Rereading Childhood

Retrieved Memories: Finding a Past Self in Childhood Books

For my entire adult life, I hauled my collection of childhood books from state to state, house to house, never rereading them. Their mere presence was gratifying, each packed shelf like a neighborhood full of houses in which I’d once lived. But finally, when my daughter was a toddler, I returned to some of my old favorites, books I thought I might someday pass on to her.

I started, somewhat randomly, with Requiem for a Princess by British children’s writer Ruth Arthur, a book I recalled only vaguely. The jacket blurb of Requiem for a Princess said that it was about a girl named Willow who dreams the whole life of a seventeenth century occupant of the estate Penliss. It had all of my favorite childhood ingredients: heroines who want to be pianists or dancers or painters; gothic mansions by the sea; the turmoil wrought by an uncovered secret; the healing powers of nature. Eagerly I set forth, gradually deflating.

The story was flat and rushed and summarized. Where were the crusty bread and goat cheese, the rice pudding and sweet milk, the snowdrops and crocuses and jonquils, the fresh air and sunshine, all of the lush detail of children’s books in the nature-heals-all-tradition? Books like Heidi and The Secret Garden and Understood Betsy, populated by pale weak children transformed to strapping, healthy ones, described in a complimentary, joyful way as fat, with brown skin and red cheeks? And what’s the point of setting a book by the sea without crashing waves, misty spray, sand that pulls each step down so deep that you have to yank your feet free?

Though I was disappointed, I kept on rereading: the first chapter book I remembered checking out of the Wichita Public Library, Carolyn Haywood’s B is for Betsy; the first chapter book I’d checked out of the Seltzer School Library, Did You Carry the Flag Today, Charley? Classics I’d regularly received in the mail from the Children’s Book of the Month Club, books about big noisy families and stories about the performing arts and series books, especially the ones about Betsy Ray, Beany Malone, Nancy Drew, Jo March, Anne Shirley, Laura Ingalls. I read, and memories unfurled like tightly-wound ribbons suddenly released. Used copies of books arrived in padded envelopes, and as I cracked limp spines, pages sizzled with familiarity, my synapses firing off like crazy firecrackers of memory exploding.

Though my worldview had been shaped by many, many books, none had influenced me quite as profoundly as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s, the first books my mother ever read to me. When I returned to them, I flew through the series, their gratitude for small pleasures infecting me. I began to think in Wilder’s language; everything was happy, cozy, pretty, snug, and sweet. And all of a sudden, I was seized by an impulse to explore the woods above our house.

I was much more excited about this than my daughter, who was eight. It was 90 degrees, and she immediately started complaining that she was hot and tired. The path climbed steeply uphill, scored with deep muddy ruts from four-wheelers. Every few feet, tucked back into trees, overgrown with weeds, old oil derricks stood like miniature windmills robbed of their blades.

We followed a set of cables stretching way up the mountain, ending at a small engine house, the whole contraption rusted over. Northwestern Pennsylvania was the U.S.’s chief oil producer from the mid-1800s until early in the twentieth century, when much of the country’s oil industry shifted to Texas. In the 1870’s, there were 4,000 oil wells in Bradford, nearly half the number of the town’s human population today.

The path plunged steeply downhill, blackberry thickets tangling along the edges where the trail flattened out. I wondered if we should turn back before we got lost, but we pressed on and suddenly found ourselves at a clearing where the whole town spread beneath our feet. Black rooftops with their brick chimneys descended the hill like stair steps. In the valley below, downtown rose up, a few seven-story buildings against the backdrop of the opposite hills.

Then the end of the trail spilled us out onto a street. Nearby, an eerie clanking repeated and repeated—an empty swing in a breeze? A child’s loose bicycle wheel? The noise was too rhythmic to be either. We crept toward the sound, ears perked for children’s voices among the steady clank, clank, clank. Sophie glanced at me, wide-eyed. We squinted through the trees, expecting ghosts. Instead we came upon a little oil rig, cables alternating as they creaked up and down.

