His father’s dental cast, writes Graham Greene near the beginning of The Power and the Glory ‘had been [Trench’s] favourite toy: they tried to tempt him with Meccano, but fate had struck’. Trench is a dentist, trapped by his chosen profession in a godforsaken Central American hellhole. Greene ponders the way, when we are very young, that chance events, objects or people may become father to the man. ‘We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.’
Too true. Pookie made me a Tory.
My new copy of Pookie Puts the World Right has arrived. I’d lost the old one, but tracked down another on the internet. Though more than 60 years old, it’s in fine condition, only 24 pages, but big and bold and colourful, with lots of striking pictures. The Pookie series, by Ivy L. Wallace, was published by Collins at the end of the 1940s, and popular with children from about four to eight years old. I was perhaps five when I read Pookie Puts the World Right. It fast became my favourite book.
Only on rereading, though, do I see its influence. I had remembered the wonderful pictures, but now I see that, insinuated into the colour sketches and the plot itself, was a moral (almost ideological) framework to which my tiny being must have thrilled. The moral chimed with an infant soul.
Older readers may remember this series. Younger readers should know that Pookie was a small winged rabbit with blue trousers, rescued in distress by a loving, poor but honest girl called Belinda, who lived alone in the wood, made Pookie a padded bed in a sort of shoebox, and helped him grow wings.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in