"We be of one blood, Ye and I! - The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling
When I was about five or six years old and still living in the little yellow house in New Phila my mother was cleaning out the closet that was just inside the front door. On a high shelf she found an old cardboard box with a musty, dusty smell and as she removed something out of it, she became terribly upset. I remember sitting on the floor and watching her and I believe that she cried. I asked her what was the matter and she held out a book (the cause of the musty smell) and said that it had been hers when she was a little girl and that it had gotten damp in the cardboard box in the closet and was ruined.
When my mother was a very small girl she had lived in Cleveland in an apartment building (which always sounded very glamorous to me until I was older and had lived in several apartment buildings myself). One of the neighbors there was a little girl whose mother was an English war bride and when that girl was invited to my mother's birthday party she brought a very English and very wonderful gift: The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling. This was the musty book my mother cried over so many years later when I was a little girl myself .
The next holiday ( I think it was Christmas) I was given the book in the picture above. (This is the same edition. I was to become very fond of the Illustrated Junior Library).
Not only did it contain amazing stories from far away and long ago, with big, juicy difficult words in them, but it had both pen and ink illustrations every few pages and COLOR PLATES. This warrants a capitalization because although I was still reading picture books and enjoying them both alone and with my younger brother, I had really already come to feel that 'grown-up' books with big chunks was words were where the action was.
But secretly I still sometimes missed illustrations. Here was proof that you really could have it all- big blocks of tricky words, black and white drawings AND color pictures, usually printed on different, thicker paper and referred to in the front of the book as 'color' plates', often with handy page numbers so you could look them up. Neat-o! There was also usually one color plate in the front of the book, called importantly, and sensibly enough, the 'FRONSTIPIECE'. Wow. I had hit the book bigtime.
The Jungle Book is filled with wonderful stories, songs and poems. The main part of the book is about Mowgli the little Indian boy who is brought up by the Wolf Pack in the jungle with the giant Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther as his teachers. If you have only seen the Disney cartoon or stop action movie, don't kid yourself, you don't know the Jungle Book. They are insipid and leave so much out.
I remember my mother reading this book aloud to me and then reading it for myself, much as I had done with Charlotte's Web. But this book was bigger, denser, older. You had the feeling these stories were written for anyone, not just kids. But when Mowgli learned the Jungle Law and how to let other residents of the Jungle know his kinship with them, I felt it too. I would sit in my room, looking at my flowered wallpaper and say the words to myself over and over. I practiced hissing, barking, meowing and speaking, "We be of one blood, ye and I!" in every animal tongue I could think of, just on the off case that it would one day save me from a hawk or a wolf or maybe just a stray dog.
But as much as I loved the Mowgli stories and others in the Jungle Book, like the White Seal, it was the tale of the mongoose Rikki Tikki Tavi that won my heart over and over again. There is a Ranklin-Bass cartoon version of this story that actually isn't too bad and I remember seeing it on TV at some point and being amazed that other people shared my favorite story and had made a cartoon of it.
The plucky mongoose who is rescued from a flood by a little boy and saves the family from the wrath of the cobras living in their garden both terrified and thrilled me. To this day I have a hatred of snakes and it may very well have started with the wicked Nag and Nagina. But even more so, this story took me to another place and time without me quite realizing how it was done.
I did not know why the Boy and his Mother and Father were living in India. They lived in a bungalow, which after some reading I realized was a kind of house- it had a bathroom with a tiled floor and a dining room and so on. The garden had something in it called a gazebo, which my mother explained was like an outdoor room for sitting in, with a roof and railings but no walls. The family ate breakfast there and was menaced by the cobra and saved by Rikki Tikki Tavi. There was so much to learn and love in these stories about loyalty and strength and helping your friends and family. Also about greed and selfish acts and going your own way. I will always love this book and love my mother for sharing it with me. It meant something special to her as a child and then to me, and to my son, and so on it goes.
For my seventh birthday I remember getting three things: My Dorothy Hamill skating doll, who stood on a pedestal in her skating outfit with her gold medal and could be posed into different skating positions ( I could not skate, but I did have Ms. Hamill's haircut, a round bowl cut which provoked my father, seeing me only from the back when coming home from work one day to ask "Who is that little boy watching TV out there?"), a white clock with a flowered face that GLOWED IN THE DARK (a faint orange glow, whose light I would fall to sleep by well through high school) and a book of fairy tales.
This was not your average little kid book either. I don't know whether my mother was consciously challenging me to stretch my reading abilities, which were already well above the regular level,
(Note- I'm not trying to brag here, I just really liked to read and happened to pick it up really fast. I am still a very speedy reader and able to retain almost everything I read that is WRITTEN, as compared to things I hear in a lecture. That's just always been how I am.)
Or my mom may have just been trying to keep up and give me things that would interest me. Or maybe she just picked books that she thought were beautiful, as they so often were, and she wanted to give me that exposure to beauty early in my life. For whatever reason, I can honestly say that as a child, I loved every book my mother ever got me. The Fairy Book by 'The Author of John Halifax, Gentleman' and illustrated by Warwick Goble, was no exception.
These were complicated, old-fashioned stories and fairy tales with beautiful watercolor painting (and a frontispiece!) throughout.The weird title and authorship was fascinating. It contained some stories I had heard before, such as Beauty in the Beast (see the illustration above), The Sleeping Beauty In The Wood, and The Frog Prince, but they were more complicated and a little scarier than I had remembered them. But this book was also filled with strange fairy tales I had never heard of: The Iron Stove, Prince Cherry, The White Cat and The Fair One With The Golden Locks, just to name a few.
I poured over these stories. They required real concentration to read, although once I got the hang of them. I could see similarities in them and also see how the versions I had previously been told seemed watered-down, weaker, not as intense or exciting. J.R.R. Tolkien once likened fairy tales to old furniture, put away and relegated as only fit for the nursery once the adults had tired of them. I think he was right about this and I do think that not all little children would like or even be able to handle some of these older, darker versions of common fairy tales. But I ate them up as a child and thrilled to the thought of evil stepmothers who shut up princesses in iron stoves or princes who were kidnapped and girls who had to use their wits and wander the world to rescue them.
My mother also gave me another book of tales, The Moon Ribbon and other Stories by Jane Yolen, illustrated by David Pallidini.
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