Title: CHILDREN’S LITERATURE NEEDS TO PORTRAY DISABILITY
Author: ul. Secesyjna 12 Wrzeszcz
Last saved by: Antoni Ruszkowski
Company: BEM

Children’s Literature Needs to Portray Disability: Three Novels and How they Show Disability

Martin Blaszk

Martin Blaszk is an English teacher and teacher trainer working at the University of Gdańsk. He also leads courses in Children’s Literature and British Culture for students studying Early Education and English Teaching. As well as this, he provides input sessions on methodology courses for various institutions and organisations around Poland. Martin Blaszk is also a performance artist.  E-mail: brcmart@univ.gda.pl

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Introduction - My Uncle Lawrie and a Certain Predicament
Blabber Mouth,  The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time  and  A Different Life  
Interesting and Lively Characters Who Can Be Empathised With
Humour as a Way of Engaging and Holding Interest
The Use of Detail – the Disabled Person’s World is Our World
Reactions to the Disabled Person
The Language Used about the Disabled and Disability
Conclusion
References

Introduction - My Uncle Lawrie and a Certain Predicament

I liked my uncle Lawrie. He was tall and slim with a matinee idol moustache. He always seemed to wear a suit and he had a succession of cars at a time when to have a car meant something special. My uncle also enjoyed going to the pub to drink beer and perhaps, when the mood was on him, sing some of the old songs. I could never sing like my uncle, but I did grow to share his love of beer. In fact, he was the first person to tell me about it. I was nine, he was opening a bottle of beer and said: “You wouldn’t like the taste of this now, but when you’re older you’ll grow to love it.” He was right. 

As well as being a ‘car guru’ and my introduction to beer, my uncle also had one of his feet missing, amputated just below the knee. He lost the other foot a few years later. Both through diabetes. He walked though, and drove, because he had special devices that he could strap to the remainder of his legs to let him walk and carry on driving. My uncle then was disabled, but it did not seem to bother him and because it did not seem to bother him it did not bother the rest of the family either. We all knew my uncle was somehow different, but that difference was simply part of the fabric of our everyday lives.

Social perception of disability is ambiguous, motivated by compassion and hostile forces, understanding and misunderstanding, curiosity and aversion. That the representations of these perceptions in literature should be paradoxical is not surprising. (Keith, 2004:1)

A helpless case.
A spazzo.
Sympathetic smiles.
Well-meaning whispers. 
(Gleitzman, 1993:58)

Unfortunately, my uncle died a number of years ago and so I no longer have that direct personal contact with someone who is disabled. Because of this, nowadays, I find it difficult when it comes to telling you about my perceptions of people with disability. I find it difficult because I now have next to no contact with disabled people. I find it difficult because I always feel uncomfortable in front of disabled people: I always see the disability before the person. I also find it difficult because I am never sure what language I should use when talking to or about people with disability: should I say disabled, impaired, challenged or person with special needs? Whatever vocabulary I use, it always seems to be wrong, and puts a distance between me and the person I am talking with or about. Simply stated, it seems that whenever I am in the company of a disabled person or talking about disability I never really know how to act or what to say.

I am telling you about my predicament, not because I want you to feel sorry for me, but rather because it seems to be something that many people, if not society as a whole, has a predicament with. The two quotes above, one from an academic paper on how late twentieth century writers have dealt with disability, the other a fictional account of a young girl who is unable to speak, seem to give voice, each in their own way, to this same problem.

There are a number of reasons for such a situation. One is that for many years people with disabilities were separated from the rest of the community which ‘led to the creation of stories, myths and expressions’(Solis, 2004:2) related to them which we are still fighting against today. Another is the dominance of one particular social view. As Joseph P.Shapiro states:

...influences in our culture teach children early in life to accept the idea that certain human qualities like physical ‘wholeness’, good looks, high intelligence, and clear speech, are valued and identified with high status individuals, whereas the qualities of others are demeaned, stigmatized, ridiculed, feared and degraded. (Solis, 2004:1)

Importantly, in relation to how we might be conditioned to view people from an early age, Shapiro continues:

Youngsters learn to assume that people with disabilities are more ‘different from’ that ‘similar to’ persons without them [disabilities], and those differences lessen them and set them apart. The consequences of such beliefs result in segregation and isolation, which in turn, reinforce negative attitudes. (p1)

Yet another reason for the predicament in which we find ourselves is the fact that disability itself is a complicated and complex concept to interpret or represent. There are many different types of ‘disability’ and society’s relation and reaction to these disabilities is constantly changing. This means that any attempt to understand disability always has to rely on the ongoing social debate and social construction. Which begs the question: ‘Whose definitions and perspectives will be used to make meaning of disability’s many variations?’(p2)

All in all then, it seems that a lack of contact with disability, received notions about what in society is positive and acceptable and what is not (what is normal and what is not), as well as a difficulty to say easily and exactly what disability is, have led to the predicament of not knowing how to act or what to say in front of disabled people.

The situation is not at a stand still however. Laws have been passed in many countries, including Poland, that now see greater integration of disabled people into the community, especially in terms of work and education. In addition to this, with postmodernism and political correctness, the debate surrounding what is positive, acceptable or normal and how we talk about these things, is now a more open and onward rolling one. It is also a debate that children’s literature is very much a part of.