Turning the corner, we found ourselves looking down on the roof of Sophie’s school. “We could walk to school this way,” I said. I pictured her tramping through the woods like a storybook pioneer girl. I imagined strolling with her through the stillness, watching the leaves change in the fall, feeling, under our feet, the earth turn hard and frozen, our footsteps marking white stretches of snow. The Little House series had reminded me what it was like to feel like a character in a book.

“Mmm,” was all Sophie said in reply to my half-cocked notion about walking this way every day.

One of the first lessons most of us learn as writers is about the power of detail to build worlds and evoke memory, but rereading childhood books brought that home to me even more forcefully. It was, it turned out, those details that most strongly tapped into my memory and had the power, even in adulthood, to incite my imagination and remind me who I once was. As I reread, I existed in a relentless state of déjà vu, long-forgotten details appearing like retrieved memories: the strains of a fiddle beside a campfire, the smell of the woods on a summer day, the taste of peppermint, a new bird whistle, a chair seat braided from yellow rags, the glimmer of the stars overhead.

(This blog was excerpted from McCabe’s forthcoming book, From Little Houses to Little Women: Revisiting a Literary Childhood.)

On the Trail of Laura Ingalls Wilder

(originally published MariE Shopp blog)

On an overcast day in July, 2007, I packed up a Rent-a-Wreck, a Ford Taurus with 132,000 miles and an alarming tendency to rattle and groan during left turns, and headed off to follow the trail of Laura Ingalls Wilder. My nine-year-old daughter and I lived on the Pennsylvania/New York border, just a few miles south of Cuba, New York. That’s the area that, one hundred fifty years before, young Charles Ingalls’s family had also left to head west.

I pictured them setting out on a summer day from the pine-forested hills of Allegheny County, canvas stretched over the top of the wagon, a baby on the box behind the seat, children crouching in the swaying bed. The wagon probably held a couple of trunks of family possessions and supplies: porcelain bowl and pitcher, treasured family photos, a musket and fiddle, coffee beans and corn meal and molasses, salt pork and dried fruits.

Here’s what I imagined: the wagon hot and stuffy, even with the sides rolled up to let in a breeze, the children watching the two lines stretching endlessly behind them where the wagon wheels have flattened the grass. Wheels creak and hooves clip-clop through the vast silence of the roadless prairie, moving about two miles an hour, covering maybe fifteen miles in a day.

Birds rise into the overturned blue bowl of sky like pepper emptied suddenly from a shaker.

Clouds scud above and quick rabbits rustle through grass, and sometimes near creeks the children spot muskrat houses or beaver dams. And from the height of bird flight, the speed of clouds, the numbers of rabbits, the thickness of mud walls, Charles Ingalls learns to gather information about the length and harshness of the season ahead. This is one of the skills he will pass on to his daughter, Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose stories will teach generations about westward migration and white settlement of the American frontier.

I wasn’t sure why I felt compelled to follow the path of Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose series had profoundly affected my childhood. I wanted to write a book about the novels that had shaped me when I was young, and I was thinking about visiting places related to those books—Prince Edward Island and Anne of Green Gables territory, Mankato, MN and Maud Hart Lovelace sites, Concord, MA and Louisa May Alcott’s homes and museums. But Laura Ingalls Wilder’s work had been the most formative for me. My mother had started reading me the books when I was three and I’d gone on to read them over and over myself.

At any rate, there we were a couple of days after we’d left home, my daughter and me, heading through thunderstorms for Wabasha, MN, across the river from Pepin, WI, where Little House in the Big Woods takes place. Everything was the deep color of the world after rain—the green, green grass, the velvet blue of the overcast sky, the wet orange cones along the highway, the newly-painted yellow lines.

As we crossed the Mississippi, I thought how easy it was to speed over water that pioneers could only cross when it was frozen. Families left trunks and pianos and rocking chairs strewn along the banks of this river, finding it too great a risk, in the end, to carry such heavy possessions across potentially fragile ice.

In Pepin, we wandered through a recreated bedroom displaying a trundle bed, a sewing machine that belonged to Laura’s cousin, and a red wool petticoat mounted on the wall. In back there was a kitchen crammed with an antique stove, dishes, and a wizened but still fragrant clove apple once used to scent drawers.Later we drove out to the site of the Little House in the Big Woods. I stood in front of the replica cabin and my daughter took my picture. Wings beat loudly behind me: not bats, as I imagined at first, but swallows that darted back and forth through the cabin rafters.

