There were few picture books that struck me as quite as cursed, as a budding reader, as Tony Ross's 1987 publication Oscar Got The Blame.
The conflict described throughout the book was in most respects entirely banal - a child has an imaginary (or, depending on your interpretation, invisible) friend and struggles to convince his parents of their existence - and yet it played out like a miniature horror story for young children, with an increasingly sinister undercurrent that culminated in a spectacularly hair-raising visual punchline. If you turned to the final page and saw what was lurking right at the end of the story, then you could bank on having a sleepless night or two. It can be seen as a reversal on the author's earlier book, I'm Coming To Get You!, concerning a ravenous space alien stalking an Earth boy, which is entirely upfront about the grisly nature of its central conflict but closes on a reassuring punchline that suddenly puts everything into perspective. And, maybe it's just me, but I've always found Ross's visual style to have a lively but somewhat grotesque quality that, as a child, made me feel kind of queasy. His sense of humor could skew fairly dark, as you'll know if you've ever read his subversive take on The Boy Who Cried Wolf (his was the first version of the story I knew, and I was disappointed when I discovered that it wasn't the standard), but there was something about reading a Ross book that made me feel inherently uncomfortable, even with things as ostensibly mundane as they are throughout most of Oscar Got The Blame. Oscar works as effective companion reading to I'm Coming To Get You!, with which it shares some thematic parallels, notably a subtext regarding how children process difficult emotions (there's also a striking physical similarity between the respective protagonists of each book), bringing us to the conclusion that the monsters you really need to watch out for are inevitably the ones you carry around inside of you.
The book opens by introducing us to Oscar, a small and rather sheepish-looking boy, and to his best friend, Billy, of whom you can't form any immediate impression on account of his being invisible. Oscar is very attached to Billy, but his parents have little patience for the arrangement, insisting that Billy doesn't exist outside of Oscar's overly active imagination. This is a problem, we discover, because Billy has a penchant for causing all manner of trouble around the household, for which Oscar is always assumed to be responsible. From that, a narrative rhythm develops, in which we're told about the various misdeeds supposedly carried out by Billy, with the inevitable consequence that Oscar got the blame. At the end of the book, when Billy's misbehaving has gone far enough to get Oscar banished to his bedroom in disgrace, Oscar laments about the injustice of the situation, and the fact that no one ever believes him about Billy. The final word goes to Billy himself, who accords that, "They never do", as he suddenly becomes visible to the reader. Billy, it turns out, looks a lot like Oscar, but with red devil horns and a malevolent glare that would make even the most hardened individual's bladder weaken. Significantly, when Billy does eventually make himself seen, Oscar has vanished into thin air.
The implied twist - that Billy and Oscar are actually two sides of the same coin - does not seem especially complicated, and yet it's interesting how many people I've encountered who interpreted that final reveal to mean that Billy was real, and that Oscar was in a position of righteousness all along. There are certainly sufficient clues throughout the illustrations that would appear to implicate Oscar in Billy's alleged crimes. For example, when Billy is accused, by Oscar, of bringing mud into the house, we can see little flecks of mud on Oscar's raincoat. When Billy has reportedly tried to give the cat a bath, causing the poor animal to freak out and create havoc around the kitchen, Oscar is visibly clasping a wash cloth behind his back. From my perspective, Ross is leaving precious little room for ambiguity, but then I wonder if some readers have difficulty in consolidating that final, nightmarish image of Billy with the timid and unassuming Oscar we've been following throughout the course of the narrative? It is a startling contrast; Ross could have conveyed much the same idea by adding a slight smirk to Oscar's face at the end, but instead he chose to give his readers a full-on final scare, with a "Billy" who looks as though he's demonically possessed.
