Really weird kids’ books from the past

[aweebitlost]

I was reading the DC The Elephant & the Bad Baby tonight and it struck me how very odd it is.

An elephant takes a baby for a joyride to nick a load of food and then everyone is cross with the baby for not saying please?!

Then there’s the Long Slide with the 3 stuffed animals that climb a giant slide, vomit, meet some witches etc and don’t seem to get any pleasure out of the experience.

AIBU or were some kids’ books from the past plain bizarre?! Any other good ones people can think of?

laSnack that sounds like Robert Swindells, maybe Brother in the Land?

LadyLa I still have my copy of Children of the Dust somewhere and I think your description must be a different book. I remember the story as it starts off with a Mum, teenage girl plus two younger siblings stuck in their farmhouse when the bomb goes off. They all become ill from fallout except the youngest girl because she will only eat canned food and bottled water and never goes outside. Eventually the mother takes her to a nearby farmer because he also seems healthy and then the mum, teen and other child die.
It then jumps to the Dad who managed to get to a government bunker and survived. But many many years later when people leave the bunker they can't deal with the environment outside etc. They find people that survived outside have evolved - ie slightly having fur on the skin, their eyes changed so their pupils aren't burnt etc.
They come across an elderly woman....the little girl from the beginning of the story.
I also still have my copy of Plague 99. I re read it at the beginning of covid ( I know). So many unanswered questions with that one. As the whole book is them slowly getting from South London to North London - how the heck did they eventually make it to Cornwall. How did they get there? It's never explained.
I came across a copy of When The Wind Blows in a charity shop. It had a post it note on it "this is NOT a children's book".

There was a lot of that nuclear war stuff in the 80s....

I absolutely loved all the post apocalyptic books when I was a child. Brother in the Land, Z for Zachariah etc. Then when I was about 12 I read The Stand by Stephen King which is the ultimate novel of that genre, and I loved it ever since.

But for some reason my parents gave me the audiobook of When the Wind Blows to fall asleep with, and I remember lying, horrified, in my bed, listening to that.

We watched the film version of When The Wind Blows at school for a PHSE lesson. Want to make a bunch of 15/16 year olds completely silent and making no eye contact to each other.... that's how you do it.

Interesting trivia fact.....when Raymond Briggs (author of When The Wind Blows) wrote his autobiographical book Ernest and Ethel about his parents he was asked by the publisher to change the illustration of his mother giving birth because it was to traumatic.
So elderly couple dying of radiation fallout = ok
woman giving birth = eww no thanks

Brilliant trivia fact! I love Ernest and Ethel. I remember a lovely TV adaptation of that a few years ago. Think I’m going to have to look up the film of When the Wind Blows…

I can't believe official government advice was once "put a door against a wall to create a shelter".....
(Sorry going a bit off topic now)

@LadyLaSnack , that was fascinating about the stories in the collection 'In a Dark, Dark Room'. Particularly the one about the girl who would never remove the green ribbon from around her neck, until her husband did on her deathbed, and then her head fell off! And you say it is thought to be derived from an old French story?

It's interesting, because during the French revolution, when of course aristocrats and many other people were guillotined, I read somewhere that those who managed to escape started a fashion of wearing ribbons around their necks, (red ribbons though), to sort of ironically emphasise that their heads had managed not to be chopped off. I know the story is 'the Green Ribbon' but could there be a connection there?

@LadyLaSnack thank you for that! I would be prepared to swear the ribbon was yellow in the book we had. It must have been a compendium (or a retelling) as we definitely didn't have the book you mentioned. It might not have been the one I mentioned either though.
And luckily we did not have those pictures either!

Shameless place mark

I think the best kids books are quite bizarre..

I love The Owl Service but it did also frighten me (mind you I read it when I was 8 I expect... )..

I went from non-reader, struggling in remedial reading classes at 5/6 to mega-reader, reading age of 25+ by 9 - bless that remedial reading teacher who came into our school twice a week, she absolutely unlocked it all for me!

I grew up in a house that was filled with books, books lined every wall, my friends told each other I lived in a mansion that was also a library (it wasn't a mansion either, it was a big victorian semi that was cold and draughty!) - because in their experience, books lived on 'the bookshelf' a thing they had one of in the house or if they were lucky, one in their room...

Once I could read I read EVERYTHING... The Hobbit, Stig of the Dump, Agatha Christie's, Nevil Shute, Dick Francis,... but mixed all this up with Enid Blyton (all of them!), all the horsey/pony stories from the 1940's on onwards... anything my mother referred to as twee, naff or rubbish... i devored it, alongside the childrens classics versions of Around the World..., 20000 Leagues..., Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Treasure Island etc.

I gave myself some nightmares, but the favourites stick with me.

Struwwelpeter... ahhh the pictures! Ugh! Brilliant!

The Hairy Toe - we FOUGHT over who got to read this in school, it was so popular.

