Page 54 (2/2)

t deals with the same sort of eerie and unfathomable events and does it in a manner I have never seen matched by any male short story writer

I have no doubts at all where women stand when it comes to one of the most important facets of all creative literature I mean of course children’s books You may scream all you like when you read that statement, and I do not say it because I sometimes write children’s books myself I say it because I am convinced that they are one of the most important All other forms of fiction are written purely to divert and entertain the adult mind Children’s bookselse at the sa They teach him to be literate, they teach him vocabulary and nowadays they teach hi the ti television

The nored by literary azines, by Sunday newspaper reviewers and by the so-called literary establishiven the most attention of all, then adult novels, then poetry Children’s books are only noticed every now and again And yet – now listen carefully please – and yet, let any of these high-blown authors or critics attempt to write a children’s book, I mean a fine children’s book that children will fall in love with and which will endure through the years, and he will almost certainly fail

I am fairly sure that it ischildren’s book than a fine and enduring novel My reason forthis contentious statement is as follows How many adult novels are written every year that will still be read widely twenty years later? Probably about half a dozen How many children’s books are written every year that will still be read widely and avidly twenty years later? Possibly only one

Youwriters do not bother even to try to write children’s books You would be wrong Most of theo, a New York publisher called Crowell-Collier had what they thought was a brilliant idea They decided to invite all theworld to write a children’s story They would teh fee They would then combine all the results in one volume and they’d have a classic on their hands

The invitations went out, and because of the high fee and the relative shortness of the task, all the writers accepted These were big naiants of the literary world I won’t mention who they were but you would know them all

The stories came in I saw each one of them Only one writer, Robert Graves, had any conception of horite for children The rest of the stories were guaranteed to anaesthetize in two ot hold of them They were unpublishable The project was abandoned and the publishers lost a good deal of money

When it co classic children’s books, woood at novels, they are better still at ghost stories, but they are best of all at children’s books You have Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden You have Beatrix Potter You have P L Travers’s Mary Poppins and Dodie Sren’s Pippi Longstocking, E Nesbit’s The Railway Children, Mary Norton’s The Borrowers and quite a few more Now these are classics, and by that I es of six and ten in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and Japan will have read them That is many millions I venture to say it is several millions more than the number of adults alive today who have read, let us say, a fine Graham Greene novel or a Nabokov

The writer of a classic children’s book can go into any school or any home where there are children in any of the countries I have mentioned and he or she will be known and welcomed I don’t ood novels are read I mean any home None of the entrenched literary establishments of London, New York or Paris realize the power of a children’s book once children have fallen in love with it Or if they do, they don’t want to adeneration of children continue to read a classic children’s book over and over again and school teachers keep it always in their classrooms

I have wandered away froize for this, but I have wanted for a long time to have my little say about children’s books and especially to pay tribute to the part that wo the classic library

But to go back to Eddie Knopf and the great television ghost series By now the series had been officially christened ‘Ghost Time’ My twenty-four choices were sent off to California and were read with iuls out there, as if we had a winner on our hands All we had to do noas to ured that a series of chilling ghost stories flashed on to the television screens fros when it was pitch dark outside would give the entire nation the creeps No one would dare to go to bed and turn out the light afterwards Old ladies living alone would be found dead fro Texans would quiver in their high leather boots and fire their six-shooters at the screen to silence it for ever Children watching the shoould be afraid of the dark for the rest of their lives Psychiatrists would double their business The Church would protest And everyone would watch our show every week It was a heady prospect

The first step was to make the pilot filood This is the filencies and to the advertisers the at it they either turn thu up the millions that are required to make the whole series The pilot indicates the flavour and quality of the series and gives a fair idea of what the other twenty-three episodes will be like

So a really good strong story was essential for the pilot Out ofof Alfred Wadhaood story, and it would dramatize nicely

I wrote the screenplay The film was shot at Elstree Studios with a first-rate director and top actors, though I’ve forgotten who they were Eood introductory thereat pilot filood) was flown to America and then it was shown to the powerful hty decisions

It was a disaster The filht But we had made a terrible mistake We had chosen the one story that no American television netould dare to show It dealt, you see, with Roman Catholicism, and the whole plot of the story revolves around the fact that a priest must never, under any circu confession Alfred Wadhaed He protests his innocence but no one believes hi is to take place, another oes to the prison priest and confesses that it was he and not poor Alfred Wadhas him to own up He refuses He also reminds the priest very forcibly that he cannot break the secrecy rule of the confessional The priest, bound by his religious vows, is therefore unable to save the wrong host of Alfred Wadhas to the wretched priest

You can see it’s a good story But the sight of it on the television screen would be guaranteed to inflame the hearts of millions of Catholics across the United States The advertising men and the television bosses who saw the pilot were apoplectic They threw it out and refused to have anything host series venture I have still not quite got over the shock of that rejection and that is probably why I have not included Alfred Wadham in this collection