Trust Me on This : Cinderella With an Attitude

Noel Streatfeild was one of those extraordinary writers who turn out books more or less the way a hen turns out eggs. The rebellious daughter of an English bishop, she ran away to become an actress. In her 30s she began to write. Under her own name she wrote 45 novels, some for grown-ups, some for kids. As Susan Scarlett, she wrote 12 more. Though she never touched nonfiction until she was nearing 60, she then found time to produce 17 books of nonfiction--still, of course, writing frequent novels.

Usually a person who writes this much--two or three books every single year--is somewhat repetitious. Often such a person is slave to a formula. Noel Streatfeild was both. But not in every book. In her best books she approaches greatness.

Her closest approach comes in a series of children’s books that I haven’t mentioned yet: the so-called Shoes Books, called that because in the United States they all have the word “shoes” in the title--”Ballet Shoes,” “Theatre Shoes,” etc. All 12 are stories about artistically talented children, at least one of whom usually is a dancer.

Eleven of the books range from pretty good to very good; the 12th--”Movie Shoes”--is wonderful. First published in 1949, it takes place in England and in California soon after World War II. England still has food rationing, bomb sites, austerity of every kind.

In London lives a family named Winter. The father is a writer, just now totally blocked and also sick. The mother is beautiful, artistic, kind and ineffectual. Then there are three children. Rachel is 12 and a dancer. Tim is 8 and a budding genius at the piano. Jane is 10 and likes dogs.

There’s another difference as well. Rachel and Tim both have their mother’s good looks. Jane isn’t ugly, but there’s absolutely nothing cute about her, in manner or appearance.

For the sake of Mr. Winter’s health, this family is going to move to Southern California for six months. Not being allowed to take more than a few pounds out of England, they are going to be guests of Mr. Winter’s sister, who lives in Santa Monica. Aunt Cora married an American when she was 18, and has been in California ever since.

It is a measure of how different the world was 50 years ago that none of her relatives in England have seen her or even talked to her since her marriage. No one was jetting across the Atlantic in six hours; you sailed on the Mauretania and took a week. No one faxed or dialed from London to Santa Monica; only the rich used international phone service at all. The normal speed communication was an airmail letter. Aunt Cora is going to be a major shock when they do meet her.

But even apart from aunts, the visit to California is not initially popular with the Winter kids. Rachel is going to lose her first professional opportunity--a chance to dance in a Christmas pantomime in London. Tim is going to lose a chance to get free lessons from a concert pianist. Jane is going to be forcibly separated from her dog.

The pleasure of the book is in seeing how this polite, talented (except for Jane), war-starved English family responds to lush, orange-juiced California--and how it responds to them. The most fun of all is their encounter with the movie business.

Jane is the one who makes contact. About their second day in California, she is walking along the beach and sees a spaniel down at the waterline, eating a decomposed fish. Difficult with people, Jane is fierce and protective about animals. Soon she has figured out which house the spaniel came from, and is on the back porch giving its surprised owner a lecture in her small, elegant English voice. “Some people don’t deserve to have dogs,” she begins.

The spaniel’s owner happens to be a young director for Bee Bee Studios. He is struck both with Jane’s voice and with her scowl. Several weeks later he winds up giving her first a screen test and then a part in his current film. This is not because she suddenly develops talent, or gets nice, or pretty, but because the part is for just such a sulky child as she, with just such an accent. He’s filming “The Secret Garden.” The child star who was to play Mary has gotten sick; he takes Jane as an emergency replacement. The initial effect on her character is to make her even worse than before; along with everything else, she is now puffed up.

“Movie Shoes” is actually a kind of realistic fairy tale. It could even be called a modern variant on “Cinderella,” this time with believable psychology. The original Cinderella is mistreated for years by her stepmother and stepsisters. As all who know the story will recall, this does not embitter her one bit. After her fairy godmother sets her up with good clothes and she marries the Prince, her first act is to find noble and wealthy husbands for those same two stepsisters. That shows what a really nice person she is. (Unless, of course, you look at it from the point of view of the two husbands. Then you might wonder what kind of future they face.)

Jane is a good deal more probable. She’s a Cinderella, all right, but through DNA, not wicked stepmothers. She has a fairy godfather in Mr. Browne the director--only his motive is to save his picture, and he is often, and justly, furious with Jane. She does not turn all cozy-sweet once she gets some recognition. On the contrary, her relations with Maurice Tuesday, her fellow child-star in “The Secret Garden,” begin badly and get worse. He, being a real actor, is able to whisper spiteful things in the hope of upsetting her, and then half a second later look with big candid eyes at the camera, and tug at all hearts. She probably would kill him if she could. The interplay between these two is one of the funniest things in a book with many funny things.

I need to pause a second on the humor, because it’s of a rare kind. Usually a child’s book is funny in one of two ways. It’s funny to the child, but seems a bit simple-minded to the adult reading aloud, who gets pleasure only vicariously, from the giggles and shining eyes of the child. Or it’s funny for the grown-up, with secret adult touches, and half-wasted on the child, over whose patronized head the humor mostly goes.

Not in “Movie Shoes.” The enmity between Maurice and Jane is funny in a complex way to adults and in a direct and simple way to children. Ditto the highly unself-conscious behavior of Tim, the 8-year-old piano prodigy. Children laugh with pleasure because he talks in such a confident, slightly bookish way, and keeps saying startling things to grown-ups. Grown-ups are apt to be sorry he’s only in a book, because they’d like to snatch him out and adopt him.

But good as the humor is, it’s still not the best thing about the book. The best is its tremendous sense of motivation on the part of totally believable characters. Rachel is focused. Tim has two or three different focuses, among which he shifts with ease. Jane is a one-girl animal-protection society.

For children who lack a sense of direction, getting to know the Winter kids is something like being magnetized if you are an iron filing. And for parents, it’s an irresistible encounter between two wildly different cultures.

Trust Me on This is an occasional feature in which writers make a case for that forgotten, obscure or unsung book that they put in everyone’s hands with the words: “Read this. You’ll love it. Trust me on this.” A number of Noel Streatfeild’s Shoes Books, including “Movie Shoes,” are available in paperback from Dell.