The passing of children's author and illustrator David McKee last month got me thinking about what might be his most underrated work, I Hate My Teddy Bear, which was first published in 1982, and which I'll wager you didn't read about in too many of his obituaries. McKee was better known for his series of books about Elmer, a multi-coloured elephant, Mr Benn, a habitual cosplayer, and King Rollo, a monarch who appealled to me as a nipper because, much like myself, he struggled with getting his laces tied (Rollo, though, found arguably too easy a solution). His most famous one-off story was Not Now, Bernard from 1980, a surprisingly chilly tale of parental negligence, in which a mother and father are too wrapped up in themselves to notice that their son, the titular Bernard, has been killed and replaced by a hulking purple monster. By the end of the story, the monster itself has grown disturbed by this state of affairs, and protests that, "I am a monster", only to be met with the same disinterested response that Bernard presumably received for much of his life. To the adult reader, it is tempting to apply a metaphorical reading of the story, in which Bernard "becomes" the monster in acting out against his apathetic parents. As such, it might be understood as a deliberate inversion on the ending of Maurice Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are; whereas Max ultimately comes in from the wilderness to reassurances of his mother's unconditional love, in the form of the "still hot" supper, "Bernard" receives no such consolation, the TV dinner and bedtime milk prepared for him being perfunctory tokens of a half-hearted parenting routine in which neither his mother or his father can find time to properly acknowledge his existence. Crucially, Bernard's innocence is not recovered by the end of the story - he embraces his Wild Thing and allows it to consume him and remold his identity. His parents have not grown or changed in any way, but Bernard has taken his first major steps in what will undoubtedly be a long and messy journey in figuring out how to survive in such an indifferent world.
Regardless of whether you prefer to take the story literally or metaphorically, McKee leads us to an unrepentantly harsh conclusion, one that might occasionally prove too much for some readers. In my experience, the book is more likely to strike a nerve with adults, presumably because they're going to be more receptive to McKee's implicit commentary on deadbeat parenting; children, I think, are more liable to appreciate it as a grisly tale with a clear punchline, one that feels more at the expense of the unwitting parents than either Bernard or the monster. One of my fondest memories of infant school was when a supply teacher came in and read my class Not Now, Bernard. We already knew how the story went, but this was clearly her first time reading it, and she couldn't conceal her horror at the outcome. Another teacher attempted to deflect from the bleakness of the ending by pointing out how nice it was that the monster was, for a moment, able to sit down peacefully and read one of Bernard's comic books (though she disapproved of him breaking one of Bernard's toys). Still, Not Now, Bernard was hardly an anomaly in McKee's output - he had a distinctively morbid side that would intermittently show its claws, and trusted that his readership could handle a sour conclusion. Tusk Tusk (1978), about a war between two tribes of elephants, is a cautionary fable about the dangers of not accepting differences in others (and just when you think the elephants have reached a peaceful solution, McKee insists on upsetting the equilibrium on the final page). The Sad Story of Veronica Who Played The Violin: Being an Explanation of Why the Streets Are Not Full of Happy Dancing People (1987) advertises its own playfully doleful intentions in its deliberately overwrought title; a shaggy dog story about a young violin virtuoso whose music invariably brings her listeners to tears, it reaches an abrupt and particularly mean-spirited punchline that, as with Bernard, has zero qualms with abandoning its protagonist in the digestive system of a raging beast. This punchline does, however, call attention to what appears to be a running theme throughout many of McKee's works - which is to say, communication, and the characters' failure to understand one another. It is this lack of communication that tends to be the root cause of tragedy in much of his work.
I Hate My Teddy Bear finds McKee in a considerably more genial mood than with Bernard, Tusk or Veronica, but it strikes me as the book in which the theme of thwarted communication is most poignantly expressed. I was also read I Hate My Teddy Bear back in infant school, and it made a pretty strong impression on me, though I'll confess that I did not commit the title to memory, nor the fact that teddy bears played any role at all within the story. I simply remembered this strange book about a couple of children who were arguing, while there in the background was a peculiar parallel storyline involving enormous stone replicas of human body parts being carted around (mostly hands, with one lone foot - I had remembered there being a nose in there too, but perhaps I was confusing that with some other book). As a child I never did figure out what that was about. Neither did my teacher, who commented that, "Maybe they were building something," and left it at that, which got me speculating that the items in question were being pieced together to create a single giant statue, and I shuddered to think what kind of sculpted creation would require so many hands and only one foot. I wasn't sure I actually wanted to see the finished product. When I came across a copy of the book later in life, I scrutinised the picture very carefully, hoping to finally make some sense of those mysterious statutes - and, as it turns out, McKee does indeed reveal the in-universe purpose of the concrete hands, but only in the final illustration. That much does not remain a mystery. What McKee is less upfront about is how are we expected to interpret the motif of the statues in conjunction with the A-story about the book's protagonists, John and Brenda, two children professing mutual disdain for their teddy bears (John's bear is blue while Brenda's is pink, which admittedly doesn't register as very PC from a contemporary standpoint), but also cannot tolerate the thought of their own teddy bear appearing inferior to the other. As per the blurb on the back of the book, "Brenda and John are so busy
arguing about their teddy bears, that they don't notice something very
strange is going on around them", which directs that our focus to the nature of this narrative mismatch, and what is potentially revealed therein.