Deepening the confusion is that time an animated retelling of the story was featured in a 1990 episode of Words and Pictures centred around the prefix "fr" (the initial focus being on friends, before seguing into frogs). This was from the era that I was shown in school, when presenting duties were handled by Stuart Bradley and Nutmeg the cat (a puppet voiced and operated by Mary Edwards). Before seeing this episode, I was already familiar with Oscar Got The Blame, and I was bracing myself for the horrors of Billy's grand appearance, which transpired to be totally unnecessary. For the most part, the animated images are faithful to Ross's illustrations, but the final reveal is staged in a markedly different, and honestly quite puzzling way that feels reflective of a conscious desire to tone down the story's more unsettling elements, with the result that the final implications end up diverging drastically from those of Ross's narrative. This time, when Oscar is exiled to his bedroom and gripes that nobody believes in his friend Billy, Billy does not make himself visible; instead, he's represented by a burst of energy emitting from the wall behind Oscar. Oscar has wandered well out of view before Billy chimes in, but I don't think it's really communicated that Oscar and Billy are in fact the same person; based on this representation you'd be far more likely to come away with the impression that Billy was real all along, just invisible. This is in spite of Stuart's musings immediately after the sequence, which fall more in line with the implications of the book ("Billy did do some naughty things, didn't he? Maybe it was really Oscar that did them...") Also lost in translation is Billy's intensity at the end of the book - there, his closing declaration of "THEY NEVER DO!", is presented in capital letters, providing a direct contrast to Oscar's more demure representation, while depicting Billy as this intractable whirlwind of chaotic energy. Stuart's reading of the story, surprisingly, takes the opposite approach, making Billy sound mildly more hushed than Oscar, which feeds into the idea of Billy leading this clandestine existence to all but Oscar. Instead of leaving the viewer with a final scare, this ending just feels odd and a little downbeat.
Let's face it, though, the story becomes so much more eerie when we work on the assumption Billy isn't real, and instead have to reconcile meek little Oscar with those true colours he apparently flashes at the end.
Your first impression of the matter might be that, irrespective of whether Billy is real or imaginary, Oscar really needs to develop a better taste in friends. Despite the wholesomeness of some of the earlier images, which show Oscar walking with his arm wrapped around the invisible Billy, and Oscar sleeping in a bed with two teddy bears, one of them set aside for Billy, Billy does not seem to be doing much other than getting Oscar into trouble, with the final pages putting a more antagonistic slant on their relationship. The closing exchange between Oscar and Billy takes the form of a taunt from the latter to the former, as Billy triumphantly revels in his ostensible impunity. His tongue is protruding from his mouth, a mocking gesture possibly directed at Oscar in context, although since Billy is breaking the fourth wall and looking at the reader in this image, we might interpret this disturbing visual punchline as being at the reader's expense. I would go a step further, and argue that the closing image functions as a kind of thematic echo to an illustration that occurs earlier in the story, and which carries a similar degree of uncomfortable emotional intensity (and which, perhaps none too coincidentally, was also omitted from the Words and Pictures adaptation). This image depicts Dad's reaction when he discovers that "Billy" has dressed up the dog in his clothing, by means of an extreme close-up of the man howling with rage, in which Ross appears to have taken immense delight in accentuating as many gruesome details as possible, from the assortment of veins in Dad's bulging eyeballs to his bristly, unkempt whiskers, to the yellow stains on his imperfectly-aligned teeth. This image of the screaming Dad and our final, unsettling glimpse of the incorrigible Billy, stand out as the two most significant of all the illustrations, in that they represent the opposing forces in the pivotal conflict at their most exaggeratedly monstrous; in each, we see an unbridled outpouring of the tensions we suspect are perpetually bubbling below the surface of the household's dynamics, and the result in both cases is just as grotesque. They are suggestive of a raw, fundamental primality to our nature that social mores dictate we suppress and rein in; "Billy" becomes an outlet for the feelings and impulses that Oscar is expected to paper over and never express, with the image of Dad indicating that he, too, is as capable of such ferality. Indeed, we might even conclude that "Oscar" is really the mask the character is forced to assume and that "Billy" represents his id at its most pure and uninhibited. That Oscar should be harboring so much unexpressed rage of his own does not, perhaps, come as surprising, given that he is the underdog in an ongoing conflict in which his only permitted recourse is to keep mum.
