Book Reflection: Mostly Mary

Continuing my occasional series of reflections on books with bears in them, this week I’ll be looking at a chapter book for children:

Mostly Mary, by Gwynnedd Ray (illustrated by Clara Vulliamy).

I was introduced to Mary by a bear called Paddington.

I mean that, literally. I bought a hard cover edition of A Bear Called Paddington in Paddington station when I visited London (why wouldn’t you?) and the blurb on the book jacket included a very interesting sentence:

“Like Winnie the Pooh and Mary Plain, Paddington is a bear to remember.”

Now, I am quite familiar with Winnie the Pooh. Even if Disney hadn’t made sure I had that “tubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff” on my radar from an early age, I probably would have encountered Christopher Robin and the good folk of the 100 Aker Wood through the story books my mother bought for me as a child.

But Mary Plain? I’d never heard of her. Here she was, being mentioned in the same breath as Winnie the Pooh and Paddington (two much beloved bears), but she was a complete mystery to me.

Well, I did what any librarian would do. I googled Mary Plain and discovered she was the heroine of a series of books published from the 30s through to the 60s. She was, apparently, quite a popular character at one point. So why had I never heard of her?

Unfortunately, none of my libraries had a copy of any of the Mary Plain books, but it just so happened that four of the books had been recently reissued with new illustrations by Clara Vulliamy. I ordered the first two books, and sat down to meet a new friend.

There’s something you have to remember about Mostly Mary. It was written in 1930 as light entertainment for children. So it is a cheerful, light-hearted, entertaining book… about a terrible zoo that would never be built in a civilised society in this day and age.

I visited the bear pits in Bern a few years ago, and the old pits weren’t in use at the time – they now have the bears in a park along the river bank where they have some space to roam and grass and trees and things (although I understand these are connected to the pits with a tunnel, so the bears can use both spaces). When I saw the bear pits, it made me sad to think that bears would spend their whole lives in those concrete bunkers. Now, thanks to Mary Plain, I know that people also threw random crap at them while they were in there.

Gwynned Rae used to visit the zoo while she was living in Bern in the 1920s, and the bears were the highlight of the zoo for her. She imagined them as being like a family with small children, going about their business being bears in a pit, and that’s the angle from which she has written this book. Mary is very much like a child, but not completely anthropomorphised. The book consists of a series of stories (mostly about Mary, but some of the other bears take the lead in a few stories – hence the title). During these stories, the bears are playful, happy and interested in the world around them.

But they’re in a terrible zoo, during a time when people treated animals with little respect, and I kept coming across parts of the book that were supposed to be “oh, how dear!” moments, but were actually “well, that’s a bit sad, really” moments instead.

Mary overhears one of the humans commenting about her, saying “isn’t Mary plain?” and she thinks this must be her full name – she gets so excited and happy about this that she runs to her favourite part of the concrete bunker and hugs herself because there was no one else around to hug. People throw stuff at the bears all the time, and that’s pretty much the most interesting thing that happens to them, so they like to play with the random crap that has been tossed at them. People also throw food at them – often carrots bought from a stall, but also “treats” like honey and condensed milk, and the bears practically live for these moments. There is one lone tree in each of the pits, and they’ve been used so much that the lower branches are all broken off…

There’s a point in the book where Mary is put on a leash and taken to some rich person’s party. This is supposed to be an awfully big adventure for the young bear, but all I could think of is, “Really? This was something they did in the 20s? Rented bear cubs from the zoo as party tricks?”

And this charming, happy-go-lucky bear cub is just so excited to encounter every crappy part of her crappy little life.

I wanted to love this book, but we’re in a different place now (thank God), and it’s hard to love something that cheerfully celebrates a mistake we made in our ignorance that we regret deeply (at least, we should regret it deeply – I’m sure there are some people who don’t, but those people are the ones who never stopped to ask “but what must it be like?”).

A child who has never seen the pits and hasn’t got a full appreciation for how terrible the zoos from that time were would probably enjoy the book and fall in love with Mary. I wish them luck. Personally, I have to wait a little longer before I can bring myself to read the second one.