Like Lily Takes A Walk by Satoshi Kitamura, I Hate My Teddy Bear is a first-class example of a picture book in which the story being told appears to rest in a certain discrepancy between word and image. In textual terms, it is a straightforward tale about two children who,
having been turned outside to play together by their respective mothers,
engage in a string of petty, passive aggressive arguments. As the children talk, a rhythm emerges in their dialogue, with John ascribing some kind of outlandish quality to his bear (it can talk, count backwards, sing and fly, according to John), and Brenda insisting that her bear is every bit its match. This goes on, with the tone of their exchange becoming increasingly heated, until they are summoned inside for tea by John's mother. At this point, the children abandon all hard feelings, and the focus of the text suddenly shifts to a conversation apparently going on between the bears themselves. Having spent the duration of the story passively listening to their young custodians talking them up (albeit from afar - the children abandon their bears early in the story, only retrieving them at the end), they congratulate one another on the amazing things they can supposedly do. The Pink Teddy admits that at least one of the talents ascribed to it by Brenda was an exaggeration: "But I can't fly". "Neither can I," says the Blue Teddy. The only extraordinary plot point conveyed in the text is in this closing revelation that the bears are alive and capable of conversing with one another, and if you had the story read to you without seeing the illustrations you might very well assume that this is the very strange "something" to which the blurb alludes. Looking at the images, the giant hands are so dominant, and the milieus in general are so richly detailed, that John and Brenda appear intermittently to merge into the background, a recurring feature in a picture so visibly bigger that, if not for the narrative grounding of the text, it would be easy to lose track of them.
Ostensibly, there are echoes of Not Now, Bernard in the basic set-up, in that both books deal with children who, having been turned aside by their adult caregivers, seek an outlet for the resentment they are unable to express directly. Here, however, McKee's illustrations are much more sympathetic to John and Brenda's mothers, in giving them a micro-narrative of their own that does not reach a clear resolution. The text informs us that "On Thursday, Brenda's mother came to visit John's mother", but the reason behind her visit is revealed only minimally within the images - it is apparent that Brenda's mother has come to John's mother in search of emotional support due to some distressing news she has received via letter. The text states that, in addition, "Brenda came to play with John", and while the two children are seen eating biscuits together in an amicable fashion within the accompanying illustration, the illustration does not privilege John and Brenda by making them its obvious focal point. Elsewhere in the room, the sight of Brenda's mother sobbing as John's mother surveys the letter - supplemented, cryptically, with the photograph of an unidentified man - and, outside the window, the toes of the giant foot statue passing by all seem every bit as prominent. The text indicates that we should be paying attention to John and Brenda, but it is difficult not to feel invested in what is happening right over their shoulder. Notably, as John and Brenda eat biscuits together they are smiling contentedly, suggesting that they are unaffected by the adjacent display of sorrow. In that regard, the book might even be seen as anti-Not Now, Bernard; whereas the former story was all about adult indifference toward childhood angst, I Hate My Teddy Bear touches on childhood obliviousness to adult grief, an important distinction being that John and Brenda are not so willfully in the dark. It can be deduced that John's mother sends them outside with their teddy bears so as to avoid exposing them to the harrowing conversation she is about to embark on with Brenda's mother. These undertones of parental hardship might also call our attention to the curiously spartan conditions in John's flat; while the kitchen is adequately furnished, the living room is mostly bare, with mostly makeshift furniture made from overturned crates and a sunbed, raising questions about the circumstances of their accommodation (eccentric decorating style, financial hardship or hurried relocation?). Likewise, the respective fathers of John and Brenda are conspicuously absent from the story, and it seems that McKee does indeed intend for us to ponder their whereabouts; a framed picture on the kitchen unit shows a blonde-haired man who could be John's father (although if should also be noted that John, unlike either of his parents, has red hair - it still wouldn't be out of the question for the blonde man to be his father, but McKee hasn't made their potential biological connection overtly obvious). If so, is he still in the picture figuratively speaking? On that same note, we might speculate that the man whose image was attached to the letter that has Brenda's mother so upset is Brenda's father, and that the source of her distress has something to do with their relationship (my tentative theory is that he's been declared Missing In Action in some war). For now, whatever concerns their mothers have to share might appear to go over John and Brenda's heads, but their erratic behaviour outside of the building suggests that they do sense a degree of unsettlement. After all, no obvious motivation is supplied, either within the text or illustrations, for why John turns so abruptly on his teddy. We can only assume that he is taking the opportunity to enact some form of misplaced anger in the absence of parental authority, although the nature of this anger is also unclear. The parental anguish glimpsed at the beginning sets up an undercurrent of unease that runs throughout all the story, in which the children's acts of hostility against their teddies and one another provide a crude kind of outlet for what goes otherwise unarticulated.
