The Magic Blanket

Last year, which seems a lifetime ago now, during what was the first lockdown for everyone else, but the start of eighteen continuous months of shielding for me, my eldest daughter asked if we could turn a story she invented when she was three into a book.

That story was a Magic Blanket story - one of the bedtime stories that she used to tell me when she was little, which I have now written up and illustrated.

Apart from having to learn to draw from scratch, which was incredibly hard, the hardest part about writing up the Magic Blanket story has been writing up the Magic Blanket story.

And if that sounds gnomic, it isn’t.

It isn’t related to this year’s horrific health-related issues either - although needing three attempts to spell any given word now doesn’t help. I never thought of myself as particularly intelligent, largely because in many ways I’m not. But there’s a difference between knowing that there’s always something to learn … and your brain, which you’ve always been able to rely on, suddenly not working. It’s terrifying.

It’s because the easiest part of any endeavour is the idea.

The idea is the easy bit.

Realising the idea in a way that honours and does the idea justice is the challenge.

The challenge was that the original Magic Blanket story was a told story.

It changed every night depending on what had happened that day; what we’d done together as a family; where we’d been; what we’d seen.

That it was a living, breathing ever-changing thing was what made it so potent.

Because my daughter was telling it, the Magic Blanket story worked in exactly the same way that a child’s imagination works.

Each telling was the same.

Each telling was different.

Each telling straddled the possibilities of the world as is and the world as it might be.

Each time, the start would be rooted in the realities of our lives: where we lived, how we lived, who we’d seen that day, what we’d done that day.

But having started in the real, it would then leapt into the world of her imagination - which was just as real to her as anything we’d done that day. I could literally see her living the adventure as she told it. Because of that, it had an internal life of its own. My daughter wasn’t just telling me a story: making herself the hero of her own life, she was living, and could see herself in, the adventure as she told it.

It’s been tough to write down a living, felt thing in a way that represents those nights when we flew around the world on a Magic Blanket.

I don’t want to catch it; or capture it.

That language sounds too much like caging up a living, breathing thing. I don’t want to do that.

I want to honour the energy and vitality she had when she told it; so that the magic of her young imagination is there on the page; so that when others read it, they are just as transported.

So, all of the licks and tricks you develop over a lifetime of writing things down … ?

They had to go.

All of the little rhetorical moves, and cute conceits and set-ups that you use to construct points and ideas and arguments …

Gone.

And although it’s been a difficult journey, I think it’s amazing that the best thing I’ve ever been involved in isn’t mine, but my daughter’s.

But that’s about right, because they’re the best thing I’ve ever done and I really did nothing: they came out perfectly and fully realised without any help from me at all.

And any parent, if they’re honest with themselves, would admit that. They come out fully formed as who they are. Who they end up as is a combination of who they are and the influences that surround them as they grow into that. A tree will always be the tree it’s supposed to be, but the shape it assumes is formed by where it is on the hill, where the light comes from, where the rain falls from, where the prevailing wind blows from …

When I used to lecture and research, I used to say that Children’s Literature had more power than anything written for adults.

I wasn’t just saying it to be provocative.

There were solid reasons behind my thinking.

My colleagues would laugh at me.

They were into the ‘cool’ stuff: identity politics; gender theory; poco studies; text as vehicle for critical or cultural theory … You know, the closed loop stuff where the primary discourse validates the secondary discourse and the secondary discourse validates the primary discourse and everything goes ‘round and ‘round in an intellectual circle jerk until Ouroboros finally turns into Jormungander, Ragnarok happens and all of the academics drown in the ensuing flood?

Yeah.

That stuff.

Part of it was academic sour grapes. The most popular undergraduate course then was the third-year Children’s Literature module, which was oversubscribed to the point where the powers-at-be cancelled it because everyone wanted to read The Water-Babies, which left no-one signing up for their course on Modernism, or their course on Culture, Literature and Society, or their course on the topography of whatever navel they were gazing into at the time.

Academia is a funny business.

Funny peculiar rather than funny ha ha.

The very best in any field know how much they don’t know, and separate their expertise from their ego. Being challenged for them, like Eric Murray and Andy Triggs-Hodge, is an opportunity to learn something new and develop further. But for others, where personal insecurity or lack of self-esteem has led to their constructing a personal identity dependent on the external validation of being seen as an expert in a particular professional field, being challenged represents an existential threat - and the fragile ego fights viciously when confronted by that.

So, there were lots of How hard is it to read Peter Pan-type jibes, even though the CL course was by tens of thousands of words the most intensive primary and secondary reading course on the books.

And I get it.

You’ve worked all of your life to become an expert in literary manifestations of the other; you’ve read Derrida in the original (why? Derrida is easy: everything that is is, and we’re all punctured by space and time. There you go. You’re done, and so is he); and you have big thoughts on what globalisation means in a post-neoliberal age …

… and someone (me) comes along and laughs at your pretension; says that Children’s Literature is always the most representative literature of any age; and then goes off to take a boat up and down the river before going out dancing.

I’d hate me too.


Except I don’t.

I was, and am, right.

Some might say that Children’s Literature, especially when it contains fantastical elements, is escapist; or that it refuses to acknowledge the realities of life and retreats into otherworldly scenarios or idealised landscapes.

But you know what some might say …

… and they’re usually wrong.

The reality is that those works tend to evoke an age far better than others.

The big issue novels that try to do that, fail.

Why?

Because big issue novels like the realist or state-of-the nation novel, for example, try to narrate the moment, and in beginning its narrative bring it to an end. Even the most representative of representative literatures will always fall short in trying to capture and reveal and explain the now. The finite cannot represent the infinite; the fixed point of then can’t represent the ever-changing now.

The Fantasy and the Children’s Literature genres, though, simply present the foibles, anxieties, and preoccupations of the age with little attempt to explain or resolve them. Even if they’re abstracted or refracted, everything concerning their cultural-historical moment ends up present within them. You will learn more about Edwardian Britain by reading Peter Pan, for example, than any ‘serious’ contemporaneous state-of-the-nation attempt; more about the interbellum by reading Winnie-the-Pooh or The Hobbit (although you should check out Mrs Dalloway too); and so on.

I’m not making those claims for The Magic Blanket.

But we’re eighteen months into the pandemic, I’ve nearly died, and I’m still iller than I’ve ever been in my life, with more to come, and my life has changed irrevocably, I don’t know when I’ll see my children again, and I worry about them every day - and I’d be foolish not to see that the Magic Blanket’s themes of family life, abrupt and unwanted separation, going into the unknown alone, and overcoming challenges and adversity to find each other again have never been more pertinent.

A piece of good news is that a children’s book publisher has just got in touch to say that they love it and are taking it up.

It’s been a very difficult period and my children have been through a very difficult series of events, events that I never wanted for them, and experiences I never wanted them to have, but that’s a piece of good news. I think that it will now be a proper book will make my daughter very happy - and the only thing I care about in this life is making her happy.

I’m her Dad.

That’s my job.

©℗ A. I. Jackson

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Origin(al) Stories was first launched to show some of the thoughts, decisions and processes that went into the writing, recording and release of the Northumbria album.

Following the launch of The Landing Stage, which brings together some of the things I do, I’ve continued adding to Origin(al) Stories.

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