Is it not strange that some of the greatest writers of stories for children never had children of their own? Think of the British Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), author of Alice in Wonderland and The Hunting of the Snark, or of the Danish Hans Christian Andersen, author of classics such as The Little Mermaid, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Hardy Tin Soldier, The Ugly Duckling and The Snow Queen. Both remained unmarried and childless. Jacob Grimm, one of the two Grimm Brothers who collected and rewrote German folk stories into immortal fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel, also never married. And when Dr Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel), the American author of illustrated classics like Horton Hatches the Egg and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, was asked why he and his wife did not have children, he is reported to have replied, "You have 'em; I'll entertain 'em."
I cannot claim to belong to that club, having written The Glum Peacock not for other people's entertainment but for that of my own children. That it got published as a book is, of course, another matter. As someone who started off publishing poetry and 'serious fiction' (novels like The Bus Stopped and Filming: A Love Story), I was not expected to write The Glum Peacock, which is a simple fable in rhyming, loosely metered verse for young children. Of course, that is not the way I see it. I never set out to write 'serious' or 'high' literature. For me, there are only two kinds of literature – good and bad – though both come in various shades, and one need not like all shades of good literature. For me, good literature is further divided into what my friend, the French writer Sébastien Doubinsky, conveniently dubs 'soft' and 'hard' literature. Hard literature, he claims, engages with the world, literature and language in creative and, at times, radical ways. Soft literature, by inference, is competent stuff that never pushes the boundaries of the established – in the world or in language.
One can claim that good children's literature also comes in these two varieties – soft and hard. Soft children's literature has a soporific effect on the child: it is meant to make Jack a 'good' boy and go to bed on time, as the fantasy writer Michael Moorcock put it in a recent interview. But the kind of children's literature that I (and Moorcock) like is meant to make Jack and Jill engage with their world, learn to think for themselves, and live out their lives in creative and satisfying ways. That is the kind of children's literature I try to read out to my children, and to create for them. This is not to be confused with moralising or dourness; good 'hard' literature is always 'fun' in an intelligent way, and children's literature doubly so. Life and the world can be hard and 'unfair', but they are also fun and exciting; in any case, they are what we have. One of the worst crimes parents are capable of is depriving their children of their inherent sense of wonder and excitement at being alive. Hence, all good writers know that seriousness is not dourness, just as 'fun' is not empty-headedness.
Dad, the author
Even if I had been the dopy-surly, highbrow kind of spoilsport author, I am sure parenthood would not have permitted to continue. Parenthood does not involve just the birth of a child – it involves your own rebirth. As a father who shares equally in child-rearing with the mother of my children, I have had to re-invent myself too – sometimes by discovering aspects of my personality that had been neglected since childhood and sometimes by inventing new ones. My parents and aunts love to inflict on unwary visitors some fairly standard family anecdotes about how I was such an avid listener of stories as a podgy child that I would refuse to go to sleep as long as a story was being narrated, and would throw a tantrum if it was discontinued. Evidently, I had a voracious appetite for stories and would demand a new one as soon as the old one ended. As a parent, I had to rediscover this part of myself – and I had to invent a new part. For, suddenly, I was no longer the listener; I was the storyteller.