Our eyes adjusted to the dark interior, a narrow common room and two tiny bedrooms, smaller than many of today’s typical closets. We craned our necks at the loft above the bedrooms, a platform meant to suggest the attic where Mary and Laura played, where pumpkins had served as chairs and tables, and hams and venison hung above in paper wrappings, along with bunches of dried herbs, braided ropes of onions, and wreaths of red peppers. This platform was empty, but our memories of the books filled in the details.

Over the next two weeks, we would tour many log houses, sod houses, dugouts, old churches, schoolhouses, post offices, banks, jails, and depots, replica violins and china shepherdesses and Charlotte dolls and hand dug wells. We would drive through Kansas and Iowa, Minnesota and South Dakota and Missouri. My daughter would smile with a kind of despairing politeness when asked for the sixth time, at the sixth tourist site, if she wanted to try to play a pump organ. She started to complain about the long hours in the car. But finally, as we pulled up into our own driveway, my daughter, who’d been whining the last few hundred miles, would say, “That was fun. Let’s do that again.”

For a minute, I wanted to do just that. Turn around and start again, driving again down long stretches of highway, passing moving vans and RVs, lumbering vehicles labeled “Sunseeker” and “Pioneer Spirit.” I wanted the pioneer spirit to infect me again, an in-the-moment awareness of details that distances daily aggravations, forcing me to inhabit my life in a newer, calmer, more grateful way, appreciating small pleasures. I wanted to turn around and do it all again, head back again toward the Little house in the Big Woods, my anticipation swelling like the bluffs, back again to the place where the books began, which is also the place where my love of reading began.

Girl Detective and Pioneer Girl: Eight Surprising Commonalities between the Nancy Drew books and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House Series

Other than being children’s books heroines, Laura Ingalls and Nancy Drew might appear to have little in common. The first was a real pioneer girl born more than half a century before the second, a girl detective who is purely fictional. Laura is the center of gentle, organic, autobiographical family stories; Nancy, though now-iconic and much-beloved, was created largely as a consumer product. Laura travels by covered wagon; Nancy tools around in her blue roadster.

But, as I discuss in my book From Little Houses to Little Women: Revisiting a Literary Childhood, recently released in paperback, these two heroines and their series have a surprising number of things in common:

They first appeared in stories around the same time, Nancy in 1930, Laura in 1932.

Both broke models for female heroines, offering adventure and positive messages about possibilities available to girls.

Both inspired TV shows in the 1970s. “Nancy Drew Mysteries,” ran from 1977-1979. “Little House on the Prairie” ran from 1974-1983.

Both book series are products of collaborations between writers whose values were often at odds. The Nancy Drew books were produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, headed by Edward Stratemeyer, a children’s book mogul who created characters, series, and outlines and then farmed out the actual writing to a variety of authors. The early Nancy Drews, as documented in Melanie Rehak’s 2006 book Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her, were written by two women. Rehak portrays in fascinating detail the reluctant collaboration of Mildred Wirt Benson and series editor Harriet Stratemeyer Adams. While until recently Benson’s contribution had been downplayed, the role of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter Rose Wilder Lane in writing the Little House series has long been acknowledged by scholars. There is evidence that Rose helped to shape her mother’s lyrical writing into stories and that the series is a complicated mesh of the politics of mother and daughter. Both series are the products of sometimes difficult relationships and reflect the sometimes conflicting values of the teams who created them.

Both series feature characters who intimidated me as a child with their dazzling competence. Pa Ingalls singlehandedly builds log houses and barns and digs wells and constructs chimneys and, when recovering from an illness and unable to “work,” fashions rocking chairs out of slender willows from the creek bottom. He farms, he plays the violin, he’s a community leader. There’s nothing he can’t do. Nancy Drew is also fazed by nothing. If someone at a neighboring table chokes on raw steak, she pauses from tracing clues to administer the Heimlich, add a delicious marinade to the meat, and fire up her portable grill to ensure that it’s fully cooked. If her boyfriend Ned discovers a message in Hieroglyphics, Nancy darts over to translate it—into French by way of Swahili. If her car overheats, Nancy purchases a new thermostat and installs it herself, substituting roadside sticks and rocks for more conventional tools. If Nancy’s slacks rip while she’s camping on a mountainside, she whips out her sewing kit and stitches up a pair of new pants from tent cloth. OK, so maybe these are exaggerations of Nancy’s prowess, but not by much.