That McKee bothers to specify that the events in question take place on a Thursday seems entirely incidental, although it does lead into one of the book's broader themes, which concerns everything being part of an ongoing flow, with no clearly defined beginning or end. The happenings of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were essential in getting us to where we are today, much as the events depicted here will have consequences of their own for Friday and Saturday. The lack of any real closure regarding the mothers' narrative thread seems only fitting in that sense; whatever is paining Brenda's mother will presumably not be remedied within the very brief window of time in which the story unfolds. Instead, the story ends with a moment of harmony in which the balance of the universe appears to have been restored for just a second. The penultimate illustration shows John, Brenda and their mothers inside the flat, snacking on tea and cake. Brenda's mother wears a dreamy expression, suggesting that her mind is preoccupied, but for the time being her weeping has stopped. The room in which they are all based is visibly different to the one seen at the beginning of the story, with its intriguingly bare-bones decor; furnishing is still minimal, with the mothers seated on a rug on the floor, but the room boasts a warmer, more vibrant feel, with the added comforts of carpeting, cushions and curtains, perhaps reflecting a rosier outlook for the characters. There are, nevertheless, traces of unease that pervade this scene - John and Brenda are no longer at odds, although McKee denies them any explicit moment of reconciliation, and it might bother us that the children are positioned in different areas the room, their attentions directed away from one another, in contrast to the page's opening counterpart, when they were shown eating biscuits side by side and smiling (also troubling is that John's facial expression, in the penultimate image, is obscured by a teacake, meaning that we can't actually see if he is happy or sad with the ending arrangement). McKee instead gives the closing display of unity to the bears, who are standing out on the balcony. The final illustration shows the view from the balcony, and with it, reveals the purpose of those strange hulking hand statues - they are part of an art exhibition happening in the neighbourhood park. But where one puzzle closes, another merely opens up - the juxtaposition of the exhibition with the image of the two bears huddled together amicably suggests that there is a thematic parallel to be drawn between the bears' mutuality and the giant hands that permeate every last inch of the story. Notably, the final illustration is the only one in the story in which John and Brenda do not appear - this particular glimpse of chiselled paradise is reserved exclusively for their teddies, presumably because their earnestness makes them more receptive to it (ironically, though, they are not looking at the exhibition but at each other).
As with Lily Takes A Walk, the story revolves around the failures of participants to see eye-to-eye, a theme that extends not only to John and Brenda's arbitrary disagreement but to the reader's more comprehensive view of the world surrounding the protagonists, and the multitude of interconnected lives with which they unwittingly cross paths on their short excursion. Every illustration in McKee's book is an incredibly busy one, inviting the reader to examine each image with a Where's Waldo/Wally-like scrutiny. The bizarre assortment of hand statues being carried throughout the book provide most the dominant parallel narrative, but there are various other micro-narratives that emerge and unfold across multiple pages. In one image, we see a dropped glove upon the ground; in another, a woman wearing only one glove frantically inquiring about something with another passer-by (this narrative thread too is given no resolution; neither the woman nor the glove feature in any subsequent illustrations). We also see a man purchasing a harmonica and being trailed by a mysterious woman in a pink hat (seen only from behind), intent upon following him - as it turns out, he is heading to a bandstand in a park, where she takes her place the lone spectator to his performance. It becomes apparent that hands are an important motif, not simply in the hulking statues that feature in every illustration, but in the most modest gestures being enacted by the various bystanders - one person is seen reading another's palm, an elderly couple holding hands lovingly (one of them is also holding a hand-shaped lollipop in their free hand), and others carrying out various tasks all dependent on dexterity (knitting, painting, photography). McKee puts great emphasis on the plethora of ways in which the characters make use of their hands, to the point that the book becomes a low-ley celebration of the human hand and its tremendous potential. From a thematic standpoint, the hand serves two key functions - firstly, as a means of communication, as reflected in the numerous gestures the bystanders make with their hands throughout, and, by extension, a means of connection.
