Tent Under the Spider Tree - by Gene Inyart

My Favorite Childhood Reads

Around ten years ago, when some people I work with got involved in the Children & Nature Network, I started thinking of this novel that I read and loved in elementary school. A book about three girls who spent a summer camping out alone. They slept in a tent, explored field and stream, and faced an invading horde of daddy longlegs (hence the title).

Having just read Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods, I found myself wondering if I’d made the whole thing up. Three pre-adolescents in a tent by themselves? That book was in my grade-school library. Would it even be allowed today?

Curiosity aroused, I got online and tracked down a copy of Tent Under the Spider Tree. It really is as good as I remembered. Short chapters written for kids, characters with distinct personalities, plenty of action.

My recollection was a little fuzzy. The girls camped out for a week, not a whole season. They weren’t entirely unsupervised: there was a farmhouse nearby, and a daily check-in with the family that lived there. But still. The girls slept every night in their tent by a stream. They couldn’t see the house from their camp. They prepared their own meals and survived mosquitoes, gnats and leeches. They had disagreements, but worked things out without adult intervention. At week’s end, they knew they’d had an experience they would never forget.

What a contrast with the kids described in Richard Louv’s book, who have lost touch with the natural world. The Children & Nature movement, working to reverse this trend, is finding out we also need to pry Mom and Dad away from their desks and computers and cars, because parents don’t let kids run free any more. Even if they want to, society tends not to let them. Two years ago, a single mom was arrested for letting her 9-year-old play at a park while she was at work. In the daytime, with a cell phone. And that wasn’t an isolated case.

The girls in Spider Tree didn’t have cell phones. That book was published in 1959. I found it in the early ‘60s. To my fourth-grade self, it read like a marvelous adventure, but not especially far-fetched. Today, it seems like a fairy tale: nearly as fantastic as the Harry Potter series. As dated, in its way, as those Betsy-Tacy stories that took place over a century ago.

The Betsy Books - by Maud Hart Lovelace

My Favorite Childhood Reads

There were a bunch of these books, and I think I read them all. Betsy-Tacy was first in the series, set, as I recall, in the very early 1900s. Two little girls met and became Best Friends. In a subsequent book they bonded with another girl called “Tib” (short for Thelma), and became a threesome. The girls grew up together, went to school, moved on to high school. Readers got to know their families: Betsy had a big sister, Julia; and I think Tacy had several siblings. As time went on, Betsy left home, spent time abroad, and got married.

It’s been many years since I read these books. I don’t recall any intricate plots; it was more slice-of-life stuff, how it was to be a girl growing up in that time. Just a few incidents stick in my mind. Some members of Tacy’s family caught scarlet fever or some other contagious disease, and the whole household went under quarantine. Years later, Betsy was living in a German boarding house, doing personal hygiene with a basin and washrag. She found out there was a real bathtub in the building, reserved for the use of army officers, and talked a couple of housemaids into smuggling her in for a real bath.

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More information about Betsy, Tacy and friends

My Favorite Childhood Reads

A funny thing has been happening in my mind these past few months. I’ll be going about my daily routine and suddenly find myself thinking of a book I read when I was a kid. I’ll recall scenes, characters, and whole sequences of events. Sometimes it’s a book I haven’t thought about in decades. Sometimes it’s a more familiar story, one of those I always suspected I would never forget. (I should mention here that I have vintage copies of several childhood favorites. They live on the top shelf of a bookcase in my writing room.)

Perhaps, at age 60, I’m starting to enter a second childhood. Maybe some part of my psyche figures it’s time to climb into the attic of my mind and sort through the piles of stuff that are lying around in there.

When something interesting turns up in the attic, it’s fun to share with friends. In the coming weeks, I’ll post mini-reviews of my favorite childhood reads. Some are classics that anyone would recognize. Others may be obscure, and I’ll be interested to find out if any of my friends also read them. Feel free to comment and share!