Tag Archives: children’s books

KSP’s The Wild Oats of Han

16 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by in book review, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Katharine Susannah Prichard's writings

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I’m trying to read the fiction of Katharine Susannah Prichard at least roughly in order, but of course that’s never as straightforward as it sounds. The Wild Oats of Han wasn’t published until 1928, but it was actually written in 1908, meaning that perhaps I should have it read it first; I’m reading it second.

Its genre is complicated, too. It’s presented as a children’s novel, but (my 1968 edition at least) is introduced with a note from KSP saying it ‘is truly, really story’, an idiosyncratic way to say it really happened. It is perhaps a memoir of childhood written in the form of fiction. Regardless, it is beautiful.

In this book, KSP’s prose is lyrical and captures the mind of a child incredibly well. Han is a dreamy, rebellious girl, a fascinating character, a girl who ‘scarcely knew the world of the real from the world of the unreal: both were blended in the crystal of her mind.’ (16) A mentor figure, Sam the woodcutter, tells her that ‘wild oats is a crop most people sow when they live like children’. (56) (The meaning has surely narrowed over the years.) Han determinedly sows her oats, skipping school to glory in the beauty of the bush; enchanted by the circus; battling her nemesis, Miss Whittler; in love with the family and friends around her. It is episodic, each short chapter almost self-contained, with only a loose progression of the overall narrative. Things change in the last few chapters, as the circumstances of her parents (absent characters for most of the novel) impede on her idyllic life, and she must go ‘down into the great mysterious world they had talked so much of, to take her part in the joy and the labour and the sorrow of it.’ (160)

Jack Beasley comments that the novel ‘is more a story about children for adults, than for children themselves’ (A Gallop of Fire, 31), and I agree with him. Its achievement lies in its evocation of the enchanted world of a child’s mind, which is not necessarily something a child can appreciate – only adults in retrospect; it reminds me in this respect of Randolph Stow’s Merry Go Round in the Sea. Early in Wild Oats, Han comes across a cave which amazes her:

Han went to school the next day. But the smell of the hills was in her nose: it was like a taste in her mouth. Memory of the cave haunted her. She had a mind-picture of the great underground room, so vast and deep that, leaning over the edge, she could not see how far it went, only the bones glimmering on the floor in the darkness. (31)

A children’s novel would require that there really be a human skeleton to discover at the bottom of the cave, or at least that some great adventure occur there. Yet Wild Oats evokes the gap between our childhood expectations of adventure gained from stories, and the reality that adventure is more a state of mind.

On finding a book from my childhood

27 Tuesday Sep 2011

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The fiction shelves of Allanson Primary’s library took up one wall of the year 6/7 classroom. I don’t remember new books being added, but there must have been some. There were certainly never any books weeded in my years at school; if a book was in the library, you could count on it staying there.

I was obsessed with Ancient Egypt from Year 1 to Year 3, and toward the end of this, a kind girl who liked me (I, too embarrassed, shrunk away) came up to me during library time with a book I hadn’t noticed before. It had a boy lying between the legs of the Sphinx. My momentary excitement was dulled when I realised it was a novel with nothing to do with Egypt; it was set in London, and the boy was found between the legs of the replica Sphinx. I cannot remember if I even took it out, let alone whether I read it – and yet I vividly remember the girl showing me the book .

For me, it’s the books which I half remember, the ones I can’t go back to because I can’t remember the title or even the author, which have a hold on me, ghosts on the edge of memory. The few favourite childhood books which survived household purges and I still own are precious, but do not haunt.

But this time I found a ghost, found it in an opshop on Saturday, for 50c, the same edition as the one from my childhood (there are six cover variations floating around the web, none of them this one). Its title returned to me when I saw it: The Finding by Nina Bawden. It was a withdrawn library book, from another public primary school, with a borrowing card stamped with dates around the time I borrowed it.

I remember liking the cover, but now the Sphinx looks like he’s alive and it just looks so… earnest.

The first few chapters have an eerie familiarity as I read them last night, so I probably did read it. It starts woefully, with one of those terrible sentences our teachers tried to make us write in creative writing in primary school:

On the day of his Finding, the mist lay on the river; a soft, white vapour drifting on the brown Thames, lazily stirred by the slow tide of the water into smoky tendrils and curls.

But it gets much better after this, with the strange appearance of a Pentecostal tent meeting catching me offguard.

I never knew anything about Nina Bawden as a child; she occupied a good section of shelf in the library, and in that sense seemed familar but we didn’t know if these authors on the shelves were alive or dead. Born in 1925, Bawden is still alive even today, but her husband died in a train crash early this century.