‘Please,” asks Pookie in his very first outing into the world of children’s literature, “what does a fortune look like?” “Now, that is awkward!” replies a conceited green elf. “Any other question in the world I could have answered easily but just that particular one? No! A pity! … but I know this. ‘For’ sometimes means ‘because’, and ‘Tune’ is a music tiddleypom, so if you put the two together would that help?” Such sophistry is no help at all to the little white rabbit, who has just nearly drowned trying to share the watery fortune of a frog.
Pookie has left home, with his worldly wealth tied up on the end of a stick in a red spotty hankie, because he isn’t a normal brown bunny like his brothers and sisters and he has a secret sorrow: a pair of wispy wings. It takes a chance encounter with another elf, Nommy-Nee, who will go on to become his second-best friend, to convince him that “a fortune doesn’t look like anything … it just is something, something different for every person. For some it is Health, for some it is Money and for some it’s Love.” It must be love, concludes Pookie, since he’s perfectly well and has no need of cash.
This line flashed to mind when I encountered a Spectator column by the political commentator Matthew Parris, who made the startling claim that Pookie had made him a Tory. Ivy Wallace began the series in 1946 and went on to produce 10 books set in a woodland world of toadstool cottages and goblin markets, where Pookie finds a home with lonely woodcutter’s daughter Belinda. Citing the third book in the series, Pookie Puts the World Right – in which our hero tries, and fails, to send winter packing – Parris wrote: “It gave me a parable for what I must already have wanted to believe … The little rabbit now realises that the seasons have a purpose, that lazy or foolish animals with ill-sited burrows or nests have to be shown their folly, and every creature given an incentive to work hard, prepare and store.”
Like Parris, I first encountered the books when I was around five-years-old, and if anything, they made me a socialist, for in my reading they were all about the power of community and, by extension, of collective action. This is clearest in Pookie in Search of a Home, where the inhabitants of Bluebell Wood resort to civil disobedience to defeat developers who are set on felling their homes to make way for a road. With Pookie leading them, the woodland folk sabotage all the work by night and hide all the tools in nearby Gloomy Wood. When Pookie is caught and tied up in a sack, he is rescued by the Grand Rabbit Drumming Circle, which scares the interlopers into abandoning their plans. (Only years later did I discover that rabbits really do drum their back feet to raise the alarm.)
At a time when the seasons are irrevocably changing, and humans with ill-sited burrows are being regularly flooded or burned out by vengeful nature, Wallace’s stories leap into new life as eco-fables. Her illustrations combine a whimsy of elves with acorn-cup hats and beech mast slippers, harking back to Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies books of the 1920s, with some exquisitely observant nature drawing – particularly of birds. Pookie’s terrifying face-off with winter is echoed in the gentler Pookie and the Swallows, where we follow the birds from arrival, through their breeding season (complete with ugly bald chicks) to the poignant moment of every British summer when they muster for the start of their migration to Africa.
The books had a particular resonance for me, as I grew up in Africa – so, far from leaving, the swallows were on their way home. Since my home was sub-Saharan – flat, hot and pretty much devoid of trees – Wallace’s weather-tossed forests and flower-filled hills had a particular faraway magic. To this day I cannot see a toadstool without imagining a chimney sticking out of the top and a cosy patchwork bed nestling beneath its gills. And fortune-hunting will always be associated with a courageous little rabbit in blue rompers setting off in search of love, with his toothbrush, three acorns and a carrot tied up in a red spotty hankie.
