Guest feature by Paul Dowswell: THE MANY-SPLENDOURED OBSCENITY OF VIZ

 

Paul Dowswell's journey from foolish youth to mithered old codger is near to its end. In between these two points he has written some books and hopes to write some more. His website can be found here.

The Inuit, famously, have over 40 words for snow. That’s nothing. Readers of Viz’s Profanisaurus, their “ever-expanding dictionary of contemporary profanity, euphemism and obscenity”, will know that the British have hundreds of words for the perineum. And there are probably just as many for assorted other nether regions and what you might be doing with them. And there are certainly scores more terms than the Bristol Stool Chart’s eight, for what might come out of your bottom.

Those who have never read it will probably regard Viz as an Olympic-standard wallow in schoolboy puerility. Well, I can’t argue with that. But it can also be very funny, and just as witty as anything the last 40 years has conjured up to amuse us. The Guardian ran a piece about Viz in 2021 and over 500 readers wrote in to share their favourite thing in it.

In its early ’90s peak it was selling almost as much as the Radio Times and TV Times. When I first started reading it in 1987, it seemed fantastically fresh. It spawned a host of short-lived imitators too, with titles such as Zit, Spit and Poot. They were equally obscene but they all lacked the spark of genuine invention and joie de vivre that Viz possessed in abundance. That’s not to say that Viz wasn’t also prone to alarming lapses of taste and judgement. But this piece is about the best things in Viz so I’m going to leave that can of worms unopened.

I could attempt to intellectualise its appeal and employ words like scatological, Rabelaisian, earthy, ribald – but in essence it was four young men who should have known better, trying to make each other laugh in a Newcastle pub with the most outrageously obscene ideas for comic strips they could think of.

Chris and Simon Donald, Simon Thorp and Graham Dury, and a rotating cast of contributors, certainly had a lot of them. And most of them were very funny. The initial idea – take the template of the Beano and the Dandy but have the characters you create doing bizarre and inappropriate things – was an instant success. The titles of the strips alone will give you the idea: ‘Buster Gonad and his unfeasibly large testicles’, ‘Sid the Sexist’, ‘The Fat Slags’, ‘Bertie Blunt, his parrot’s a c***’, ‘The Bottom Inspectors’, ‘Terry F***wit – the unintelligent cartoon character’.

More often than not, these strips were as one dimensional as their names would suggest. But occasionally, Viz would come up with something deeper and more disturbing. Victorian Dad, for example, featured a nightmarish modern-day parent with the mindset of a puritanical Victorian. He becomes sexually aroused by the sight of table legs and beats his son every day to remind him that life isn’t fair. Another character goes by the unlikely name of Fru T. Bunn. A baker by trade, Frubert Bunn, whose daughter is, of course, called Chelsea, is an extraordinarily vivid portrait of middle-aged male sexual frustration. He channels his sex drive into the creation of gingerbread sex dolls and most episodes end with him grievously injured in Beano-style bandages and Plaster of Paris.

In its heyday the writers often seemed to be vying with each other over who could scrape through the barrel and go right down to the Earth’s core. Dr Poo (Tom Baker era Dr Who searches in vain through time and space for a quiet, unoccupied lavatory where he can ‘go’.) Dr Poolittle (a Doolittle-like character suffers from constipation), Billy Bottom and his zany toilet pranks – go on, have a guess…

The similarity in style to the Beano and the Dandy even presented the characters talking directly to their audience. ‘Hello readers. Today I’m going to…’ Funniest of all, and nearest to the Beano in its lack of swearing and material of a sexual nature, was Johnny Fartpants (Tagline “There’s always a commotion going on in his trousers.”) Schoolboy Johnny even has a German pen pal called Hans Honkyhosen, who visits from time to time. On one occasion (best suspend your disbelief here...), as an April Fool prank, Johnny furtively ‘buries’ a fart in a cake mix his mother is preparing for a visit from the vicar. The fart then springs out when the vicar cuts the cake. (Of course it does…). Even if you are appalled by the subject matter I invite you to admire the sheer ‘leaping off the page’ gusto of the artwork. The episode takes a nightmarish turn when Johnny’s exasperated parents feed him quick drying cement disguised as porridge to clog up his alimentary canal and put an end to his ‘bottom pranks’.

