There's a connection between an obscure, long out-of-print children's poetry anthology and early 90s pop music that you likely don't appreciate. I myself was entirely oblivious to it until just a week or so ago, when I happened to dig my old copy out of storage. The book in question is High Time You Grew Up, which was printed by Mary Glasgow Publications in 1989, and compiled by poet Fred Sedgwick as part of the This Way That Way series, a collection comprised of ten anthologies, five of which were aimed at the infant demographic (ages 4-7), and five at juniors (8-11). The series seemed to be quite popular when I was child - at the very least, copies were prolific enough throughout my own school - so shame that they've effectively fallen off the face of the planet (before being reunited with my own copy, I'd attempted to source another from Abebooks, and my search came up woefully short). The connection occurs on page 3, with Sedgwick's presentation of "Fragment" by Gerda Mayer. If the accompanying illustration, courtesy of Felicity Roma Bowers, strikes you as oddly familiar, it's because it's the same image (more or less) that appears on the cover for the Genesis album We Can't Dance - and, yes, it was created for this book first, before finding its way into the hands of Collins and crew. On the Genesis album, the background colours have been modified for a more dominant yellow effect, and the child's silhouette has been tweaked - a girl in the original, on We Can't Dance they have been given a more masculine appearance, and a hat similar to that of the adult figure, emphasising that the two are to be seen as generational counterparts, a move that seems particularly evocative of the opening track, "No Son of Mine" (indeed, the "No Son of Mine" single offers another variation on the image, this time showing the child alone and abandoned). That is this anthology's claim to pop cultural fame, and for that reason alone it should not be permitted to sink into obscurity.
I know none of the details regarding how Bowers' art was brought to the band's attention, but it strikes me as wholly appropriate that an illustration from this particular anthology should have touched a nerve with somebody within the Genesis ranks, in seeking a graphic correlative to a song about the regretful frictions that dominate a parent-child relationship. More compelling still is how the cover illustration to "No Son of Mine" seems to function as an extension of the anthology as a whole, its relation thematically as much as aesthetically - the image of a child, left to contemplate the world by their lonesome, perhaps prematurely, but on some level almost certainly permanently, feels like the perfect all-purpose visual tag-line to any number of poems from this collection.
The title of Sedgwick's anthology was taken from the final poem, "High Time You Grew Up" by David Kitchen, and clues us in that the overarching theme of the collection has to do with the anxieties and inevitabilities of coming of age - in particular the clashes of will between parent and child as the latter is tasked with having to navigate from childhood and to adulthood, and confronting the realisation that they cannot stay in their place of perceived safety forever. Not every poem follows this theme overtly - "Home Sweet Home" by John Gohorry, for example, is a charming piece of nonsense verse that appears to emphasise the necessity of remaining young at heart. Ditto "The Walk" by Anonymous, which mimics the structure of a children's party game in which a story is recited continuously in succession, with a new detail added with each participant. Some of the poems examine this sense of bygone innocence from a perspective in which time and space are the antagonists - for example, in "Back Home" by Amryl Johnson, the poet reflects on her nostalgia for her childhood in Trinidad, and the feeling of cultural displacement that continues to reverberate through her present life in London, with the conclusion that, "Back home is just a sad-sweet memory". Some have the echoes of the historical traumas that stand between the past and the present; in "Fragment", we see Mayer, whose Jewish family were forced to flee her native Karlsbad in 1938 to escape the incoming Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, pay tribute to the "frail ghosts...faint tune" that is the memory of herself and her father playfully holding up a mouthorgan to the Bohemian winds. Elsewhere, multiple poems deal specifically with the failure of parents and children to see eye-to-eye, with consequences ranging from the farcical to the downright gruesome. Some of these conflicts are fully benign - "Eating Habits", the only poem in the anthology to be contributed by Sedgwick himself, offers a humorous bit of role reversal in which a child relates their exasperation at being unable to convince their mother to swap her granary loaves for unhealthy white bread ("I've really tried to show that what's, well, good, isn't always good for you"). In "Old Grandpa - A Poem To Finish" by John Cotton, we hear the opening details of an anecdote about a familial senior, a grandparent this time, whose faded eyesight and adrenaline-chasing propensities will spell trouble for anyone foolhardy enough to hop aboard the pillion of his trusty Norton. Four of the poems find children having to cope with situations where they are left without parental oversight, only one of which, "Half Asleep" by Wes Magee, is especially non-threatening in nature. In the others, the children end up contending with demons both internal ("The Purse" by David Kitchen) and external ("Eddy Scott Goes Out To Play" by David Orme), and maybe something in between (the title poem). It's this particular threesome of poems that most got under my skin whilst reading the anthology as a child. Although the We Can't Dance connection immediately made the publication that much more fascinating to me, you might have picked up on the fact that I was looking to reacquaint myself with it before I knew that it was there, and you really have these three poems to thank for that. They made their mark on me because they each, in their own individual ways, managed to chip away at a little piece of my own perceived childhood safety. On a thematic level, they also segue beautifully into one another, and would have made a brilliant closing trilogy to the collection if not for the rather awkward placement of "Eating Habits" in between "The Purse" and "Eddy Scott".
