Shoes and the child's mind

This last week, my forbidden pleasure has been Noel Streatfeild's 1937 novel, Ballet Shoes. What a document of the Depression, a vanished era in the theatre, and the child's mind it is--not to mention charming almost beyond its author's merits. The story, as you will recall, concerns three orphans, improbably and separately rescued from disaster by a paleontologist, eccentric in a storybook manner. Before he leaves them with his hapless niece Sylvia, the children dub him "Gum" (Great Uncle Matthew); with equal whimsical improbability, he gives them the common surname Fossil. They call Sylvia--who is neither their mother nor their nurse--Garnie, a childish corruption of "Guardian," and as in the Mitfords and their "Hons" and "Bod," these childhood nicknames take on an almost sacred, immutable quality. The remainder of the novel gives itself to the story of the Fossil sisters' gradual rise in the theatre--the lively half-world of pantomimes and matinees that employed London children before the era of Annie or Cats. They are lucky, each of them, to have a distinctive talent, but much of the book is devoted to their work--the assiduous daily training they undergo at Madame Fidolia's Academy, hours of home tutoring from their spinster-schoolteacher boarders (likely a lesbian couple?)--and the achievement and even joy they derive from their efforts. It is a fantasy of real life in its florets of whimsy (of course the boarders supply their educational and emotional wants precisely! of course Gum re-emerges like a deus ex machina!) --but of genuine fantasy and magic, there is none; nor do we desire any. What is most striking is Streatfeild's uncanny recollection of what satisfies the child's mind, male or female. Conversation is rarely long or sentimental; her heroines are never little philosophers or psychologists, but genuine children, kind, selfish, and hard by turns. She lavishes her novelist's attention on their clothing--crucial dresses and outfits--and on food they enjoy and long for (and sometimes lack). She remembers, somehow, what we forget: the child's almost fetishistic love for real, tangible things (clothing, toys, food), around which wishes and fantasies can cluster. Her children's lives are semi-magical; but the children themselves are never false or sugary.