Children’s literature dealing with disability is not a new phenomenon, it has been around for almost two centuries. In classic children’s literature there is Clara in Johanna Spyri’s Heidi, Katy and cousin Helen in Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did next, as well as Colin, in Frances Hodgeson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. However, as Susanne Gervay (Gervay, 2004:1) points out, most of these portrayals did not actually help society to become more knowledgeable about the realities of disability. Quoting models devised by Biklen and Bogdon (p1), Gervay states that for the majority of this time the disabled person was shown as one of the following: pitiable and pathetic, an object of violence, sinister and evil, atmosphere for the rest of the story, a super crip [cripple] with super qualities, laughable, his/her own worst-and-only-enemy, a burden, non-sexual, and / or incapable of fully participating in everyday life. Things have changed over the last thirty years however, so that portrayals have now ‘increasingly begun to emphasise the reality of medical conditions as well as the influence of social attitudes on disabled persons capacity for independence, social integration, equality and pride in their uniqueness’(p1). These more real and informative portrayals within children’s literature place it very much at the centre of discussions covering representations of disability, and in this way give it a major role to play in making society, especially young society, more knowledgeable about disability and the disabled. As Rebecca Butler (Butler, 2005:26) has written about a role for children’s literature: ‘the chance to raise awareness in young minds and create a more perceptive society is too great an opportunity to miss.’

Blabber Mouth,  The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time  and  A Different Life  

Bearing in mind the predicament mentioned above, along with the idea that children’s literature should be involved in exploring themes of disability in order to inform, three texts shall now be looked at to see how they explore themes of disability and thereby help ‘raise awareness in young minds’.

The three texts chosen have a target readership ranging from young readers to young adult readers (9 to 16), although they may attract a younger and older readership. The books are: Blabbermouth by Morris Gleitzman, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon, and A Different Life by Lois Keith. 

In surveying the texts, first a brief outline will be given. Then, in a more detailed exploration of each of the books, some of the common features they share will be drawn together. These features include the way each of the books engage the reader by using well drawn characters and humour. Their use of detail to create worlds that are recognisable and real, so that the disabled person’s world is seen to be the one inhabited by all of us. In addition to this, the more detailed survey will look at reactions to disability, and the language used to talk about the disabled and disability. Throughout the survey it will be seen that although the books deal with disability and in some cases graphically so, they are neither gruesome nor off-putting, but rather involve the reader fully, as well as providing real insights into the life of the disabled person.

Blabber Mouth

Rowena Batts, or Ro as she is known by her close friends, is starting a new school, a daunting enough prospect for any 12 year old. Rowena however is not just any twelve year old, she cannot actually speak. Rowena’s story, as it unfolds in Morris Gleitzman’s Blabber Mouth, is basically a school story which shows the various adventures she and her father experience as they set up a new home (and life) in a small Australian town. It starts with Rowena’s disastrous first day at school and continues with her making friends with Amanda Cosgrove. It also describes the embarrassment that her father sometimes brings her and some of the problems she experiences in the way that people relate to her. Towards the end of the novel we see Rowena’s growing acceptance within the school and the beginnings of her and her father’s integration into the community. On the way Rowena also experiences bullying in the person of Darryn Peck.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time

With The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time we have another novel that is written in the form of an adventure, only this time it is more fully in the guise of a detective story. The main protagonist is Christopher John Francis Boone who is fifteen years old and has Asperger’s Syndrome – abnormalities of social interaction and repetitive and stereotyped interests and activities. The story starts when Christopher finds his neighbour’s dog dead on his front lawn. But the dog, Wellington, is not only dead, it has been stabbed to death with a garden fork. Thus begins Christopher’s adventure, he decides to find out who killed Wellington and at the same time, with the encouragement of his teacher at school, keep a record of his investigation. The book The Curious Incident... is the record Christopher keeps. It is a story in which we find out who murdered Wellington. Over and above this however, it is also a story in which Christopher’s ‘being’ is revealed as he runs away from his father in Swindon, to go and live with his mother in London. It shows how he lives in the world, how he interacts with people and how people interact with him, as well as the effect he has had on his parents’ relationship. It is a detective story then that solves who Christopher is, as much as who murdered the dog Wellington.

A Different Life

A Different Life charts one year in the life of Libby Starling, when she goes from being an able-bodied teenager to a disabled teenager. Throughout the course of the book we see Libby dealing with problems of identity, friendship and first love, all things that are the staple diet of much teenage fiction and are probably recognisable to all of us from our teenage years. The book also shows her suffering from a mystery illness and her recovery in hospital, a recovery however that leaves her disabled. This journey through a year in Libby’s life also looks at how Libby and those around her cope with Libby’s new life, a different life. Family and friends have to make adjustments mentally, as well as physically, especially Libby’s close family, who end up having to rebuild part of the house to cater to Libby’s new needs. Libby is also seen to encounter problems with health care workers who will not accept her disability, as well as resistance from her headmaster, who does not want a disabled person in the school. There are as well, more enjoyable moments, when Libby is with her friends battling to get back to her school for instance, or when she is going out on a first date with Jesse, a boy from school she has admired for a long time. Unlike either Blabber Mouth or A Curious Incident..., at the beginning of the novel the protagonist of A Different Life is not disabled, but rather able-bodied. This adds the extra dimension of someone who has known what it is like to be able-bodied, so the story also revolves around Libby’s own, as well as society’s prejudices in relation to disability. 

