Who can forget the timid Sylvia comforting her doll while
the wolves of Willoughby Chase howl round her shattered
train carriage? Who has not longed for a Necklace of
Raindrops, with the magical power to bring rain to a
parched land, or a Harp of Fishbones to make “a
liquid murmur, like that of a stream running over pebbles,
under a bridge”? Wolves and weather workers, dukes
and devils, enchanted gardens that spring out of the
back of cereal boxes and pies in the sky that can fly
you somewhere better all became part of the world of
childhood thanks to Joan Aiken.
To read a novel, or a story, by Joan Aiken is a unique experience. Many great children’s authors have described parallel worlds, whose history diverges from the one we know, or in which magic is possible and paupers become princes. Yet Joan’s fiction is immediately identifiable, like a certain taste or smell. The TES famously praised her “wild humour and imagination” and certainly wildness is an element, though that suggests a lack of control. She is a terribly funny writer – terribly in the old sense of the word, because her humour always has an edge of horror to it, and a gothic awareness of evil, madness and the dark. Like Dickens, whose love of orphans, grotesques and exuberance she shares, Joan Aiken makes her readers very aware of just how rare goodness and courage are, and how powerful wickedness. Some parents and teachers think children should be protected from this knowledge. I can only say that there are always many little girls – and boys – at the mercy of Miss Slighcarp, and they need to know that bullies, especially adult ones, can be defeated even if they wear your mother’s clothes and take over your home. If Joan’s stories are characterised by anything, it is by the searing passion for justice and for kindness that flames in a child’s heart. This passion was not wild, but channelled into her superb stories – erupting in their volcanoes, cannons, storms, music and of course wolves - and children recognise it at once as their own.
Joan Aiken emerged in the second flowering of children’s fiction, when The Wolves of Willoughby Chase was published in 1963. Her range, even for a children’s author, is quite astonishing. She can captivate an audience still on picture-books – my own daughter yearned so deeply for a Fog Hound with cloudy tail and coppery eyes that her stories were the first she read to herself – and she can hypnotise teenagers with sophisticated horror stories like those in The Windscreen Weepers, or brilliant pastiches of Jane Austen. Generations have grown up on the gentle quirkiness of the Arabel & Mortimer tales, about a small girl and her pet raven, which the BBC televised; parents, teacher and readers marvel over the vigour and ebullience of her imagination and prose. She had the energy of genius and her novels convey buoyancy and hope even when, as in Midwinter Nightingale, the body-count rises to nightmarish levels.
Although she was also the creator of memorable heroes such
as Felix in Go Saddle the Sea, and Owen in The Whispering
Mountain, it is the heroine of the twelve-volume Wolves
of Willoughby Chase sequence who is unique and important.
Dido Twite, the indestructable guttersnipe, is clearly
descended from two other classic rebels of children’s
literature, Mary in The Secret Garden and Jo in Little
Women while, in turn, prefiguring Philip Pullman’s
Lyra in His Dark Materials. Irreverent, rude and utterly
loyal, Dido was the friend you’d want by your side
in a pinch, and the first working-class heroine to appear
in classic children’s fiction. To come across her
bold disregard for convention was thrilling in the 1960s – and
as I know from reading her adventures to modern children,
exciting and inspiring, even today. Dido has an indomitable
spirit of practical common sense that sees her through
adventures in several continents, fighting flying aurocs,
outwitting witches, confounding knavish Hanoverian conspirators
against the House of Stuart and preventing St. Paul’s
Cathedral from being blown up. The rude, dirty, neglected
Cockney sparrow of Blackhearts in Battersea becomes a
heroic girl-Odysseus, making the long journey home to
an England disordered by political treachery which Simon,
who once pitied her, must now rule as King. I urged Joan,
just before she died, to make England a Republic in the
last novel, which will be posthumously published: but
failing that, Dido would make a marvellous Queen. We
will have to wait and see. Even in death, Joan Aiken
was a master story-teller, leaving us begging for just
one more tale from the treasure chest of her imagination.