 Viz’s fondness for mixing high art and science with low humour was also a frequent feature. One quiz tie-breaker invited readers to name their favourite noble gas. The comic strip The Bach that dogged in the night featured JS Bach taking a break from his cantatas to go dogging in a nearby forest, much to Mrs Bach’s displeasure. Max’s Plank featured the German atomic physicist Max Planck as a schoolboy, getting up to mischief with a magic plank.

More than anything, Viz loved a pun – evidenced here in a one-off 2003 strip by relatively new boys Barry Farmer and Lee Healey, and their terrifying creation Vidal Baboon:

 One thing I quickly grew to love about Viz was their complete disregard for the bottom line (so to speak). They took enormous risks in offending both a potential readership and the advertisers that flocked to present their wares in their unexpectedly vast circulation publication. The Clown Chat Line spoof below is a perfect example of Viz having its cake and eating it too. At the time (early 1990s) the back pages of their comic, along with the UK’s downmarket tabloids, were festooned with real-life telephone sex lines, the advertising of which no doubt brought their publisher a substantial income.

 True, most of the Viz output was and remains cheerfully obscene, but they could also be admirably prescient. One long running character Timmy Timpson (appearing in Spoilt Bastard) is a hideous eight-year-old in a sailor suit whose adoring mother Cissy submits to his every whim. He has milkshake and Skittles for breakfast and habitually calls his poor mother a ‘fat old toilet’. The strip had the unsettling effect of making the reader wonder if they had ever behaved quite so appallingly, or indeed allowed their own child to do so. But one particular episode, shown below, from a 1997 edition of Viz, uncannily predicts the political landscape of 2026:

 And Viz could produce contemporary satire just as sharp as Private Eye. Here’s a strip featuring the vainglorious Luvvie Darling – a rather Daily Mail inspired caricature of those actor types – approaching a vanity publisher with his memoirs. I grew to detest vanity publishers while teaching creative writing classes and hearing stories about them from students, so there is much to relish in this depiction:

 And finally, I have to include one of Viz’s magnificent advertising spoofs, this one for a ‘Sexual Temperance Spoon’, designed to discourage unwanted amorous advances. Whoever came up with the slogan ‘The only spoon that stops stirring’ has earned my undying admiration. 

All illustrations reproduced by kind permission of Fulchester Industries/ Diamond Publishing.

WRITERS REVIEW PUBLISHING marks its first birthday

 

Great reissues and new fiction - more on the way this year!

Our new venture, an author publishing collaborative, launched last April with titles by Judith Allnatt, Mary Hoffman and Linda Newbery. Since then we've announced the publication of Sheena Wilkinson's Miss McVey Takes Charge and most recently Dennis Hamley's intriguing Spirit of the Place. 

We're very proud of our small but excellent list, which will soon see the addition of a sixth title: Sue Purkiss's first novel for adults, An Ordinary War, based on her father's experiences as prisoner of war in Poland. Christina Hardyment plans to join us with her next Alyce Chaucer mystery novel, and Linda Newbery's The Hide will appear in October. 

Coming soon on the blog - a piece by Dennis on the inspirations behind Spirit of the Place.

Find out more about our authors and their books on our website. 

See also:

Q&A with Judith Allnatt about The Poet's Wife

Q&A with Mary Hoffman about David: the Unauthorised Autogiography

Q&A with Linda Newbery about The One True Thing

Q&A with Sheena Wilkinson about Miss McVey Takes Charge

Guest review by Graeme Fife: THE ROMAN TRIUMPH by Mary Beard

 

"Beard’s book offers at least an inkling into an answer … never the answer, and that is the mark of an outstanding historian and communicator."

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press.

Mary Beard is deservedly celebrated for the way she brings to life the ancient world by plucking what might seem trivial information from inscriptions, the treasure trove of artifacts, what one might call ‘the unconsidered trifles'.

This study of one of the most egregious customs of the Romans is an essential insight into the workings of those people, their Empire, the way it was acquired and held, by law, language and brute force. The parallels with later empires, like them or despise them, are obvious.

The Triumph was all about show, an adjunct of political power. Words filling out that conceit spring immediately to mind: fame, from the Latin word for being talked about (an infant is so called because he or she cannot talk); glory – from their word for boasting; ambition, which meant walking round but it hides the purpose of walking round which was canvassing support ... Julius Caesar, of aristocratic birth, doing the populist thing by walking the streets of the poorer district of Rome and his Gallic Wars - how many parts is Gaul divided into ...? Oh, come on, it starts the whole history and copies of those war despatches were widely distributed as political flyers. He was self-advertising and wildly successful at it.