Interesting and Lively Characters Who Can Be Empathised With

Some of the common features each of the texts share in their exploration of disability and difference shall now be looked at. First and foremost, each author creates interesting and lively main and secondary characters whom the reader wants to know more about. The authors also create main characters who are involved in situations and with other people that the target reader group can relate to. So, for example, A Different Life begins with a list of concerns that are preoccupying Libby: 

On the 16^th of July last year when I was fifteen years, two months and four days old, the questions in my mind were:”

1.	Was I going to get a seat on the back row of the coach tomorrow when we went on the Year-10 trip to Littlehampton, or would Cleo blank me (again) and make sure it was filled up with the latest crowd she hung around with?
2.	When was Mum going to stop seeing Robbie as the sweet, little, innocent, perfect child and me as the difficult, moody teenager?
3.	What was I going to wear tomorrow? Jeans and T-shirt (baggy? Skimpy?)? Denim shorts and the black shoes with the clumpy heels? Red shift-dress? And how come other girls seem to know about these things and I don’t?
4.	How had I done in the exams? (Terrible probably but I honestly, really, truly was going to work harder next year for my GCSES.)
5.	What did others (especially boys) think of me? Stupid, pretty, ordinary, ugly? Did they think about me at all?
6.	And last, but by no means least, was Jesse ever, ever going to look at me and think I was special?

A week later, it was impossible to believe that this was all I had to worry about. (pp3-4)

Rowena in Blabber Mouth writes a letter in which she explains who she is and that she cannot speak. This explanation includes her interests and hobbies in equal measure to outlining her disability, so that, as with Libby, we see a character who shares the interests and hobbies of the other, ‘normal’ children around her, as well as those of her readers. It also shows that Rowena is aware of what might frighten the other kids away from her, so includes the reassurance that her inability to speak is in no way a reflection on her ‘normality’ and carries no unpleasant surprises for them:

‘G’day’, the letter said, ‘my name’s Rowena Batts and, as you’ve probably noticed by now , I can’t speak. Don’t worry, but, we can still be friends cause I can write, draw, point, nod, shake my head, screw up my nose and do sign language. I used to go to a special school but the government closed it down. The reason I can’t speak is I was born with some bits missing from my throat. (It’s OK., I don’t leak.) Apart from that, I’m completely normal and my hobbies are reading, watching TV and driving my Dad’s tractor. I hope we can be friends, yours sincerely, Rowena Batts.’ (p3)

With Christopher, in The Curious Incident..., the situation is a little different to either Libby or Rowena. Christopher too is seen to be involved in the everyday things of life, but from his perspective. So that things which the reading audience take for granted, as part of the everyday fabric of life, are seen to be full of difficulties and unexplored dangers for the boy with Asperger’s syndrome. Simply being with other people or talking with other people, let alone negotiating new places or travelling by public transport, are all shown in light of the problems they cause for Christopher. Placing Christopher in these everyday situations, the author engages with the audience’s understanding of the world, to show how Christopher’s understanding is different. The way Christopher describes his feelings or his inability to act or react in what might be seen to be a normal fashion, is also shown by the examples he chooses to give when he wants to explain how it feels for him to engage with strangers or go to a new place. They are examples which an audience, especially a younger audience who have just negotiated their first trip to France, will readily understand. In the two extracts below Christopher describes how he feels about meeting strangers and making conversation:

I do not like strangers because I do not like people I have never met before. They are hard to understand. It is like being in France, which is where we went on holiday sometimes when Mother was alive, to camp. And I hated it because if you went into a shop or a restaurant or on a beach you couldn’t understand what anyone was saying which was frightening...” (pp45-46)

    “The people who live at number 40 are called Thompson. 
    Mr Thompson answered the door. he was wearing a T-shirt which said
Beer.
Helping ugly people
Have sex for
2,000 years
    Mr Thompson said, ‘Can I help you?’
    I said, “Do you know who killed Wellington?’
    I did not look at his face. I do not like looking at people’s faces, especially if they are strangers. He did not say anything for a few seconds.” (p47) 

    “I went up to Mrs Alexander and said, ‘Do you know anything about Wellington being killed?’
    “...And she said, ‘You’re Christopher, aren’t you?’ 
    I said, ‘Yes. I live at number 36.’
    And she said, ‘We haven’t talked before have we?’
    I said, ‘No. I don’t like talking to strangers. But I’m doing detective work.’
    And she said, ‘I see you every day, going to school.’
    I didn’t reply to this.
    And she said, ‘It’s very nice of you to come and say hello.’
    I didn’t reply to this either because Mrs Alexander was doing what is called chatting where people say things to each other which aren’t questions and answers and aren’t connected. (pp50-51)

Humour as a Way of Engaging and Holding Interest

As well as engaging the target reader by creating characters who share their concerns, interests and the situations they too will find themselves in, all three novels also use humour to engage the reader or keep their interest. It is not however comedy for comedy’s sake, but usually humour arising out of a particular event or situation. With the extracts above, from The Curious Incident..., we can see that it is the way Christopher views the world that provides the humour - in the way he asks about Wellington or sums up Mrs Alexander’s chatting. The simplicity and matter-of-factness of his interaction and interpretation, stripped of any ‘social nicety’, reveals things for what they really are. So that he asks questions in a way that we would all like to ask, or describes things in a way that we all know to be true but do not, because of politeness. This ‘challenging’ of the way things are done or viewed will have a particular resonance with teenagers and young adults (the target readership), who are also involved in challenging society.

The humour in A Different Life... is very much evident in some of the ‘eccentricities’ of the characters who surround Libby or the relationships she has with them. Her father for example is a hobbyist who loves to tinker with his red MG sport’s car, a ‘link with his long-lost youth’. Little Brian, a three-year-old child suffering from disability whom Libby meets while in hospital, relates to the world around him through the hospital food. He also mispronounces words, so that mushrooms for example become ‘munchrooms’, which leads to some comic interpretations of the food upon the hospital menu.

