Reading the Child Invention
Victoria de Rijke in discussion with Ayeshea Zacharkiw

Some years ago, when I left infant teaching for higher education, I read an article in Children’s Literature in Education by Adrienne E. Kertzer called ‘Inventing the Child Reader: How We Read Children’s Books’, which suggested that children’s literature is not so much a distinct literature as a way of reading literature (A. E. Kertzer, ‘Inventing the Child Reader, p.12). At the time I found this statement intriguing, although my suspicions of pseudo-psychological limits to reading have much increased, working as I now do with both children and teachers as readers of literature, and finding there are not so many (and not so obvious) differences between them. Kertzer stated, "Children’s literature is based on a fiction, the invented child reader" and went on to cite Richard Hughes’s novel A High Wind in Jamaica as "not a children’s book because the text by its definition of the child discourages the child reader" (p.16). Ten years on I am ready to take issue with this, both in terms of the invented child[1] and the fiction.

In brief. A High Wind in Jamaica tells the story of a group of children sent to England after a hurricane destroys their homes in Jamaica. They are unexpectedly taken onboard a pirate ship and share fully in the pirates’ adventures until the return to domestic family life. The pirates are captured and sentenced to death on the testimony of a ten-year-old girl, Emily, who is probably guilty of the murder of which they are accused. It is perhaps one of the most sinister and least sentimental books about childhood written in English.

My response to Kertzer’s article will be to challenge the three assumptions on which she defends her case: first, that there is such a thing as recognizable literary childishness; second, that there is such a thing as a child reader; and third, that children read without objectively questioning the text.

Using A High Wind in Jamaica, as Kertzer did, with reference to a transcript of a taped interview between me and an 11-year-old reader, I shall examine whether or not this is a book for children, and whether or not good readers (rather than just older ones) are questioning. The central strength of the book is that it categorically refuses to state what typical childishness may be. This seems an honest approach, given that, by the time the concept has been thought through, and articles or novels are written on the subject, we’ve grown up, and our childhood is presumed to be over.

A High Wind in Jamaica has a publishing history that relates specifically to this question, and I shall make brief analysis of this, as well as the changing look of the book, as an analogy for the changing condition of childhood and the child reader. Adult investment in the child reader has resulted in a kind of inverted process of growing up—growing down, if you like—where the book drifts out of a child’s reach.

To begin with the history: A High Wind in Jamaica was first published by Chatto & Windus in 1929 to critical acclaim, giving "certain Victorian values—in particular the sentimental cult of childhood—a distinctively 20th-century blow to the head" (P.Baker, Classic Review, p.5). Whether the book was aimed at children is questionable; Hughes had a confessed interest in experimental forms of writing and reading, resisting the obvious in preference for the "obscure" (Richard Hughes, Introduction to William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury) and representing the "demolition of the Rousseauistic vision of children as noble savages" (Reinhard Kuhn, Corruption In Paradise, p.156). It is seen as having "influenced 20th-century feeling about children as decisively as Freud" (Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica, back cover of 1994 Harvill Edition) and paved the way for later antisentimental works about childhood, such as Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

I have a 1940s copy published by Evergreen Books, its cover a neutral "cyclamen pink" with green trimmings, and a 1950s copy by Four Square Books, which is more clearly aimed at the newly invented teenager. This cover, with windswept figures braving the hurricane, suggests an action-adventure story and features the genre (novel) and price (2 pounds sixpence) clearly under the vivid brushstrokes of the image. My 1960s and 1970s copies are identical Penguin Modern Classics price now an unimportant 30 pence placed on the bottom back cover). The front cover, designed by Germano Facetti, shows a detail from View of Roseau (Dominica) by Lieutenant Caddy, which is in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich (back cover of Penguin Modern Classic edition, 1971), demonstrating a far greater emphasis on book-jacket design and attribution of all contributors. This image suggests a pleasant maritime reference to a colonial past, as well as a rather more élite audience of readers (or parents of readers) of classics, also presumed to be museum-goers and art enthusiasts. It is also now called "A classic novel of childhood" (back cover).

