CHILDREN'S FICTION

Patten's first book for children, The Elephant and the Flower, was inspired by a toy elephant that he fished out of the River Dart and which still resides in his back garden. (His children's play The Pig and the Junkle likewise had an object as a stimulus – this time a rusty robot found on a Liverpool rubbish tip, which he also still has.)

The Elephant and the Flower was published in 1970, and was to be the first of the many highly successful books that Patten was to write in his parallel career as a children's author. His move into children's writing was particularly timely at that point. It immediately provided him with a new dimension for further exploring some of the themes of childhood, magic and imagination that had preoccupied him in Little Johnny's Confession and Notes to the Hurrying Man. In some ways, perhaps, it became a partial solution to the problem identified in ‘Ah Johnny, What When You're Older?’ of how to buy a ‘single back to innocence’. It also served as an important balance to the intensity of his adult writing. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph magazine in 1990, Patten described writing for children as taking ‘a holiday from one's own seriousness’.

Patten's fiction for children ranges from the fabulous to the urban and contemporary, and – although all of his children's writing contains humour – his tone can also vary from the quietly serious to the broadly comic. At one extreme is the enchanting fable Jumping Mouse, for example (referred to in Chapter 4, page 57 and now printed in Grizzelda Frizzle and Other Stories) which is derived from a Navajo Indian folk tale. Described by Charles Causley in Twentieth Century Children's Writers as ‘a small masterpiece’, it is set in a world of talking animals and of magic, and is told in the timeless heightened language of fairy stories:

At the other extreme, a story such as Impossible Parents (1994) is entirely modern in its setting and diction.