Mr Bear Part One

 Dear Mr Finch,

Many years ago - well, just over twenty years actually - I lived in Lincoln. Because of a bad combination of joblessness, lack of transport and an unfortunate attack outside the cathedral in late summer I was never very happy there BUT I did have a magical couple of years working at a higher education college not far from the centre of the city called Bishop Grosseteste College. It’s now just Lincoln Bishop University which is a great shame, losing a great deal of the character that made it such a wonderful and idiosyncratic place to work.

Me during the Lincoln years, but confusingly in Grimsby

Because it really felt like a small idyll - small enough for you to know most of the staff and students, departments which had their own dogs and crammed into an old 19th century building which was not large but had its own chapel and was several storeys high and surprisingly easy to get lost in.

I was employed as a librarian, by the retiring head librarian Chris who was leaving because he could see the eccentricities slowly but steadily being stripped away and couldn’t face having to compromise to things such as computers and meetings and, frankly, most of the things I also struggle with. He probably thought as a youngish professional librarian I was a safe pair of hands but he also probably saw my inner eccentric curmudgeon as well and felt I was a bit of a kindred spirit.

Chris at the extension opening of the new BGC library. He is, quite correctly, looking unimpressed on the right hand side with the stick, staring at the camera with the disdain of a man who will ever see technology and conformity as the enemy 

He was a wonderful boss. Grumpy at unnecessary change and technology (and a voluble atheist, forever cross that someone had signed him up to a book catalogue not as Chris Child but, wonderfully, as Christ Child),  he loved non league football and steam engines and nothing more than turning up early to tinker with his library catalogue, clearly his own version of a steam engine. The college used an impossibly rare cataloguing system that had not been updated since the mid seventies called Bliss, mainly because it kept child development and education together and as a primarily teacher training college Chris and his predecessors felt this was significant. The system was kept in four huge and slightly collapsing blue volumes, heavily annotated by Chris and other head librarians - as there were no substantial computers when the system was last updated, that had to be inserted and improvised somewhere by the head librarian. Thusly, the short cut of every librarian ever - of checking what other librarians had catalogued a book as - was impossible, because each of the hundred libraries who used the system worldwide had adapted it their own way. I loved this. It was exactly the sort of wayward library I had dreamed of working in and, frankly, spoiled me for every library I worked in afterwards.

The point of this - although I could tell so many stories about Chris and maybe will one day - is that Bishop Grosseteste as a teacher training college was very focused on all elements of education and had an incredible children’s book collection. I even shared an office with the children’s librarian.

And did I pay any attention? No, sadly I did not.

I was by this time slowly getting back into comics, after an incident in Nottingham Forbidden Planet with a copy of Jeffrey Brown’s book Clumsy falling on my head pointing the way forward. But I did not pay any attention whatsoever to the children’s collection. And do I now feel foolish? Yes. Yes I do.

Although - although - I did rescue a few items from the book sale shelf over my couple of years there. And one of them, frankly falling apart, was something by Chizuko Kuratomi and Kozo Kakimoto called Mr Bear. I only saved part of the cover but when many years later I did find another Mr Bear book I immediately recognised it and bought it.

And this is the long introduction of how I discovered my favourite children’s picture books of all time.

To be very much continued!

The Little Worm Book by Janet and Allan Ahlberg

 My Dear Mr Finch,

Today I am going to talk you in brief about a little book that means a great deal to me. It is The Little Worm Book by Janet & Allan Ahlberg, from 1979. I have no idea why my parents bought it for me or where from, but I do know that when I was about six or seven it was one of the funniest things I had ever read and I loved it dearly (that and The Perishers Rather Big Little Book... About Marlon by Maurice Dodd, which featured the stupidest character from that comic strip/ cartoon but had some genuinely very funny sections that would make me tear up with laughter).

Anyway. Back to the Little Worm Book. We take the Ahlbergs for granted, because they were so prolific - both together and after Janet’s tragic early death with Allan and many, many collaborators. Their genius is that made their books look simple and straightforward, but the more you read them the more you realise that these things took time, effort and care to be so joyously easy to read.

The first page sets the tone immediately, a faux guide book or text book that even a six year old gets the tone of. But immediately it breaks off into simple absurdity.

I was obviously struggling with the word “the” and it looks like I was underlining it here (carefully and in pencil, because even as a six year old I loved books as books), but obviously doing so with a book that brought me great pleasure.

I suspect this page appealed because my dad was forever the sort of person who spent walks pointing out flora and fauna and wildlife and telling us about things. I first discovered the writer Ivor Cutler through my ex-brother in law (who I am still very fond of) who likened a passage in Life In A Scotch Sitting Room where father takes the family for a windy walk while he points at thistles to family walks, and he wasn’t wrong. So this page clearly resonated and was always a favourite because there’s nothing a kid likes more than a slightly cheeky teasing of things they love, and I did love those walks. This page wouldn’t have resonated for everybody reading it but does suggest the Ahlbergs knew what kids lived like and were happy cheerily mocking those things lightly.

I loved these pages because even as a child I liked a joke to be repeated and stretched, plus there’s even a hint of danger with those dead bodies (which as a kid I’m sure I thought were sleeping). And it’s also not afraid to use names a child wouldn’t know like Agincourt (I’m still not entirely sure what Borodino or Bull Run is but can guess the context from the art) which hopefully, and almost certainly with me, would result in asking your parents to explain. My dad invested in a copy of the Children’s Britannica in the late seventies and was always encouraging us to look things up in them, and I can almost see him getting the volume down to show me how to look things up and explain what Agincourt was. These are very happy memories, especially since my dad has been not with us for several years, and possibly was part of my reasoning to become a librarian in my teens. My dad was very proud of his reference section.

The most striking thing about the book as an adult is that I clearly took so much from this without realising it. In my first self published comic, I did a little two page potted guide to strange creatures I had dreamed about and would follow it up a few years later with a couple of books about creatures called Hadrons, based on little figures my wife had made (and who turned up in our world when the Large Hadron Collider was switched on - at a show in Manchester many years ago a woman saw one of the books and laughed because her friend worked at the Collider and bought a copy for her, which I am very proud of). In retrospect that’s clearly my tribute to this book (as is my later, and slightly more pointed, Life Cycle of the PE Teacher). I’m amazed how much the writing and the art influenced me without me realising it.

As a child I used to think the cartoons of Hanna-Barbera were made by two American housewives called Hannah and Barbara, around the kitchen tables after their husbands had gone to work (I was weirdly fond of old American sitcoms like The Beverley Hillbillies and I Love Lucy as a small child, and assumed the women and their husbands were of that vintage). Sadly this is not how they were made, despite the clear image in e mind that said otherwise, but I do like to imagine Janet and Allan Ahlberg chuckling away at the table or on the sofa of an evening thinking of jokes for this. There are so many wonderful books that they made so it’s not a surprise some are less known than others, but this is a real treat and a joy and I’m so happy I still have my childhood copy.

Until next time!

Chris Browning
Todmorden, West Yorkshire

The Ministry of Mysteries

 Swemmit is an island full of mysteries and secrets but, according to a law passed in 1855, they are seen as markedly and vitally different and curated by two different departments: The Ministry of Mysteries and the Society of Secrets

The Ministry of Mysteries is run out of Swemmit House by tiger Osiris Kinchip, and his two assistants - a koala called Big Norm Ganderblast and the frog Señor Lopez - who both investigate, record and catalogue all mysteries on the island. They do not solve them, goodness no, but someone has to keep track don’t they?