When I started teaching in 1989 at what was then Middlesex Poly-technic, A High Wind in Jamaica was out of print, and I found it impossible to teach without students’ having proper access to the text. I was thrilled when, in 1994, Harvill republished it in paperback, though somewhat confused as to why it was printed phonetically and cost £7.99 (about $13.00 US). The contemporary cover, by Nelly Dmitranova, reflects the anxiety of our times in terms of childhood crisis. The child (presumably Emily) is depicted with streaming hair that is also the ocean, upon which a little schooner sails. The child is red-faced, blushing (with guilt? shame?), and has her hands raised in a melodramatic gesture of horror. The book is twice the size, twice as glossy, and at least 20 times as expensive as the last available edition. This cover also seems to be most conscious of representing the book as about children, but not for them.

This new publication takes the further measure of censoring the readership simply via the exorbitant cost. No child (or parent) is going to risk £8 on a book, and it may now only be found firmly shelved in the adult section alongside Keri Hulme’s The Bone People and Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point.

How has this come about? Why has this come about?

These questions have inspired my argument that young children can read A High Wind in Jamaica and can recognize themselves in it. For making the following analysis possible, I am indebted to an enthusiastic group of first-year students in the bachelor-of-education English course I coordinate, who read the book themselves and gave it to their children, and to Ayeshea Zacharkiw.

Ayeshea and I have a few things in common: We have to spell our surnames out to everyone, and we both read a lot. Some of the differences between us are 20 years; Ayeshea is more impatient than I am (but I was an infant teacher); and she is mentally quicker than I (she picks up new things and tells jokes very rapidly). Her background is not middleclass or academic, whereas mine is both.

What follows, then, is not an empirical study, but a reflective conversation between two literary critics. It was unbalanced in the sense that I gave Ayeshea two weeks to read the book once, whereas I had read it many times and teach the book as part of the university degree course. I was aware, as a trained teacher of children and literature, that l asked leading questions. The questions were based on Kertzer’s criteria against children’s reading A High Wind in Jamaica, and I had a contrary point to make. I am similarly aware that Ayeshea’s responses and enjoyment may have been shaped by her will to please. In fact, the terms of her reading, like that of most children, are probably led if not fed by adults.

I gave Ayeshea the 1940 edition with no picture on the cover, nothing about the writer, and written instructions to avoid adult influence, thereby causing a little trouble at home, where Ayeshea insisted that her parents not look at the book or speak to her about the book she was reading—a challenge to the order of things!

First I asked Ayeshea how she read the book:
AZ: By opening the book (laughs) How do you mean?
VdR: (laughs) Like, what kinds of ways did you read? Where and how do you read?
AZ: I read it in bed, two chapters at a time, except for the last two, which I read separately, because they were the longest.
VdR: OK. And you read it in bed. With the light on, or with a torch, or...
AZ: I don’t know where the torch is. Mum’s stolen them all, so it had to be with the main light on, but you can only read a bit, cos if you read for too long, they catch you, cos you can’t get out of bed in time to turn the light off. (laughs)
VdR: (laughs) How easily did you read it?
AZ: Well, the book’s a bit old, so some of the words… wouldn’t have been in books like today, like Neggro, Negro, um, and there are lots of… I mean, the first line (reads) "the fruit of Emankipation" or something.
VdR: Oh yes, that’s right, the first line.
AZ: I thought "Oh my God," is it...
VdR: (reads) "one of the fruits of the Emancipation in the West Indian Islands is the number of ruins"
AZ: Yeah. I thought "Is it all going to be like that, with all these new words in I’ve never heard of?" (exasperated laugh)
VdR: Right. Do you know what emancipation means?
AZ: No. I looked up most of those words in the dictionary.
VdR: Did you? It’s um… It means liberation, or freedom. What do you think that very first passage means?
AZ: (reads) "One of the fruits of..."–yes, even though there’s freedom, it’s all ruins, um, they’re not very far apart, because they’re (reads) "within a stone’s throw"—all different houses, ruined slaves’ quarters (reads) "Earthquake, fire, rain and deadlier vegetation did their work quickly," I suppose rotting them down dead.

