By, About, And For Children

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 237, 7 January 1944, Page 6

By, About, And For Children

VERSE BY NEW ZEALAND CHILDREN, Edited by Tom L, Mills and illustrated by E. Mervyn Taylor. Progressive Publishing Society. VERY pretty cover camouflages a foreword by the editor and 77 verses by New Zealand children, About 12 of the verses may be valuable in themselves, but the other 65 surely are valuable only to relatives of the children. A foreword is often an apology for having written a book which people are expected to buy. This foreword hasn’t ‘any outward appearance of an apology, but it attempts to explain why this book should be considered valuable by (1) Schoolmistresses who can’t find suitable verse for their children, (2) ardent exponents of child psychology, and (3) Directors of Broadcasting. It tells us too that the verses will be nice for school concerts and that it will encourage the reading of poetry and the spirit of emulation and competitiveness among children. Emulation and competitiveness make war — surely not poetry! One child has a nice sense of nonsense. The girl from Feilding would have written amusing narrative verse. Someone from Roxburgh should be worth knowing. But why is she frightened of the word paddock? Another verse might interest a very new and ardent student of child psychology, and last but surely not least ‘there is a small girl who somehow shows in four | lines that even though she can’t yet good verse, she is at least an honest-to-goodness New Zealander. % x TALES FOR PIPPA. By Dorothy Black, illustrated by Barbara Milne. Progressive Publishing Society. N attractive cover and Dorothy Black’s natural, spontaneous writing should please small children. But so many untruths about a real baby in real surroundings will be questioned by the young to-day. There are to be "More Tales for Pippa." Let us hope they will improve as she grows older, just in case someone is tempted to say: Hush! Hush! Nobody cares, Dear little Pinna has fallen down-

stairsl

S.

M.

* THE MAGIC RINGS. By Alice A. Kenny. Illustrated by E. Mervyn Taylor. A. H. and A. W. Reed, Wellington. PROBABLY the best recommendation I can give this story is to mention that my eight-year-old daughter got her nose into it early on Christmas morning and could hardly be persuaded to take it out for Christmas dinner. It is a fairytale "thriller," constructed in the tradition of Grimm and Andersen, but told in a more modern idiom. Miss Kenny knows that the best ingredients for this kind of story are still lost children, witches, talking animals, ogres, and oneeyed dwarfs, and just in case her descriptions are not vivid enough, Mervyn Taylor has done a number of full-page illustrations of them. * Ba * POPPA PASSES. By A. W. Reed. Illustrated by George Woods. A. H. and A. W. Reed, Wellington. HIS represents another blow struck in the "Dig for Victory" Campaign: there is a great deal of gardenjng lore mixed up with the account of the adventures of the Vedgie People, and above (continued on next page)

(Continued from' previous page) all there is some intensive propaganda for the compost heap. It follows therefore that this book (a fairly long one) will be appreciated mostly by older children, and by children who already possess a working knowledge of the different varieties of vegetables and how to grow them. Mr. Reed’s ‘sense of humus, indeed, is rather sharper than his sense of humour. The idea of writing a comic fantasy about the events in the gardener’s calendar and peopling it with such characters as Bertha Broadbean, Poppa Potato, and Penelope Pea, was an ambitious one, and to be completely successful it demanded a rather more delicate touch than is employed ‘here. Also, it was surely unnecessary in a book for

children to use so much cinema slang and sentences like this: "Okey, dokey, Bertha, I’ll be getting down now. Sun’s a bit fierce-like." However, Mr. Reed obviously knows his onions, and loves them too. The book, which is attractively printed and well bound (it is becoming © a pleasant. rarity these days to handle a New Zealand publication with a good stiff board cover) owes at least as much of its appeal to the frequent illustrations of Gecrge Woods as to the text. Mr. Woods would probably not be surprised or affronted to know that his drawings -and especially his Cabbage Duchessimmediately put me in mind of Sir John Tenniel and Alice in Wonderland.

M.

G.