Author Sam Leith: 'A good children's story lasts a lifetime'

Children’s books aren’t just for children. And childhood reading isn’t, as our culture sometimes seems to suppose, something to be put away with mild embarrassment as we graduate onto the ‘grown-up’ sort. What we read as children not only underpins our whole subsequent reading lives; it also lives with us and within us, as do our childhoods themselves.    

There are all sorts of statistics and numbers available in support of the proposition that childhood reading is good for you. Children who read in their spare time have improved mental health, are tested at above-average reading proficiency (34.2%), are more able to relax, learn more about the world (50.9%) and report wider empathy and increased curiosity towards other people (32.8%) and cultures (32.4%). But I want to talk about something a little less Gradgrindian. I want to talk about magic.  

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It starts at the side of the bed at evening. When a parent reads to a child something extraordinary happens. Here is the first encounter any child will have with the way language can be not just instrumental, but a source of delight. In the musical words of Julia Donaldson, Allan Ahlberg, Maurice Sendak or Rudyard Kipling, read “just so”, again and again, they hear the bounce and play of rhythms and rhymes, the cadences of sentences, the delicious anticipation of the page turn.  

What’s more, when you have a parent reading to you, just for those few minutes, you know that you have that parent’s complete attention. Mum isn’t half-there and half-not-there, distractedly checking her emails on her phone. You’re both in the story. The cognitive work is reinforced by the emotional connection, and vice versa. You are, like the addressee of the Just So Stories, “best beloved”.     

The groundwork thus laid, you’re ready to move on and out into the multiverse of worlds in the nursery bookshelf or the children’s section of the library. For most children, most of the time, if things are going well, life will be… not boring, exactly, but circumscribed. It’ll be safe. It’ll be governed by routines of toothbrushing and mealtimes and school bells. Fiction allows you to imagine worlds a little less safe and a little more exciting.    

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To read a story as a child – a really, deeply involving story – is to be in contact with an alternative version of yourself. It’s a space in which you can safely test out in the imagination what it would be to face a moral choice, to be brave, to get through sadness or fear and come out the other side. It allows you to imagine being, in E Nesbit’s phrase, “the sort of people that things DO happen to”. It allows you to imagine what it might be to be a hero – and that is deeply nourishing.   

A fantasy or science fiction novel – of the sort which have always been abundant in the children’s canon – can give you a place to escape to. (That never leaves you: my late father coped with the stress of his final exams at university by escaping headlong into Tolkien’s Middle-earth.) And a realist story – one which deals with the lives of children in whom you will recognise something of yourself – can make you feel less alone; just ask the millions of readers whose adolescences were made a bit less painful by the work of Judy Blume. Most of the greatest children’s stories give you a little of both things: even when the setting is far-fetched, the emotions are universal.   

Fiction can be a way, too, of enchanting the workaday world. The wonderful novels of Alan Garner or Susan Cooper, for instance, allow their readers to imagine that a magical order of things, where so much more is at stake than remembering your PE kit, could exist right here and now, just waiting for you to catch sight of it.   

That’s what I meant when I titled my book The Haunted Wood: a tip of the hat not just to the haunted woods of folktale where – a little bit scared and a little bit excited – you might stumble on a wolf, or a gingerbread house or Baba Yaga’s chicken-footed hut, but a metaphor for the places we go to when we read, and from which, like the children in the folktales, we return changed.    

And since children’s stories are so often written by adults for whom childhood itself was unfinished business, the ideas and emotions in those stories are ones that reflect the child in every adult and the adult in every child. That’s why I say they are not just for children. 

If as a young reader you found the end of Charlotte’s Web moving or shed a tear at the closing paragraphs of the House at Pooh Corner, Tom’s Midnight Garden or Watership Down, indulge me. Go back and reread them as your grown-up self, knowing what you now know about time. They hit even harder. Put away childish things? I don’t think so.   

The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading by Sam Leith is out now (Oneworld, £30). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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