BookBrunch

This snowy week has made me reflect on the influence of childhood reading. The salient characteristic of the British in the snow is that they immediately become more playful, more childlike. And not just, it seems, because they don’t have to go to work and can’t drive anywhere. We all play games, having snowball fights, hurtling down hillsides on slidy things and building snowmen. What other circumstances can make adults throw things amiably at each other in the street, chase each other around, stop to make something useless but aesthetically pleasing out of material that is to hand, and whiz downhill shouting ‘Whee!’ before landing on top of each other in a laughing heap?

Maybe we do this because there is something intrinsically play-inducing about the snow, or something Proustian that reminds us of the fun we had with it as kids that we all want to relive. But I think there is something more, something about snow in our imagination, born of what we have read.

Francis Spufford in The Child that Books Built talks about how our internal lives are formed by childhood reading. He remembers looking for Piglet in the snowy woods with an au pair, recreating the Woozle-hunting episode in Winnie-the-Pooh in which Pooh and Piglet follow their own footsteps round in circles. (The au pair, charmingly, had already put a home-made Piglet sitting on a log in the wood.)

But Spufford also wrote a whole book about snow and ice: I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, in which he traced a national interest in polar exploration back to Byron, Coleridge, Tennyson, Melville, Conrad, and the Shelleys. Grand expeditions may be inspired by great poets and novelists; larky trips to the park may be inspired by children’s books.

When Raymond Briggs invented The Snowman he was already tapping into our sense that a figure we make, Pygmalion-like, feels like a sort of imaginary friend. But surely every snowman built since his book is more evocative, containing more latent magic, more potential to turn into an amazing companion. We build our snowmen with even more glee. (And incidentally The Snowman was originally set around this time of year, snow being rare in Sussex before Christmas; it was the elongated television adaptation that added Father Christmas and a Christmas tree, absent from Briggs’s book.)

The snow in my soul (not like the chip of ice in The Snow Queen) includes the snow on the other side of Lewis’s wardrobe – reflected lamplight on the snow is always instant Narnia. And there is Mole trudging behind Ratty in ‘Dulce Domum’, forever associating snow with somewhere near Home, somewhere we came from and want to go back to.

And though I didn’t grow up with these, I think the next generation will be influenced by the playfulness of Nick Butterworth’s Tiger in the Snow!, of Martin Waddell’s Snow Bears and of Kipper's Snowy Day (Mick Inkpen). The magic of the snow, too, will be an echo for those children of Chris van Allsburg’s illustrations to The Polar Express. They will have learned, from Shirley Hughes’s The Snow Lady, not to make unkind likenesses of other people out of snow. And when they lie in the snow and slide their arms up and down it will be a tribute to Angela McAllister and Claire Fletcher’s The Snow Angel; while every child who rushes to the classroom window to see snow will be reliving Allan Ahlberg’s own childhood memory as recorded in "Only Snow" (from Please Mrs Butler).

Booksellers who have found business quiet this week because of the weather might use the time ordering and assembling a special display of snowy books, for the moment when it is all melted, like Briggs’s snowman, and everyone wants their souvenir. It will only nurture children’s enthusiasm for the next blizzard.

What favourite snow books or references can you remember, to add to that display? 

Comments (5)

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Corvus
written by L. Lee Lowe, February 06, 2009

Snow is deeply embedded in the imagination of those who live in the northern hemisphere. A recent favourite has been Geraldine McCaughrean's The White Darkness, and my own soon-to-be serialised YA novel [http://corvus-lowe.blogspot.com]Corvus also takes place in a virtual Arctic.

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written by adele geras, February 06, 2009

The snow is a very useful device for novelists too! It enables you to gather a cast of characters together in one place and keep them there whatever happens. I've done it in 'silent snow, secret snow' and it was good fun. It's also very picturesque and covers up a multitude of architectural sins when it has to. But I'm glad I live in Sunny Manchester and haven't seen any this time round!

Snow
written by Elizabeth Roy, February 06, 2009

The title that sticks in my mind from my own children's reading is that wonderful picture book, The Winter Bear by Ruth Craft and Erik Blegvad. We can still recite it on winter walks - twenty years later. And I'm sure there was a snowy episode in one of Lucy Boston's Green Knowe titles.

Snow
written by alison doig, February 06, 2009

One of the most evocative snow scenes is surely in Susan Cooper's 'The Dark is Rising' - the wonderful bit where Will wakes up on his birthday morning and the snow has changed the world. For many years members of our family have re-read this book regularly at Christmas time. (Please don't mention the appalling film). Another wonderfully atmospheric snow story is John Masefield's 'Box of Delights', a magical novel only let down by its ending.

Snow
written by Anne Rooney, February 08, 2009

For rather older children, but Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Blood Red, Snow White have fantastic snow. Very evocative, and somehow all the better for being left to the imagination rather than illustrated.