The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark

Re-reading children’s books as an adult is often something of a revelation. Often, the revelation is simply that the whole adult thing is actually a bit of a cover, which can be blown by a few well-chosen quotes from a mournful toy grey donkey, and you have to admit to yourself that being paid to sit at a desk all day is all very well, but in all honesty you’d rather be out playing Pooh Sticks. At other times you are taken aback by the sheer banality of the content, and begin to understand why your dad suddenly found something pressing he had to go and do – usually in the shed – when you asked if you could read “Where’s Spot?” together for the fiftieth time. (I’m not sure why they had such a pressing need to know where Spot was in the first place.) And sometimes the revelation is that actually there’s something rather clever – or, more often than not, rather rude – that you never noticed as a child and that was probably put in there to make the lives of the adults who read the books to the children marginally less tedious.

There are quite a few books from my childhood that have the first effect on me, and whose glories far outweigh those in the likes of Harry Potter, which I never really got into, not least because J. K. Rowling’s propensity for adverbs got more than a little irritating after a while. (Have you not noticed that in those books nobody ever just says anything? Everything has to be said casually, or urgently, or sharply, or coldly...) To name but a few, if you’ve never discovered Allan Ahlberg’s “Please Mrs Butler” or anything by Shirley Hughes (gorgeous drawings that look like places where real children live, as opposed to those perfect 1930s detached houses that came complete with a garage and a dog called Pat) I urge you to go and borrow them from your local library while you still can. Then of course there was the real Winnie the Pooh, which was far, far funnier than Disney’s poor yet popular imitation, especially when read on a cassette by Alan Bennett, and includes lines like “You can’t help respecting anybody who can spell Tuesday, even if he doesn’t spell it right.”

But there’s one book I’ve always loved more than any other, and judging by the outpourings on Facebook lots of other people agree with me – “The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark”. If you have no idea what I’m talking about I recommend you to go away and read it or, better still, get Maureen Lipman to read it for you (not in person – she’s probably quite expensive – but you can get it on CD in Waterstones for a fiver). Basically, it tells the story of Plop the baby barn owl (and where can you go wrong with a name like Plop?) who is (there’s a clue in the title, folks) afraid of the dark. So his mother sends him off on his own – in the daytime when they’re asleep – to find out all about the dark, in frankly a shocking display of owlet neglect that would have avian social services flocking to the nest these days. This premise thus established it’s easier to imagine a tiresomely predictable chain of events, at the end of which, lo and behold, Plop decides he does like the dark after all. And there is a bit of that at times. Fortunately for Plop, it so happens that everybody he meets seems to have an almost fetishistic love of the dark and absolutely no qualms about meeting a talking owl. Not one of them says “Yeah, I see what you mean, dark’s quite scary cos you might get mugged and that”. Instead they babble on about fireworks and stargazing and Father Christmas. Similarly Plop fortuitously stumbles upon lots of nice, wholesome people, and not the sort of people you might routinely expect to be hanging around in the dark. Jill Tomlinson might well add a touch of realism to the whole story by having Plop meet teenagers who, far from getting their kicks playing hide and seek in the woods and singing round a campfire are sitting on the wall of the local garage slowly drinking themselves into oblivion with a bottle of White Lightning. But she doesn’t, and, pleasingly, she mitigates the whole “this book is going to teach you something” with some lines so sweetly funny I (much to F’s annoyance, as he was trapped in the car with the CD playing) let out a delighted “awww!” every time I heard them. They include “I don’t think owls have those. Not barn owls, anyway,” and (Plop’s only a baby, you see, and he can’t really fly yet) “he closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and fell of his branch”. It occurred to me that this is a book I’ve never seen dramatised on TV, yet I have far more visual images from it than from many that have.

Anyway, I’ve rambled long enough and I’ve proven, as per the start of this post, that the whole adult thing is just an elaborate yet flimsy cover, and one day people will find me out and realise I’ve just been masquerading as an adult all this time, it’s just that these days I have a husband and gym membership and I drink coffee and real ale and other such things that denote grown-up status. In case you were wondering, I am actually going to give the CD to my 5-year-old niece, in the hope she’ll enjoy it as much as me. But it’s going on my ipod first...