For the triumph - not lightly awarded – the conquering general, imperator, entered Rome with his army (in normal times no army was permitted to enter Rome: that counted as belligerent sedition) and a gaggle of captured slaves, carriages laden with booty ... it was bringing the glory of conquest home to the central hub, Rome. Interesting that in Latin the word for to or towards, ad (advent, address etc), is not used with two words: home and Rome.

Beard launches her fascinating study of this phenomenon of high-style propaganda, with the words of Seneca, tutor to Nero: ‘Petty sacrilege is punished; sacrilege on a grand scale is the stuff of triumphs’. Given what many men of power, political or financial, do these days, doesn’t this ring so horribly true? Seneca was being mildly cynical, of course, but he was telling the truth and not everyone bought into the whole lookatme lookatme schtick.

One of the best known advertisements of the Triumph may be Caesar’s triumphant return from swift victory over an upstart king (any warlord who opposed Rome was an upstart) in 47 BC. His despatch with the same words had already reached the Senate but they were used again, painted on boards, to impress the people who thronged Rome’s streets in their thousands to watch the parade: Veni vidi vici. Those three snappy words in a way encapsulate his appeal: he wasn’t messing around, he got on with the job. For example, the procession ended with the ascent of the Capitoline Hill to the Temple of Jupiter. ‘Julius Caesar,’ writes Beard, ‘is reputed to have climbed the stairs to the temple on his knees in a gesture of humility’. Pure showmanship: as if to underline that he was one of them, the ordinary people, the voters.

Placards, cardboard cut outs, the soldiers singing bawdy songs about their general - to avert the jealousy of the gods because their general, riding in a chariot, his cheeks raddled in imitation of the father of gods and men, rode with a slave whispering ‘Memento te mortalem’ ‘remember you are human’ that is not a god … as if.

So much of it was sham: in modern terms, the TV celebrity masquerading as a leader. Suetonius in his Lives of the Caesars says that the emperor Caligula (named by his father’s soldiers when he was a child with them on campaign – the word means ‘little marching boot’) drew up his army on the beach of the Channel and told them to fill their helmets with sea shells, the ‘spoils’ for his intended triumph over the waters of the sea.

Beard writes with brisk energy and insight. At the heart of this fine investigation into how show is connected to political ambition and the overweening desire to own, to conquer, in the words of one of today’s greatest political shams to be king of the world, is her lucid scholarship and the ability to question herself in her inquiry as much as the commentators on the actual event on whom she must rely. She says: ‘Why on earth did the Romans do it? Why did they invest such time, energy and expense in this ceremony? Why?’

Purification? Glorification? Symbolic capital …?

Beard’s book offers at least an inkling into an answer … never the answer, and that is the mark of an outstanding historian and communicator. For there never really is a full stop, only ever a hanging comma on which we sit as on a swing in a secret garden.

The Roman Triumph is published by Harvard University Press

LOVE LANE by Patrick Gale, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"Harry is such an endearing character and his story so quietly compelling that I'm sure many readers will want to seek out or revisit his earlier incarnation in A Place Called Winter."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. Her latest novel is The One True Thing; her second for Writers Review Publishing, The Hide, will appear later this year.

It's twelve years since readers were introduced to Harry Cane in A Place Called Winter, a novel based on the experiences of Patrick Gale's great grandfather. Caught out in a scandalous affair with a male dancer, Harry leaves wife and baby to seek a new life in Canada. After many threats, trials and hardships, he finds a happy relationship with neighbouring farmer Paul, after first believing that he's been killed in the Great War.

As with all Patrick Gale's work, Love Lane welcomes readers to its pages with warmth and empathy. Although it's not essential to have read the first novel, we pick up Harry's story years later. First he suffers the hurt of seeing his lover marry a woman for the sake of respectability; then, when Paul dies unexpectedly, Harry is manipulated / blackmailed by Paul's stepson into parting with the house and land he's devoted years to, for far less than they're worth. Rootless, and prompted by a letter from his daughter Betty, Harry sails back to England to reunite with family members in Liverpool and Wakefield.

