Yatterings

Lizza Aiken recently edited The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories for Big Mouth House, the children’s imprint of Small Beer, written by Joan Aiken. Going to see Lizza Aiken was a little like settling into one her mother’s novels. I’d arrived early and set about wandering around the neighbourhood, mainly to calm my nerves. Its an odd part of London in which insanity borders on the sane and some of the dead are more famous than the living. It reminds of the peculiar worlds that Joan Aiken constructed, perfectly ordinary parodies which intagliate the real with the imaginary.

“Well, there are a couple of things to do with that. First of all, she was quite deaf at one point in her life. [When she was sent to boarding school] it was a shock to her to have no privacy, suddenly it was all changed. She always said two things. One, she stopped growing completely because the shock was so great and the other was that she started going deaf in order to fade out all this sort of noise and she was fairly short sighted so she lived in this world of her own choosing, she could filter stuff out. She always said that there were things that she half saw, half heard and half imagined. Things overheard on buses. She picked up. A willful misreading. Even if she realised she’d misread it, she’d think how wonderful if it had been the other.

“She had a curious childhood. She didn’t go to school until she was 12, she was brought up not in much contact with children at all. Her mother married her step father when she was 5. He was essentially a Victorian much in the same way as the books in the house. There were no children’s books, and there weren’t that many books for children in the 1920s, so she read whatever was in the house which were Dickens, Dumas and Austen. Her mother was Canadian and she read all these brilliant girls books, things like the Wide, Wide World, Alison Webber or the Katy books. E. Nesbit was a huge influence with the Bastable children or whoever where they would nipping off to Egypt in between or children who quarrelled and got into trouble. It was very real. So, this was her world and she never compromised this really. In her later years when she was writing the Arabel and Mortimer stories, they were much more urban. She enjoyed technology but could always see that it would drive people crazy. In a sense, two different worlds but always linked.

“Funnily, enough we had a parallel situation when my brother and I were growing up. If she wanted us out of the house, she’s take us on long walks, and she said when you’ve got querulous, slightly hungry, tired children, the way to keep them going is by telling them stories and not finishing them until the next day.”

Though her published career began in the 1950s, Joan Aiken had been working as a jobbing journalist and slush pile reader for a magazine. Her first job, during the war, was a mind numbing role in the BBC ruling lines across index cards but widowhood and near penury forced her to write articles at a rate of knots for a variety of publications. Sharply observed from this determinedly singular perspective her stories evince joy and mischief at this new, post-war world.

“Well, if you lived through the war, everything was incredibly regimented with blackout. You had to make do, you had to follow the rules. I think what I find entertaining about the stories from that period is that she doesn’t write about the actual threat or use fairy tale symbolism because reality was so grim. Who would want to confront that? [Children] want to imagine that the teacher is a fiendish magician or to have made friends with the rats and the spiders and help defeat the evil. You have to see things in fantasy terms in order to deal with them and Joan understood that.”

Lizza has recently edited the Serial Garden, the complete collection of the Armitage short stories which date from the 1950s until near her death in 2004. Her stepfather, Martin Armstrong, wrote short stories for BBC radio which she found terribly twee called ‘Said the Cat to the Dog’, featuring the Armstrong family and their menagerie of animals. “Armitage is a take off of Armstrong and they were also about the village in which she was growing up. The first book she had published was a book of short stories, All You’ve Ever Wanted (1953), which contained some Armitage stories and for years she carried on. They were about this village on the Sussex Downs, in a way about the wartime and post-war worlds. Suddenly there were toasters and stuff, and the Festival of Britain. You know, a lot of it was a parody of this awful world which they had gone through and suddenly there were materials like polystyrene and this was a gift to her to send all this up.

“She had gone on writing these stories for years because she knew the world terribly well and every time some mad invention came through, she’d think ‘well how would they deal with it?’. How would poor old Mr Amstrong have coped if he’d had a computer? I’m sure she would have got on to that.

“She’d written a few new ones before she died and thought it would be nice to collect them together. Small Beer were the obvious people to offer it to. She always said that short stories were her greatest love. A book takes time where you plot and plan. I think she’d felt that some of her stories were the best thing she’d ever written. These ones (in The Serial Garden) are not scary but she had a terrific feel for horror. Her older brother and sister were quite a bit older than her. Her brother as twelve years older than her and when they were young, they would read aloud to her so she heard the early version of Pinocchio.

“She certainly didn’t believe in writing horror for children, she wrote about oppressive situations. It always is the sort of Gothic it becomes really dark and that’s an absolute crystallisation of her … that children have adults have lost to deal with horrible situations. She was very involved with the real world. The first thing she did every morning was to get the newspaper, at 7 o’clock every morning, and what she did about it was her writing.”