Both book series were considered groundbreaking. Mary Hill Arbuthnot considers the publication of Little House in the Big Woods to be a milestone in children’s literature. She writes, “Stories about the west were a staple of the abhorred series books; the Little House books benefited from children’s fascination with the setting, but turned the west into more than a backdrop for predictable dramas of good and evil.” Many, many readers and critics have seen Nancy Drew as groundbreaking as well, a feminist heroine who transformed the visions of countless girls, providing a model of independence and freedom.

Neither Nancy Drew nor young Laura were writers, but Nancy Drew’s persistence in tracking down clues and finding solutions mimics the research and creative process; Laura, describing the world for her blind sister, hones her descriptive powers and grapples with the complications of language and vision. Both characters inspired many young readers to become writers.

Both heroines and series have proven inspirational to generations of readers from all sorts of backgrounds and across political spectrums. A Wickipedia entry cites biographies and articles in which prominent women claim Nancy Drew as an influence, including Sandra Day O’Connor, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Laura Bush. Passionate fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder from all walks of life and political positions: conservative and liberal, living history interpreters and homeschoolers and scholars, gather ever two years at a combination fan and academic conference, Laurapalooza, to talk about the wide-ranging influence of her books.

From “Ain’t it Awful Mabel” to WTF: Slang and Classic Children’s Literature

Among the major lessons of the books of my childhood is that slang is very bad, and that it’s the central task of parents to cure their children of it. There is much handwringing over the use of informal speech, the kind of despair we reserve today for stalled potty training, profanity, bullying, drug abuse, and delinquency.

Take Eunice Young Smith’s dreamy Jennifer Hill, books published in the late 40s and early 50s about a character growing up in the early 1900s. Jennifer is fond of superlatives: “spiffy,” “spondolix,” and “scrumptious.” Their mother doesn’t quit approve of this. She keeps admonishing the children to say “surely,” instead of “sure,” “goodness,” instead of “gosh.”

Jo March, not lying on the rug. Illustration by Sue Rundle-Hughes

Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne is aggrieved when young Davy of Anne of Avonlea, published in 1909, admires a “bully splash,” since bully is apparently a highly vulgar if enthusiastically complimentary adjective. 1880’s Little Women’s Jo likes to exclaim “Christopher Columbus!” but manages to finally overcomes this appalling habit. She is eventually praised by her father for no longer being his “son Jo.” He says, “I see a young lady who pins her collar straight, laces her boots neatly, and neither whistles, talks slang, nor lies on the rug as she used to.” Jo, the most critical of all heroines of female indoctrination, is also, paradoxically, the only literary heroine ever to be cured of using slang.

Poor Laura in Little Town on the Prairie isn’t reprimanded for slang, but what appears to be its close cousin, “wooden swearing.” In the book, published in 1941 but taking place in the late nineteenth century, Ma scolds her for this after an outburst against the pressures of having to study all the time in order to earn her teaching certificate at fifteen and provide her sister an education. Laura doesn’t swear, but her tone has suggested that she might possibly want to, and the mere possibility of this desire merits a reprimand. Even an all-too-human expression of exhaustion is too unladylike to be borne.

Even while her characters are perpetually reprimanded for their slang, Anne creator Lucy Maud Montgomery makes fun of the prudery that leads to euphemistic language, as in an argument in which Dora insists that a tomcat should be referred to as a “gentleman cat” while Davy maintains it should be a “Thomas pussy.” And in Anne of the Island (1915), when corrected for using the phrase “dig in,” Anne’s friend Phil laments, “Oh, why must a minister’s wife be supposed to utter only prunes and prisms?” Slang, she adds, is only “metaphorical language.” She then wisely concludes that she’ll be perceived as stuck up among the parishioners that her future husband serves if she doesn’t use their language.

