Big Books in my Little Life

In the Little House series of books, Laura Ingalls Wilder told captivating stories of the hardships and triumphs of American settler life in the late 1800s, based on her family’s time in Wisconsin, Missouri, Kansas and Minnesota.  The storytelling style was different to anything ten-year-old me had ever read.  Loving the character and voice of Laura, I vowed if I ever had a daughter, she’d be named Laura.*
 
From 1974, the stories gained a worldwide stage via the hit TV series Little House on the Prairie.   Yet most Australians have never read the books.  Until the 1980s, our childhood literary fare was heavily British-influenced.  Our schools, however, had to meet a homegrown quota; thus we were force-fed the best and worst of Australian literature.
 

                            
British kid-lit was a wholesome genre.  Just to re-affirm my worship of Enid Blyton, favourites were:


The Famous Five.
The Naughtiest Girl
Mallory Towers
The Five Find-Outers
The Faraway Tree Trilogy

I didn’t like The Secret Seven.  Controversially**  I didn’t like The Wishing Chair.  Other great Brit fantasy authors were Mary Stewart and Ursula Moray Williams.  If the masterpiece Harry Potter series had existed, I’d have been in heaven.

Brainwashed by British accents and magical forests and castles and boarding schools, I hated my first all-Australian novel, Storm Boy (Colin Thiele).   But! – here's the lesson: never discount a popular author on the strength of one book.  Weeks later, I devoured Thiele’s February Dragon as quickly as the raging bushfire ripped through its chapters.    

I recoiled at the silly title of our next Aussie ‘required text’ -  I Can Jump Puddles (Alan Marshall).  Yet once read, the true poignance of the title is revealed, and its mere mention will move you. 

Then at age ten, despite the best efforts of the education system, I discovered American junior literature.  Hello Trixie Belden!  Encyclopedia Brown!  Bring on Anne of Green Gables, A Wrinkle in Time  and the wondrous coming-of-age novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  Most brilliant of all: The Phantom Tollbooth.   And of course, the Little House books.

Wilder's simply-expressed wisdom stays with me.  Fans of the books will recall the devastation of Mary’s blindness; I found this line so affecting:

“Her blue eyes were still beautiful, but they did not know what was before them, and Mary herself could never look through them again to tell Laura what she was thinking without saying a word.”

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*  A kind American friend, aware of the story behind my youngest daughter’s name, last week sent me a lovely package of Ingalls souvenirs, direct from Walnut Grove.  The memories prompted this post.
   
** everyone except me seems to love The Wishing Chair

RUN-RUNAWAY

Even the happiest children have moments when they loosely plot the idea of Running Away From Home.  In my formative years, when broken homes and true homelessness were (or seemed) less of an issue than today,  ‘running away’ was a popular fantasy, heavily fuelled by childrens’ books and films of the time that made it seem entirely do-able.

My best mate Gail and I (both having perfectly nice parents, even if mine were in the throes of divorce) made grand plans to escape the perceived misery of home.  We always scheduled it for a Friday night, giving us two days on the lam before our school realized we were missing.  This didn’t account for the fact we, um, weren’t at boarding school, so our families would surely notice our absence by Saturday morning.

Each Friday for the duration of our Running Away phase, we’d say goodbye at the school gates and awkwardly agree to wait ‘just one more week.’  Deep down, we knew it would never happen, but this didn’t stop us making Plans - Plans with a capital P!

Our Running Away Inventory included practical items (raincoats, gumboots) but completely overlooked the need for cash.  We’d reach our (yet to be determined) destinations by bus, glossing over our inability to pay the fares.  Lunch was perhaps the most solid part of the Plan:  meat pies and custard tarts, to be purchased from delicatessans that our little suburban minds imagined would exist on every street, riverside and mountain-top in Australia.

To cover the unthinkable possibility of starving at breakfast and dinner, we’d raid our family fridges just before leaving, cramming piles of food into Tupperware containers.  Our belief was that Tupperware always kept food fresh, even unrefrigerated in a travel bag for weeks at a time *cough* 

Staring wistfully from the back bench of Greyhound bus (fares mysteriously paid)  we’d nibble on food leftovers that would magically stretch, like the loaves and fishes, across our journey to ….  wherever it was.  That’s not to say we totally lacked direction: we knew our confident attitude, cute freckles and affinity with animals would surely secure us work at farms, becoming perhaps the youngest Jillaroos in Australia.

I was startled when Gail suddenly added two items to the inventory: “Guns” and “Ammo.”  Not that I even knew what ‘ammo’ was; neither did Gail, but she assured me we needed both in order to shoot animals for food.  I still worried about carrying a rifle (especially on a bus) but it did paint a suitably adventurous picture of us wandering along the road at dusk, casually taking aim at any unfortunate bunny that crossed our path.  You just shot them and threw them on a fire to cook them, right?  (What did we know of skinning and gutting?)  Sitting cross-legged by our cosy campfire, we’d stuff it with marshmallows and sing a dirge or two as it roasted over the flames.

So, with food sorted, what about accommodation?  We imagined dossing down under the stars … but were also of the mind that if we wandered up to any motel, the manager would be moved by our tender years and automatically offer us free beds for the night. 

Our plans were ridiculously ambitious for a couple of 9 year old cashless girls from Adelaide.  Then again, my own secret deviation from the plan (and I bet Gail had one too) saw us both back home again by Sunday night, having Taught Everyone A Lesson, without having missed even a single day of school.