Sunday January 1, 2006
Nanny to keep kids in line
TOTS TO TEEN
By DAPHNE LEE
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In Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, the author reveals his foolproof technique for getting his family to buy him exactly the gifts he wants: he tailors his requests in such a way that each family member is encouraged to spend time in their favourite store.
This would work with me – anything to spend even more time in a book shop! And of course, there’s the added pleasure buying books as gifts brings. At Christmas and on my birthday, I even buy myself presents. This Christmas, it was the 100th anniversary edition of E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children and Rene Goscinny’s Nicholas.
One of my oldest friends (we have known one another for 27 years, and been close for 25) got me the complete Nurse Matilda by Christianna Brand, illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. Bloomsbury recently reissued the three books in the series. They are Nurse Matilda (ISBN: 0-747-57675-0), Nurse Matilda Goes to Town (ISBN: 0-747-57677-7) and Nurse Matilda Goes to Hospital (ISBN: 0-747-57678-5), and you can buy them singly or as a box-set (ISBN: 0-747-58125-8), although the latter is not yet available locally.
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Anyway, you can get a three-in-one edition of the books, published, also by Bloomsbury, under the title Nanny McPhee: The Collected Tales of Nurse Matilda (ISBN: 0-747-57899-0). It has the most awful cover (thankfully, though, all the original inside-illustrations are there), but if you enjoyed the film, you might prefer it to the original covers drawn by Ardizzone.
Now he is a genius illustrator. His pictures look as though they were drawn by someone who was relaxing in the garden with a sketch pad and a lemonade, and all the while, chuckling gently to himself. His characters look like they might scurry off the page and you can almost hear them laugh and chatter. It’s like you’ve come upon magically animated pictures and the figures are holding themselves still for fear that their secret may be discovered!
By the way, Brand and Ardizzone are cousins and the Nurse Matilda stories were originally told to them by their grandmother. My beautiful new copies of the books (pocket-size hardbacks, with dust jackets and gold-tooling) feature pictures of both the author and illustrator as children.
If you are fond of Mary Poppins, you will like Nurse Matilda. I prefer her as I find Mary Poppins a little too chirpy, and I like the children in Brand’s books. They are so naughty, so inventively bad, that their wickedness may serve as an inspiration for some.
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