Betsy, undoubtedly using slang. Illustration by Vera Neville.

Thank goodness that slang wasn’t eradicated from the speech of all characters. Sometimes, it’s one of the quickest routes to recreating a time period. I remember one autumn night a few years ago, as a light cold rain fell and leaves skittered across the street, I dropped my daughter off at a school dance and went home to reread Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy books, set in the early 1900s. While my daughter was off at a middle school gym navigating a world of kids who casually said “WTF” at every turn, I was content at home with a bunch of teenagers whose favorite slang is “Ain’t it awful, Mabel?”

The period slang is one of my favorite things about Lenora Mattingly Weber’s Beany series. In Meet the Malones (1943), a bigshot football player takes an interest in Beany’s sister Mary Fred. Dike—yep, that’s his name—prefers “smooth little queens” to “mop squeezers” like Mary Fred or to “studes,” girls who make good grades. But suddenly, wisecracking Dike resolves to make Mary Fred his “squaw.” Dike is clearly using Mary Fred; his trendy language announces his lack of substance, as does his unfortunate name, probably meant as an ironic reference to a hole in the wall that lets water through rather than any secret lesbian tendencies.

In Make a Wish for Me (1956), Beany’s boss, Eve, says, “In my day we called it ‘petting.’ And it did a girl no good to be labeled a ‘petter.’ You’ll notice, Beany, it’s always the girl who is labeled, never the boy. As I say, it’s a man’s world. What’s the word for petting now? I can’t keep up with it. Smooching?” Beany replies, “No, that’s baroque—meaning old-fashioned. Now it’s loving-it-up. Only at Harkness we have a new word—more-thanning. . .” Nowadays, more people remember terminology like petting and smooching than loving-it-up and more-thanning. Most of this slang had largely fallen out of use by the time I encountered these books, replaced by necking and then making out. Today, people hook up rather than loving-it-up. They certainly no longer more-than, as far as I know.

The World According to Children’s Books: What I Learned from Childhood Reading

I grew up reading books mostly published before 1970, ones that reflected the values of previous generations and knocked me completely out of step with my peers. I wasn’t aware of how much those books were products of a particular place and time, and so I thought that their values were timeless, universal.

For instance, through childhood reading it became readily apparent to me that a normal, well-balanced family has four children. The Boxcar Children has a quartet of resourceful youngsters, two boys and two girls. The Little House books’ Ingallses (eventually) have four daughters, Little Women‘s Marches have four daughters, Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy Family has two boys and two girls, Eunice Young Smith’s Jennifer books have two boys and two girls. In Jennie Lindquist’s Golden Name Day series, Nancy Bruce is an only child—but she goes to live with her adopted grandparents and becomes a unit with her three adopted cousins (all girls). Lenora Mattingly Weber’s Malone family has four children, three girls and a boy.

I also knew from my reading that if you’ve experienced an illness or trauma, the solution is to go to the country (or the Alps, the moors, the woods—anywhere remote.) Fresh air and sunshine will restore you. (See Heidi, The Secret Garden, and Understood Betsy.) Better yet, pick up your whole household and move to the country (along with your two parents and three brothers and sisters and live-in housekeeper.) Your house will have a cupola on top. There will be a subplot about being kidnapped by gypsies, who will actually turn out to be allies (see Eunice Young Smith’s Jennifer books and Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy Family books.)

Even if you don’t live in the country, a really interesting house will have nooks, crannies, hiding places, cool attics. Like Jo in Little Women, you can hang out up there writing melodramas and eating apples. Maybe, like Heidi, you’ll have a sleeping loft, or like Nancy Bruce, you’ll find a cute little house in the woods and inside, a crystal tree with a mysterious and romantic story attached to it. Or maybe, like the Melendy kids, you will discover a secret room.

If you’re a pioneer girl, you’ll do the extreme version of moving to the country or occupying a cool house. You’ll live in log cabins and sod houses as you go further and further west every few years—never east. Eastward movement is embarrassing and shameful. Only wimps move back east. (See Wilder’s Little House series.)

