Writer and reader Rachael King surveys the childhood reads that satisfy her as much now as they did then.

Do you read children’s books, even if you don’t have children of your own? “Of course not”, I hear you say, “I’m a grown-up. I have left behind childish things”. But go on, secretly, you really want to, don’t you. Because what is a children’s book but a map of the world, a life-altering experience distilled into a perfect package: a galloping story that leaves your hair swept back and your heart beating faster, or a gentle cajoling breeze that takes your hand and shows you magic hiding just out of sight? And don’t we all need a bit of magic right now? 

W. H. Auden declared that if a children’s book isn’t good for adults as well, it just isn’t a good book. More recently, S. F. Said, author of the wonderful new Blakean fantasy Tyger, said on Twitter, “We call them children’s books, but really, they’re written for an audience that includes children, but excludes no-one. Children’s books are books for everyone.” 

If that doesn’t convince you, stop what you are doing and go and read Katherine Rundell’s sparkling ode, Why You Should Read Children’s Books Even Though You Are So Old and Wise. It puts into words everything I’m thinking as I merrily strain my eyes over my old, jaundiced Puffin editions. 

Going back to your childhood reading offers not only comfort but intellectual joy – you will pick up on things that you didn’t as a child, because good books are multi-layered and offer a different experience for every reader, no matter what their stage of life. When Katherine Rundell writes for children, it is to satisfy both her child self (“autonomy, peril, justice, food and… a density of atmosphere”) and her adult self (“acknowledgements of fear, love, failure; of the rat that lives within the human heart”).

I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, a rich, if not diverse, time for books. The books that were available to New Zealand children then were almost all written by white New Zealand, Australian, British and American authors, with occasional Scandinavians like Tove Jansson and Astrid Lindgren thrown in. Some of the books I read had Māori or Asian characters, but they were usually, apart from a few stories in the School Journal, written by Pākehā authors. So honestly revisiting my childhood books means a return to a landscape as snowy white as Narnia under the reign of the White Witch. Thankfully, today’s young people have a much wider choice of authors and stories, and much more chance of finding themselves in a book.  

So with that in mind, and after trying and discarding some along the way, including Nancy Drew (read this for the best commentary ever), The Famous Five (boring!), Barbara Sleigh and Edward Eager (both of whom I adored but their sweetness and whimsy didn’t tickle my adult sensibilities), here are six books or series that reward returning to, or, if you didn’t encounter them in childhood, reading as an adult.

C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series

Children’s books are the ultimate in comfort reading, especially if you can remember what you were doing when you first read them. I picture my dad reading The Horse and his Boy aloud to me in my bunk when I was six, when he was living alone in a damp fibrolite bach after he and my mother separated. We had to abandon the book after I vomited all over it after too much fairy bread at a party, but he gave me the Narnia set for my next birthday, so I could read them myself. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read them. Yes, they had hidden Christian allegory and xenophobia that I was blind to, and Lewis did wrong by Susan in The Last Battle, but reading Narnia books will forever be tied to my memories of my late dad and other key flashbulb memories. If I had to choose a favourite it might be The Silver Chair: of all the Narnia children, I identified most with bullied Jill Pole, and mopey Marsh-wiggle Puddleglum, and it gave me complicated feelings about handsome, black-clad prince Rillian, my first literary crush. 

The Owl Service by Alan Garner

I thought I had read The Owl Service as a child but when I picked it up last year, nothing about it was familiar to me. I found the book, which explores class and fate, mind-altering. To compound its strangeness, I watched the 1969 television adaptation straight after – and though the dialogue is almost word for word the same as the book, the children, who I had imagined to be about 14, are played by actors in their 20s, which heightens the psycho-sexual aspects of the book that might elude a child reader (or they might just feel something but not know what that is). The three teenagers play out an ancient love triangle that is doomed to be repeated in the small Welsh hamlet, seemingly forever. The ending is chaotic and mystical, abrupt and unexpected, as the perceived hero of the book lets the side down (she wanted flowers, not owls, you fool!). A couple of years earlier I read the more conventional The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, which people look back on with moon-eyed nostalgia, but it was, frankly, disappointing and boring. I feel like a philistine for saying it, but I feel reassured that even Alan Garner called it “a fairly bad book”. So skip the Weirdstone and go for The Owl Service I reckon. Then watch the freaky TV adaptation. 

Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer

A classic timeslip novel which sees a 1950s boarding school pupil waking up in the same bed, but in the body of Clare, from 1918, while World War One still rages. I remembered the premise but hadn’t appreciated the beauty of the writing and how Farmer uses landscape to convey the melancholy tone, and the poignancy of the effects of war on the community. I was possibly one of the few people to come to The Cure via Penelope Farmer rather than the other way around. Robert Smith blatantly lifted the lyrics and title for his song Charlotte Sometimes directly from the book (The tears were pouring down her face / She was crying and crying for a girl / Who died so many years before…) The music video shows a sexy soft-focus schoolgirl (Charlotte is 13 in the book), haunted inexplicably by a Victorian version of herself. Farmer wrote honestly and humbly about her experience of being ripped off by, forgiving, and meeting Smith, in that order. She speaks of how she was struggling financially while the band was getting rich but conceded that the song gave the book another life, including sales it might not otherwise have had. 

