of a real soldier conveys events in a faithful and immediate way. Clever design can add another layer of interest, with envelopes to open and letters to unfold. Matt Elliott’s award-winning graphic novel, Nice Day for a War, was inspired by his grandfather’s war diary and is a perfect example of how ephemeral material and strong graphic illustrations can create a compelling war story for older children.

Despite being aware of their young audience, however, writers try to be faithful to the events – ‘You have to get the facts right,’ says David Hill. Susan Brocker, whose latest junior fiction is Kiwis at War: 1914 (2014), tries ‘to present the reality of war honestly and realistically to children without being too grim or engendering feelings of hopelessness and despair.’ Philippa Werry says ‘I try to balance telling the truth with not telling too much of the truth, or not telling truths that children might not be ready for.’ She tries to avoid ‘anything which feels gratuitous’ in choosing images or writing particular scenes. Sandy McKay, author of When Our Jack Went to War (2013), found the subject matter quite challenging – ‘While I wanted to convey the horror, I didn’t want it to be the main focus of the book.’ Instead, she focused on the life of a twelve-year-old boy back in Dunedin and the ‘boredom and absurdity that soldiers experienced along with the fear and anguish’. In Nice Day for a War, Matt Elliott and illustrator Chris Slane focus on the minutiae of soldier’s lives as a way to pull readers into the story – What food did soldiers eat? How did they get clean? What did a trench system look like? Indeed children’s curiosity for these details and for war stories in general has surprised many writers. Glyn Harper recently visited a school to talk about his books and New Zealand’s role in World War One: ‘I spoke for about ten minutes but spent the next hour answering their questions.’

World War One does hold a certain fascination for us from this safe distance. Its events are epic and tragic in scale and it has become a strong part of our country’s story. ‘Children are hungry for good stories from the past and for stories they can relate to,’ says Glyn Harper. Susan Brocker believes that the interest children have in the war is due to its conflict being ‘direct and intimate’, with fighting often hand to hand or on horseback, compared to the remoteness of modern technological warfare.

Matt Elliott recounts an encounter with one of his young readers after a school visit where he talked about Nice Day for a War:

As I was leaving with my host, the girl ran after us and said she had a question she was too shy to ask in the classroom. She then said, ‘If there was a war today would you go and fight?’ I turned it back on her and asked her what she would do. She thought about it for a few seconds and then said, ‘I would if my friends were going.’ What an amazing statement. There, a century after World War One, you see the aspect of human nature that saw many, many boys and men sign up to be part of the Big Adventure.

Stories about World War One may focus on a particular protagonist or battle, but for many readers they give a way into their own family’s stories. ‘People say they are grateful that someone has told this story – they feel it is also their family’s story,’ says Sandy McKay. David Hill agrees and says, ‘It’s pleasing to think that books may help to bring some awareness and communication within families.’ Despite this collective response to war stories, most are inspired by real personal experiences. Phillippa Werry, like many writers, feels a responsibility to ‘the people whose stories I am telling – the men and women who went to war – so as to preserve their memory and their dignity.’

When considering the retelling of New Zealand’s World War One experience for children, all writers believe books have a special role in helping children learn about difficult subjects. ‘Books,’ says David Hill, ‘put events inside a coherent frame of cause and effect. They can let the reader experience or come to terms with distressing issues vicariously, and in a controlled, reassuring manner.’ The power of books as an art form is in their ability to transport a reader as far as their imagination will allow and to contemplate the unimaginable in a safe environment. For Matt Elliott, ‘books remain special because children can hold them in their hand and extract from them what they can at their own pace.’ When comparing the reading experience to the viewing experience, David Hill says ‘Films can batter you; books can brace you.’

The sharing that happens around books is an important part of their power too. ‘Stories can be shared by the larger family group and revisited often,’ says Glyn Harper. ‘I think parents often get as much from a well-crafted book as their children do. When the stories are read again, perhaps when the child is a bit older, new insights can be gained and new learning can occur. Books as an art form keep on giving something every time they are read.’

And the interaction between a parent reading and a child listening is an important part of the reading process. As Phillippa Werry points out, ‘You can read a book to a child and take your time over it, look at the pictures together, stop and answer their questions. You know how much they can understand.’ In a recent piece on Booknotes Unbound, author and children’s book expert Kate De Goldi says,

reading to your child gives you the chance to experience their responses to story and language, to witness their growing understanding of the world unfolding around them, to see them connecting, little by little, the component parts of that world.[5]

And as my daughter and I dived between the covers of Jim’s Letters and read bravely on, I was reassured. The story was touchingly told, and the sorrows of war displayed faithfully but not gratuitously. And to my surprise her eyes remained dry, her mind brimming over with questions. At the end of the story she paused, then asked, ‘Can you read it again, Mummy?’

Tags: Children's Books, Children's Reading, Children's War Books, Chris Slane, David Hill, Glyn Harper, Jennifer Beck, Kate de Goldi, Matt Elliott, Philippa Werry, Sandy McKay, Susan Brocker, Ted Dawe, World War One

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