The first of the three, "The Purse", is told from the perspective of a young kleptomaniac who compulsively steals from his mother's purse whenever he's left alone inside the house. His mother is seemingly unaware of her son's thieving compulsions and regularly buys him things; pleads the protagonist: "Each kindness makes it worse/Because I know, when she's next door/My hands will find her purse." The poem plays like a darker, more introspective version of Allan Ahlberg's "I Did A Bad Thing Once" (from the collection Please Mrs Butler), in which the confessor is unable to fathom his compulsive actions, just that he will, invariably, surrender to them. His observation that "my hands will find her purse" indicates that he sees his body as operating independently of his will. In Sedgwick's anthology, the impact of the poem is enhanced by illustrations by Kim Palmer; they are presented in black and white, the only illustrations in the anthology to adopt this approach, the effect of which is to give the images a cold, washed-out feeling that is reflective both of the protagonist's blanched, fearful state and the self-loathing vantage point from which they can only contemplate the whole sorry business. Despite his admission that he has never been caught and made to face any consequences for his actions, he laments that, "I'm sure someone's watching me", alluding to his own guilt and better judgement; this much is captured in one illustration in which we get a voyeuristic glimpse of the protagonist edging toward the purse from a reserved enough distance on our part. Above the protagonist is a framed picture, too far away to make out; on the next page, we see that it is a picture of a woman and child, which we assume to be the mother and protagonist at a younger age. In the present, his back is turned to the image as he steals from her purse. There is a sense of time coming between them and threatening to blemish their relationship - from the sounds of it, his mother is unwilling to let go of that ideal vision of her son, while the boy himself knows it to be no longer there. The world he now inhabits is a more precarious and confusing one, in which is mother remains, in a distinctly unhappy way, a source of comfort and stability; latching onto her purpose is how he maintains his sense of normalcy and stability.
His situation is positively rosy compared to that of "Eddy Scott Goes Out To Play", which may be the darkest, single most fucked up poem I think I've ever encountered in an anthology marketed explicitly toward children. I at least suspect that it was intended for a slightly older age range than the one advertised on the cover. Orme's poem tells the woeful tale of a child whose daily routine involves being turned outside to feed and entertain himself, equipped with a pound ostensibly for his dinner. On this fateful occasion, Eddy blows his coin on a fruit machine and, realising that he has no means with which to feed himself, starts scavenging the arcade desperately for dropped change. He is approached by a stranger who has taken notice of his plight, but it quickly becomes apparent that their concern veils a far more sinister agenda. Sadly, although Eddy has been expressly advised not to "talk to funny men", he sees nothing at all threatening about this scenario (what he really could have done with is a talking cat to keep him grounded), and accepts the stranger's offer to take him out for a slap up meal. The poem ends with Eddy's mother returning home from work to discover that Eddy hasn't made it back. Orme punctuates the narrative with italicised verses in which we are informed repeatedly that: "Eddy's mum's at work all day/Eddy's dad has gone away/Hot or cold, wet or fine/Eddy Scott's sent out to play" - the repetition reinforces the drudgery of Eddy's routine, but also enables Orme to conclude on a particularly ominous note, in offering a final variation of "Eddy was sent out to play". Although Eddy's fate remains unknown by the end of the poem, the shift to past tense isn't exactly a reassuring sign.
The corresponding illustrations are supplied by Barry Rowe, who's chosen to represent the predator as a shadowy figure in a trench coat and fedora who looks as though he strolled right out of a Humphrey Bogart noir. The fact that you can't discern the features on his face, compared to Eddy and his mother, marks him out as a dubious presence, a character doing their utmost not to draw attention to themselves (except to Eddy) and to disappear into the night once they've fulfilled their dubious deed. Pretty effective in its way, but I can't help but wonder how much starker the poem would read with no visual aids, and only Orme's words, where the stranger is identified merely as "someone" and no clear description of them is given (in fact, if we go by the text alone then we can't even take it for granted that Eddy's abductor is male). There, we have no reason to believe that they appear as anything other than perfectly amiable, as they presumably do to Eddy, and they keep a chilling anonymity about them, so that we, as much as Eddy's mother, have no idea with whom exactly Eddy has absconded.