Playing Beatie Bow by Ruth Park

Set in Sydney, this 1980 novel is another timeslip story. Abigail, furious at her family situation, follows a mysterious girl – Beatie Bow – back into 1873. The Rocks of the nineteenth century come alive in vivid, cacophonous detail, as does the Bow family and their Orkney dialect. I remember reading and loving the book at 11 or 12, but as an adult was surprised by dense, lyrical descriptions and the menace that Abigail faces. At one point she is abducted and narrowly misses being sold for her virginity – I’m not sure how much I would have understood at that age, so it was worth coming back for a second read. There’s also the blossoming of first love, and a candid account of all the kinds of kisses Abigail has endured up until that point (“hot muffin” and “hairy sardine”) alongside intricate details of the types of ships that sailed in Sydney Harbour at the time. It must have been educational in more ways than one, but the thrill of the story hasn’t dimmed in 40 years, and it’s easy to see why it’s an enduring classic of Australian children’s literature (even though Park was born a New Zealander).

Under the Mountain by Maurice Gee

Under the Mountain is a foundational text in the King family. In 1980, my brother Jonathan and I lived in Auckland, side-eying volcanoes, and we auditioned (unsuccessfully) for the parts of Rachel and Theo in the iconic TV series. My brother went on to direct the 2009 film version. Gee, according to his biography by Rachel Barrowman, wanted to write for his own children, but also he’d heard that “children’s book as a rule sold better than adult ones”, so he turned to, of all books, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen for inspiration. It really holds up to an adult reading. Gee’s language is typically elegant and never dumbed down for its audience, and because he thought victory was often scored too easily by child heroes, he kills off cousin Ricky at the end, “floating face down in a sea as black as oil.” And then Lake Pupuke erupts causing death and destruction… it is dark. He may have regretted frightening the bejeesus out of a generation.

The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper

These books meant way more to me than I can fit into a couple of hundred words. When I discovered them aged 12, in exile from my family, boarding with friends in Hastings and feeling desperately melancholy, they shaped my worldview, made me yearn to visit Cornwall and Wales and to feel the pulsing of the Dark, the Light, and the Wild Magic beneath my feet wherever I stood. So naturally I read the series every decade and they never lose their shine. Susan Cooper is having a bit of a renaissance of late, thanks to Robert Macfarlane and his annual #TheDarkisReading hashtag, and the incredible BBC audio adaptation he wrote, which was broadcast this past Christmas.

Many people have read The Dark is Rising, but reading the whole series back-to-back is an immersive, wonderous experience. While the first, Over Sea,Under Stone, has been described as “Five Go to Cornwall” in its tone, the series gathers gravitas as it goes. The Grey King is Cooper at the height of her writing power. I find the magic never leaves me; I just need to pump it up every now and again. 

In the wonderful Backlisted podcast episode on The Dark is Rising, Macfarlane as guest says: “We’re all in exile from our childhoods, looking back at a threshold we can’t cross.” As a child, I very much yearned for the future and what it might bring. While reading these books can’t and shouldn’t put you back over the threshold, I reckon travelling back in time with all the knowledge and experience you have now, meeting your forward-looking self and striking up a conversation, might be just thing you need right now. 

But Katherine Rundell says it better: “Plunge yourself soul-forward into a children’s book: see if you do not find in them an unexpected alchemy; if they will not un-dig in you something half hidden and half forgotten.”

Jeremy Rose was first photographed by Ans Westra at the age of five, dressed in a clown suit. Here he reflects on their final meeting, and the ones that came before.

A couple of weeks ago I was delighted to get a message from Ans Westra suggesting we work on some projects together.

“We could think of another collaboration. Perhaps about the good things we used to get into in the past. I can think of so many where our histories have crossed: Matauranga School,” she wrote.

“The great work done in mental health before it all folded through wrongly expressed sentiments. When the patients from Porirua were shunted into drug dependency and ended up living on the streets. I have so many great photographs on that last topic which now could be used as it can be classed as history.”

I was particularly delighted because it was the first I’d heard of her since I wrote a piece for NZ Herald’s Canvas magazine, published in January, recording a reunion between her and Mongrel Mob member Dennis Makalio, 40 years after she’d photographed him at the gang’s Porirua pad.

To say I was excited about the prospect of exploring our mental health system in the 80s and early 90s isn’t quite right. 

My mum, Lisa Rose, who ended up taking her own life, and Ans were friends. And Ans had told me, while we were driving back from Foxton where her exhibition Handboek was on display, that once when she was in hospital my mum had told her: “You’re not bipolar: you’re just unhappy. And she was right.”

