Is there any horror to compare with World Book Day horror? I’m over it all myself because my daughter is at secondary school and they don’t get you to dress up at The Very Hungry Caterpillar there.
But for anyone with a child at primary school, it starts when they’re toddlers and you find yourself reaching for a mackintosh, umbrella and bear for the Christopher Robin look, and goes on to the very end with half the boys dressed up as footballers on the spurious basis that Marcus Rashford once wrote a self-help book and the girls, if they’re lazy, are still doing Roald Dahl’s Matilda, which is an easy look – a pile of books, sweater and skirt, and you’re there. I don’t know if it actually gets children reading; it certainly gets parents sweating.
There’s a new aspect to the wretched thing these days. It’s not enough to dress up as one of half a dozen characters – and the range of books drawn on is quite painfully limited. No Gulliver’s Travels (should be an easy one that), no Treasure Island (eye patch plus parrot), no Swallows and Amazons (bring a boat), no Emil and the Detectives (short trousers plus suitcase)…oh no. It’s all Roald Dahl, David Walliams, Harry Potter plus Eric Carle.
But the fresh aspect is this: on the basis that so many parents cheat and buy stuff to dress their children in – apparently this year it’s averaging £19 per child (and what’s wrong with cardboard and old clothes?), some schools have dropped the Book bit of World Book Day. Children are now encouraged to dress as a word from a book. Any word, any book, apart, one presumes, for the definite and indefinite articles, though they could be fun. I would salute the child who went as the slithy tove from the Jaberwocky.
A colleague tells of one child who was quite determined to dress as the Sun yesterday, in a nice yellow suit, but last night wanted to be a Watermelon (cue for his patient mother to rustle up a bit of green and red cardboard) and today wanted to revert to the Sun, before going back to the Watermelon. His brother was easy…from a book about the treasure of the Loch Ness Monster he decided he wanted to be gold, so that was a cinch. But you’ll notice the trend here…it’s not the children doing reading; it’s the parents killing themselves to dress them up. Yet another competitive thing for modern parents, a contest that the Tiger Mothers always win.
The thing about World Book Day is that it misses one target: the grown ups
I am told that one of the people behind the whole WBD thing was actually a Spanish bookseller, Vincente Clavel, who wanted to honour the birthday of Cervantes, the Don Quixote man, in the 1920s. Dressing up as a poor knight on a horse could be a challenge, but I assume Clavel actually had in mind readings from the great man, which would be dandy …. a bit like Bloomsday. It was the UN which came up with the whole grim business of World Book Day as we know it in 1995 … and 30 years on, it just gets more and more of a pain.
What we actually need is not a WBD but an entire school year in which reading for pleasure is part of the week. In fact, most schools do have a reading aloud element to their routine in nursery years, but the crucial thing is to keep it up through primary to secondary school. My daughter’s secondary school does in the early years and that’s more than most. As exams approach, you end up with the set pieces in the GCSE English syllabus, which means that an inordinate number of children are familiar with A Christmas Carol but no other Dickens novel. And what I should really love is to make children learn poetry by heart – that is, the kind of poetry that lends itself to being read out loud, so no stupid Carol Ann Duffy or Seamus Heaney – throughout their time at school.
And reading can mean just listening. Last week we learned that more children are absorbing books from audio than reading alone, and that’s just dandy. Humankind started out listening to stories – it’s how we got Homer – and it’s still the best way to take them in. The Victorians were forever reading aloud to each other. So if that’s how to get them hooked on Little Women or the Moomintrolls, fine.
But the thing about World Book Day is that it misses one target: the grown ups. While children are dressing up as the Wizard of Oz, the adults are reading not very much at all. Apparently four in ten people in Britain haven’t read a book in the last year. And of those who have, the books they are reading they shouldn’t – fantasy porn by Sarah J. Maas, say, or just fantasy, or Sally Rooney. Looking at the bestseller lists would actually put you off the reading habit.
So…how about dropping WBD and making reading a normal part of everyday life for absolutely everyone? You know, in a second hand bookshop you can get a Muriel Spark or Evelyn Waugh for £2.50? A paperback in Waterstone’s – say, PG Wodehouse - is about £8.99. I know, we’re all broke, but this is a retreat from the world that really is there for us all.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