"Eddy Scott Goes Out To Play" disturbed me as a child and it disturbs me now, although inevitably my perspective on the situation has shifted somewhat as I've gotten older. As a child, I think you get the satisfaction of feeling superior to Eddy, as you can spot well ahead of him what kind of danger he's in. We were, after all, taught from an early age that a stranger who offers you sweets and tries to get you to go with them inside their car is the reddest of red flags. I think I was also somewhat inclined to see it as a moral fable in which Eddy suffers the consequences, not simply for being gullible enough to get into a stranger's vehicle, but for feeding his lunch money to that dumb fruit machine in the first place. Revisiting the poem as an adult, however, I don't get the impression that Orme intended it as a condemnation of Eddy, who is, lest we forget, the victim of this scenario. The message is clearly that Eddy gets into his horrific situation because nobody is watching his back, except for the wrong sort of person. Arguably, the poem betrays a slight prejudice toward single parent families, with Eddy's mother posited as unable to manage the situation on her own (there is also deliberate ambiguity as to what is meant by his father having "gone away" - has he abandoned the family, is he in prison or is he dead? Seems a bit optimistic to suppose that he might be off on a business trip); nevertheless, there is a powerful contrast to be drawn between the absence/indifference of Eddy's parents and the observant attentions of the predatory stranger. We suppose that Eddy gravitates toward the latter not simply for the promise of a free meal, but because he's grateful to finally encounter somebody with so much interest in him. What's also striking about the poem is Eddy's total lack of a voice throughout - all of the dialogue heard comes from either his mother or the stranger, bringing a bitter irony to the ending observation that, when Eddy's mother returns home and calls for her son, "There'll be no answer: just her voice/Echoing along the wall". As for that dumb fruit machine, I note that Orme describes it as "hypnotising", making me feel that the stranger isn't the only aspect of this scenario that's ruthlessly preying on Eddy. The opening verse recalls the struggle described by the protagonist of "The Purse", who was willed to the titular object by a compulsion professedly beyond his control. Here, Eddy is lured to the fruit machine because the streets outside are dark and rainy, whereas the arcade appears bright and inviting; in that regard, the fruit machine acts as a precursor to the stranger themselves - attractive offers and a bright, friendly exterior that we expect to disappear not far down the line. The significance of the fruit machine is also echoed in that baleful final line, "Eddy was sent out to play", the suggestion being that Eddy has been prompted to gamble, both recreationally at the arcade, and in a broader, much more urgent sense, in going out every day and having to make life-or-death judgements in a world he's painfully ill-equipped to comprehend.
Finally, we have the anthology's titular poem, "High Time You Grew Up" by Kitchen once again, which I'm convinced was purposely positioned so as to round things off with a little comic levity following the nightmare scenario described in "Eddy Scott". Here, we have another situation in which our protagonist is faring badly with being left alone, except that this time they are safe within their own home. Their parents are right across the hallway, and whatever peril they might sense they are up against presumably exists exclusively within their head. Sleepless and alone in a darkened bedroom, they have a great nocturnal void to fill with whatever ludicrous horrors their imagination is able to concoct, intermittently earning the censure of their parents whenever the impulse to summon them becomes too strong. Like "The Purse", the poem is told in the first-person, giving us a direct line into the protagonist's erratic thought processes, which vacillate between reason and sudden irrational terror - they deduce that the brushing outside their window can't be a burglar, "'cause we've got nothing worth burgling", before going off on some inexplicable spiel about "the man with black eyes and black fingernails" who crawls into your bedroom at night in order to peel back your skin. There is a twist to this particular tale, and we'll get to that soon enough, but the really delicious irony of the poem, for me, lies in how Kitchen has chosen to represent the parents - not as reassuring guardians against the unknowns lurking in the dark, but as behemoths in their own right, periodically roused from their sleep to bring their wrath down upon the protagonist. All of their dialogue is presented in capitals, which helps distinguish their voices from that of the protagonist, but it also gives them a thunderous, intimidating quality that is deliberately devoid of emotional warmth. They are the voice of reason to the core, plain-spoken intrusions on the protagonist's propensity for invention and for wild flights of fancy. This interchange is teased out further by Nicky Marsh's illustrations, which are agreeably colourful but give a certain playful grotesqueness to the characters, familiar but not quite the same beasts in the dead of night as we might expect to see in the day (certainly, the sight of the scowling mother, with her hair in curlers and her burly shadow, did little to help my own sleep as a child). Meanwhile, the parents' movements to and from the bedroom are tracked with a precise, rhythmic onomatopoeia ("A thump/A heavy thud, thud/A light on, four more steps"), the protagonist's attunement to which suggesting that they are well-accustomed to this routine from similar disputes on previous nights.
The character dynamics, and the title, take on a new perspective once we get to the punchline of the poem, when the father permits the protagonist to keep their bedroom light on, and asks them, with evident sarcasm, how old they are, to which they respond, "Thirty four, next birthday, Dad." Oh god, how funny it is now to contemplate that there was once a time in my life when 34 seemed ridiculously old, when reading that line and attempting to calculate how much life's experience that amounted to was utterly beyond my comprehension. Reading this book as an adult, I can't help but wonder if Sedgwick's decision to make this the title poem, and to effectively make that line the punchline to the entire anthology, was intended as his joke at the expense of any adult who might be reading, either back in 1989 or years down the line. Shouldn't you, he teases playfully, be doing something more grown-up than reading an anthology of children's poetry? This implicit jibe is complemented by the winking acknowledgement that there is, of course, tremendous value to be had in immersion into a little nostalgic childhood pleasure - the very nature of the anthology, in emphasising the relentless march of time and the inevitability of change, bears out just how satisfying it can be to puncture through all that and by remaining in touch with who you were back then. Obviously, you can't go home again. You can revisit the same old haunts, but never quite from the same angle. Can you work with what you see now?
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