What also sticks out is that, despite the intensity of that final illustration, Oscar/Billy hardly seems like a sociopath in the making. Few, if any, of his actions appear to have been practised out of malice. Some of them, such as tracking mud into the house and leaving the bathroom taps running, feel like the kind of honest, everyday mistakes you would expect from a child of his age. Others, like making breakfast (chaotically) and washing the cat, come off more as misguided attempts at being helpful. Dressing up the dog in his dad's tie and slippers is the type of cheeky deed a small child would think amusing and not understand why it might be a problem. The most outright mischievous the character seems to get is in putting frogs inside his grandmother's slippers. For the most part, Billy does appear to mean well, which is partly what makes that final image so disturbing. That Ross has chosen these kinds of smaller, mundane mishaps, as opposed to anything particularly shocking or dramatic, is as good an indication as any that Oscar is experiencing nothing more than the usual trials and tribulations of growing up, in having to navigate feelings and impulses that he does not necessarily comprehend, whilst coming to grips with social convention and what is expected of him. The most obvious comparison would be Shirley Jackson's short story "Charles", except that in this scenario the parents obviously have no delusions as to what is going on. Which is not to say that the parents are not, in some way, a part of the problem. Oscar Got The Blame deals with a common concern in children's literature, which is the failure of parents and children to see eye-to-eye. Oscar's parents are not as negligent and horrible as Bernard's from Not Now, Bernard by David McKee - they are clearly the sensible, no-nonsense sort, and their refusal to indulge Oscar's fantasies, under the circumstances, is understandable - but there is a distinct lack of emotional warmth in any of their depicted interactions with Oscar. For the purposes of the story they exist purely as authority figures and dispensers of the titular blame. The only hint of any affection on their part is in the mention of a bedtime story, of which Oscar is deprived as a punishment, implying that they make a habit of reading to him on a nightly basis. This in itself is rather ironic, as it suggests a willingness to engage in imagination and fantasy of which the parents otherwise seem entirely intolerant; the opening of the story indicates that they object on mere principle to the suggestion of Billy, even before it explored how Oscar routinely uses his friend in unsuccessful bids to circumvent his parents' authority. The reference to the story potentially offers a hint as to Billy's real function, in providing a buffer between the strict austerity of Oscar's parents and his need for escapist fantasy. Underpinning that is the lack of evidence that Oscar has any actual flesh-and-blood friends with whom he can expend his rough housing energies. He is seemingly an only child, and no other children appear throughout the book, suggesting that his world is isolated, and that his friendship with Billy provides a refuge in which to shelter from loneliness and adult stringency alike. Oscar's bond with Billy might be self-destructive, but it is the best offence and defence he has with the odds so weighted against him; his adherence to his imaginary friend is itself an act of defiance, a refusal to play by his parents' very matter-of-fact rules. The final appearance of Billy might be the stuff of nightmares, but perhaps we should take it as reassurance that Oscar is a survivor, whose wild heart cannot be broken.
The significance of Billy is perhaps echoed in the second story to be featured in the "Fr" episode of Words and Pictures, Frogs' Holiday by Margaret Gordon, which depicts the altogether more genial friendship between a band of holiday-making frogs and a laundrette owner named Mrs Crumple. Here, it is noted that small boys, along with big fish, are one of the greatest banes of frog's existence (Mrs Crumple, it is established, is a friend to neither fish nor boy, making a her an excellent ally to the frogs), and therein we find the implicit suggestion that Oscar's misbehaviour stems from some fundamental itching in his callow psyche - which is to say, he is much the same bundle of malevolent energy as any other child.
The best part of the "Fr" episode, though? There are rats involved! Compared to their predecessors, Vicky Ireland and Charlie, who typically
stayed put in their library, Stuart and Nutmeg tended to do a lot more
location shooting, and in this episode they visit some children in a classroom who've created scrapbooks about their friends. One girl is awesome enough to have dedicated a page to her rat friends, Alice and Rascal. Alice, the hooded agouti rat, then shows up to be formally introduced to Nutmeg. Alice gives the cloth cat a sniff, but appears to quickly lose interest, wandering off in the other direction - we're assured that they became very friendly, however.
Interestingly, a second animated adaptation of Oscar Got The Blame materialised only a year later as part of the VHS release Anytime Tales by King Rollo Films, a compilation of ten different stories derived from the works of Tony Ross and David McKee (also included were the former's I'm Coming To Get You! and the latter's Not Now, Bernard). This version was more faithful to Ross's book than the Words and Pictures animation, incorporating the close-up image of Dad howling (although his teeth here aren't quite so disgustingly yellow), and ending with the unsettling entrance of the visible Billy, who in this take is depicted as emerging from the wall once Oscar has walked past it. I doubt this approach did much to stifle the dissension among consumers as to the exact meaning of that ending, but if it gave a few children sufficient goosebumps then I'd consider the job done.
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