There are heroes all around us

Illustration by Rebecca Cobb

Children's author Helen Peters writes about her heroes, both literary and real-life, to celebrate this year's Children's Book Week

I would love to say that Pippi Longstocking was my childhood heroine, but due to terrible literary neglect on the part of my parents, I didn't come across her until I had my own children. It was love at first read. Pippi is superb: fearless, funny, full of energy and endlessly imaginative. I love her because of all these qualities, but most of all because of her utter disregard for authority in all its forms. As a law-abiding person myself, I find her anarchic nature incredibly attractive (and sadly unattainable).

Jo March from Little Women was my favourite literary childhood heroine. She is clever, unconventional, passionate, courageous and loving - and she's a writer! She is engaged in a constant painful struggle to retain her integrity and her independence of mind in a society which wants woman to be decorative and subservient. More than a century later, Jo still leaps off the page, in no small part, I’m sure, because the author poured so much of herself into this complex, creative character.

As I grew up, I was drawn to stories of those amazing Victorian women who worked and campaigned tirelessly for the causes they believed in and who changed attitudes and the way things were done: people like Elizabeth Fry, Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale. Their lasting achievements and their defiance of convention are inspirational.

But, in a quieter way, there are heroes in my own family too. My grandfather, who fought for two years in the First World War trenches, earning the Military Cross for outstanding gallantry, and then came home, taught himself to farm and built a new life for himself and his family. My mother, who held her family together when her brother died in a car crash and who then, when her other brother's marriage ended, uncomplainingly helped bring up his two children as well as her own four - without a single day off for thirty-five years. My father and brother, who have worked eighteen hour days, seven days a week for decades to keep the family farm going, battling everything from foot-and-mouth disease to the threat of the farm being flooded to create a reservoir.

And that’s the thing about heroes. They come in so many forms. When, as a child, I'd hear someone say their dad was the best dad in the world, I would think: No, you're wrong. My dad is the best dad in the world. It was only later that I understood we were both right. Most of them don’t make it into history books, but there are heroes all around us.

Helen Peters is the author of The Secret Hen House Theatre (Nosy Crow)