Ayeshea demonstrated a pragmatic approach to reading, breaking down new vocabulary by using contextual cues and the dictionary (not one student at degree level grasped the ironic reference to "fruits" and "ruins" either) coping shrewdly with the practical difficulties most children encounter, such as "lights-off" rules and parents stealing torches. Ayeshea’s response to one of the most difficult sections of the book—a letter to the children’s parents from Captain Marpole, the man who has been entrusted with seven children and preferred to hand them over to pirates rather than risk losing his life or treasure—reveals as sophisticated an understanding of Hughes’s irony as students in higher education could manage:

AZ: I had something to say about that. In it, it said that, um, Captain Marpole had, um, said that the pirates had, er, killed the children, but I think he was trying to hide that they’d gone because he had let them have his treasure, and he didn’t want to seem—that he wanted to keep his treasure instead of giving it up and, um, letting the children stay alive, so he thought rather than say I wouldn’t let them have my treasure so they took the children, he said they’ve killed them.
VdR: Right. Good.
AZ: But I only realized that at the end. Because I thought they had died. When I read on, there they still are, and I was thinking maybe this is how it happened. Maybe they’re going to suddenly be killed. I didn’t know. I just had to sit down and work it out.

At a later point she pointed to stylistic difficulties overcome:

AZ: It’s a bit misleading, you think, "Oh, they’re dead, there must be some different characters soon," so you work out they’re not dead, when you’ve been thinking along the lines of something else—but then with things like the treasure, I read back through that letter, back before the letter, and found out he wouldn’t give the treasure and that’s why he said they were all dead. You need to refer back along the pages and remember pieces all through the book. He’s also being a bit sarcastic, like with (from memory) "Grown-ups never do tell us anything," but it can also be true.

An excellent definition of satire—sarcasm that "can also be true"—and of intelligent reading: the "need to refer back along the pages," and to hold sections in mind. Ayeshea could empathize way beyond her own age; she was not fixated on one character, or one experience. She appreciated why all the children avoid naming their hosts as pirates, saying they call them "pilots" for the sake of the "liddlies", quoting Hughes’s term for the youngest children:

AZ: To reassure because some of them are "liddlies".
VdR: Why does it take the children so long to ask if the men are pirates?
AZ: I think sometimes they think, "No, they can’t be. Yes they are. Maybe they’re not. No, they’re too nice." And then they do something wrong: "Maybe they are".
VdR: (laughs)
AZ: I think they just sort of bring it up when they can’t get to sleep, trying to sound more inquisitive than frightened.

Ayeshea read character acutely enough to spot motive for labeling. She appreciated the humor of the book and went beyond it with her interpretation. She readily grasped Hughes’s ironic use of the word drawers as pseudoshocking:

VdR: (reads) "What do you think this ship is? What do think we all are? To mend your drawers for you, eh? To mend… your… drawers?" [p.84]
AZ: (laughs)
VdR: (reads on) "There was a pause, and they all stood thunderstruck… They could hardly believe so unspeakable a remark had crossed human lips."
AZ: Well it’s not really that unspeakable considering some of the things you hear today. Why are you sliding round the deck with your pants on? (laughs)
VdR: (laughs) Yes.
AZ: But I think he’s not used to mending children’s pants.
VdR: No. (both laugh)
AZ: And when they’re being asked about what horrible things the pirates have done—and she says (laughs), um, he wouldn’t let us slide down the deck with our pants on! And he said the word!
VdR: (laughs) So how do you think the adults reacted to that?
AZ: They might have been, they might have thought, "Oh no," um, "why not?" or "I should think not!" Depends, well, back then, when this book was written, it might have been really naughty to say this word, so they might have been horrified—or felt they should be. The jury must have gasped. (gasps)

I found the level of learning and reading potential almost frightening in this exchange. Ayeshea picked up and used new terminology, reflected critically on archaic vocabulary, and predicted and acted out the adult’s hypocritical reaction, all at breakneck speed. Her grasp of Hughes’s ironic intentions in grouping children with pirates was clear:

VdR: So what do you think this book is saying about childhood and adulthood?
AZ: Adults of all ages talk to each other, but children—all the younger children stick together, and all the younger children don’t understand things that adults are on about. The older children understand some of it. It puts them in separate groups, like all the adults, then the pirates, and the children, and within the children’s group there’s younger and older, boys and girls.

