Every day, on my walk to work, I pass a primary school. A group of little people are being dropped off by parents. They are met at the gates by a teacher who greets them all by name before leading them up the steps to breakfast club. In the cold and dark of winter, with the school’s windows glowing invitingly, I sometimes envy these children their warm, welcoming cocoon.
I thought of that daily scene often when reading this book, which is inspired by Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s time as Waterstones children’s laureate. During his laureateship he ran a campaign with the literary charity BookTrust called Reading Rights, addressing literacy inequality for children in poverty. It was prompted by the discovery that nearly half of children were arriving at school without having been read to. Many had no clue how books worked. They were trying to swipe rather than turn pages, or expand illustrations by pinching them with their fingers.
Cottrell-Boyce, the author of children’s novels Millions and Cosmic among much else, is the ideal face for such a campaign. A longstanding school visitor, he has a feeling for the way kids who don’t meet the usual spelling and neatness benchmarks can get overlooked. His worldview is a distinctive brand of Liverpool-Catholic collectivism, which homes in on disparities of wealth and how they can tantalise and demoralise children. One Birkenhead school he visits is near the cruise terminal where luxury liners float at anchor – “a good place to see money, but that money is sailing by, without a second glance at these terraced streets”.
In the course of the campaign, he makes a salutary discovery. A teacher says to him: “Maybe don’t go on about the summer holidays. They hate them.” Summer, that time for adventure when the Famous Five explore smugglers’ coves in Cornwall and the snow melts in Moominland, is no longer seen as a glorious escape. For many children, it feels like a banishment from their happy place, school, where society finally takes notice of them. With its breakfast and after-school clubs extending the day at both ends, school has become a site of security and safety as much as one of education. He wonders if this is what makes the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson books so beloved: they portray school as a refuge.
Recalling that his parents talked about their experience as wartime evacuees for the rest of their lives, Cottrell-Boyce argues that “any crisis is like a barium meal, illuminating the weak spots in the body of the state”. Austerity followed by the Covid years has transformed children’s lives. Schools were once part of an ecosystem of support for children and their parents that included libraries, youth clubs and Sure Start centres. Now, in many places, “the school is the last evidence of a civic sphere – the Alamo of services”. He finds teachers exhausted because they are doubling up as therapists, nutritionists and social workers, trying to assuage the effects of a vast social injustice. Primary teachers, especially in reception, have become caregivers, because many children do not arrive “school ready” – that is, toilet-trained. He comes across schools that have discreetly installed launderettes, or maintain a store of “pre-loved” school clothes.
Cottrell-Boyce is particularly exercised about the housing crisis that has stranded many children in cheap hotels and other forms of temporary accommodation. Of the children who move house more than 10 times between reception and year 11, just 11% pass five or more GCSEs. With this comes furniture poverty. Social housing is normally let “void standard”: empty and unfurnished. Cottrell-Boyce finds it especially shocking that so many children are denied the little kingdom – Robert Louis Stevenson called it “the land of counterpane” – that is their own bed. The Merseyside charity Time for Bed gave out 582 bed bundles (bedframe, mattress and bedding) last year.
If I have made this sound like a miserable book, it isn’t. It is interlaced with luminous bits of autobiography, mainly of the author’s early years living in a flat just off Liverpool’s Dock Road, sharing a room with his parents and brother. Remembering lascar sailors in turbans or fezzes, and merchant sailors all in white, he now sees that this introduced him to one of the oldest stories of all: that ofthe stranger arriving on shore, from Odysseus to Sinbad.
Back then, he says, the next parish “might as well have been the Orinoco” and “Bootle was more or less Narnia”. He and his brother would sit in the window spotting aunts, uncles and cousins in the passing crowd. His human geography was so contained that he had no idea he lived near the Mersey until one day, out of the window, he saw a pair of bright red funnels moving above the rooftops. Then his family moved to a half-finished suburban housing estate where, amid the smell of raw timber and fresh putty, he finally had a wardrobe where an entrance to Narnia could be imagined.
These scenes support the book’s overall argument: a child is a camera with the shutter open. “Every baby is Galileo,” Cottrell-Boyce says, watching his granddaughter’s miraculous acquisition of language and motor skills. Professor Sam Wass of the University of East London Baby Development Lab tells him: “A few days or weeks ago, you were an aquatic creature, and now, all of a sudden, you are in east London. Where do you even begin to make sense of that?” A child is a magical sponge, soaking up the world. The downside of this miracle is that bad experiences – of black mould, cockroaches, moonlight flits, domestic violence, debt – stay with a child for ever.
Refreshingly, Cottrell-Boyce does not think of reading as a moral education. Some of the best-loved tales in the Arabian Nights, he points out, revel in lying, cheating and selfish ambition. One of the most famous, the tale of Abu Hasan, is about a fart. Lots of lullabies depict babies being killed or stolen. Frank L Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, was an apologist for the genocide of Native Americans; Roald Dahl was a committed antisemite.
What matters when reading to a child is something that can’t be measured in our new age of “utilitarian rationalism”, he argues. It has little to do with the content of a book and everything to do with creating a moment of shared attention and mutual noticing. June O’Sullivan of the London Early Years Foundation calls it “the pedagogy of the sofa”. It is the antithesis of the frictionless, forever time of the digital world (Cottrell-Boyce is not a fan of Cocomelon, the YouTube channel for kids, mostly because it can be streamed endlessly). The crucial element is familiar routine, which can only happen when children have furniture such as beds and sofas, and clothes kept in something other than bin bags.
This book’s chapters are “expanded diary entries”, Cottrell-Boyce concedes, mostly written on trains and in Premier Inns during his laureateship. He has a chatty, unguarded, slightly repetitive style, and an overfondness for ramming points home with the single-sentence paragraph. But he makes the case for how British childhood has changed, and why that matters, with trenchancy and heart. The children whose school assemblies he graces are lucky to have him.
• A British Childhood: How Our Children Live Now by Frank Cottrell-Boyce is published by Picador (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
