A Misleading Question

Many years ago I read for the first time a novel by Noel Streatfield called Ballet Shoes, possibly the book for which she is best known. It is a story for and about children; about three girls, Pauline, Petrova and Posy Fossil, who took this surname because they were all adopted by a kindly archeologist, Great Uncle Matthew or GUM. It tells of their childhoods, as part of an oddly random but united family obliged to make a living. The living they make, in their various ways, is on the stage. Some years ago when I was working as a librarian in the National Library Service I found another novel by Noel Streatfield called The Whicharts, which tells the same story as Ballet Shoes, but tells it for adults. The three girls are now revealed as half-sisters, all illegitimate daughters of a charming but irresponsible, well-born Englishman. They are cared for by a woman (the Sylvia of Ballet Shoes), who had page 8 loved him deeply in spite of his facile character and who grows to love his daughters as if they are her own. He dies leaving them in difficult circumstances and in an effort to make a reasonable middle-class living, the girls become involved, as in the children's book, in life on the wicked stage. The story pursues them through childhood and adolescence, tells us how the girl who corresponds to Pauline in Ballet Shoes is seduced, I think by a theatrical director, and how the one who corresponds to Petrova actually locates their mother after their loving guardian dies, and finds herself shyly welcomed by a woman as odd and adventurous as she is herself. The family in this book is not called the Fossils, but the Whicharts (a name which also involves a play on words however, coming as it does from their mishearing of something in the Lord's Prayer, Our father, which art in heaven... words eloquent to children who had been told, on debatable evidence I must say, that heaven was where their father was). I was fascinated by all this new information which suggested that Noel Streatfield certainly knew more about the family than she had revealed in her children's book and I gave The Which-arts to a friend of mine who had enjoyed Ballet Shoes. She read it and, feeling betrayed in some intangible way, became angry. 'It just made me wonder how much truth we tell children?' she said. 'How much should we tell?'

She was asking leading questions, but questions which are also misleading. It is an old debate with many answers. For instance I don't think Noel Streatfield would have been allowed to tell everything she knew about the Fossils in a children's book back in 1936, though she certainly would be permitted to tell more today, since our interpretation of childhood has altered since then. However, as an adult reading Ballet Shoes I am now always aware of that ghostly other story, that extra truth, and something about the nature of my adult experience makes me think that The Whicharts is the truer story. I think Ballet Shoes is a better book for what it is than The Whicharts for what it is, and yet for all that I feel I have unfair knowledge, for I can't help including what I know of the adult story as part of the truth of Ballet Shoes. I say to myself, 'This is what was really happening, but we couldn't tell the kids.' Unlike my friend I don't think Noel Streatfield should have either insisted on telling the full truth or not told any of it. No one tells the full truth anyway, and children's literature would have been the poorer for not having Ballet Shoes. Nevertheless, I have never forgotten my friend's question, and there is a dislocation in my feelings about it all—a sort of page 9 puzzlement which I am perhaps unfairly trying to get rid of by passing it on to others.

How much truth do we tell children? We certainly encourage them to tell all the truth themselves. I impressed on my children what my mother impressed on me, that we should always tell the truth. (Funnily enough, now they're grown up I quite often find that I wish they wouldn't tell so much, and I know my mother often wishes I would shut up.)

How much truth we choose to tell children is an important question, but not a fair one. How much truth should we tell grown-ups for that matter? After all, children often want to know about things and adults often don't. Many people want to protect the innocence of childhood but isn't it also a pity to disturb security and innocence in adulthood? Sometimes we just don't like to see people living happy lives for what we perceive as wrong reasons. We tell them the truth, as we see it, and if they choose to ignore it, we tell it again and try to force them to listen to it. This poor single word 'truth' has to bear a heavy burden. It is not fair to ask one word to do so much work when, unlike Humpty Dumpty, we exploit our labour force. We don't pay words extra when we ask them to carry a heavy weight on our behalf.