Vintage bedtime reading for World Book Day: 'A Child's Garden of Verses' by Robert Louis

Mar 1, 2017
3 min read

I'm a huge fan of World Book Day. Anything that gets kids reading is fantastic, in my opinion, so what better way to mark the event then writing about the first book that really kindled my imagination? When it comes to childhood literary loves, the list is long and familiar. ‘’Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’ were well-thumbed favourites, greatly enhanced, of course, by their amazing illustrations. But there is one book which particularly bedded itself in my mind: ’A Child’s Garden of Verses’ by Robert Louis Stevenson.

This collection of 65 poems was probably

where my love of language first began to stir. I grew up listening to my mum read it to me at night:‘Leerie the Lamplighter’, ‘Where Go the Boats?’, ‘Bed in Summer’. So when my children were around four, I started to track down a copy to share with them as well. But it couldn’t be any edition; it had to be the 1963 Hilda Boswell-illustrated version I had poured over as a tot: the cloudy watercolours and dreamy landscapes, the deep rivers and aching blue skies, the swirling fairies and dancing firesides. These were the pictures I had drifted off to sleep imagining, and I wanted my children to experience them too, to be haunted and lulled to sleep by the same fleeting fantasies and strange otherworldliness.

Fortunately, I managed to find one, and I’m now the proud owner of an original,if slightly battered, edition, an exact replica of the one I used to read as a child. The illustrations are just as I remember and have an old-fashioned charm that we all find very soothing, which seems to me to be the essential component of any bedtime story. But it’s the words that stay with me the most.

“In Winter, I get up at night

And dress by yellow candle light.

In summer, quite the other way,

I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see

The birds still hopping on the tree,

Or hear the sound of grown-up people’s feet

Still passing by me in the street.”

These words have a hypnotic, incantational quality, and we find ourselves quoting them – and other lines – at the slightest provocation: swinging in the park (“Up, up, up in a swing! Up in the sky so blue!”), walking by a river (“On goes the river, out past the mill, away down the valley, away down the hill”) or catching a train (“Faster than fairies, faster than witches, bridges and houses, hedges and ditches”). The poems show children doing things that children do – building cities out of blocks, messing about in streams, building dens from dining chairs – and there’s a lot of pleasure to be had from affirming such simple pleasures in a 21st century setting that seems increasingly dominated by X-boxes and Ipads. But, above all, it’s the blend of historical detail and universality that we like.

The collection first appeared in 1885 and still manages to communicate how the world must have seemed to Victorian children at the time: the terror of the long steep climb up the stairs with only a flickering candle in a darkened hallway; a child gazing through the window at dusk and watching the Lamplighter walk the streets (“for we are very lucky, with a lamp outside our door, and Leerie stops to light it, as he lights so many more.”). But they also tap into universal themes that children from any age have experienced; the boredom of being ill and confined at home; the frustration of having to go to bed when it is still light outside. (“And does it not seem hard to you, when all the sky is soft and blue, when I should like so much to play, to have to go to bed by day?”)

Above all, the simple clarity of the language rings through. And, as always with great children’s literature, the unshowy, stripped-back beauty of the words renders it even more affecting.

“Dark brown is the river.

Golden is the sand.

It flows along forever,

With trees on either hand.

Green leaves a-floating,

Castles of the foam,

Boats of mine a-boating –

When will all come home?

On goes the river

And out past the mill,

Away down the valley,

Away down the hill.