Look what arrived today:
More Birthday Presents!
The Church Mice Spread Their Wings
written and illustrated by Graham Oakley (1975)
It’s always difficult to pull quotes out of these books
because the pictures are usually the punchline to the text and that dimension
is lost here. So go, seek these books
out for yourselves.
‘“When Mother Nature has finished soothing our fevered brows perhaps she could give us a good rubdown as well,” said Sampson bitterly as they stood dripping by the water’s edge.
This made Humphrey very angry. “Here we are, cast up on a foreign and exotic shore and all you can do is make silly jokes,” he snapped, studying the map which had got a little damp.
“According to my calculations, we’re in China,” he said, “probably on the Pong Yang Peninsula.”
“We’re in Wortlethorpe Park,” mumbled Sampson.’
In ‘Spread Their Wings’ the mice force Sampson to give up
all his weekends to escort them on country breaks, and of course everything
that can goes wrong, until the mice are convinced they’ve been washed ashore in
foreign lands and Arthur and Humphrey suffer a terrible fate.
AND!
The Diary Of A Church Mouse
written and illustrated by Graham Oakley (1986)
‘My New Year’s Resolution this year was to start work right away on the Story of My Life, but I’d hardly finished one sentence before up breezes Arthur and says that really it’s best to wait until you’re very old before you write your life story because by then you’ll know what happens in the last chapter. I said that it was more likely that by then you’d have forgotten what happened in the first. But he says no you wouldn’t, not if you kept a diary. Well, I must say, that sounded a pretty good idea which is quite surprising because Arthur doesn’t have many of those. For once I’m going to take his advice. So here goes.
1st January Absolutely nothing happened.
2nd January Ditto.
3rd-8th January Very uneventful.
8th-10th January As above only more so.’
Humphrey keeps a diary of the year’s events, including an
encounter with an abominable snowman, a very special Valentine’s card, some
expert kite design, May Day celebrations, some very unsportsmanlike sports,
Sampson’s new mouse-eating girlfriend, a disastrous attempt at homemade
fireworks and a Christmas with fifty-seven Father Christmases.
This brings The Church Mice Collection to 10/12. I only have the two ‘new’ (as in, written
after I was no longer a child) books to get and I’ll have The Complete Collection. VERY EXCITING.
I’m either excited or eating a banana sideways. |
The Church Mice Spread Their Wings is the fourth book in the
Church Mice series and The Diary Of A Church Mouse is the ninth. Rather coincidentally, both books have a
similar theme of Sampson wanting revenge on the mice, especially Humphrey,
since Humphrey has always had a spiteful relationship with Sampson. But then Sampson is pushed the brink of his
‘not-killing-mice’ vow in every book, which is always a lot of fun.
There’s a rather dark joke (SPOILER) at the end of ‘Spread
Their Wings’ where Arthur and Humphrey crash their own funeral and the mice are
annoyed with them for not being dead. The callousness and shallowness of these (very British)
characters is delightful to find in children’s books (no patronising wackiness,
just genuine humour), and is convincing for the personality of mice. Small and fickle go well together.
The Diary Of A Church Mouse is the most different of the
series, being written from the perspective of Humphrey, rather than a 3rd
person narrator. The books always rely
on juxtaposition to create humour, with the narration often being contradicted
by the illustrations, but this one takes it even further. Humphrey is an utterly unreliable
narrator. We all know he’s a verbose,
pompous idiot who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else because he’s read a
lot of books (having started out as the school mouse) so having him narrate
means that every single picture shows the real story behind his
blustering. It’s very funny and a nice
change, but I wouldn’t want to be stuck in Humphrey’s mind for more than one
book.
The layout is noticeably different in The Diary Of A Church
Mouse. The pictures appear to be
slightly cropped, not fading out at the edges but with clear corners that look
to me as if part of the picture has been lost.
This may be because it is a 1996 reprint. It is clearly from the same series of editions as The Church Mice
In Action I have, which come with a thick green panel on the left of the cover,
which isn’t very attractive. I much
prefer the editions that have a full picture on the front cover that then wraps
around on to the back cover (as I have with The Church Mouse, The Church Cat
Abroad, The Church Mice Adrift, The Church Mice At Bay and The Church Mice At
Christmas). But when collecting out of
print books, you take what you can get.
Besides, I don’t even know if that style of cover is available for the
later books in the series.
Anyway, back to the layout.
In this book most double pages have one large picture on the left which
depicts only one of the entries on the right page, and it’s a little confusing
because the right page still has smaller illustrations for some of the entries,
so basically the pictures are out of order.
In all the other books, the correct pictures and text are placed
together and there’s no confusion about which one to look at first.
Despite this, both books are funny, clever and full of wonderful
illustrations (I wouldn’t expect less from the extremely talented Graham
Oakley), and this completes the main part of The Collection, so I am looking
forward to sitting down and reading them all from The Church Mouse (1972) to
The Church Mice And The Ring (1992) with no gaps.
Thank you everyone who has helped me get hold of these
books.
Only two more to go!
‘2nd June Being democratic we had a meeting today to decide which team sports we all want to play. The most votes were for kiss in the ring, next came marbles and then I spy with my little eye. Obviously they’re not yet ready for democracy so me and Arthur told them what they wanted to play and that is football and cricket. As their leaders, me and Arthur will play tennis because it’s posher.
3rd-10th June Busy making bats and balls, etc.
11th-28th June Everybody practising hard. Team Spirit not particularly noticeable yet but under pressure, in the matches tomorrow, it will blossom like a beautiful flower.
29th June It didn’t.’
~ The Diary Of A Church Mouse by Graham Oakley, 1986
For the rest of you, who don’t now own the ten greatest illustrated
children’s books ever published to whisk away those Monday blues, you’ll just
have to make do with a Musical Monday.
Beauty School Drop Out from Grease
Performed by Frankie Avalon
Written by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey
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