How Black Beauty and Charlotte the spider can teach children about death

Charlotte's Web, Black Beauty, Farthing Wood - such books can teach children far more about life and death than some of the cutesy newer offerings
Charlotte's Web
Life lessons … Charlotte's Web PR

Many people's first experience of death comes with pets. Hamsters are notorious for popping their clogs, and then giving rise to exhumation orders when tearful kids remember that the little brutes hibernate (sorry, Johnny - if it wasn't dead before, it is now). Rabbits, guinea pigs, cats and dogs - short life spans or parlous traffic habits can send a tender-hearted youngster to school pale and red eyed for a week. And while it's less traumatic than losing a human relative or friend, it's often the first inkling children get of the undiscovered country; the deeply unsettling fact that death is one day coming for us all. It's hard to process for small fry and parents alike.

Reflecting this, the first meaningful fictional deaths children encounter are likely to be animal, albeit anthropomorphised to some degree. Once, moral tales for sin-ridden infants didn't hesitate to kill off the bad for cautionary purposes and the good for pathetic, but now you don't usually get on to proper people deaths until you have entered the 8-12 reading bracket. What your parents might have forgotten, though, is just how upsetting some of those four-legged deaths can be. Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, for example, features a stable fire with appalling consequences:

"There was a dreadful sound before we got into our stalls - the shrieks of those poor horses that were left burning to death in the stable … "

This terrible phrase has haunted me since the book was read to me at age six. "Shrieks" was bad enough, but the inexorably protracted agony of that "left burning to death" gave me nightmares for a month. You could practically hear the flames crackle.

Or what about EB White's Charlotte's Web? People who haven't had their memories jogged by subsequent rereading or the recent film tend to remember a clean, pink pig and a talking spider, losing to time-erosion the mordant analysis of bad eggs such as Templeton the rat. Strangely, though, they also forget the heart-wrenching account of Charlotte's death:


Charlotte's Web was required reading at my primary school, as was The Animals of Farthing Wood, Colin Dann's animal odyssey about a group of creatures who form an alliance and set out for the haven of a nature reserve when their original home is destroyed. Despite the Oath of Protection the animals swear to each other, Farthing Wood remains grim and unsentimental. Infant field-mice are spitted on thorns by the sinister redbacked :butcher bird", ditzy pheasants are shot, and two elderly hedgehogs meet a miserable death trying to cross a six-lane motorway.

Scarred though my young psyche was by these tragic accounts, I'm still glad to have encountered them when I did. Without the shadow of the ultimate consequence, it's hard for a book to have gravitas, and round about the Santa-doubting age you begin to need more fear, emotion and loss to season your reading matter. That quiet death of an anthropomorphised spider was the first hint I had that good people (arachnids) would one day die, and that they probably wouldn't be taken off to heaven with a fanfare, but might be alone, unnoticed and unmourned at the end. It was hard to bear, and it made me angry as well as sad, but without Charlotte's lonely death the book would be infinitely impoverished.

There are a lot of Magic Puppy and Cutesie Kitten series about at present: dear little tales in which the titular furry friend is unlikely to face a fate more dire than being lost and rescued with some dispatch. I have nothing against these, but there are far too many of them. We should make more space for Sewell, White, Dann, and all the tough writers who teach you first about suffering and death, without pandering to the yen for unlikely Panglossian perfection - young readers deserve, and want, to taste the bitter with the sweet.