Read me a dirty story, Mummy

Rachel Johnson on why so many children’s books are about sex (or ‘shagging’) and hard-core social issues

‘I sit on the toilet, pushing it all into my hand, and then I paint the walls brown. Brown to wash out the white of my anger. Brown to make them hate me. Oh, how they hate me. Back in my room, I tear off my pyjamas and rip them to shreds….’

Well, it’s not nice, this extract from a children’s book called Georgie by Malachy Doyle, I know. I’m sorry to share it with you. I do hope you’ve already eaten. But it’s in my ten-year-old daughter’s bedroom, along with the rest of her utterly representative contemporary ‘kid-fic’ or ‘child-lit’ library of Jacqueline Wilsons, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen paperbacks, her Babysitters’ Club collection, her Princess Diaries series, all much-thumbed compared with the pristine editions of books that I loved at her age, which remain almost defiantly unread: Anne of Green Gables, Watership Down, The Secret Garden, The Warden’s Niece, Little Women, I Capture the Castle, How Green was My Valley (it still gives me a shiver of pleasure, just to write their titles), A Traveller in Time, The Dew Drop Inn, What Katy Did. I could go on. I think we all could.

I used to think that Jacqueline Wilson — who was given an OBE in 2002 for services to literacy in schools but is known as ‘the devil-woman’ in my house — was about as bad as it gets. I would, out of curiosity, dip into The Illustrated Mum (as the blurb goes, ‘a moving and sometimes comical story of how two girls cope with looking after their manic-depressive mother’). Or Dustbin Baby, about a girl who was dumped in one as soon as she was born. But as I now know, Jacqueline Wilson’s oeuvre is of almost prelapsarian innocence compared with some of the new stuff being published.