Connectivity, both physical and otherwise, seems to be the prevailing theme of McKee's story, as suggested in the illustration on the title page, which shows the two teddy bears smiling directly at the reader with their arms linked (another irony - given that the bears symbolise this connection in most ideal state, they themselves have no hands). Somewhat incongruously, at their feet (or lack of) we also see the solitary dropped glove that features in one of the illustrations within the story, underscoring the importance of the hand as a motif but itself signifying detachment and misplacement. The glove is a symbol of vulnerability, and the threat of being lost and left behind in a world of overwhelming scope. The disconnect between the protagonists and the overflow of activity around them, more than simply chiding John and Brenda for their inattentiveness, seems to play into that vulnerability - the paradox that, in an environment so seething with life, the characters are so dominated by the omnipresent risk of ending up alone. John and Brenda's ridiculous argument is, in its own way, a kind of bonding ritual, with Brenda following John's every lead in order to keep with him, and John continually upping the scale of his challenge in order to reassert his advantage over Brenda. Both children are clearly dependent on one another in order to reaffirm their worth, but the rules of the game state that neither is permitted to show weakness to the other. Their plush companions, by contrast, are open about their own limitations (that neither is able to fly) and discover that they are not so alone in that regard. We might see the bears as representing the inner voices of their respective owners, in expressing the kind of mutual sympathy that John and Brenda are dying to communicate with one another, but each too guarded against.
The hand sculptures, meanwhile, provide the book with a quirky visual through line, one that, despite the celebratory arrangement of the closing page, produces its own undercurrent of unease. The sight of multiple people hauling these great, absurd statues across each page is undeniably humorous, yet their imposing nature gives them an edge that is equally as sinister (it does not surprise me that I was so bothered by their presence as a child), causing them to seem intermittently grotesque, even predatory - in one illustration, we see a giant hand lurching from the lower-left corner of the image with its fingers outstretched, as if intending to prey on the two unwary children. In other images the hands appear to be dictating the action around them - on one page, we see a statue with its hands pressed forward in a pointing motion, and the majority of bystanders gazing in the specified direction (at what, McKee does not reveal; besides John and Brenda, there is one other dissenter pointing in the opposite direction, apparently having spotted something equally transfixing - McKee's salute to non-conformity, and a reminder that there is something of value to be discovered at every angle of life). Another hand has its fingers crossed, which could be seen as a gesture of hope, or alternatively duplicity, to indicate that the speaker is knowingly divulging in some untruth (underscoring the feigned posturing of John and Brenda's ritual). More genially, as John and Brenda run back inside the block of flats, the hand glimpsed through the door behind them is stretched out in a waving motion, as though bidding the two farewell. The hands, feeling less like sculptures than divine forces overwhelming the lowly mortals beneath them, appear to signify the bigger picture - the overpowering flow in which everything is ultimately swept up, and the fluctuating river of joy, anguish and confusion it persists in dragging its subjects down. The final illustration (notably, the "waving" hand is positioned at the centre of the exhibition, signifying McKee's farewell to the reader) lauds our mutual helplessness within this broader scheme as a great unifier, with the indication that understanding can be achieved through the recognition that we are all as fundamentally fragile as one another.
One further mystery rears its head - in the last two pages McKee appears to broaden his thematic palette and develop an interest in shoes, suddenly making that lone foot statue (also featured in the final display) not seem like such a galling anomaly. Both John and Brenda's mothers have their shoes removed and positioned near the rug in the penultimate illustration. In the final image, we see a pair of discarded shoes, with no obvious owner in sight, and this, as much as everything else, feels like it might be the real punchline of the story. The shoes could be a symbol of empathy, an allusion to the familiar idiom about walking in another's shoes, although McKee does not make this connection particularly explicit. More persuasively, they are a callback to the dropped glove from earlier in the story, although - unlike that glove - the shoes have been discarded together and are thus do not make for such a forlorn image. Again, it is as if McKee is saying that we are all lost in this world together, and this is something to be cherished.
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