A classic example of the "girls and boys" segregation is the unmentionable "suggestion" (p.181) of what happens to the eldest girl, Margaret, taken into the custody of Otto, the pirate cook. Hughes’s only reference to what Margaret’s morose Aunt later labels as "obvious" abuse is assumed by Kertzer to be indicative of "the widening gap between the children and ourselves," but it was analyzed by Ayeshea on a far more subtle and sophisticated level of linguistic diagnosis:

VdR: Margaret kind of stops talking to the children, doesn’t she?
AZ: Yes, because I think she’s ashamed of herself, after a while. And she sort of sits in the comer and sulks a lot. It doesn’t say it like that though, but that’s what seems to be happening; that’s the impression.
VdR: Mmm. Good. OK. Um, she’s described here (reads p.124) "She was, after all, his affair." Why is Margaret described as Otto’s affair?
AZ: I don’t really—maybe he was looking after her. Or, affair, like in French, means your "things": vos affaires. She might be his affair as in she might be under his control.
VdR: That’s really useful, using the French.
AZ: Yeah. (laughs)

Knowledge equals power. Ayeshea started French this year at secondary school, and immediately made use of it. Does it matter whether the reader reads affair as punning on business or love interest in an obviously adult way? Ayeshea, in tracing the "borrowing" and the etymological root of affaires from the French, exposed the inequality of power relations that is the essence of the book.

She spotted the comic, farcical parallels Hughes set up in that, as animals, children and pirates have much in common:

AZ: I think they liked the pirates’ well I think they’re like them, like with the belching and playing about.

And when the eldest boy John falls to his death, it’s an uncomfortable reality everyone (adult or not) onboard avoids, in a typically childlike evasion:

AZ: They just pretended they just didn’t know anything, exactly like the children. But then, with the pirates, they were allowed to do more, well, wild things. They had to get used to each other, and they looked after one another. when Emily’s bitten Jonson, she’s, you know, repentant, and she’s saying, "Sorry, can we be friends?" like he was a child. (laughs)

The child Emily betrays her former comrades the pirates in the trial at the end of the book, although it is not made clear how knowingly she sends them to their deaths. Again, Ayeshea objectively questioned Hughes’s depiction of the problems parents have with childish brutality, particularly Emily’s father, who sees her "inhuman, stony, basilisk look" (p.186) the night before the trial, and realizes, "with a sudden painful shock, he was afraid of her!":

AZ: Why is her father afraid of her?
VdR: Are you asking me?
AZ: Yes. (laughs)
VdR: Perhaps Emily’s not quite what her father expects of a child. Why don’t grown-ups expect children to be (reads) "inhuman"?
AZ: They just expect them to play, and to just–be stupid (laughs), but Emily’s not stupid. She’s learning lines, and she’s going to court, so she’s big, and she looks so serious, and she’s got control of what she says, so he could be scared, because she could say anything.
AZ: I think it is based around the word control. Margaret’s in control of the children, but they don’t like it. Jonson’s in control of them all, but when Emily bit Jonson, she was in control.
VdR: That’s right.
AZ. And when her leg was cut, Jonson was back in control.
VdR: And when it comes to the court scene, who then?
AZ: It’s not really right, if they ask you for what you think happened. Then you should say what you think happened, not what someone told you to say you think happened.

