Meet Mary Kate by Helen Morgan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
There is gentle and then there is this, the gentlest of things which takes your gentle into an infinite black hole (don’t question my science here, I’m making a point) of gentle until it is the most gentlest of all gentle things. This is gentle. It is the definition of gentle. It is the most gentle. I wanted to be all ‘lol, here’s the gentle thing, look at its gentleness’ but then I thought about it and I told myself off and I decided to instead come to meet this book on its own turf rather than making it meet me on mine. And there is such interest in that, when you interrogate and collapse your own boundaries and indeed the sense of any boundaries entirely and just coming to find the book where it is and letting yourself embrace that and understand that and figure it out.
So, the findings, this: a collection of short stories by Helen Morgan about a girl called Mary Kate, and a close friend to things like The Milly-Molly-Mandy Storybook and My Naughty Little Sister. Mary Kate is four years old and has very quiet and very gentle adventures about her life. One story sees her fall ill and have to stay in bed, another sees her visit her grandmother and another still sees her rescue Mummy when she manages to get herself stuck in the loft. Illustrated throughout by the incomparable Shirley Hughes, these stories are maybe ten or so pages at the most and told in a quiet and very clean style. The paragraphs are very precise things – a sample: “Mary Kate slept till lunch time. She ate the scrambled egg Aunt Mary brought her and then Mummy came to straighten up the bed and wash her face and hands.”
(delightful: so gentle, so soft, so simply immediate!).
The preface describes this as something “to be read aloud to children of 3 or 4 who want to hear about other boys and girls” and the exquisite precision of this statement delights me; it’s a Puffin book from Kaye Webb (somebody who I do wish to read a lot more about at some point) and it knows precisely what it is and who it is meant to be. And there’s something incredibly acute about that awareness, about knowing of a readership who wants something very specific and knowing that this book can deliver that.
Yes, read from today’s perspective, it’s dated. Yes, there are a few moments where you might think – is – this – it? And there’s an afterword about the author that is jaw dropping in detail (a moment in which her father burns two novels that she wrote because she was “so bad at all her school subjects except English” is an enormously brutal thing, no?) but in a way, that doesn’t matter because I’m not three years old and I’m not trying to find out about the world and I’m not in need of a ferociously gentle hand to lead me into it.
And yet, even as I write that, I think: I am. We are all in need of this and of its breathtakingly wonderful illustrations from Shirley Hughes because this is a tiny little gently rendered snapshot of intimate, personal, domestic life in which Christmas is always wonderful, small walks are full of wonder, and cakes are always just out of the oven in time for tea.
(Another word on those Hughes illustrations: exquisite. One of the delights of reading children’s books from this period is finding people like Hughes learning their craft and realising how perfect she was from day one. The way she understands childhood will never not delight me: she entirely removes herself from the moment and gives you a child and all of their everything and it is just a delight, each and every time).
View all my reviews
Daisy May Johnson 