My favourite childhood book
‘Twigwidge’ by John Emlyn Edwards, chosen by Jon Mackley, Programme Leader for BA English, for World Book Day 2019
I didn’t read very much as a child. In fact, I was quite a late developer when it came to reading. The books we were asked to read featured two children called Janet and John. The reading theory was “Look and Say” and the text was along the lines of: “See the kitten. Come and see. See the kitten, Janet. One little kitten.” Needless to say, they weren’t very exciting to a six-year old.
Radio and television programmes were very much a part of the teaching programme. This was long before videos, and when even cassette recorders were uncommon. So, we would sit in the assembly hall, watching the clock count down on the screen for a TV programme to start, or we would be sitting around a table in the classroom listening to the radio (one week we were so noisy that the teacher turned off the radio so we didn’t listen to the programme — we didn’t realise that it was a live broadcast).
The BBC Radio for schools produced a theme for each school term, this would be based around a theme, and there would be songs for the children to join in with, perhaps singing, or on a musical instrument (most likely the recorder, or if you were really ambitious, then the bass recorder). There were themes such as Sailing Ships and Flight.
The story that really engaged me, however, was called Twigwidge. The background to the story was that two children called Lindsay and Jonathan moved with their family to the countryside from the village. They had a large back garden and their father offered to build them a treehouse in the chestnut tree and the bottom of their garden. But, he complained after a couple of days working on it, no matter how hard he tried to build it up, someone was knocking it down again overnight. So, after dinner, the children planned a vigil in the tree house to try to catch whoever was demolishing it. But, to their surprise, the perpetrator was already there. A little man made of leaves and twigs with little berry eyes.
He called himself Twigwidge and he was the spirit of the chestnut tree and he was furious that someone had the nerve to build something in HIS tree, when it frightened the birds and animals that lived in the tree and upset the tree itself. However, when the children spoke about their own lives, Twigwidge was fascinated and so they agreed that Twigwidge would live in the tree house and tell them about how he looked after the tree, painting the leaves different colours and putting the sticky on the sticky buds.
The story then follows Twidgwidge and the children through key points through the seasons — Easter, having a picnic during the May Bank Holiday, Summer holidays, Autumn, playing conkers, Hallowe’en, Bonfire Night (Twigwidge was not happy about THAT, I can tell you!), the first fall of snow and Christmas — and Twigwidge’s response to them. And because Twigwidge had a different outlook to the children, he would mix up his words claiming to be “confuzzled” or referring to swans as “soppy great river chickens”.
At the end of term, we could buy the books with songs and music for 2p, and I was gutted that, on the day that the teacher was selling the books, I hadn’t brought in my pocket money that day to buy a book and didn’t know it would be acceptable for me to ask her to put one aside for me to buy the following day. I recently found one on eBay!
My mother was a children’s librarian before she retired. Needless to say, she realised that the first enthusiasm that I’d shown in reading was something to be nurtured. She discovered that a hardback book was available, she ordered it for me. It cost £2.95. Looking back, when the average children’s paperback was about 15p, this was a massive investment and must have been quite a substantial dent in the weekly family expenses. I read the book and I loved it. I still love it. This is the book that opened the doorway to me to enjoy reading.
Fast-forwarding a couple of months: early 1977. The BBC showed a public safety programme called “The Finishing Line”. This highlighted the dangers of playing on railway lines. Watching it was one of the most traumatic instances of my early life. The premise of this is a village fete, where there is a competition — like sports day — which is based around the railway lines. The programme was designed to shock.
Even now, writing this, I have flashes of memories of children falling over on a railway line and being run over by a train; rocks being thrown through train windows and passengers and crying, their faces bleeding from the rocks and glass; and then finally, as the children run through a train tunnel and play “chicken” with a train, only a handful survive and the dozens who were killed are laid out along the railway lines.
It’s over forty years since that was broadcast, and over the last thirty years, I have had conversations with people of a similar age to me, and they remember something that seriously disturbed them and then suddenly remember “the trains!” (I found this on Youtube a few years ago. I couldn’t watch it through to the end, but I was able to separate the images that my infant mind produced, to looking at it as an adult who was able to recognise where two images had been used close together to make the viewer believe something terrible had happened). I was thoroughly distraught by this film, but I suppose it achieved its objectives because I’ve never trespassed on a railway line. In fact, I think I was terrified of even travelling by train for many years.
I had been at a friend’s house just down the road when I watched this, and I was walked home, crying about what I’d seen, despite being told that the blood was just tomato sauce. I was utterly inconsolable, but I remember Mum suggesting that I went up to my room to read Twigwidge. Whether it was the comfort of the story, or whether the book suitably distracted me, Twigwidge made all the bad thoughts go away. And it’s the book that I’ve gone back when things have seemed difficult. It’s the book I associate with comfort and safety. Even as an adult.
I’ve moved a lot in my lifetime. I recently worked out that it’s been 12 times as an adult and 5 as a child. Sometimes my things have gone into storage. Sometimes they’ve gone into my parents’ attic (And some of them are still there!) But Twigwidge has always moved with me. The book has always been on my shelves. And now I’ve had the chance to share him with my children. And they love him too!
