Express. Home of the Daily and Sunday Express. express_logo

Martin Townsend

Editor of the Sunday Express

Related Topic: Sunday

A word from the Editor: Ladybird

IN HIS book Delight, a litany of the things that made him happy, JB Priestley listed “the sunshine after rain”. How could anyone argue with that?

Ladybird books suggest a world more carefree and colourful than today Ladybird books suggest a world more carefree and colourful than today [GETTY - PIC POSED BY MODELS]

Last Sunday, certainly, I was in no mood to do so.

For weeks the heavens seemed to be confirming Spike Milligan’s assertion “there are holes in the sky, where the rain gets in/ But they’re ever so small, that’s why rain is thin”.

Then, suddenly, the sun was shining again, it was dry and I was heading up to King’s Cross station, with my wife and youngest son in tow, to despatch my eldest son back to York University. It was the sort of Sunday morning weather that puts you in the frame of mind to enjoy every moment.

There was a time, not so long ago, that this big, old station was the last place anyone wanted to go. A major London terminus, yes, but grimy and seedy with the terrible fire within recent memory, in an area infamous for every sort of misdemeanour, from pickpocketing to prostitution.

Now, with its dramatically curved roof, scrubbed brick and wide concourses it looks oddly like the future.

At just before 3pm my son sloped off to his train and we headed back across the station in search of a spot of lunch. It was then that I spied Watermark books, a bookshop in the corner of the station, with a flashy glass front and the general air of literary seriousness. I was there like a shot.

In my opinion there are two things in retail definitely worth celebrating: one is the arrival of a new bookshop,  anywhere and, at any time, the other a new record store.

I subsequently found out that this is the first Watermark book store in Britain. French-owned, it has shops elsewhere in the world but has chosen the formerly shabby and now wonderful King’s Cross as the place to make its debut in Blighty. It seemed only right that I celebrate by buying something special.

I thought about getting Morrissey’s autobiography; a mammoth tome which I have been tempted to read for a few months now but since, heaven knows, the sun was shining and I was anything but miserable now, the occasion called for something a bit more cheerful.

It was then that I saw, proudly displayed in the window, a box set of postcards depicting 100 classic Ladybird book covers. This seemed a present to myself entirely in tune with the cheerful mood of the day. I grew up, as I am sure many of you did, with Ladybird books. They were a gentle introduction to the hard facts of science, history and the natural world and a rather magical window into the more vivid tales of myth and fiction.

I can’t quite work out whether Ladybirds are still published but there will be celebrations next year in Loughborough where the books originated

Back from King’s Cross I could not wait to tear the cellophane off the presentation box and plunge back into the cheerful world they inhabited.

I was slightly too old to remember the earliest Ladybirds for children; Bunnykin’s Picnic Party, a couple of naughty cats called Smoke And Fluff, and two pigs plotting their Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-style escape thing in a rickety rowing boat (Piggly Plays Truant) but even these seemed to suggest a world of youthful literature more colourful and carefree than anything that exists today. I felt much more at home with the historical covers (a comely Florence Nightingale with her lamp, a helmeted Julius Caesar and unnamed companion planning death and destruction on an English hill). Also in a Ladybird series entitled “well-loved tales” were a ferociously unforgettable Jack & The Beanstalk, a super-glamorous Cinderella and a grateful-looking Rapunzel.

There were also cards that seemed to underline just how much more receptive (or, perhaps, respectfully obedient) children must once have been: a series of Ladybirds entitled People At Work which included The Policeman, The Postman, In A Hotel (a vast army of chefs) and, best of all, The CustomsOfficer: a determined-looking fellow in a peaked cap and full uniform  rifling through an open suitcase  owned by a dodgy-looking chap in a trilby and raincoat. Can it be possible that any child spent their pocket money on this?

Finally, and perhaps my favourite of all, a card depicting the cover of a Ladybird called Your Body, the book that was given to me by my father some 40-odd years ago in lieu of sitting down and having to explain where babies came from. I have three children now, so presumably it was all in there.

I can’t quite work out whether Ladybirds are still published but there will be celebrations next year in Loughborough where the books originated, to commemorate their centenary. For the time being these beautiful cards are celebration enough of a lovely Sunday at King’s Cross but also of a more innocent world long since slipped away.
http://www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/martin-townsend/454709/A-word-from-the-Editor-Ladybird
www.express.co.uk
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-15
92477
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:6GF43Q2FP6KRTYEPUMSKCGZFZ5MZMXOS
<urn:uuid:8b0d980c-820d-40bc-9462-1f6be5010d5f>
2014-04-21T02:39:36Z
176.34.121.173
sha1:JQPFBYXQLE7ULIONIYLOOKJ4L62I3WLW
<urn:uuid:d071b853-f48b-49cb-872c-10aaa33f3eb8>
http://www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/martin-townsend/454709/A-word-from-the-Editor-Ladybird
length
response
<urn:uuid:6e12a754-367f-466b-b953-15d2f4e98e73>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-147-4-33.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-15
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for April 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf