What do nine year old girls like reading about?

Before I start I should say that this post is the result of chatting and reading with my nine year old daughter, Bella, rather than any extensive scientific research. Still, for what it's worth:

1. Food.
    Jaqueline Wilson knows this. Her books are full of food descriptions which Bella trots out in detail (with the implication, more often than not, that it would be nice if I'd roll up my sleeves and get replicating): "pizza triangles and quiche fingers and little sausages and amazing chocolate cake and a sponge with pink icing too and ice cream with special strawberry sauce."* It's the way J.W. details all her feasts that really seems to tickle Bella's imagination.
    Then there's made-up food. What could be more enticing than something that doesn't actually exist - like the B.F.G's frobscottle - whose scrumptidiliumptiousness can never be tested, and therefore never disproved? Narnian turkish delight has the same fascination - and the fact that it is Forbidden Fruit only adds to the allure.
    Foul foods are also of interest - the B.F.G's snozzcumber springs to mind, or Horrid Henry's gloop. The next best thing to literary deliciousness is literary vileness.

2. Horrible people.
    Obviously. There's nothing like a villain - or at least, someone unlikeable - to get a story rolling. A lot of Belle's favourite stories follow the Cinderella model: the tormented or overlooked nobody who triumphs against the forces of evil (whether that's the terrifying Other Mother in Coraline or the merely snotty Ethel in The Worst Witch). More often than not it's obvious whose side you're meant to be on - morality isn't very nuanced in books for nine year olds, and I suppose that's fair enough.
    Having said that, my daughter's feelings for her Enid Blyton books stray into the realms of moral ambiguity. She loves Malory Towers and The Famous Five with a passion, but she manages to do so without adopting the Enid Blyton world view. In fact, she (Bella) can get quite annoyed with the 'good' (i.e. insufferably priggish) characters whom E.B. is clearly championing.
    "See what's made Gwendoline such an idiot?" says one of the author-approved Malory Towers girls, on witnessing Gwendoline's tearful farewell to her mother at the start of her first term. "Her mother! Well, I'm glad mine is sensible. Yours looked jolly nice too - cheerful and jolly."
    Maybe, as nice as it is to have your own thoughts and feelings echoed by a favourite book, it's fun to be outraged?

3. The Olden Days.
    Until quite recently the Olden Days was, for Bella, a slightly unbelievable era comprising Henry the Eighth, the-childhoods-of-grandparents, dinosaurs, Romans - and probably some other stuff - in no particular order. Quite vaguely conceived. But that's no longer true. She's starting to take an interest in history, and that's because she's been reading stories (fictional and non-fictional) about people who lived in the past. The Railway Children, Little House on the Prairie, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Kaspar Prince of Cats....
    It's vertigo-inducing (and not just for a nine year old) to realise that things so distant that they might as well be made up...are not made up, and that real people, as real as herself, lived through them. Bella whizzes round a version of nineteenth century England with Jacqueline Wilson's Hetty Feather series and the fact that she's being educated passes her by entirely - it's the story that matters.   
    Everything about The Olden Days seems bigger and bolder - that must be part of the attraction too. The Olden Days were grimmer (freak shows, orphanages, consumption, rationing), but also more glamorous (the dresses, the carriages, the balls), whilst somehow managing to be cosier too (think of all those buttered crumpets and steam trains).

    As I say, this is an idiosyncratic and by no means comprehensive list of things that Bella enjoys reading about. I'll probably keep changing and adding to it (until I notice that I've edited it out of existence, and that what I've got in its place is a wholly fresh post called What do ten year old girls like reading about?)

(*That's a quote from The Dare Game - A Tracy Beaker Story. The Malory Towers quote is from First Term at Malory Towers)

Chagall No. 5

 

It was late July, I was fifteen years old and the art teacher was handing out summer holiday homework. I'm sure I heard her say, "Elizabeth, I want you to do your project on Chanel."

"Right." I nodded meekly, wondering how my friends had managed to land Bonnard and Cezanne while I'd got ladies' perfume and the little black dress. It didn't seem very me. Fortunately, but embarrassingly (oh, how the art teachers laughed) this misunderstanding was cleared up before the end of term, and I spent my August collecting Chagall postcards, reading one of those great big glorious Taschen books and copying the colour plates with oil pastels (albeit in a rather incongruous spirit of carefulness). I've loved Chagall ever since, in the way you only love the things you fall for in your teens.

I spent a happy couple of hours at Tate Liverpool in July, wandering round the Chagall:Modern Master exhibition. I don't know if 'Chagallian' is an adjective but if it is I want to be it (as a writer...as a person). To be Chagallian is (off the top of my head) to be lyrical, magical, colourful, joyful, nostalgic, exotic, homely, musical, whimsical, insouciant and kind. (Qualities I would earnestly strive for, if earnest striving wasn't a bit unChagallian.)

I found this painting, The Red Jew (1915), very moving. I'd always skimmed past it in books, thinking that he looked a bit of a grump, unlike Chagall's usual gentle rabbis. But then the audio-guide (which, by the by, is informative and to the point, like the exhibition itself : long enough to absorb; short enough that neither brain nor feet are aching before it's through) pointed out that The Red Jew's divided face - one melancholy eye open, the other shut - shows a life lived in both prayerful introspection and engagement with the world. I looked again and bought the postcard in the museum shop. He's propped up on my desk even as we speak, and I can't get him to do the querulous look anymore.

Chagall:Modern Master is on at Tate Liverpool until October 6th.
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/chagall-modern-master

The Sea, The Sea

 

There's a row of old fishermen's cottages not far from the stretch of Manx coast where I took this photo. In an ideal world (not this one) I would own one and retreat there to do my writing. I went inside one of them recently and had a look round, so I know exactly where my desk would be positioned in relation to the wood-burning stove and tiny, briny windows.

It would be difficult to live there and not be a writer of books peopled by maritime ghosts. The woman who owned it (as if to prove my point) said that this particular row of houses was notorious, two or three hundred years ago, as the haunt of prostitutes, smugglers and brewers of illicit hooch. More than likely there are purses of doubloons behind loose bricks at the back of the fireplace, or at the very least a map of Treasure Island. It was a dark cottage - the walls were fortress-thick and wonky, with inexplicable niches carved out here and there - but with the sea glowing through every south-facing window wasn't going to bother me.

I do know, really, deep down, that I'm not going to metamorphose into some kind of Daphne Du Maurier/Herman Melville hybrid just by transporting my desk to a seaside cottage. I'd probably sit there drumming my fingers on a blank sheet of paper, my shoulders sagging from inspiration-overload. I do know. It's difficult to shake the suspicion though (especially as the composition of this final sentence has just been interrupted by my children wanting to know whether we've got any peanut butter) that all I need to be a top-notch writer is a particular kind of quiet, a particular view, and a house of a certain vintage that's mine, all mine...