An interesting reference to Hughes’s wry attack on the unjust judicial system, where the (lying) child is primed with lines (made up by a lying lawyer) to learn, and the only honorable group is the pirates, who go willingly innocent to their deaths, ("rather than (later) guilty of some great sin") (p. 192) Ayeshea pointed out the relativity of justice, where the pirate takes the place of the child:

AZ: He would rather die innocent than later on–be guilty of something, so, it was fair in one sense.

Kertzer stated, "Only an adult reader can be addressed in the second person when the narrator describes Emily’s growing taller: "her grave face lost none of its attractiveness by being a fraction nearer your own" (p.166). I asked Ayeshea what she thought that passage meant:

AZ: Well, if this is an adult book [her teacher told her it was], then it would be an adult reading it and "a fraction nearer" would be a fraction higher. To them.
VdR: Right.
AZ: Yeah, adults are bigger than children, so if she’s a child, say, here, and an adult there (sketching heights), then she’s a bit taller, nearer the adult. It might mean the book’s intended for adults—
VdR: But when you read the book, you were lying down. You read it in bed, and so did I!
AZ: Yeah, so we’re at the same height. Marek could read it best cos he sleeps in a cabin bed.
VdR: (laughs) Good joke!

Marek is Ayeshea’s younger brother, who is nine. (One of the students I teach boasts the youngest recorded reader of A High Wind in Jamaica, her daughter, age seven, with no apparent problems.)

VdR: So, last questions: 15 this a book for children? Or for grown-ups? And why?
AZ: First, it depends what reading level you are; otherwise you’d never read the words. But when I kept a dictionary by my side like for Negro, I looked them up and thought, "Oh yeah, now I understand all these other bits," but if you are an English teacher, you probably know all these words anyway, and you could zip through it without having to stop and learn all these new words. It’s an old book as well, so it’s got all these old expressions, but I think anyone could read it whether they’re children or grown-ups. Yeah. It might take the children longer than older people, but cut at two year olds, cos you have to be sensible about ages.
VdR: Right. I agree. And do you think there’s anything in it that adults now wouldn’t like children to read?
AZ: I don’t know why it’s been republished for adults. There are words in it I suppose, rude words (laughs) and piracy, but you can get horror books especially for children, but adults read them. Well, anyone can read any book. It’s just what level you are at reading, whether you like that particular type of book, and if you don’t like it, you can always put the book down.
VdR: Mmm, absolutely. You’re free to do that, aren’t you? It’s not in control of you! (laughs)
AZ: (laughs) No, course not. Once you’ve bought it. It doesn’t matter who you publish it for. Anyone can buy it and read it, or get it out of the library.
VdR: So what kind of particular type of book do you think this is?
AZ: Well, it’s about life. It’s about life on the schooner, and about children, as they’re the man characters, and about the difference between grown-ups and children, who’s in control.

Children’s observations are often valued by grown-ups for their blunt honesty and wisdom, for cutting through the adult flannel and exposing simple truths, most often because adults are already uncomfortable about hypocrisies which they are concealing. Ayeshea reminded me that there are a number of basic requirements for effective reading: a level of basic literacy, information retrieval and developmental skills ("cut at two year olds, cos you have to be sensible about ages"). What a terrifically blunt reminder of the low expectations teachers and adults have of reading potential! And could Ayeshea be recalling the description of the children’s mother in the novel? "She could read when she was two-and-a-half. Her reading was always serious" (p. 33). The act of reading cannot be controlled by publishers’ reading-age targeting, or price, given access to the library and a free choice of genre. In conversation, Ayeshea and I also emphasized, by the repetitive use we made of the word control the significance the book places on power relations, in terms of its subject. The term subject could be applied to both reader and plot.