Stig of the Dump - i never questioned why he'd be without any parents in a dump... he just was.

I earned myself zero popularity in secondary school when I read not just my english classes set texts, but everyones, and then started on other areas as my mums friend was head of english at a school in Wales... absolute book nerd!

I really don't like Raymond Briggs, all his stuff is massively miserable!

The Silver Crown, by the Z for Zachariah author Robert C O'Brien.

It had a massive impact on me, I loved it (still do). It begins with 10 year old Ellen's family dying in a house fire, and she has a mysterious crown. She has to find her way across the US by herself (picking up another orphan on the way) and comes across a mysterious Nazi like cult connected to the crown. It is so bizarre but at the same time magical.

@Ginpostersyndrome

I remember a book of stories that my little sibling had called something like Stories For Six Year Olds. There was a couple who fell in love as small children and she always had a ribbon round her neck. Every year on his birthday he'd ask her to take the ribbon off and every year she'd say "no please don't ask that". Then one year she gave in and undid the ribbon and her head fell off. And how sad he was. The end. That's the weirdest one I ever read.

I remember this! I used to love those books and I would get one every year on my birthday.

I loved Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr, and A Candle in Her Room by Ruth Arthur. Both very creepy.

Anyone else still a bit freaked out by Tottie, The Story of a Doll's House?

Me! At least, I think so - was that the one where the dolls shove a really stuck up doll called Marchpane (I think) into an open fire? And a dog made from darning wool and a needle? That scared me shitless. Almost as scary as the opening sequence of 'Picture Box' on tv.

There was a book in the library called Daisy's New head. In it Daisy tells her friends that she put her head in the washing machine and it unscrewed and she had to go to a lady to buy a new head.
Mum did tell me that Daisy was just trying to show off to her friends, but I wasn't convinced.

Another weird one called "After the First Death" (Robert Cormier??) about a young girl who does her dad's bus taking a class of little children to school and it gets hijacked.
It's much darker than you'd get nowadays. One of the children is killed, the children are drugged to sleep, and to add to the detail, the girl has a weak bladder and you get that descriptions too. I can't remember whether she's killed at the end or not.

Grendal Raymond Briggs's Father Christmas and Father Christmas on Holiday aren't miserable
(Pretty much everything else is....he is well known for being a nice but well grumpy man)

I remember reading a book when I was young called "Where the Rainbow Ends". Not weird as such but the most jingoistic, dated book I have read. As far as I remember there was a lot of "Oh we can do this because we're British" and cries of "For England and St George". Even at the time I read it, it seemed so old fashioned (though for some reason, I still loved it!).

Hmm, have just found a copy of it on Ebay.... I probably won't be able to resist it!

@borntobequiet

All the Ant and Bee books. They’re bonkers.

oh god that takes me back!! I loved ant and bee!!

We had a pretty psychedelic book when I was a kid called "Ann in the moon", all about this little girl who gets whisked away to meet fantastical characters that live on the moon. Bit like alice in wonderland. Best thing were the amazon.co.uk%2FAnn-Moon-Frances-D-Francis%2Fdp%2F0430004915&tbnid=Guq799OZtfLGdM&vet=12ahUKEwjWraaBhLf1AhUYShoKHZHjCk8QMygEegUIARCWAQ..i&docid=UOPDbG-P0ZssmM&w=1920&h=1080&itg=1&q=anne%20in%20the%20moon&client=firefox-b-d&ved=2ahUKEwjWraaBhLf1AhUYShoKHZHjCk8QMygEegUIARCWAQ pictures, which were very cool]]

Der Struwwelpeter aka shock-headed Peter. Passed down from my Austrian grandparents.

@Naranjo

You're the only other person I've ever heard mention The Silver Crown. What a very odd book.

We had a book called The Story of Buttercup Fairy - it had been in my dad's Family ,dated about 1930s/40s. It was about a very overweight fairy who was so fat she could not make it to the pixie king’s ball. Eventually she is so fat she falls out of the flower she lives in, bounces through the woods until she landed on a hedgehog whose prickles make her pop and lo and behold she is now a beautiful thin fairy and can go to the ball! I mean where do I even start - no wonder my sister and I had slightly confused issues about weight....

read loads of post apocalyptic stuff when I was about 12. It has all blurred into one so I can't remember which events were in which books but I remember one in which the female protagonist's sister is pregnant and someone asks her if she wants a boy or a girl and she answers with the single word 'yes'. I wonder if it is the same one with the eyeless baby @LadyLaSnack

@nonevernotever

Oh Marianne dreams is wonderful. But all the time slip ones are a bit odd(in a good way) I think. (When Marnie was there; the Saracen lamp; a traveller in time, Charlotte sometimes...) For picture books what about where the wild things are? Or The story of Horace?

I absolutely loved When Marnie Was There, and as a child I thought if I had a daughter, I'd call her Marnie.