Goat Goes to Playgroup

by Julia Donaldson and Nick Sharratt

I am ambivalent about Nick Sharratt. Sometimes his illustrations seem garish, cartoony and a bit like shouting. There is not much depth, it’s all about FUN! Everything is primary-coloured and obvious.

Julia Donaldson is of course the author of The Gruffalo, which H and I are alone in the universe of books in not really liking, I think. Maybe he just needs to be older? Perhaps I need to have a better imagination?

H vehemently disagrees, though, on Nick Sharratt, who is his hero. He would read You Choose and Just Imagine on a loop, every day, for his entire life, foregoing playground, football, friends, education and career path.

Goat Goes to Playgroup is one we both like, though. Goat is gentle and sweet and hideously vulnerable. He is one to make every mother’s insides contract. Joyous, naughty, different than all the other kids, constantly having accidents, too much energy to settle to anything.

Circle Time comes and Goat is over the other side of the room on his own, climbing the climbing frame, whilst the others politely sit, assimilating knowledge and getting ahead.  Goat, you are fine now and having a monstrously wonderful time at nursery, but what will happen to you when they start measuring your progress and testing you every week and trying to standardise you into a British education system goat?

The last page is lovely. The mums and dads come to pick up their offspring, and their faces are filled with that look parents get where they are trying to drink their child in as deeply as they can after being away from them. Mummy Goat is jumping out of her skin with joy to see her naughty little boy, and he is looking so sweet and dopey and innocent.

Very very sweet and nicely funny is our verdict, and definitely the pick of the Sharratts we have had so far.

H’s comment: ‘He needs his wellie boots’ (Goat wets his pants, causing a puddle to form. H does not comprehend at all that this is embarrassing, and cannot fathom the two pink spots on Goat’s cheeks. He does comprehend that if you wish to be in a puddle, you are supposed to have your wellies on, however, and so wisely advises Goat upon each reading).

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Dinosaur Dig by Penny Dale

Dinosaur Dig by Penny Dale

Here’s one that H chose himself. I tried vigorously to dissuade him as the marriage of dinosaur with digger was, to be polite, an unpromising prospect. It also seemed a bit wrong at first glance for an author to unite these two subjects, simultaneously so beloved of toddler boys and yet so realistically unlikely ever to co-exist. It seemed a bit like offering H sugar-coated bacon or cheesy Frutellas.

Dinosaur Dig, however, is ever so gentle and funny and very subtly witty. I won’t spend long on it because it’s short and not at all complicated and you probably won’t read it that many times.

It’s all about the dinosaurs. They are a kind of scaly union of blokey builder with hyperactive toddler. Their faces have that mad joy that two year olds have while they are running and screaming. Their bodies, however, are muscly and powerful and they are clearly awesomely efficient manoeuvrers of construction machinery. They are like you, H, but they are builders too! And dinosaurs!

Then there is the climax: the dinosaurs have used their array of machines to build a sort of prehistoric stone age swimming pool that seems to have a strong Mayan influence, as well as a really good slide. This is so surreal and unexpected; pure literary genius.

H’s comment: ‘that one like Lofty!’, ‘that one like Roley!’, ‘that Fireman Sam’s hose!’ (Bob the Builder, Fireman Sam and Peppa have colonised his mind and he speaks of them all day and they people his dreams).

Mr Gumpy's Outing (John Burningham)

Ah, Mr Gumpy. Your outing presents to toddler fans the fragile joy of anticipation, the lesser pleasure of realisation, the likelihood that hopes and dreams will be trampled on by poorly behaved acquaintances, and the consolations of cake in good company.

The Mr Gumpy of the outing is a gentle and very English fellow, with a floppy hat and a faded old blazer especially for boating. A selection of animals join him for a jape on the river in his punt, culminating in the punt capsizing and everyone tipping in.

As the story opens, Mr Gumpy is situated in a landscape that is rosy and bucolic – ‘This is Mr Gumpy’ – all pastels and smiles with a rolling, well-kept lawn. Perhaps he is a country GP? A vicar?

Page two, however, and doubt creeps in. Round the back of the Gumpy mansion, where the garden ends in the river, all is murky and green. The house from the rear looks dilapidated and Gumpy is obviously lonely. Is he in fact a retired, under-occupied depressive creative type presiding over the collapse of some prestigious real estate? Does he have an up-to-date CRB? Where are the LIFEJACKETS?

Two children and a parade of beautifully drawn animals arrive one by one to solicit a ride. The rabbit is a definite rabbit, not a bunny: large, wild and powerful looking. The dog has wistful eyes and is thoughtful. The chickens have huge scratchy feet and introduce a note of yellowy sunshine.

All of the animals are given specific orders based on Mr Gumpy’s anticipation of how their naughtiness will manifest. Your toddler will love this catalogue of badness.  Finger-shaking and exaggerated sternness are recommended to the narrator.

Poor Mr Gumpy: his depressing prognosis is right in every case, and the boat is overtaken by aggression and chaos. Everyone plummets into the river. Mr Gumpy’s hat is lost, exposing a sad little bald patch.

His grumpy world view has been vindicated, however, and he is clearly pleased by that. He is able to proceed home with all the children and animals for tea. Tea is completely lovely: a cake with strawberries, a bowl of cherries, an enormous blue floral teapot. Mr Gumpy has put on a pink blazer and presides over an enormous, happy table. As with the best children’s literature, gluttonous fantasies are thus furnished to the greedy toddler. And his greedy mother.

It is a beautiful book, with the element of darkness that the best literature has. Everyone appears out of nowhere and exudes loneliness, and everyone is comforted by being together, whilst struggling to get along, because all the characters (except possibly the chickens) are rugged individualists.

The message is: expect the worse, take comfort in food, prefer the company of animals and children to that of adults.

H’s comments: Ah loike sheepie, Mummy.

The Toddler Reader Manifesto

I love reading with H, my just two-year-old. Yet I have found it hard to find books that we both like. There are lots with too much text for him; lots that are so earnest and lacking in imagination that I want to hurl them into the carpark over which our flat abuts; and lots about diggers and dinosaurs (not a bad thing but it gets a bit old).

Yet when we find a good one, it makes me so very happy. I often wonder if I have lived an overly textual life, reading and writing all the time, so that when I am exposed to an effective and artistic union of vibrant pictures with some decent text, my soul leaps like a little kitten sniffing its first anchovy.  Some authors  – Sarah Garland, John Burningham, Quentin Blake, the Ahlbergs – make me really feel more excited than is proportionate.

So, I am often telling innocent bystanders about these books, and they are clearly bored to tears, though mostly polite. Hence the blog, so that the joy can be shared among the ranks of the interested. Those who know that books are the centre of everything, and that they must not waste valuable hours of their child’s life reading anything stolid, overly worthy or drab. Those who recognise the need to obtain a good selection of books that can be read to a child at least 45 times each without vomiting (him / her or you).

Anyways, the Toddler Reader will aim to make a list of really good books for children aged around the same as my H. You can peruse it and hopefully have a chuckle and feel a little sorry for me, a former academic whose skills at draining the joy out of life through over analysis are now being given full flower in burdening the innocent heroes and heroines of children’s literature with way, way too much significance.

I will be posting once a week-ish. I understand from my research that parent blogs ought to elicit the positive involvement of the child so I will be including a comment from H to round out each review.