Creampuff Tries to Remember the Freakier Books of Her Childhood
I think that someone needs to devote a website to helping nostalgic adults find the songs, books and movies which they now remember only vaguely, due to age and/or drug use.
I think I have a pretty good memory for titles and details and such (Space Camp! The oeuvre of Monica Hughes! The names of all of Anne of Green Gables‘ children and how they occupied themselves during WWI!) but there are some things that escape even me. For instance, there were these two books I loved to read in junior high. I would always read them IN THE LIBRARY and never took them home. I don’t think I ever knew the titles or the authors of these two books - I would locate the books by where they were on the shelf and what their spines looked like.
I suspect they were both written in the 60’s. One was set somewhere in Europe, possibly Eastern Europe and it was about a long limbed teenage dancer who, SOMEHOW, gets her foot - ONLY her foot - run over by a train. There’s a line drawing in the book of this babe splayed out by the train tracks, unconscious, with her toes kinda chewed off. Of course she nearly dies of grief over her lost dancing career, but then some kindly carpenter (the Jesus figure, perhaps? Was it a religious book?) builds her a wooden foot prosthetic - and she can dance again!!! Yaaaay!
I must have read that book a dozen times. All I remember are the toes and Jesus.
The other book I was obsessed with involved a younger girl (I keep thinking her name was Trixie . . . oo, oo, CHRISTIE! CHRISTIE! IT WAS CHRISTIE!!) who is in some kind of accident where a piece of metal gets poked through her cheek and when it heals, after much suffering in the hospital, her face is twisted a little on that side, so she looks like she’s always smiling. I don’t remember the point of the story, or what happens after Christie and her poor, twisted smile get sprung from the hospital, but I DO remember the long descriptions of painful medical procedures she had to endure before her face healed. And that she wore pigtails.
The third book that I lump into this “fascination with maiming” trifecta is Save Queen of Sheba
I remember this book being very tense - this kid named King David (for real) gets half-scalped by Sioux Indians when his family’s wagon train is attacked. He’s in the middle of nowhere and then has to get his spoiled little sister, Queen of Sheba, to safety at some fort. This book gave me quite a thrill when I was young, particularly how King David has to deal with the hole in his head caused by the partial scalping, but perhaps, in retrospect, it was not so hot. Here is my favourite review of the book from Amazon.ca:
Reviewer: An 11-year old reader
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be bored out of your mind. Well read this book and find out. At the starting it sounds pretty exciting towards the middle you suffer SBD (severe boredom disease). At the ending the author find a cheap way to end the book before the editor’s deadline.
I tell you - kids today . . . so hard to please.
Anyway, so . . . maiming. That sucks. Why was I obsessed with it as a young person? Am I alone in my interest? Obviously not, as clearly someone ELSE thought enough of these stories to actually publish them. Hmmm . . .
I was talking to my clinical psychologist mom on the phone this morning about my sudden remembrance of, and interest in finding, these books. She said to me:
“You know, often the stories that really stick with us from our childhood offer a lot of insight into our various patterns and behaviours as adults.”
There was a pause. A tumbleweed blew by. I heard it over the phone.
“So . . . uh . . . what do you think your . . . interest in these stories of . . . maiming has to say about . . . you?”
Good question, Mom. Gooooood question. I’ll . . . I’ll have to get back to you.
So hey! If anyone out there remembers either of the mystery books I’m talking about, please feel free to drop me a line and let me know! And if YOU are having trouble remembering some freaky books from YOUR childhood, please . . . feel free to drop me a line. And let me know. That I’m not alone.
Comments:
Alright, totally not a book, but at some point in my childhood I watched a movie (possibly in my grandparents basement) about a little girl during the depression who gets run over by a train. And her mom had some sort of side-business making dolls or toys (that the little girl never got to play with) and had been squirrling money away in the lining of this old coat she always wore, and then I VIVIDLY remember a scene where the doctors are standing over a stretcher carrying the remains of her daughter (in case you missed it earlier - WHO HAD BEEN RUN OVER BY A TRAIN) telling her that there’s nothing else they can do and she starts screaming and dumping all of this money from her coat on the stretcher. And I believe the doctors take it, even though they can’t actually do anything.
Okay, actually I sort of hope I never do remember the title of that movie.
Now that I’m thinking about books - Rembember “Bridge to Terabithia". No maiming, but definitely with the doom/gloom/death. I was also quite enamored of the ‘one month to live’-type books where the teenaged, female protagonists had all been recently diagnosed with terminal diseases. Leukemia featured heavily.
Comment by Berin — Tuesday, June 7, 2005 @ 1:01 am
Yikes! And they want to keep kids from reading “Catcher in the Rye"? No wonder the suicide rate is going up with these lovely gems to choose from
Comment by Kristi Shupp-George — Wednesday, June 8, 2005 @ 6:25 am
“Bridge to Terabithia” is one of my all-time fav books. It makes me so angry yet I am so in love w/ both the little girl and
the art teacher. Sigh.
Speaking of weird movie flashbacks .. I have this one where a little girl is playing in the woods (autumn) behind her house with her
Raggedy Anne (or some such) doll. She puts it down for a sec, wanders away, comes back, and the doll has this giant red spot in the
middle of its forehead. And you see a couple of dark figures lurking in the shadows. Talk about creepy!!
Oh … favourite book maime scene – well, she’s already maimed … Klara in the first Heidi book. There was this great black and white
line drawing of her in the book I had, looking all pathetic. Disturbingly, it was very romantic.
Comment by Queen Katicus — Thursday, June 9, 2005 @ 5:30 pm