We're now in 1950s England in the company of characters based on the author's grandparents and parents. From these perspectives we see Harry as much older: a scruffy elderly man with meagre possessions who must be accommodated, entertained or tolerated, his future uncertain. Betty's husband Terry is a prison governor with little time for visiting relatives, in one episode deeply preoccupied with preparations for a double execution by hanging of two men in their twenties. The burden of supervising the deaths of these young men whose guilt is far from certain weighs heavily on Terry, yet he's contemptuous of men sent to prison for homosexuality and aghast when he realises that Harry, as described by his sister-in-law, is 'a sexual deviant of the Oscar Wilde sort. Not at all someone I'd consider safe around grandchildren.' 

Loneliness, repression and misunderstanding form a pattern; Harry isn't the only male character to conceal his sexuality. We experience the disappointment of compromise not only from the men but from the women they partner. The sad fate of an affectionate but huge and hungry (at a time of rationing) Pyrenean mountain dog seems to echo these unsatisfactory human accommodations. Throughout, in the background of various family groupings, Harry demonstrates a quiet empathy, often intuiting what others are feeling, or concealing - particularly with his troubled granddaughter, Whistle. But he knows he is in the way; how and where will he spend his remaining years? Several poignant surprises and developments keep us anxious for him until the end. 

As in the novel that preceded this, Mother's Boy, Patrick Gale is adept at conveying the demands and rituals of domestic life of the period: removing stains from clothing with Omo, the novelty of television, making the most of rations, recommending a meal of mashed brains to nourish an ailing baby. Harry is such an endearing character and his story so quietly compelling that I'm sure many readers will want to seek out or revisit his earlier incarnation in A Place Called Winter.

Love Lane is published by Tinder Press.

See also:

Q&A with Patrick about Mother's Boy

Take Nothing With You reviewed by Linda Newbery

Notes from an Exhibition reviewed by Julia Jarman

Guest review by Nick Hodges: MEMOIRS OF A FELLWANDERER by Alfred Wainwright

  

"... an easy ability and simplicity of style; his delightful pen and ink illustrations of mountain and moorland ..."

Photograph with king parrot by Judith Ramage

Nick Hodges is an Englishman living in Australia. He is a teacher and freelance journalist concentrating on Travel and Nature. His work has been published in Britain's Sunday Times, The Times Educational Supplement and the Tourist Board magazine, In Britain. Down Under, his work has appeared in leading newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Sun Herald. He has recently completed 20 years of writing a monthly Nature Notes article for a Sydney newspaper. He has designed and taught adult courses on The Birds of Sydney.

Wainwright: to those in the know the name is synonymous with fell (or mountain) walking and his guides to Lakeland, the Coast to Coast Path and the Pennine Way are legendary.

AW - as he is often known - died in 1991 shortly before his Memoirs of a Fellwanderer was published.

Like me, his walking guide books are getting on in years. But whenever I visit the north of England and if the weather half co-operates, the need to climb to high places grips me and so off I go with the appropriate Wainwright volume in my hand.

 

It's AW's way with words; an easy ability and simplicity of style; his delightful pen and ink illustrations of mountain and moorland; Cold Pike and High Pike; Dove Crag and Loft Crag.

Wainwright grew up in Blackburn, Lancashire, where he worked in local government before moving both job and home to the Lake District with which he'd fallen in love at first sight.

Subsequently he came to know the paths and the fells like nobody else. In his Memoirs he explains how he took to drawing, writing and publishing his works and the many years of constructing what must be his greatest achievement: the seven volumes of the Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells.

And Wainwright himself? His Memoirs indicate a man of both patience and impatience. Perhaps a grumpy old man? 'I suffer fools badly', he writes. When his first wife left he says, 'I never saw her again. I was not greatly concerned'. However, Betty, his second wife of 21 happy years, who writes the foreword to the Memoirs, sings his praises: he was 'a sensitive man hiding himself behind a gruff exterior'. Certainly he could be self-deprecating: 'I received an award from the Queen: she didn't know the reason for it either'.

AW disliked people walking in groups for the noise and the damage they caused to the trails. Coming across a single file of ramblers on a narrow mountain path he would acknowledge the first and then, as he passed the others one at a time, would studiously ignore them.