Specific events related to Libby and her involvement with other characters also give openings for humour. There is the moment in the story where her brother stops making allowances for Libby’s disability and returns to acting like the ‘naughty’, ‘irritating’ and ‘obnoxious’ seven year old he always was. The sign that Robbie is back to normal is when he goes into Libby’s room to reclaim the presents he had given to her during her illness, as tokens of love:

The first thing he did was to go into my room and take back all the things he’d given me over the past few months – Morris the rabbit, the mongoose pencil, his little brown suitcase and lots of other things he’d wanted me to have...[he] came into my room with a grim little face and his lips pressed together in a silent straight line, and gathered them all up. He gave me a look you’d give a naughty child who’d eaten all the chocolate biscuits and marched out again. (p190)

In another incident Libby is out shopping with her friend Cleo, when a shop assistant takes an abnormal interest in Libby’s condition. In this case the humour is less gentle and more subversive:

‘Your poor little friend. What’s the matter with her?’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘The one in the wheel chair. Was she born like that?’
    ‘How the fuck should I know?’ Cleo snapped. ‘Never seen her before.’
    ‘Oh,’ said the assistant, covered in confusion. ‘I’m sorry. I thought I saw you talking to 
     her.’
    ‘Yeah. I was asking her if she did drugs. I’ve got some Es to sell. Want any?.’
    ‘Oh no. Oh dear. I ...’ The assistant backed off quickly, colliding with a rack of oversized 
     tops for pregnant women, knocking them flying. Cleo and I fled in hysterics.
    ‘Cleo, you shouldn’t do things like that,’ I said between breaths.
    ‘Stupid cow. She should mind her own business.’ I’d never have the nerve to say it 
     myself, but she was right. It was true. Complete strangers did seem to think my business 
     was their business these days. (p314)

Blabber Mouth is perhaps the most openly subversive of the three books in the humour that it offers. It starts with Rowena stuffing a frog into the class bully’s mouth and then goes on to offer various incidents where Rowena’s father embarrasses her and ‘offends’ certain members of local society.

When Rowena stuffs the frog into Darryn Peck’s mouth the reaction of the other children only serves to heighten the humour of the situation:

I leapt across the room and snatched the frog Darryn Peck was holding and squeezed his cheeks hard so his red lips popped open and stuffed the frog into his mouth and grabbed the sticky tape from the art table and wound it round and round his head till there was none left.
    The others all stared at me, mouths open, horrified. Then they quickly closed their mouths. (p3)

The episodes where Rowena’s father appear, serve to show her dealing with one of the mainstays of teenage fiction, the embarrassing parent. It also allows the author to describe some of the most humorous encounters that occur in the book. These include her father bursting into a Country and Western song after the ‘frog incident’; ‘an attack’ on the wife of a local dignitary at the school sports day; a food fight with a local dignitary, and finding her dad locked in the school stationery cupboard, when it is thought that he has run away. Another episode places Rowena, her father, and Rowena’s teacher, Ms Dunning, in a local restaurant. Rowena’s father and Ms Dunning like each other and the meal is their first date. Rowena’s description of the meal shows both her feelings for her father and the humour:

Why couldn’t he have stayed considerate and quiet and normal for the whole of the evening?
    The disaster started when Ms Dunning said she couldn’t eat any more.
    She’d only had about a third of her roast lamb.
    Dad looked sadly at all the food going to waste and I knew we were in trouble.
    At first I thought he was going to call for a doggy bag, which would have been embarrassing enough in the Copper Saddle, but he didn’t.
    He did something much worse.
    He told Ms Dunning how he’d read in a magazine somewhere that if you stand on your head when you feel full, you open up other areas of your stomach and you can carry on eating.
    Then he did it.
    Stood on his head.
    The waiter walked out of the kitchen and saw him there next to the table and nearly dropped a roast duck.
    All the people at the other tables stared.
    I wanted to hide under the tablecloth.
    I waited desperately for Ms Dunning to swing into action. If Darryn Peck stood on his head in class, she’d be giving him a good talking to before you could say ‘dingle’.
    But she didn’t give Dad even a medium talking to.
    She just watched him and laughed and said that she’d read in a magazine somewhere that if you stand on your head when you’re full up you choke and die.
    Dad sat back down and they both laughed some more. (pp82-83)

These are perhaps the most comical moments in terms of ‘slapstick’ but there are other moments where the comedy is gentler. One of the recurring strands of humour concerns Rowena’s best friend Amanda Cosgrove, and the problems she has understanding Rowena when she is using sign language to communicate. Amanda is constantly misinterpreting at moments which are extremely important. When Rowena tries to explain to people from a charity organisation that she is just like everyone else, her statement: ‘I’m just like all of you. An ordinary person with problems.’ is interpreted by Amanda as ‘An ordinary person with ditches.’ And when it is believed that Rowena’s father has run away, Rowena says that she feels ‘numb’, while Amanda understands that she feels like a ‘dentist’.

In all cases the comedy is something that is recognisable to the target reader: it is either something that is provided by certain characters; arises out of the interaction of characters; is an action that is naughty and should not have happened, or is a ‘play’ with language or words, the kind of language use that children from nine upwards understand all too well.