A really good heroine will help other people heal by her very presence. (See Anne of Green Gables, Pollyanna, A Little Princess, The Secret Garden, The Golden Name Day, and the Jennifer series.) A really great heroine works miracles. Like Nancy Bruce, who helps her lame friend Alex walk again. Or Mary Lennox, who helps her lame cousin Colin walk again. Or Heidi, who helps her lame friend Klara walk again. Or Jennifer, who helps her lame friend Sarabeth—whose name evokes both Heidi’s wheelchair-bound friend Klara and the sickly March sister, Beth—to—guess what?—walk again.

Many times, the miraculous nurturing powers of these literary heroines come from their very essence, not their effort, not even their touch. The title character of Donna Parker at Cherrydale enables a mute boy to talk and a grieving concentration camp survivor to find joy in life again. Sara Crewe, Anne Shirley, and Pollyanna simply inspire others through their charm, dignity, imagination, and optimism. “You are always making people happy,” a character tells the title character in Anne of Windy Poplars. “Why, whenever you come into a room, Miss Shirley, the people in it feel happier.”

If you are dismissed as ugly by adults or peers, but have high cheekbones, never fear—that’s universal code for “future beauty.” If others comment regularly on your starry eyes, that’s also good. Dreaminess means that you’re imaginative. The more criticism and/or teasing that you endure as a child, the greater will be your eventual triumph. (See Rachel, the vastly underestimated high-cheekboned heroine of Noel Streatfeild’s Dancing Shoes. Or starry-eyed Jennifer in Young’s series. Or awkward young Hans in Eva Moore’s The Fairy Tale Life of Hans Christian Andersen, who grows up to become a world-renowned author to whom all of the citizens of his home town raise their torches.)

Furthermore, really sensitive, imaginative characters make up whimsical stories about flowers and fairies. Anne delights in giving ornate names to ordinary places; Jennifer fantasizes that she can talk to bumblebees. When Anne, in Anne of Avonlea, falls through the roof of an old duck house, she is stuck hanging there while her friend goes for help, forced to draw on her own inner resources to pass the time. No problem. Anne entertains herself by working out a “most interesting dialogue between the asters and the sweet peas and the wild canaries in the lilac bush and the guardian spirit of the garden.”

In contrast to all of the lessons I learned from books, there were only three children in my family, my childhood home was a boring, serviceable split level built in 1965, I was never sent to the country to recover from anything nor did my family ever pick up and move to a pastoral setting. I did not have high cheekbones and when my eyes got starry my teachers told me to stop daydreaming and pay attention. I never helped anyone lame walk again, and I was secretly ashamed that I didn’t care what the bees would say to the flowers if they could all talk.

If these books failed to reflect my own white, middle-class reality, their values undoubtedly seemed foreign to many, many other readers. But for the most part, I didn’t feel inadequate or diminished by these books. I was too busy living vicariously through them, becoming these characters, surprised to close a book and remember that I was me, in my own room, in my own life, but still richer for the journey I’d just undertaken.

Welcome to Rereading Childhood

As a child, I was a passionate reader—especially of books about girls who wanted to be writers, books passed on to me by my mother and aunts. My forthcoming book From Little Houses to Little Women: Revisiting a Literary Childhood is the story of my journey back through the books that shaped me as a child, from Nancy Drew to the Betsy-Tacy and Anne of Green Gables series—and my journeys to tourist sites related to some of my favorite writers.

I retraced the path of Laura Ingalls Wilder and visited sites related to Betsy-Tacy series creator Maud Hart Lovelace in Minnesota, museums devoted to Louisa May Alcott in Concord, MA, and tourist attractions revolving around Anne of Green Gables creator Lucy Maud Montgomery in PEI, Canada. In the process of returning to these books and visiting these places, I began to understand my powerful connection to many creative, intelligent heroines as well as to my mother and aunts who first inspired me to read these books—books that eventually helped me forge my own path.

There were many more books that I wanted to revisit for this project and didn’t have a chance. This blog is a chance to do that as well as include additional material that didn’t make it into the book. Conversation with others always jogs my memory and reminds me of books that were important to me, so I especially welcome reader comments and would love to hear about the books that shaped you.

Rereading Childhood

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