There’s a sadness that comes with having someone close to you commit suicide which, in my experience, is never far from the surface. Having that sadness bubble up can be unsettling and tiring. But Ans’s story reminded me of Mum at her best. Supportive, critical of established norms, and incisive. And I was drawn to the idea of writing about mental health and the toll it takes – particularly on people who are made to feel like outsiders.

People like Ans and my mum.

For some reason I assumed the conversation had taken place in the 1970s – before my mum’s descent into mental illness. Some of my earliest memories are of Mum taking me to visit one of her and Ans’s friends – the poet Meg Campbell. 

But when I popped into Ans’s house the week before last to discuss what she had in mind, she put me right.

In fact, they had briefly been patients together in Wellington’s Ward 27 psychiatric ward in the early 1990s.

“It said on the door that it was a voluntary ward but they took my clothes off me and locked them away,” she told me.

“I asked a nurse if I was mad, and she said: “No you’re not mad… for a CRAZY person.”

Ever the photographer, Ans had asked for permission to take her camera with her but was told that wouldn’t be possible. I’m not sure whether that’s a pity or not. I’m sure the photos would have been honest, but being reminded of my mum in that environment would be hard.

Mum was right: Ans wasn’t bipolar and her stay was short.

Ans was a hoarder though. But on a hoarder’s trash-to-treasure index her house was well and truly in the treasure section. 

As you opened the front door, Ans greeted you from her bed. You had to clear a pile of books from a chair to sit down. The walls were dripping with paintings by a who’s who of New Zealand artists: most of whom she knew personally. Ans’s own works were all but absent. There was a pamphlet for one of the shows in the pile of stuff I removed from the chair and some of her books on the bookshelf.

Wellington had experienced quite a shake a few days before my visit and Ans told me with a laugh that she had woken up on the floor not knowing quite what had happened. Ans often laughed. It was almost a form of punctuation.

I asked her what she had in mind when it came to the mental health project and she told me she had two series of photos she was particularly keen on that had never been published. One was of patients at the Hutt hospital during a time when it had a Peruvian psychiatrist with progressive views on mental health, and the other was from an open day at Porirua hospital.

She described a photo of a Māori man – who had spent most of his life at Porirua hospital – being held by a security guard with a punk rock haircut. The man’s family didn’t want the photo displayed. “It was a pity, really. It’s a very tender photo.”

We agreed that we would get in touch with family and see whether, with time, they’d come to see the picture differently.

The photographer Bruce Connew once told me he thought the language of photography – shooting, capturing, taking an image – spoke to one of the more problematic aspects of the discipline.

Ans was at my mum’s funeral: as always she had her Rolleiflex camera in hand. I remember Johnny Baxter, the son of poet James K Baxter, coming up to me and asking if I wanted him to tell her to stop.

He was still pissed off at Ans for the photos she took without asking permission at his dad’s funeral. 

My brother Tim had asked Ans to take photos, which I’ve never seen and have no desire to. There are some memories that don’t need a photograph’s prompt – in fact, it would be unwelcome.

But for each of us who has events caught by Ans that we prefer to leave alone there will be dozens, like Dennis Makalio, who are grateful there was a photographer interested enough in their story to take the time to record it on the distinctive, almost square negative of a Rolleiflex camera.

My earliest memories of being photographed are from when I was about five, when Ans visited our family in Ngaio. I’ve got a photo of me in a clown suit, with my two brothers, hanging in my bedroom. Ans gave it to me in the early 90s. I had gone up to her house to talk to her about photos of Matauranga – an alternative school in Wellington that I had attended and was writing a history of.

She gave me a piece of paper with a series of negative numbers and said I’d be able to find them in her collection stored at the Turnbull Library. No fee required. I’m sure she’s done the same for hundreds of others.

And then she gave me a slightly tattered, exhibition-sized print of the photo of us three brothers. 

Reviewing Handboek – the collection of her photos published to coincide with her retrospective – in 2008, I wrote: “Being photographed by Westra is a far more subtle experience than being ‘shot’ on a standard SLR camera. There can be few photographers as physically defined by their camera as Westra. Her slight stoop seems purpose-built for the head-down posture, required by a Rolleiflex.”

Ans continued taking photos until the end. On the trip to Foxton and back she snapped photos on a small digital camera. Her eyesight seemed to be fading.

“Cute dog,” she said, as she took a photo of a calf in a trailer being towed in front of us.

She was looking forward to a stint as an artist in residence in Invercargill.

As I was leaving she mentioned that Hone Tuwhare used to ring her in the middle of the night and say: “Have they made you a dame yet? I couldn’t accept an honour like that – I’m a communist. But you should get one.”

Tuwhare described Ans’s photographs like this: “Ans’s works are seedlings of a quiet joy, of hope; and smartening-up, the human sense of: Hey Mate! You’re me!”

I can’t do better than that.