Children's column: my first Puffin Posts

Written by Nicolette Jones

Friday, 16 January 2009 10:57

The arrival of new editions of Puffin Post on subscribers’ doorsteps last weekend prompts me, as one of the 16,000 founder members of the Puffin Club in 1967, to go back and look through my original copies.

In them I find yoga tips from Yehudi Menuhin, the Club’s second president (after Penguin founder Sir Allen Lane), photographs and articles by Quentin Blake (gurning playfully), Leon Garfield (so like Harold Steptoe), Roald Dahl (young and dashing), Nina Bawden (a beauty), Joan Aiken, Philippa Pearce, Ursula Moray Williams, Michael Bond . . . There are illustrations by Ronald Searle (Puffin editorial director Kaye Webb’s husband) and Shirley Hughes, and, notably, Jill McDonald, who gave the magazine its distinctive look. And celebrities other than writers attended Puffin events – proper celebrities, who were famous for doing things: Jenny Agutter, Thor Heyerdahl, Pelé.
I discover that the magazine was so much more about creativity than commerce. There were no ads, except to show the jackets of upcoming Puffin books. There were no concessions to popular culture beyond a few stills from new films of books: The Railway Children, Swallows and Amazons, Doctor Doolittle . . . Prizes were imaginative but minimal: “stringy things” in a competition to make pictures out of string; “stony prizes” for stories about stones (“no stone books please”); grand prizes were book tokens, or the juvenilia of established authors – linocuts, say, or little bound books by Catherine Storr. When asked what prizes they wanted, members suggested things that were small and delightful: “crystallized violets would be perfect”. And the competitions themselves were like exercises in a creative writing course, about favourite words and concrete poems, reportage (judged by Tom Pocock), or stories based on a theme or an opening sentence. These were competitions to make writers (and artists), and the judging could even be critical: “not for his handwriting”; “many of you missed the point”. It meant that winners felt genuinely deserving.

Will the new magazine be so nurturing of writers and illustrators, I wonder? No doubt it will at least be less middle class. In the originals, non-white faces in the photographs of Puffin events were few. One contest invited members to draw their cleaning lady. Another suggested a poem about people who help you: lollipop ladies and milkmen. A winning entry about a laundry man was mine.

The achievements of old Puffineers may be one of Kaye Webb’s significant legacies. Charlotte Voake says that winning a box of paints in a Puffin Post competition is what persuaded her she wanted to be an illustrator. At nine, Michelle Paver entered a competition judged by Mary Norton, author of The Borrowers, and wrote a story in which she “housed Borrowers in a disused flue of the boiler room in a large house in Wimbledon, with utterly sensible arrangements for obtaining water, food and light”. Paver’s Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series is still distinguished by its convincing survival skills. (Her collage of a robot, made when she was 11, is also in here.)

Virginia Bell (now Nicholson, great niece of Virginia Woolf and author of Singled Out) was commended for her choice of a favourite word, which was “nourish”. Louisa Young (a.k.a. half of Zizou Corder) says she was a “besotted” Puffineer, for whom the “very personal contact with books, illustrators, editors (Kaye!) and publishers certainly helped me to believe that writing and I had a future together”. As a child she sat in a Puffin dinghy, with Kaye Webb and literary-agent-to-be Felicity Rubinstein (whose father, also a literary agent, was praised in a parents’ competition for his play about the Gunpowder Plot). Novelist and photographer Charlotte Cory won a prize for a story in which children dealt with a ghost using a rolling pin and skittles. (She still has a taste for the gothic.) Journalist and cyclist Matt Seaton wrote a poem about an egg. John Huddy of The Illustration Cupboard, a recent judge of the Ten Best New Illustrators, was judged himself, at 6, for his picture of Father Christmas surfing in Hawaii, and for a balloon face, drawn at 7, gazing sadly over a chimney “calling for his friend who has floated away over the rooftops”. And journalist Kate Kellaway, at 13, envisaged her own future: “midnight walks, midnight writing of words . . . I should be writing on black paper with silver ink.”

There are disturbing ironies, too, in the magazine. One recurrent name is Philip Geddes, a boy who ran a local Puffin group in Barrow and who won a prize with a poem about the atom bomb. Later, in his 20s, Geddes was blown up by the IRA bomb at Harrods. His poem ends: “Bang! Dust.”

And a Puffin Club favourite is author William Mayne, who attended regular events with children and wrote of his pleasure at having 10 little girls to tea. He was jailed not long ago for sexual abuse of young girls around that time. One child’s report of an Edinburgh exhibition describes a competition to find out things about authors: “We had to find out William Mayne's special vice.” Kaye Webb must be turning in her grave.

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