Happy ever after?

By Nick Swarbrick

For some time I have been intrigued by the stories not told in books written with children in mind (I’ll use the shorthand “children’s literature” from now on): the author (and sometimes the reader) consider what happens before a story starts, what happens alongside and afterwards. In some books these “beyond the text” narratives are hardly dealt with at all, and characters emerge like Athene from the brow of Zeus, fully formed. It can work well: the child reader particularly perhaps invests in a child they might assume to be like themselves. Often the characters are introduced and then bits and pieces of their lives are dropped in. This too works well (if done sensibly), fleshing out details of the character as needed. Rarely, however, do we see this detail in the minor characters, and we are often left at the end of a book with “that’s all right then:” justice is served, wrongs put to rights and “all manner of thing shall be well.”

Folktales, because the characterisation operates on a very different level, can sometimes have a sudden ending that is unsatisfactory in terms of modern structure: characters are set up, have an adventure or resolve a crisis and go away, go home, marry a prince or princess and live happily ever after. It seems to me that these stories have broadly the themes of return and resolution (often retribution). This kind of traditional tale may raise eyebrows as we read them today, but the point is that the curtain falls on a happy scene.

But what about afterwards? How long is “happy ever after” anyway? Ever strikes me as the problem here: per omnia saecula saeculorum is not how mortals live.

Sometimes, when picking up the “afterwards,” stories end with a challenge: The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff ends with the responsibility laid on the protagonist (and by implication the reader) that it is “for us to keep something burning to carry what light we can forward into the darkness and the wind” (I have blogged about it here); similarly Susan Cooper’s sequence The Dark is Rising ends with the charge “you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you.” So it is up to survivors and their descendents to make sense of it all, to take on the lessons learned. Peter Dickinson’s stories of the development of the first humans in Africa, The Kin, ends with a similar message – but of course the “for ever” includes us as readers, knowing the “hopes and fears of all the years” of humanity.

Although fiction of a very different kind, there is something of a parallel with A A Milne: at the end of The House at Pooh Corner, Pooh’s world does come to an end: Christopher Robin has the burden of knowing that he is growing up and away from his nursery companions (the “Lords of the Nursery” in the poignant Milne Poem Forgotten) “looking out over the world and wishing it wouldn’t stop” (NB: this was an uncomfortable issue for Christopher as he grew up, as he records). Yet here, too, the author steps back from complete loss: Pooh Bear becomes the icon for a childhood largely lost, yet retained in a parallel world of memory, so that “in that enchanted place on top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.” It may be a fond wish of the author that his imagination will continue to colour his child’s life or a plea from the author to adult and child readers to retain something of the imagination and innocence of the Hundred Acre Wood – but whichever it is, in Milne’s world destruction is never that total.

While death is present in challenging, even nihilistic ways (compare Ehrlbruch’s meditative Death Duck and Tulip and Brooks’ brutal Bunker Diary), it is rare for a book to deal with the end of all things explicitly. One book, Hiawyn Oram’s Angry Arthur does so – or at least uses the imagery of destruction to describe a child whose emotions are raging: at the end, he is in bed, alone on a fragment of earth floating in space, his violent emotions subsiding, but unable to remember what caused his tantrum. Parents gone, world shattered. While it might be read as comic hyperbole, this has always struck me as an imperfect way to look at children’s uncomfortable emotions: almost completely destructive, with no way back. It does, however, raise the question of what will the end of my family look like? What will the end of the world be like – and what comes after it? The issue is addressed in school and in popular science, but the probable absence of a human audience makes it an unlikely topic.

In the book that first let me encounter the idea of total destruction, Comet In Moominland, the whole world is threatened with a fiery comet that will hit the earth on the seventh of October. “Mamma will know what to do,” Moomin comforts himself, although it is plain that a comet’s impact will be cataclysmic in a way that no Mamma will be able to lessen. In the finale, the cast of characters are gathered and are kept safe in a cave as the comet passes close by but does not hit Moominvalley. The threat of the comet (which may stand in the Moomin world for the Bomb?) passes away, and the horror of its near-destruction of the world is replaced by a restoration: a world back in the order it should have, an invitation to explore it. Mamma did indeed know what to do, although there is a concerted effort by everyone to bring them to safety. It is not the animals that keep themselves safe but a natural disaster that does not come about. The story therefore ends with an opening of a new view: “I think everything is still there… Come with me and have a look.” The new view takes Moomin, his family and friends into new adventures: total destruction has not come about, and the world is full of possibility.

Prior to his retirement, Nick Swarbrick worked in the School of Education at Oxford Brookes University, where he lead the teams for Education Studies and Early Childhood. His research interests are in children’s literature, spirituality and outdoor education and he blogs regularly as https://nicktomjoestory.news.blog/