Abstract
Panel: Regional and International Journeys in Children's Literature My International Journeys in Children's Literature by Carol Kendall When I saw the title given to this panel, I thought some terrible mistake had been made. Regional? International? Here was a jolt of a different kind to set me in motion. I had to remind myself that any writer worth her morning toast can make a few switches and mold the plot to fit the characters. Even more, any translator of Chinese tales, which provide precious few clues, has all the practice she needs at molding character to plot. Here, I only had to fit two words, eight small syllables, into my scheme of writing. Actually, I prosper under the jolt system of generating ideas. There's nothing like a good clout for jarring the brain into action. That's what it took to get The Gammaqe Cup under way. In 1952-53, we were spending our first year in England. Although today England is pretty well overrun with its empire come home to roost, in 1952 it looked exactly the way it was supposed to. No jolts there. But the people! It was the people who cranked up my brain. They all looked as though they'd been reading too much Dickens. Every seventh person was a recognizable character straight out of a book, and not just from Nicholas Nickleby. Other authors were also well-represented. In Yorkshire, where I heard my first bred-in-the-bone Yorkshireman speak, I suddenly recognized the accents of Lady Chatterley's gamekeeper, complete with those impossible glottal stops indicated in Lawrence's book by t' and 1' and nob'dy. Lady Chatterley's Lover wasn't pornography to me—it was an exercise in shaping words out of improbable combinations of letters and apostrophes. I remember well worrying over it. Surely nobody, or nob'dy, as Lawrence would have it, really talked in that laborious, throat-scratching way. Or so I thought, until I watched my Yorkshireman friend gulp down half of each word, gnaw at the other half, and growl over it. It is my personal opinion that Lady C. had a tin ear for voices—but then, she did have other things on her mind. So here was a nation full of people out of another time, but living in a quite ordinary, if somewhat quaint, way. And here the idea that had been stirring in my head finally began to take shape. I would cast my characters out of another time and place, but let them live in a down-to-earth sort of way—in a very regional way, for the Minnipins in The Gammage Cup would be confined in a small valley completely cut off from the rest of the world. THAT is surely about as regional as you can get! The central idea—the theme—of The Gammage Cup had been with me for a long, long time: Conformity, comma, the evils thereof. It was an idea generated by a certain amount of anger at the powerful influences that marshaled people, particularly women, into the niches prepared for them, and bullied them into staying there. On this matter I had a definite mind-set, which included the notion that to force children into school uniforms was to force them into uniform thinking. And here I had another jolt. The very fact that virtually all British school children were made to wear livery to school meant that in order to stand out from the rest of the crowd, they had to make their mark with headwork. They became only as individual and interesting as what went on in their minds and came off their tongues. I had long felt that Americans depended too much on their clothing to express themselves. We have improved a lot, but even today, when jeans have replaced ruffles and smocking for small girls, this old reliance on the sartorial image is still with us. It has, however, taken a new turn. Now we proclaim our inner feelings by the messages we have printed on our T-shirts. There's scarcely any need to talk at all. As we traveled in Europe and...

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