Dyslexic author wins Nestlé Children's Book Prize

The Nestlé Children’s Book Prize, formerly known as the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize, is now in its 21st year and is administered by Booktrust, an independent charity which promotes books and reading. In 2005 some 55,000 schoolchildren took part in the Prize, which celebrates the nation’s best children’s books as voted for by children themselves. The winners were presented with their prizes at an award ceremony at the British Library in December.

Targetting books for children of primary school age there are gold, silver and bronze awards in each of three categories. The gold award winners were: of the under 5 years age group, Oliver Jeffers for 'Lost and Found'; of the 6-8 years age group, Nick Butterworth for 'The Whisperer'; of the 9-11 years age group the dyslexic author Sally Gardner for her book 'I, Coriander' published by Orion, a fantasy tale of murder, magic and romance set in 17th century London.

Sally Gardner is severely dyslexic and only learnt to read at the age of fourteen. She was once told she was uneducable and was sent to a school for maladjusted children before discovering a talent for illustration and storytelling. She always wanted to illustrate children’s books but once admitted: “I honestly never thought it would be possible to write because of my dyslexia”. While Sally has published other children’s books as an illustrator and storyteller, I, Coriander is her first book consisting of words alone.

Richard & Judy Book Club

The Richard and Judy Book Club has been credited with increasing both reading and book sales (2 million plus for the shortlist titles of 2005). Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan have released the titles which will be reveiewed in their Channel 4 programme for 2006 so if you want to start reading early, here they are:

The short list of 10 was culled from 500 submitted suggestions. After reading, viewers get to vote for the Best Read Award which last year was won by Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

 Byron manuscript discovered

The only known manuscript of a poem by Lord Byron has been found within the archives of University College, London, by librarian Susan Stead who stumbled across the original, which had been assumed lost, in an 1810 edition of The Pleasures of Memory by Samuel Rogers.

"I knew Byron and Rogers were acquainted so thought it probably was authentic," she said. Byron's 12-line poem begins "Absent or present still to thee" and the poem's manuscript, which talks of friendship and memory, was dated 12 April, 1812. It appeared in print four years later in a volume of collected poems. She had the work authenticated by various Byron scholars.

Samuel Rogers was a patron of the arts and minor poet and The Pleasures was his most important work. Byron praised the Pleasures of Memory highly but he later turned against Rogers, writing a bitter lampoon against him in 1818.  

Beverley Nichols, 1898-1983, by
Nigel Smith of Bagot Books

When I was a child there were two pet food adverts that I can still remember vividly. One was a dog food ad which was presented by Clement Freud (the joke being that his co-presenter was a bloodhound and it wasn’t easy to tell them apart). At the same time there was a similar format advert for cat food with a pleasant-faced, slightly chubby elderly man (although his cat didn’t look anything like him).

As a child I read the Magic Woodland Trilogy: The Tree That Sat Down, The Stream That Stood Still and The Mountain of Magic, and thoroughly enjoyed them.

On moving to Ashtead twenty-odd years ago I noticed and admired a fine old Georgian house opposite a farmyard, in one of the old lanes that pre-date the suburban sprawl that has overtaken this part of Surrey, the pair of them fossils of the rural landscape that has been built over since the 1950s.

Shortly thereafter I discovered that this house, Merry Hall, had belonged to an author who had written about his time in there. I sought out the book, only to find it was a trilogy by Beverley Nichols: Merry Hall, Laughter on the Stairs, and Sunlight on the Lawn. This is a very readable and funny account of his acquisition and restoration of the near derelict garden and, even nearer derelict, house; assisted by his major-domo Gaskin, and the redoubtable Oldfield, a gardener he more or less found in the potting shed, and who came as a fixture in the garden. Not only had he little money to spare, but this was during post-war austerity; however, aided by various friends, particularly ‘Marius’ and Gaskin, and several interfering local ladies, he sets to work. It is a shame that much of the land behind and beside Merry Hall is now occupied by a modern housing estate, albeit called ‘Oldfield Gardens’.

The border between fiction and biography, especially autobiography, is often blurred, and in this trilogy it is very much so. A number of the characters are either invented or altered, but the writing is so heartfelt, the narrative so compelling, that I just had to read the whole trilogy, and have since re-read it.

A year of two after that I read and thoroughly enjoyed a detection novel called The Moonflower with an unlikely hero called Horatio Green. This was also by Beverley Nichols, was very well plotted, well written, and humorous; there were others in this series, so I started looking out for them, and other books by Nichols. This was when I realised that he had written the Mountain of Magic books.

Since then I’ve read several more of his gardening books, discovered that he was part of the Somerset Maugham/Noel Coward set, and that in recent years he has become a gay icon.

And then a little while ago I started reading one of his last books Down The Kitchen Sink. It wasn’t quite like the others I had read. There was no whimsy, no invention. It was by an old man who’d seen better days financially and was describing having to scrimp and make do. Part way through the book he recalls the death of Gaskin and he bemoans having to take a job in a cat food advert to try to make ends meet. By this time I had seen a photo of Nichols when he was a younger man and the penny dropped that this was the man I remembered in the cat food ads from my childhood! I do hope that he was a happier man in his last days than this book suggests - the only one of Nichols’ books that I have started and not finished. But perhaps it’s a book of its time - Bloody Sunday, Ted Heath, and the miners’ strikes. Not much in the news to cheer one in one’s old age.

I have one more of his Horatio Green books to obtain and read; there’s a fourth children’s book (The Wickedest Witch in the World) that I’m not sure whether to read or not, and several cat books I don’t think I will; and I still have a few of his gardening titles to read. I own several miscellaneous books of his. I’ve not started reading any of his purely autobiographical books yet (partly because I’m not sure how he managed to fill so many with enough that would be interesting), nor any of his books on politics, religion, flower arranging, or any of the other various subjects he wrote about. In addition to all of these he also wrote four plays, a book of poetry and, in the 1930s, music and lyrics.

Beverley Nichols is a collectable author as the majority of his books are easily obtainable and moderately priced. Some of Beverley Nichols gardening books are in print from Timber Press.