Babies United!

A Board Book Every Week: No. 12

 

Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes

by Mem Fox and Helen Oxenbury (Walker Books)

 

No apologies for featuring another book illustrated by Helen Oxenbury. The puff quote on the cover says ‘Delightfully exuberant and endearingly sentimental’, and for once I agree. This book has to my personal knowledge made one strong man cry.

The story tells of babies born all over the world into different circumstances, united by the fact that ‘as everyone knows’ they have ten little fingers and ten little toes. Cities, hillsides, deserts and snowfields, houses and tents, all feature. Oxenbury’s gently varied babies should mean children of every skin and hair colour can find themselves in here. There’s even a ginger one! But none with, for example, hearing aids or glasses…maybe because they are still very tiny? Is that an excuse? Some very small children need to use them and are fitted with the things. It would be ideal to show that these babies have so much in common with others, too.

The babies here are exuberant in their shared play, waving hands, crawling, swinging swings, rolling about laughing, in a way that will be familiar to fans of Helen Oxenbury. Others follow chickens, watch the snow, help each other, and struggle over ownership of a blanket.

Mem Fox’s text is simple and direct, rhyming and repetitive, and ends with the perfect prompt for a shared book ‘…and three little kisses on the tip of its nose.’

Rhymes with Oomph and Zoom

My latest book find is a gem – I Saw Esau: The Schoolchild’s Pocket Book, edited by Iona & Peter Opie and illustrated by Maurice Sendak, first published in 1947.

‘They were clearly not rhymes that a grandmother would sing to the grandchild on her knee,’ Iona Opie says in her introduction. ‘They have more oomph and zoom; they pack a punch.’ Well, a grandmother with a taste from the macabre, the grim or the rude might well do, and have a good giggle besides. But there would have to be a lot of explanation, too.*

There are 170 rhymes grouped into themes: Insults, retaliation, teasing and repartee, more insults, lamentation and reproachfulness are just some of them, which gives you a taste. It is ‘a declaration of a child’s brave defiance in the face of daunting odds’. 

The book was born in the days of post-war paper rationing. The wonderful illustrations only came with the 1992 edition from Walker Books, and for an illustration-fiend the helping is more than generous. There’s at least one picture on every page and sometimes one for every short verse on the page.

*But there are Notes at the back. Hurray! I love Notes. Especially when the Notes have pictures, too.