When recognised on the fells he would often deny his identity. Groups always received a 'no'. Single walkers had a better chance - especially if young and female.

Walking alone was his way; nearly always the only way. He distinguishes between loneliness and aloneness. The fells were all he needed: his 'silent friends'.

It's all in the Memoirs.

Also, how he hated gadgets and all things mechanical. He distrusted cameras even though he used one.

Among Wainwright's other interests were cats and Coronation Street and, perhaps most importantly, the charity, Animal Rescue. As for books: 'maps have always been my favourite literature'. Between completing one of his seven pictorial guides and starting the next, he writes, 'I paused only to refill my pipe'. All of his spare time and energy were needed for the research and compilation of these pocket-sized volumes.

He never missed a day's work and was never ill. His excellent health he believes was as a result of not having owned a vehicle, preferring to walk whenever possible; yet he smoked 'like a chimney'.

Nearing the end of his Memoirs AW lets off steam about the state of things. He cannot understand those who suffer from depression, bemoans the fact that the Lake District is crowded with caravans - and visitors of the 'wrong' kind; has a good old rant suggesting what we might today call right wing views. And his preferred punishment for football hooligans? I'm not writing it here: suffice to say it makes the blood run perilously close to cold.

But then he relents with a complete turnabout extolling the virtues and beauty of the world: 'this book is not a personal lament but a thanksgiving'.

Most walking guides praise that which they promote and gloss over the hard bits. Not Wainwright. He prefers Lakeland walking to the Pennine Way where, 'the cold so shrivelled some of the body organs necessary for a full and enjoyable life that I feared they were perished for ever'.

But I digress. That's from another book by Wainwright. The quotation is here simply because I like it.

Right now I feel that need: it's time to wax my boots, take a guide book and head for the hills. I'll go alone of course - but I know AW will be with me.

Memoirs of a Fellwanderer is published by Frances Lincoln.

See also Nick's review of This Birding Life by Stephen Moss

WR note: As well as his treasured books and his influence on countless fellwalkers, Alfred Wainwright's great legacy to the book world is the Wainwright Prizes, now the world's foremost award for nature and conservation writing. Established in 2013 as a single award, it's now expanded to include various categories, including children's books and illustration. We've featured several shortlisted and winning books on the blog and will soon post a review of the 2025 Wainwright Prize Book of the Year, Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton.

Bookseller feature: Sam Barnes of Books & Ink, Winchcombe

"What really makes bookselling not a job but a vocation and a calling, is the joy of witnessing those moments of serendipitous discovery when customers fall in love with books right before your eyes ..."

Sam Barnes opened Books & Ink Bookshop in 2005 in Banbury, Oxfordshire, and has since re-located the shop to Winchcombe in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds. She was our very first independent bookseller guest during her Banbury days, contributing a review back in 2018; now we're pleased to welcome her back to tell us what makes her Winchcombe shop so special.

The older one becomes, the quicker time passes. I’m sure there’s a good literary quote about this but I don’t have one coming to mind. It seems unbelievable that it’s already more than six years since I moved the bookshop from Banbury to Winchcombe. With an energy I didn’t know I had, and with my incredibly supportive family mucking in with all the least glamorous jobs, together we renovated a run-down but majestic 18th -century building – former restaurant, with dilapidated bed-sit type rooms above – into the beautiful bookshop space I have now, with the added bonus of a two bed book and nature-themed short term holiday let above, our much-loved Book Nook (ideal for writing retreats, wink wink). We have finally found our forever home. 

Winchcombe is the reason why we moved the bookshop. It’s an unspoilt small town in the northwest of the Cotswolds. It’s charming; full of character and history, yet undiscovered enough to have a friendly, active local community, which is what we fell in love with. For visitors there’s a wealth of delights on the doorstep – all within a few miles you can find majestic Sudeley Castle, burial place of Henry VIII’s last wife, Hailes Abbey, Belas Knapp neolithic burial mound, the Gloucestershire and Warwickshire Steam Railway, with a train stop at Winchcombe one mile from the town centre, Cleeve Hill which is the second highest hill of the Cotswolds, outstanding for walks and views, our historic St. Peter’s Church, complete with super grotesques, one of which is known as the “Mad Hatter”. If all that isn’t enough, Winchcombe is lauded as “The Walking Capital of the Cotswolds” due to the array of foothpaths crossing the town and the beautiful countryside around. 