I want to conclude with an analysis of Ayeshea’s understanding of the alligator incident. (Emily, the central child, borrows a baby alligator for a night from a boy onboard the rescue ship.) This discussion revealed Ayeshea’s meeting her own criteria for effective reading, that is, questioning the text:

VdR: let’s talk about the alligator, since you’ve brought it up. (reads) "Emily was translated into Heaven… She was actually going to sleep with an alligator!" [p.162]
AZ: Yes. She thought it was even better than her earthquake.
VdR: why does the writer put it like that?
AZ: Well, to show she’s sort of fascinated with this thing she’s never seen before. She’s heard about alligators and how they eat people, and she can say, "I’ve slept with an alligator, and he didn’t eat me."
VdR: And why is it important for her to be able to say that, do you think?
AZ: I don’t know. Maybe to make her sound really big, and strong, as if she’d fended the alligator off. She made sure nothing happened, but it was a risk.
VdR: That’s right. And there’s that amazing line: (reads) "Alligators…
AZ: (from memory)... are utterly untameable."
VdR: What does that mean?
AZ: That you can’t sort of tame an alligator like a cat. You can have a cat sitting at the end of your bed. It wouldn’t bite you, but it will bite a mouse going across the floor, but an alligator would bite you and the mouse.
VdR: (laughs)
AZ: That’s why it seems really good, and wild, to sleep with an alligator. (laughs)
VdR: what does the writer say about what they’re like, the child and the alligator?
AZ: I don’t know, I think they’re fascinated with each other. They’re like one another, ‘cos she bit, um, Captain Jonson.
VdR: She did! (laughs)

Ayeshea seemed within half a breath of something students at degree level found almost impossible to articulate: Captain Jonson and the alligator represent the same threat and excitement to Emily. Emily slept in "her beloved" pirate captain’s bed when recovering from a horrible accident, surrounded by "pictures of naked ladies and every ship you can think of," as Ayeshea put it. Onboard the rescue ship Emily is surrounded by real—in place of sketched—women and confronted with the possibility of growing up like the stewardess with the enormous, swelling bosom" (p.160). In Captain Jonson’s absence she embraces the alligator, her next experience. Ayeshea was right to quote dryly from the start of the book, "It was better than her earthquake." Emily collects extreme experiences and demonstrates her control by making "sure nothing happened," though there "was a risk." She is a wild child, riding her pony naked into the sea during an earthquake, loving and biting her captain with equal fierceness, and stabbing to death a Dutchman taken prisoner, all before sleeping with the alligator! The fact that Ayeshea remembered the line "Alligators are utterly untamable" (p. 163) revealed her appreciation of its significance, as Hughes undoubtedly intended. The line exists by itself, and it concludes a chapter.

Ayeshea’s cat and mouse analogy, like Kafka’s before her (Franz Kafka. ‘Cat and Mouse’), works particularly well in emphasizing the comic, fable style of this section of the story. If the alligator represents Emily’s attraction for Captain Jonson, then the mouse is Emily’s father, soon to sit on her bed and stare in horrified attraction at his daughter, the cat that may pounce. Ayeshea was recalling the description of the baby alligator’s eyes: "large, protruding, and of a brilliant yellow, with a slit pupil like a cat’s. But the eye of the alligator is infinitely more stony and brilliant—reptilian" (p. 162), like Emily’s father’s horrific vision of her "stony, basilisk look" (p. 186) the night before the trial. This in turn recalls "that terrible look on Jonson’s face as his eye met hers" (p. 190) as Emily leaves the courtroom thinking about her cat Tabby’s expression on the night of the hurricane, as she was chased by wildcats to her death:

AZ: A look of anguish, was it? And fear, cos she got separated.
VdR: Right. Real fear. And where else does she see that expression?
AZ: Old Sam. He got struck by lightning, um, but Jonson, too, in court. It reminded her of Tabby, yeah, because he was fearing that she would say it was all his fault.
VdR: Right.

Hughes makes no bones about the fact that the "children had loved Tabby first and foremost, some of each other second, and hardly noticed their mother’s existence more than once a week" (p. 33). Emily is later described as "far fonder of [the pirates] than she had ever been of her parents" (p. 131).

Given the uncompromisingly antisentimental view of childhood attachments, is this perhaps too dangerous reading material for children, who should love, honor, and obey their parents before all pets or pirates?