The Use of Detail – the Disabled Person’s World is Our World

Another characteristic the books share, especially The Curious Incident... and A Different Life is their attention to detail and use of minute detail. With The Curious Incident... this detail gives the reader an exact (and exacting) account of what life for Christopher, as a person with Asperger’s Syndrome, is like. It also hints at, by the way it is written, how the world is experienced by a person with Asperger’s Syndrome: the vertiginous feelings Christopher has when dealing with a world composed of a mass of detail, details the majority of people take for granted. In new places with large crowds, and when he is forced into the company of strangers, Christopher finds it almost impossible to continue functioning. The ‘attack’ of information overwhelms his senses so that he has to block out the world and calm himself using a ‘coping mechanism’. The episode in which he runs away from his father in Swindon, to be with his mother in London, is a startling account of the effect a new place and a crowd of people can have on Christopher. It also describes his coping mechanism:

And I wanted to go home. But I was frightened of going home and I tried to make a plan of what I should do in my head but there were too many things to look at and too many things to hear.
    So I put my hands over my ears to block out the noise and think. And I thought that I had to stay in the station to get on a train and I had to sit down somewhere and there was nowhere to sit down near the door of the station so I had to walk down the tunnel. So I said to myself, in my head, not out loud, ‘I will walk down the tunnel and there might be somewhere I can sit down and then I can shut my eyes and I can think,’ and I walked down the tunnel trying to concentrate on the sign at the end of the tunnel that said WARNING CCTV in operation. And it was like stepping off the cliff on to a tightrope.
    And eventually I got to the end of the tunnel and there were some stairs and I went up the stairs and there were still lots of people and I groaned and there was a shop at the top of the stairs and a room with chairs in but there were too many people in the room with chairs in, so I walked past it. And there were signs saying Great Western and cold beers and lagers and CAUTION WET FLOOR and Your 50p will keep a premature baby alive for 1.8 seconds and transforming travel and Refreshingly Different and IT’S DELICIOUS IT’S CREAMY AND IT’S ONLY £1.30 HOT CHOC DELUXE and 0870 777 7676 and The Lemon Tree and No Smoking and FINE TEAS and there were some little tables with chairs next to them and no one was sitting at one of the tables and it was in a corner and I sat down on one of the chairs next to it and I closed my eyes. And I put my hands in my pockets and Toby climbed into my hand and I gave him two pellets of rat food from my bag and I gripped the Swiss Army Knife in the other hand, and I groaned to cover up the noise because I had taken my hands off my ears, but not so loud that other people would hear me groaning and come and talk to me.
    And then I tried to think about what I had to do, but I couldn’t think because there were too many other things in my head, so I did a maths problem to make my head clearer.
    And the maths problem that I did was called Conway’s Soldiers. (pp180-181)

As with The Curious Incident..., A Different Life uses a wealth of detail to make the central character, Libby, and the people and surroundings that make up her world, as real as possible. In the very first chapter Libby describes herself and her relationships with her mum and dad and the ‘friends’ she has at school. In addition to this, even though the whole story is written in the form of a first person narrative, Libby also describes what she believes these people think of her. She is a young teenage girl, not overly clever and not overly beautiful, who gets on with her parents and brother moderately well, while also coping with all the problems and doubts any girl would have at that age. She is not sure who her friends are and what friendship really is. She accepts her looks but perhaps feels things could be different, perhaps better. She is conscious of fashion and has a growing interest in boys. In effect, the author, Lois Keith, builds up a convincing portrait of a teenage girl that any teenage girl would identify with, as well as those people who have close contact with teenage girls.

The layers of detail are continued when it comes to describing Libby’s decline into illness, her recovery and rehabilitation in hospital, and the adjustments Libby and the people around her have to make, with the growing acceptance of her disability. Such a wealth of detail has the effect of letting the reader experience the changes in Libby’s life as fully and in as real a way as Libby herself. Some of the most telling descriptions are those that outline some of the most ordinary things. In this extract Libby describes the flat of her disabled friend Barbara, mentioning some of the simple things that have been done to make the disabled person’s surroundings comfortable, things that the able-bodied person is perhaps not even aware of:

Her flat was brilliant, different to anything I’d ever seen, even in magazines. You came into a square hall, and on the right there was a large room full of light and a small kitchen fitted out with low units and cupboards. This had a door that led out into a little garden. On the other side was a bathroom and a bedroom. Everything was painted white and there was only the minimum of furniture, all in plain, bright colours. In the corner of the main room, there was a pine wood table with a couple of chairs, and a shiny brass table lamp and a big cream shade. On the opposite wall was an emerald-green sofa, raised to wheelchair height with neat wooden legs, and an armchair with a loose cover of deep purple. There were lots of cushions – cream, sunshine yellow and deep red patterns on them with dots or wavy lines. The floor was plain wood without any rugs or carpets. In fact, the only rug in the room hung on the wall, a big African print full of deep jewel colours and intricate patterns.
    ‘Wow,” I said, loving it all. I wheeled backwards and forwards. ‘No friction.’
    ‘That floor was a labour of love. My dad got it from a school where he was doing some decorating. They were throwing it out and he removed it in strips, cleaned it all up and laid it piece by piece like a jigsaw puzzle. My mum thought we were both mad. She couldn’t understand why I didn’t have a nice fitted carpet with autumn leaves of flowers on it so it wouldn’t show the dirt.’ As she talked, she moved around the kitchen with a tray on her lap and put together the tea and cakes.
    ‘Come and sit at the table and tell me about you.’ I realised why there were so few chairs. ‘How are things going?’ (p195-196)

Building such a strong and believable identity for the able-bodied Libby in the first chapter, means that even though Libby experiences an accident that leaves her disabled, the reader first and foremost sees Libby as a person, with a particular character and a particular set of problems, which are her character and problems, and not things which are the result of her disability. In effect, by seeing Libby first without the disability and then with the disability, the reader is constantly reminded that this is the same person, a person, and not the disability which happens to her.