Today I sit in this inviting, tranquil space – with ancient beams and honey-coloured flagstone floor which has seen foot traffic for more than 250 years and numerous trades come and go from this building. It’s a Farmers Market Saturday (which I try to open for but I can’t always make it in on Saturdays) so there’s hustle and bustle outside. I get a few passing friendly waves from locals who haven’t time to call in today and then the doorbell jingles and my first visitors of the day arrive. They are on holiday and immediately exclaim about how beautiful the shop is and how it’s bigger on the inside. Aside: I hear this comment so often maybe I should re-name the shop Tardis Books! 

Thus starts a sunny Cotswolds shop day with the perfect mix of local customers and tourists from around the globe – my favourite kind of day. I especially enjoy occasionally trying out a word or two of German which I have been trying to learn now for a few years. My least favourite bookshop days are rainy days. In Banbury I enjoyed a bookshop rainy day as I didn’t have display tables and the shop was much bigger. Nowadays I have books out on display and they’re a prime target to be dripped on (!!) so I spend rainy days in a state of anxious high alert as books and water are not a happy mix. 

The bookshop has gone through many changes over its 20 years, starting out as second hand books and new stationery (hence the name) and has now settled into a focus on antiquarian and illustrated books, themed vintage books from Penguin and Puffin paperbacks, to old Everyman editions, Ladybird and Observer’s books, collectable children’s books from times gone by – which I love hearing people reminisce about as they wander – plus other themed displays as they come my way. I also keep a large selection of more modern second hand paperback literature, crime fiction and children’s novels, a well-stocked local history section, plus a small array of hand-picked new books. 

Vintage children's books

We have an extra space which we have been slowly renovating for the past few years and this will be opened later this year as a dedicated room for history, military history and related subjects like politics. I’m excited to get this space open soon as I have some outstanding stock sitting in storage, waiting to come and fill the shelves. When you have your own bookshop it can be enormous fun to let your personality spill out onto the shop floor from time to time!! ... Since re-locating, the bookshop has evolved into stocking Willie’s Cacao dark chocolate. Willie is in the process of moving his artisan chocolate factory to nearby Herefordshire so there will be a local connection but his dark chocolates also happen to be my favourite vegan-friendly range and I like having a supply close at hand! 

Vintage teddy bears have also descended on the shop and have been a huge hit with customers of all ages. I adore seeking them out, giving them a “Teddy Bear Spa Day” and then finding them new forever homes. Prints, original art, wood engravings, antique etchings, maps and other printed ephemera have also found a space in the shop and I’m currently thrilled to have a number of original paintings made for Ladybird Books by the artist Roger Hall. Outreach events, like book fairs, have had to take a step back while we navigate our way around personal challenges that came our way with the outbreak of the Covid pandemic; so too my website stock. But we are instead thoroughly enjoying running our Book Nook apartment and meeting all our lovely bookish guests from all walks of life. 

Vintage Ladybirds

We don’t yet live in Winchcombe but when we move to the town I’m looking forward to being able to offer longer opening hours, including evening openings, so more book lovers can discover the shop. Writing this piece has been an interesting reflection for me on 20 years as a bookseller and all that that encompasses – curator, book guardian, researcher, matchmaker, reviewer, rescuer, re-homer, marketer, accountant, building renovator, designer, and hostess – but above all, what has really makes bookselling be not a job but a vocation and a calling, is the joy of witnessing those moments of serendipitous discovery when customers fall in love with books right before your eyes. This is what I hope to be doing for at least another 20 years to come.

For our first independent bookseller feature in April 2018, when Sam was in her Banbury shop, she recommended In This Grave Hour by Jacqueline Winspear

Guest feature by Ann Jungman - 'political correctness': help or hindrance?

"I am going to shrink my tirade to three personal experiences, one as a teacher, one as a publisher and one as a writer ... "

Ann Jungman is a Londoner and still lives there. After misguidedly studying Law and Reading for the Bar, Ann drifted into primary teaching and that led into writing children’s books. With a hundred and thirty books under her belt, Ann is semi-retired and enjoying a leisurely life while battling arthritis. Ann’s most popular series was about Vlad, a diminutive, vegetarian vampire with a serious identity problem. After the books were surprisingly mentioned by Penelope Lively at the Booker Prize ceremony, Ann is hoping against hope that Collins will reprint them. Currently, she is working on a book about a Jewish girl surviving in Berlin, during the War, Singing in Dark Times - a new venture, a serious novel for teenagers.