Ayeshea and I would agree, I’m sure, that children’s literature is by its "nature" (as constructed by adults) a mad idea. Readers read. They read whatever they fancy, in infinitely different ways. How little we know about what is lost by the process of growing up as a reader, rather than how many skills are gained. How little children’s literature criticism acknowledges the investment adult writers have made in their preferred vision of the child, and the child reader. The major restriction on children’s ability to read is probably what is deemed "suitable," in content and level. Just as Ayeshea and I interacted in conversation, so any reader interacts with any given text.

I have tried to write this article in the spirit of conversation; in other words, so that a child might be "able" to read it. However I wrote it, children could read it, although I doubt many adults allow children access to reading Children’s Literature in Education. More’s the pity.

A High Wind in Jamaica seems almost callous in these sentimental, hypocritical days of representing happy childhoods that do not exist. It is as pitiless as a child can be, describing literal and literary childishness, for and about the authentic child reader, regardless of age. Perhaps the new publication is so overtly aimed at adults because of an increasing cultural fear that childhood is under threat. Could there even be a strange inverted catharsis behind the recent trend in Point Horror for children?[2] And what of the political correctness debate? What is damaging and corrupting?[3] The fact that children’s literature may be prey to increasingly stringent depictions of childhood that conform to acceptable levels of classic "childishness", or the fact that it does not? Who’ll get the last word?

AZ: Do you think Emily’s like a child?
VdR: I think it proves that she’s a bit like the alligator (from memory), "utterly…
AZ: … untamable," yes. (laughs) And she can snap!
VdR: Do you think you’re a tamable child?
AZ: I could be bribed, but—
VdR: (laughs)
AZ: (laughs) No, no, no. They just can’t. If I wanted to escape and walk down the road now, no one would stop me. And if, if they would, I’d probably bite their thumb! (laughs)
VdR: (laughs) OK. Let’s stop there, that’s great. Thank you, Ayeshea. (turns off tape)
AZ: (starts tape again) The End. (turns off tape).

Notes
1. Where is the critical analysis of that mad scientist’s brainchild, the invented child reader? In what way are we to feel confident that the invention of childhood and the child reader are unproblematic categories? Neil Postman’s theory (in The Disappearance of Childhood) that the child was invented along with the printing press in the 15th century certainly underpins the notion that the growth of Western capitalist societies demanded an expanding market, and children have been growing obediently ever since. If childhood was originally stamped on a printing block of movable type, it is a stumbling block now, an uncomfortably privileged yet also exploited mass of insecurities. It may be time to uninvent categories that are proving destructive, yet perhaps there is too much purchase in the power divisions.
2. This year’s Carnegie winner, Stone Cold by Robert Swindell, is a story about a serial killer.
3. "Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica, though most of its characters are children, never appears on lists of juvenile fiction; not so much because of the elaborations of its diction (which is no more complex than that of, say, Treasure Island), but because in it children are irretrievably damaged and corrupted, Alison Lurie, 1990, p. xiii.

References
Hughes, Richard, A High Wind in Jamaica, Penguin, Harvill Edition, 1971.
Kafka, Franz, Cat and Mouse, Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Penguin, 1975.
Kertzer, Adrienne, ‘Inventing the child reader: How we read children’s books, Children’s Literature in Education, 1984, 15, 12—21.
Kuhn, Reinhard, Corruption in Paradise: The Child in Western Literature. Brown University Press, 1982.
Lurie, Alison, Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups. Bloomsbury, 1990.
Postman, Neil, The Disappearance of Childhood. W. H. Allen, 1983.
Swindell, Robert, Stone Cold. Hamish Hamilton, 1994.

from Children’s Literature in Education, Vol.26, No.3, 1995

Victoria de Rijke moved from teaching children to teaching English in the School of Education at Middlesex University, London, and is researching a PhD in "Metaphors of Childhood" [since completed]. Her publications include teaching and exhibition materials on issues of equal opportunities and child power.

Ayeshea Zacharkiw is currently [ie in 1995] at high school in Plymouth, where she is now in her second year. She is school librarian and horror books and anything Lois Lowry. She has recently taken up fencing and hopes to be a brain surgeon when she grows up.