With Blabber Mouth the weight of detail is not so great because of the age of its target readership (nine to twelve). However, the book is punctuated with significant details which give the whole text a stamp of reality. These details come at various points in the novel and in the description of various elements. There are the cowboy clothes that Rowena’s father wears or the garish jackets of Mr Cosgrove. In the episode where Mr Cosgrove and her father have a food fight, Rowena takes great delight in describing the various bits of food that hang from each of the ‘combatants’. Rowena also goes into detail about one of her father’s favourite country and western songs and the restaurant where her father takes the school teacher, Ms Dunning, for their first date. In school there are detailed descriptions of playground behaviour, the smell of the stationery cupboard in which Rowena locks herself at the beginning of the book, and even the uniforms of the ‘rescue team’ that comes to release Rowena from her imprisonment within the cupboard.

The first extract below shows how the author of Blabber Mouth, Morris Gleitzman, has picked up on the particular way that children see the world. Noting details that always seem to have some greater significance, in this case the health of the principal. The second extract is a powerful account of Rowena’s emotions when it seems her best friend Amanda is simply using her as a her community project:

Then I had to go and see the principal, Mr Fowler, in his office.
    He seemed quite tense. The skin on the top of his head was pink and when he stood up to take the tube of antiseptic cream out of his shorts pocket his knees were fairly pink too, which I’ve read is a danger sign for blood pressure if you’re not sunburnt. ” (p17)

But I did mention my doubts to Amanda while we were walking to her house.
    ‘Are you sure your dad won’t mind me coming?’ I asked.
    ‘Course not,’ she grinned. ‘He’ll be delighted to see I’ve got a community service project.’
    ‘A what?’ I said.
    ‘A community service project,’ she said. ‘Dad’s the president of the Progress Association and they’re sponsoring a youth community service drive. It’s where kids find someone who’s disadvantaged and help them. There’s a community service night tomorrow night where we introduce our projects to the other members so they can help them too.’
    My guts turned to ice.
    ‘I thought you could be my project,’ she said.

    ‘No thanks,’ I said, and turned and ran.

    I decided if ever I make another friend I’ll wait at least a week before I get excited.
    A week should be long enough to find out if the person’s a true friend, or if she just wants me for charity or to borrow money or because she needs a kidney transplant or something. (pp41-42)

In all three novels, the use of detail and minute detail, has the effect of making the stories real, so that we do not doubt that the characters of Libby, Christopher and Rowena, and the people that surround them, definitely do exist. The amount of detail also lets us explore the disabled character’s life, that different life, the one that we do not know of, in as full a way as possible. The use of minute detail in The Curious Incident..., and the way these details are often piled up, one on top of the other, also gives the target reader a feeling what it is like for one’s senses to be attacked by an overload of information, just as Christopher is attacked when he encounters a new place or crowds of people. Further to this, with A Different Life, because the lives of the able-bodied Libby and disabled Libby are described in equal detail, there is no sense of incongruity when we move from the one life to the other. As if in description, the ‘normal life’ and the ‘different life’ are not to be judged differently, but rather belong to one continuum. In this way the emphasis in the story that Libby does not stop being normal simply because she is disabled, is upheld by the way the text is written.

Reactions to the Disabled Person

The final element to be explored, in relation to how these novels from children’s literature help to build an understanding of people with disability more fully, is the way they show other people’s reactions to the disabled person. Within this, it is also interesting to note how the disabled person views themselves.

As with its humour, Blabber Mouth is the most forthright in stating the case for its disabled ‘hero’. This is perhaps all the more ironic since Rowena is unable to speak. In one of the most gripping episodes in the book, Rowena is invited by her best friend Amanda to go to a charity evening to help disabled people. Rowena is to be Amanda’s ‘Community Service Project’: an example of how Amanda is helping a disabled person. After much hesitation Rowena decides to go to the charity evening. In this scene, Rowena tells the assembled dignitaries of the charity organisation what she feels about being patronised as a ‘community service project’:

‘We’re not projects,’ I said, ‘we’re people.’
    I looked at Amanda and I could tell she’d understood.
    She gripped the microphone nervously.
    I looked at her, my heart thumping, and I knew if she was a real friend she’d say it.
    ‘Ro says,’ said Amanda, and her voice started getting louder, ‘that she and the others aren’t projects, they’re people.’
    There was absolute silence in the hall.
    ‘I’m just like all of you,’ I said. ‘An ordinary person with problems.’

    ‘I’ve got problems making sounds ,’ I said, ‘perhaps you’ve got problems making a living, or a sponge cake, or number twos.’
    Amanda said it all, even the bit about number twos.
    The hall was silent.
    ‘You can feel sympathy for me if you want,’ I continued, ‘and I can feel sympathy for you if I want. And I do feel sympathy for any of you who haven’t got a true friend.’
    I looked over at Amanda.
    As she repeated what I’d said, she looked at me, eyes shining.
    We stood like that grinning at each other, for what seemed like months.
    Then everyone started clapping. (p66)

It is obvious here that the dignitaries of the charity organisation are a symbol of the ‘compassion’, ‘understanding’ (and ‘misunderstanding’), as well as ‘curiosity’ of society as a whole, towards disabled people. It is obvious also that Rowena wants to ‘restate’ herself first and foremost as an ordinary person with ordinary problems, and not just a disability. 