What does 'political correctness' seek to achieve? It holds up standards that promote decency, kindness, toleration, acceptance of difference, anti-racism, anti-sexism, religious freedom, equality, fairness, and hopes of a better future. Who could object to any of that? And yet 'political correctness' is widely met with many doubts and some distrust and much irritation.

Mulling on all of this and starting to do some reading, I realised that 'political correctness' is a huge subject, at times blending into discussions about censorship, freedom of speech and politics. As such it is much too grand a topic for me to write anything coherent in a short piece, or, to be honest, in a long piece - it is just too big and too controversial. So, I am going to shrink my tirade to three personal experiences, one as a teacher, one as a publisher and one as a writer, that touch on all the subjects mentioned above.

Firstly, as a very young teacher in a rough school, I read my class the stories of Uncle Remus, a collection of tales told to slaves in the American South. The book was full of stories told by Uncle Remus, an aged slave. Based on a real model, the old man told stories to the enslaved people that were Americanised versions of West African folk tales. In Africa, the trickster was Brer Anancy, a spider; transposed to the US he becomes a rabbit. 

A child came in with the book and asked me to share it with the class. This was in the early sixties, when 'political correctness' wasn’t even a glint in someone’s eyes. The children loved the stories and I enjoyed putting on all the varied voices of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and all the others, I even managed a very respectable black Southern accent. I didn’t even have a flicker of doubt that these stories were not condescending or offensive – they were great stories, the language was rich, the small, weak but clever rabbit always outsmarted his larger opponents, and they were wonderfully funny.

The Classic Tales of Brer Rabbit, collected by Joel Chandler Harris, published by Running Press Kids, illustrated by Don Daily

In the decades since, Brer Rabbit has come in for huge amount of criticism and the stories have become extremely controversial, particularly since the era of Civil Rights and Black Power. Some black writers, like Richard Wright and Toni Morrison, found them a great source of information about attitudes in the pre-Bellum South and anthropologists discovered that the speech patterns, all spoken in argot, were amazingly accurate. The main problem was that Joel Chandler Harris, who retold the stories, was a white, Southern male. Harris had worked on a plantation, as a clerk, and spent much of his time in the slave quarters, fascinated by the culture the slaves had evolved, to keep a sense of themselves and to hang on to the culture of West Africa. The language the stories are told in was developed to make it hard for their oppressors to understand. However, over time that way of speaking became associated with Black and White Minstrel Shows and unflattering stereotyping that modern opinion thinks of as demeaning, implying negroes were less intelligent than others. 

At various times there have been many attempts to ban the books but they are still available, though probably less popular than they were. Beatrix Potter claimed to have based Peter Rabbit on Brer Rabbit and Enid Blyton wrote a whole series about him. For a hundred and sixty years, the stories were popular all over the world. Will they survive in the era of  'political correctness'? Who knows?

At the same time as I was reading the books with my class, the film Song of the South, in which Walt Disney animated the stories, was showing at the Odeon, Camden Town. One Saturday afternoon, I took some fifteen of my class to see it. While I had no doubts about the stories, I was appalled by the film.

It's set on the Old White Plantation, where the young master, the future owner, is very ill. Uncle Remus tells the boy stories, while the slaves stand under the boy's window singing and crying, at the thought that the lad might die. It was truly terrible, a children’s Gone with the Wind, that helped set back Civil Rights for a bit. The depiction of all those happy and musical slaves, more than content with their lives, was outrageous. When the film opened in 1946, black audiences protested outside the cinemas and stayed away. Though a huge box office success it is rarely shown now, as it is generally accepted that it is racist and patronising. The sequences that were animated, were of course, beautifully done but even there, the story of the Tar Baby was seen as unacceptable. I believe it is now banned.

In retrospect, I do not feel guilty about reading the stories, which made a bond between me and the class. The film is different, and had I known I would not have taken the class, I feel bad about it. This thought brought Marshall McLuan to mind, “the medium is the message”, in which he claims that there are hot and cool types of media. Books are “cool”, often read alone and quietly, giving rise to thoughts rather than actions, whereas film, TV, plays etc are “hot”, potentially rousing people to imitate or copy the “hot message”. If this is correct, I wonder why it is that books, particularly children’s books, are the subject of constant intervention and change on the grounds of political correctness, when the audience is the same for both. When one thinks of what is so readily available online and on TV that children have access to now, the over policing of “cool” books seems even more absurd.

