Warning: this post contains spoilers for a children’s book published a little over a century ago.
At some point, I don’t remember when or why, our elementary school librarian Mrs. Hoe vanished, only to reappear when I changed schools in fourth grade. She had a stumpy body topped by a helmet of brown curls that protected a pale, thickly-bespectacled face that I can still picture clearly though I don’t remember anything else about her, aside from the fact that she was friendly and a little odd. Nor do I remember anything much about the library itself. We got our class photos taken there both years I attended that school. I was drawn to an old copy of Little Women, and next to it was Little Men, which I found funny for some reason. I didn’t read either and to this day I still haven’t.
There were two books I did read though, and both left a deep impression on me. The first, enthusiastically thrust upon us by Mrs. Hoe, was The Worms of Kukumlima by Daniel Pinkwater, and the fact that she would rave so excitedly about so zany a book tells me that she was probably an interesting person. The cover, drawn by Pinkwater himself, is of a trio of pink earthworms twisting in some tropical glade. Like all of Pinkwater’s books, it involves a cast of oddball characters on a ridiculous adventure, told with a deadpan sense of humor that offsets the surreal hijinks. I adored this book, and still count it among my favorites.
When I was young, I was obsessed with animals, and in particular the story of Noah’s Ark. By fifth grade, this obsession had faded, but even at ten I was prone to nostalgia, so when one day I was browsing the shelves and noticed an old, jacketless book called The Log of the Ark, I immediately grabbed it. This book didn’t make as big an impression on me as Pinkwater’s did, but it remained lodged in the back of my mind. Years later, I would look for copies of it in used bookshops and later on the internet, with no luck. Complicating the matter was that there was a book with the same title that seemed to be more of a humorous take not aimed at children.
I finally tracked down a copy last week. Despite my earlier efforts, there are actually plenty of copies of this book available, though it never seems to have been published in the US. It was originally printed in 1923, several years after the parody version with the same name. Considering I hadn’t read it since I was ten or eleven, it’s amazing how much I actually remember of the book.
As the title suggests, this is a record of what daily life was like for the pairs of animals chosen to be rescued from the great flood. A number of imaginary creatures comingle with the ones we’re more familiar with, and all of them can talk and, all of them subsisting only on the marvelous fruits that then covered the earth, they get along reasonably well in the edenic paradise that the world was before the flood. The plot describes the gradual fall from grace the animals suffer, similar to that of Adam and Eve. Instead of Satan, temptation appears in the form of a creature called the Scub. The only beast without a mate, the Scub sneaks aboard uninvited, but when he is finally discovered he is welcomed by the kindly Noah. While much of the book focuses on the whimsical antics of the animals as they try to get used to life on the ark, the Scub is always lurking in the background, providing an undercurrent of unease that you don’t often find in books for children.
One of the pairs of fantastic creatures have never been seen before and don’t have a name for themselves, and so are dubbed the seventy-sevenses, after the number of the cabin they’re assigned to. The seventy-sevenses are timid, sensitive creatures, and eventually their fear of the devious Scud leads them to take to an empty treacle barrel (there is a lot of mention of treacle in this book) and float off in the middle of the night, singing a sad song to themselves. The other animals attempt to rescue them but it is too late. Walker lingers on the image of the barrel bobbing in the endless ocean, growing smaller and smaller and eventually disappearing. When the eagle is sent to see where it went, he finds no trace of it, and all the animals are bereft. There is no happy scene at the end where the seventy-sevenses are found to be safe and sound after all. The seventy-sevenses have perished. The floodwaters eventually recede, of course, and all the creatures rejoice at once again being back on solid ground, but the book ends on an ominous, if inevitable, note. The seeds of violence sowed by the Scub have been planted, and while he creeps away before he can see them sprout, there is no question that the harvest will be a bloody one.
This was Kenneth Walker’s first book, and his only one aimed at children, though he was apparently friends with a more famous Kenneth, namely Kenneth Grahame, who wrote the infinitely more beloved The Wind in the Willows. The charming, simple illustrations are by a man with possibly the most British name ever, Geoffrey Maxwell Boumphrey. Walker would go on to write a large number of adult books, mainly on science and medicine (he was a urologist) and the spiritual teachings of G.I. Gurdgieff (He studied with P.D. Ouspensky, Gurdgieff’s most vocal cheerleader), as well as a book on ESP. He died in the sixties and seems to be more or less forgotten today, which is unfortunate, as his Log of the Ark is imaginative and unsettling and, in the end, oddly moving, and it has been a pleasure to revisit it after all these years.