Throughout The Curious Incident... there are a number of episodes in which the reader is shown the various reactions to Christopher and the situations he gets himself into. On the train journey that Christopher takes from Swindon to London, to be with his mother, he is caught and then escapes from a policeman. While on the train he hides away from the policeman by climbing into a luggage rack at the end of the carriage. The confined space gives Christopher a sense of security. The policeman cannot find him, but many people see Christopher and a whole range of reactions are given. These range from someone who is simply shocked by seeing him, another person who calls him ‘fucking weird’, yet another who decides he is a ‘train elf’ and finally, a woman who is disgusted that Christopher might have touched her suitcase. None of these people try to engage with Christopher to find out why he is actually in the luggage rack. Further reactions to Christopher are shown in a situation on the Underground, where Christopher rescues Toby, his pet rat from the track, and is himself rescued by a man who is a stranger. After the rescue, the man and a woman, who is also a stranger, try to engage with Christopher:

And the lady with the guitar case said , ‘Is he OK.?’
    And the man with the diamond patterns on his socks said, ‘Him? Thanks a fucking bundle.    
    Jesus Christ. A pet rat. Oh shit. My train.’ And then he ran to the train and he banged on the 
    door which was closed and the train started to go away and he said, ‘Fuck.’
    And the lady said, ‘Are you OK.?’ and she touched my arm so I screamed again.
    And she said, ‘OK. OK. OK.’
    And there was a sticker on her guitar case and it said 
    Howl

    Records
    And I was sitting on the ground and the woman knelt down on one knee and she said, ‘Is there anything I can do to help you?’
    And if she was a teacher at school I could have said, ‘Where is 451c Chapter Road, Willesden, LondonNW2 5NG?’ but she was a stranger, so I said, ‘Stand further away’ because I didn’t like her being so close. And I said, ‘I’ve got a Swiss Army Knife and it has a saw blade and it could cut someone’s finger off.’
    And she said, ‘OK., buddy. I’m going to take that as a no.’ and she stood up and walked away.
    And the man with the diamond patterns on his socks said, ‘Mad as a fucking hatter. Jesus,’ and he was pressing a handkerchief against his face and there was blood on the handkerchief.
    And then another train came and the man with the diamond patterns on his socks and the lady with the guitar case got on and it went away. (pp225-226)

In both episodes the reactions range from a caring attitude in which the person is trying to understand and help, through a good humoured but non-involved acceptance, to outright hostility. From the episode shown above, it is also clear that the first and the last of these emotions can even be experienced by the same person. The hostility arising not because they dislike Christopher, but simply because they do not fully understand his needs. This type of hostility is also explored in A Different Life.

In one particular scene when Libby is recovering from her illness in the children’s ward of the hospital, a lady volunteer wants to push Libby around in her wheelchair even though Libby does not want to be pushed. The lady cannot then understand why Libby gets upset with her. The intervention of a nurse on the ward stops an embarrassing incident from happening:

‘You’re a big, brave girl. Now what happened to you , did you have a nasty accident?’ I looked round to see a middle-aged woman in a flowery printed wool skirt and a white blouse, smiling down at me and nodding. ‘Do you get out of that at all? You poor thing, you must have to have strong arms to push yourself around in that. Let me give you a hand.’ She moved behind me and I felt a jolt as I was pushed forward.
    ‘Don’t do that,’ I said more sharply than I had intended. It had given me a fright being pushed when I wasn’t expecting it. ‘Could you let go? Please.’
    ‘Well I was only trying help you my dear.’ She said huffily. ‘I’ve worked as a volunteer in this hospital for nearly years and mostly I find people are very grateful for the helping hand I give them.’
    June appeared from nowhere.
    ‘Libby, Brian’s asking for you again,’ she said, putting her back between me and the offending woman. ‘He’s feeling all sore and itchy under the new plaster. Could you go and talk to him?’

I was grateful for the chance to escape. (pp 131-132)

Similar to Morris Gleitzman in Blabber Mouth, Lois Keith in A Different Life, also lets her character state what she wants to get from life and how she feels about life in general. In the final chapter, Libby talks about her future with her boyfriend Jesse, and her day-to-day life:

I still think about Jesse all the time, but it’s different now. I imagine having conversations with him, telling some of the new things which keep popping into my head, and I’d like to find out more about him. Since he’s been away, I dream of us being together, kissing, touching. That feeling for him goes right down deep inside me.
    Of course, I don’t know what’ll happen to us in the future. I mean, we’re both only sixteen, we’ll be lucky if it lasts a few months. On the other hand, who knows? We might become lovers, go to university, travel round the world together. My grandparents met at sixteen and they’ve been married fifty years!

I have good days and I have bad days. At the moment they seem to balance each other out. People seem a bit funny with me, even people I know really well, and presumably strangers will be funny with me for the rest of my life. People can be oversensitive about things that they think might upset me and then without realising they’ve done it, they’ll say something really stupid which will hurt me quite deeply.

People don’t realise that on the whole I don’t see my life stretching before me life a tragic wasteland. I see interesting, exciting things to do. (pp 354 –355)

The Language Used about the Disabled and Disability

In talking about themselves it is very clear that the characters in all three books are aware of how society views them and interacts with them. They are also aware that the vocabulary which is used to talk about disabled people, is loaded with a meaning beyond that which it denotes. For Libby in A Different Life this takes the form of the struggle she has with one of the health care workers who helps her after her illness. The physiotherapist, the gruesomely named Pauline Blood, does not allow Libby to think about life as a disabled person in a wheelchair, even though Libby knows that she is making no progress in trying to regain the use of her legs. For Pauline Blood, the word disabled means not normal, the wheelchair something negative, a thing to be ‘stuck in’ for the rest of one’s life.

