Let me take you to a Social Work Show I attended in Manchester. The majority of exhibitors have a direct link to social work – local authorities recruiting staff, organisations offering training and career development support, even a business for forensically testing hair for signs of drugs and alcohol. (And yes, the writer in me couldn’t resist asking them MANY questions.)
I look for the BookTrust stall. I imagine that social services professionals are confused by a reading charity nestled amongst the recruitment brochures. In the afternoon, I deliver a seminar about the benefits of reading for children facing challenging circumstances. Attendees are definitely confused by that, because only ten people come! (May I extend my heartfelt thanks to every single one of you!) But the people who are curious, who ask BookTrust staff questions and come to my talk, go away understanding the power of books to enhance – or undermine – vulnerable children’s sense of self.
How did we convince them of the power of reading when adults so often forget the impact of their own childhood stories? After all, books can’t provide vulnerable children with safe homes or a supportive family. But books can make children feel valued, unique and important. Or not.
I have never lived in a typical family. My parents split up before I was born. They weren’t married – children ‘born out of wedlock’ in the 1960s were often adopted because of the stigma. I even have a special short birth certificate to save my blushes. My mother was training to be nurse, and although she was part of a large family, her siblings and parents all lived in Trinidad. I was privately fostered by a white family in Whitehawk, Brighton from the age of four months before returning to live with my mother when I was four. Shortly afterwards, we moved in with my mother’s Italian boyfriend, later my stepfather, and the man who will always be my dad.
And what has this to do with books? Aunty Phyllis, my foster mum, taught me to read from a young age and joined me up to the library. I was a big reader before I started school. I consumed every book that came my way, flying in wishing chairs, confronting smugglers in beach coves, talking to the animals with Doctor Dolittle. Except…
Except that the original Doctor Dolittle books, written and illustrated by Hugh Lofting in 1921, contain deeply racist depictions of African people. I have strong memories of seeing these images as a child and trying to understand why a picture of a person that was supposed to be like me was so offensive. Lofting creates a character called Prince Bumpo, a racist caricature, who is told he must bleach himself white if he wants to win the princess’s hand. I read this when I was six.
I grew up in a world where racism was explicit, both in real life and on primetime TV and in the media. Books reinforced the idea that children like me – Black children, children in multi-ethnic families, children who didn’t live with their mother and father – were ‘wrong’. I could never insert myself as a Black child into my childhood books – I had to pretend that I was a white child, in a white family with married parents. I had to bat away some of the racist slurs that would sometimes surface in those books. It was me that was wrong by being hurt by them.
Children looking at mainstream society from the edges are often aware of their marginalisation, perhaps before they can fully articulate it. I was. As they grow older, they are challenged by the stereotypes directed against them, while tackling their own unique obstacles. That was true for me too. I believe that it isn’t coincidence that the professionals who came to my talk were mostly people of colour who may have experienced the pain and fury of racism.
The lasting effect of those books for me was that I internalised the racism and only wrote stories with white characters until I was in my 30s. The idea that children of colour didn’t deserve to be in the foreground of stories was so deeply embedded inside of me.