The Blood-and-Thunder Adventure on Hurricane Peak by Margaret Mahy, published by Barn Owl Books, illustrated by Wendy Smith

Now to my publishing gripe. When running Barn Owl Books, I was lucky enough to acquire a book by Margaret Mahy, The Blood-and-Thunder Adventure on Hurricane Peak, a wonderfully anarchic story of the “Unexpected School” where the children could only go out in stone boots because of the regular hurricanes that occur and where only imaginative subjects are taught. The headmaster has no time for science but is in love with a lady inventor. Eventually, after numerous totally wacky events amid a cast of bizarre characters, the headmaster and the lady inventor marry and run a more balanced curriculum. Marvellous language, brilliant Dickensian characters and musings on themes of education and the environment - what was there not to like?

Alas, a book club wrote to complain bitterly, because the pantomime villain, one Sir Quincy Judd Sprokett, who described himself as “a very wicked industrialist”, and wants to flatten Hurricane Peak for its minerals, is in a wheelchair. Not any old wheelchair, but one that would have made James Bond envious. Sir Quincy is a real pantomime villain; all the devices on the chair enable this wicked man to act out his wicked deeds, except that the pupils at the “Unexpected School”, always mange to outwit him. The book club thought that having a disabled villain would undermine children with disabilities, so rejected the book. I asked several disabled children about Sir Quincy and they said they loved the notion of a wicked man in a fantastic wheelchair.

One wonders who made that decision, so mean-minded and literal and showing such a lack of imagination. Who in that Book Club felt that they knew better than Margaret Mahy, writer of brilliant books, picture books, young readers and wonderful novels for YA - winner of every possible prize, including the Andersen? That is why I get angry with 'political correctness'. It can be a constraint on imagination and fun, both for authors and publishers, and so often it's a small, somewhat precious group that inflicts their limited world view on more creative folk.

My third example is from a book I wrote: Vlad the Drac, my hugely popular series about a diminutive vampire with strong but rather old-fashioned views. In the book Vlad lives with a family in Kentish Town, where the mother is a doctor and the father a violinist. Vlad pretends to be progressive and thinks it's just splendid that women can now be doctors, unlike in his youth in Transylvania. However, when he gets ill, he yells “Don’t you bring a lady doctor anywhere near me!” I was told to leave it out, as it might be thought that the book was dismissing women in medicine. What it was intended to show was that Vlad is a hypocrite and has lots of prejudices that the family (and the reader) regard as absurd.

Here ends the lesson. I do still feel that anyone who sets themselves up as a “sensitivity expert” is very questionable. They have a vested interest to find a fault - if all is well, they are out of a job. It seems to me that you cannot write about peace if you don’t mention war, about racism without showing racist speech or prejudice, or sexism without some sexist content. Some people may get offended by a specific text but books are there to explain and provoke and show the world as it is and that means giving authors permission to have characters who don't fulfil the constraining requirements of a very narrow and literal interpretation of political correctness. At times it does seem to come dangerously close to a slippery slope. If authors and publishers feel that they cannot represent certain views, or use particular words, it will have a really deadly effect on literature, particularly as groups feel the need to protect children’s books more than others; children are seen as vulnerable and there needs to be a healthy balance between spontaneity and responsibility.

Children are often far more discerning than the guardians give them credit for.

While thinking about attempts to control what can be mentioned in books and even what words can be used, I was put in mind of the Oscar Wilde story, The Happy Prince. The much loved Prince is protected by his parents from knowing about anything ugly or troubling. When he dies, a statue is built in the centre of the town, covered in the finest gold. But the Prince, high up on his plinth, sees nothing but suffering and is so shocked that he encourages the birds to take the gold from his statue and give it to the poor and needy. The story ends with the statue being grey and ugly and being thrown away. 

The relevance of the story in the context of political correctness is all too obvious. We must do our bit to prepare our children for the world as it is, in all its wonderful beauty and all its darkness.

The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde, published by Thames and Hudson, illustrated by Maisie Paradise Shearring