In Blabber Mouth, the power of the language we use to describe disabled people and the different feelings it evokes is seen in the way Rowena actually describes herself. So that she is the ‘helpless case’ or ‘spazzo’ that is cited at the beginning of this article. It is also noticeable with Rowena, that throughout the book whenever she does something she feels to be stupid, she calls herself dumb. The double meaning of the word here, stupid and unable to speak, cannot fail to cause a jolt in the reader. The one meaning has a strong impact on the other: ‘dumb’ stupid equals ‘dumb’ unable to speak.

Perhaps the most subversive example of this language use and also the most clearly drawn comes from Christopher in The Curious Incident.... In a passage that is both awful and comic, Christopher describes the other children in his school, all of whom are disabled in some way. He also points out one of ‘problems’ with language when it comes to talking about disability or the disabled, the way the discourse is constantly changing, and not always in a way that a compassionate, understanding society would care to acknowledge:

All the other children at school are stupid. Except I’m not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are. I’m meant to say they have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning French or understanding Relativity is difficult, and also everyone has special needs, like Father who has to carry a packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him getting fat, or Mrs Peters who wears a beige-coloured hearing aid, or Siobhan who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even if they have special needs.
    But Siobhan said we have to use those words because people used to call children like the children at school spaz and crip and mong which were nasty words. But that is stupid too because sometimes the children from the school down the road see us in the street when we’re getting off the bus and they shout, ‘Special Needs! Special Needs!’ (p56)

It is noticeable here also, that as with Morris Gleitzman’s character of Rowena, Mark Haddon’s character, Christopher, calls into question the whole idea that people with disability or difference are in fact all that different. As Christopher reminds us, we all of us have difficulties or special needs of some sort

Conclusion

In telling their stories all three writers exploit known genres both in children’s literature or literature generally: the school adventure, the detective story and the teenage novel, and so provide an interesting plot in which the characters try to integrate into a new environment (Blabber Mouth), search for the killer of a neighbour’s dog (The Curious Incident...), or deal with the problems of teenage life which are then overshadowed by illness and disability (A Different Life). Within these recognisable story types the main character is either disabled or becomes disabled, so that issues related to disability are interwoven with the plot or subvert the more conventional plot lines of the genre. In this way they produce novels that are not ‘disability’ literature but rather texts belonging to a particular genre that have disabled protagonists as the main characters. The engagement of the reader here then, is not primarily with disability but with people who are involved in a particular course of actions within their lives, who are also disabled. 

The writers also engage their respective readers by creating characters who are both interesting and real. People whom the reader cannot help but care about and become involved with during the course of each book. This is done by describing the main protagonists and their lives in detail, and by allowing the reader into each of the characters’ thought processes, by the use of first person narrative.

By making their main protagonists disabled, all three writers also take their readers into the disabled person’s world and give them insights into what it is to be disabled. These insights include details of what it is like for the disabled person interacting with other people and also the physical world around them. It shows the reader the problems the disabled person faces as well as the individual ways they cope with these problems. The authors also show the different reactions their disabled characters elicit from other people and how the disabled person in turn reacts. The doubts and the fears of the disabled people themselves are also shown, as they too try to understand what their own disability means, how they can interact with the world and how people interact with them in relation to their disability. As well as this, each of the authors explores the way society views disability by engaging with the language that is used to talk about disability.

None of the three writers provide easy answers to the predicament of not knowing how to act or what to say when we are with disabled people. They do however show us the person that is sometimes obscured by the disability. In this way, they provide their young audience with something my uncle Lawrie was able to give me, contact with a disabled person who is a person first and foremost, and not a disability. These books also do something that my uncle never did, they show their audience disability as the complicated and individual issue that it really is. My uncle was never one to discuss his feelings much, nor show the real pain or hardship that he sometimes must have experienced. In all three books we are privileged in being able to get inside the main protagonists’ minds and so really share what they are experiencing and feeling. Because of this, the children (and adults) reading these books will gain insight of what it is like to be disabled, so that when they meet with disabled people a greater knowledge and understanding will inform their actions 

Haddon, Gleitzman and Keith, and authors who are similarly writing about disability or difficult issues, and for children, are truly involved in awareness raising that must create a more perceptive society.

References

Butler, R (2005) Different Lives: Disability in Contemporary Children’s, Literature Journal of Children’s Literature Studies Vol. 2, no. 1. (pp 15-26) 
Gervay, S (2004) Butterflies: Youth Literature as a Powerful Tool in Understanding Disability, Disability Studies Quarterly Vol. 24, no. 1 www.dsq-sds.org Accessed on 09.03.06
Gleitzman, M (1992) Blabber Mouth, Macmillan Children’s Books
Haddon, M (2003) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Red Fox Definitions
Keith, L (1997) A Different Life, Livewire Books
Keith, L (2004) What Writers Did Next: Disability, Illness and Cure in Books in the Second Half of the 20^th Century, Disability Studies Quarterly Vol. 24, no. 1 www.dsq-sds.org Accessed on 09.03.06
Solis, S (2004) The Disabilitymaking Factory: Manufacturing “Differences” through Children’s Books, Disability Studies Quarterly Vol. 24, no. 1 www.dsq-sds.org Accessed on 09.03.06