From My Reading Chair…
Dust off the cobwebs of our youth; we’re popping over to see Winnie & Wilbur.
Valerie Thomas and Korky Paul helped furnish my childhood with colour, frenetic mishaps and one wonderfully disorderly witch. Looking around at the groan-up I’ve become... well, having her as my de facto babysitter kinda explains a few things.
So yes, I came knocking at the door of Winnie and Wilbur: The Haunted House carrying some luggage. Fortunately, Winnie was in. And, true to form, so was a whole book full of chaos!
No sooner have I entered the house than a vase smashes. How curious. Curtains tear. How bizarre. A chandelier crashes to the floor. Oh dear me!
Winnie concludes that her house must absolutely 100% be haunted. Classic Winnie: misdiagnose the problem with absolute confidence, reach for the magic and accidentally give yourself an entirely new problem! Her attempted solution conjures the very ghosts she feared! HER HOUSE IS NOW PROPERLY HAUNTED!
Living with a witch ought to come with hazard pay. Well, according to Wilbur, anyway. The furry little source of the unexplained events remains characteristically calm and slightly out of the frame. Cat-astrophic, really.
Valerie Thomas lets Winnie work herself into a glorious state of alarm, and I’m happily swept along. I know she is about to make a wildly misguided decision about how she’s going to manage these translucent troubles, and I’m already giddy at the thought of it all.
Much like me, Korky Paul’s linework refuses to sit still. The pages are bright, intricate and gloriously crowded with visual jokes, architectural peculiarities and tiny incidents just beyond the main focal point. Winnie continues making matters worse and I’m trying to follow the story, but I have to LOOK at everything else going on! I have no choice but to go back and pick apart the pictures for everything I missed. I’ve known this witch for decades, and yet I’m still sticking my eyeballs into every illustrated nook and cranny.
What I loved as a child, and still love as a groan-up, is that Winnie gets things wrong. Spectacularly wrong! She is an adult who is messy, impulsive and magnificently herself, and none of that makes her any less lovable. She’s bright and loud and takes up space. She gives to her community and is a delight to spend time with, even on her consistently calamitous days. That was radical to me then and joyful to me now.
Winnie’s spell book may offer some much sought-after solutions to her self-made problem. Her methods remain somewhat spell-culative, but that’s all part of the joys of life and afterlife, isn’t it?
I came back looking for a childhood friend and found I still needed her wonderfully imperfect company. It’s a delight to knock on her door again. Although, Winnie, if you spot the ghost of my childhood self nosing around, leave her be. She’s only here for the company. Any smashed vases, take up with Wilbur.
Creep on Reading, Pumpkins!
