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The Racey Helps Picture Book with Verses by Celia Barlow
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January 30, 2024
My first encounter with the work of Racey Helps was the infamous "Woodland Old Maid," infamous because as a small child I was disturbed by clothed animals and was terrified of owls. Guess what "Woodland Old Maid" combines?
Racey Helps is one of the lesser-known children's writers and illustrators today but in his time (the period from the end of the Second World War until the early 1970s) he was a popular name. His style is simpler and less fine than Beatrix Potter's (Potter was also a very skilful botanic illustrator and mycologist) and varies from the twee through the humorous and nostalgic to the downright disturbing (for me anyway, as see above). Resolutely based in the West of England rather than succumbing to the lure of London, he started drawing in earnest to entertain his little daughter, born just before the outbreak of war. Given the time scale it isn't hard to imagine the illustrations as idealised pre-war country scenes ... with animals. (that said, his creatures are unafraid of some kinds of progress, whether rigging up homemade 'moon rockets', or even carrying out a badger-led moon landing).
The knowing owls of "Woodland Old Maid" are not his standard style, and I have wondered if the cards are supposed to be a game in-universe, that's to say, played by children in the world he is depicting. His owls are more usually old duffers, more silly than threatening, and his badgers Reasonable Authority Figures, whether expedition leaders or motherly matrons. The frogs? well, Beatrix Potter didn't attempt to make frogs human-like; her Jeremy Fisher looks like a naturalistic frog because she realised that halfway between frog and human is an uncanny valley and a terrifying one at that. Racey Helps had no such qualms, his frogs raffish young fellows such as Humphrey Goggle with his sports car (so Mister Toad although I suspect he would have left the dilettante Toad to eat his dust). Then there are hedgehogs such as Pinny who jumps into a barrel and sails off down river in Pinny's Holiday, and Diggy the Mole who takes his pick (so to speak). They, I suspect, are the edge-of-the-forest dwellers, travelling people, makers of secretive fires at dusk, miners, apprentice engineers.
The bulk of his characters however - representing pre-war villagers in his prelapsarian world - comprises some squirrels but mostly rabbits, often children who get into all sorts of scrapes or go on hikes and have picnics with their grown-ups. Then there are the mice. The mice are, I think, somewhere between child and pet. They aren't the children of the rabbits because there are child-rabbits, but the mice are often cared for lovingly by the rabbit population, and do adorable things like swing from daisy stalks (I don't think even baby mice - at least once they start looking like mice, when they're about a week old - are quite that small really but it's a cute image). Nor do they live in 'fancy little houses': the rabbits' burrow may have a cradle for the babies and a rocking chair for mum and a table for their tea and a picture of Grandpa on the wall (Grandpa is a pie. That's right. A rabbit pie) but it is still a burrow, not a house. (also one of the buns in that picture, "Bedtime Story" is clutching a golliwog. Animals with human dolls?)
"The Racey Helps Picture Book" was published in 1984, with illustrations by Helps and verses by Celia Barlow, who I also find as author of "Dinwald the Dragon" but is not, I suspect, the former Member of Parliament for Hove of the same name (though it could be; she would have been in her late twenties at the time of publication. Not to be confused with the very fine coloratura Cecilia Bartoli either). Here we see rabbits being packed off to school, and also some of their other pastimes - there's an egg and spoon race, a sack race (do frogs cheat at the sack race? Is this why their legs feature in some cuisines ...?), cricket (which of course dissolves into farce as the bunnies and squirrels decide rules are optional), and badminton (where it has really kicked off including using rackets as weapons). Then there are days at the seaside (presumably Devon or thereabouts) and on the river (the Avon or the Severn or one of their tributaries - fun days jumping in the water - watched by an irritated heron - or getting stuck in reeds in a punt). The modern world makes an entrance in the form of a car parked outside a 1930s-looking house,which the animals decide to wash (or rather, spray one another with the hose. At least at first, as the verse tells us they do later knuckle down and actually wash the car. The air of high-spirited fun is as ever tempered with a message of doing what you were supposed to do ... eventually). There are removals vans (Bun & Co), a bargain day at a draper's store (B Bun & Co again - in a hollow tree) and a queue at the doctor's burrow. A picture of rabbits buying vegetables is more detailed than most, with a realistically-drawn carthorse in the traces of the vegetable cart, autumn leaves falling and autumn primroses in flower. Elsewhere his foliage can have the bluegreen daze of summer and draw the eye to blue distant hills. Finally there is that "Moon Landing" picture, the mousetronauts and animals ... in ... space (no pigs, sadly) wearing bubble space helmets but just coats on their bodies and fur on their lower halves, no spacesuits. Must have been cold up there.
As a charming little book that is doubly nostalgic - an illustrator who is barely remembered these days, already harking back to an era before the war - this is a simple and inoffensive pleasure.
Racey Helps is one of the lesser-known children's writers and illustrators today but in his time (the period from the end of the Second World War until the early 1970s) he was a popular name. His style is simpler and less fine than Beatrix Potter's (Potter was also a very skilful botanic illustrator and mycologist) and varies from the twee through the humorous and nostalgic to the downright disturbing (for me anyway, as see above). Resolutely based in the West of England rather than succumbing to the lure of London, he started drawing in earnest to entertain his little daughter, born just before the outbreak of war. Given the time scale it isn't hard to imagine the illustrations as idealised pre-war country scenes ... with animals. (that said, his creatures are unafraid of some kinds of progress, whether rigging up homemade 'moon rockets', or even carrying out a badger-led moon landing).
The knowing owls of "Woodland Old Maid" are not his standard style, and I have wondered if the cards are supposed to be a game in-universe, that's to say, played by children in the world he is depicting. His owls are more usually old duffers, more silly than threatening, and his badgers Reasonable Authority Figures, whether expedition leaders or motherly matrons. The frogs? well, Beatrix Potter didn't attempt to make frogs human-like; her Jeremy Fisher looks like a naturalistic frog because she realised that halfway between frog and human is an uncanny valley and a terrifying one at that. Racey Helps had no such qualms, his frogs raffish young fellows such as Humphrey Goggle with his sports car (so Mister Toad although I suspect he would have left the dilettante Toad to eat his dust). Then there are hedgehogs such as Pinny who jumps into a barrel and sails off down river in Pinny's Holiday, and Diggy the Mole who takes his pick (so to speak). They, I suspect, are the edge-of-the-forest dwellers, travelling people, makers of secretive fires at dusk, miners, apprentice engineers.
The bulk of his characters however - representing pre-war villagers in his prelapsarian world - comprises some squirrels but mostly rabbits, often children who get into all sorts of scrapes or go on hikes and have picnics with their grown-ups. Then there are the mice. The mice are, I think, somewhere between child and pet. They aren't the children of the rabbits because there are child-rabbits, but the mice are often cared for lovingly by the rabbit population, and do adorable things like swing from daisy stalks (I don't think even baby mice - at least once they start looking like mice, when they're about a week old - are quite that small really but it's a cute image). Nor do they live in 'fancy little houses': the rabbits' burrow may have a cradle for the babies and a rocking chair for mum and a table for their tea and a picture of Grandpa on the wall (Grandpa is a pie. That's right. A rabbit pie) but it is still a burrow, not a house. (also one of the buns in that picture, "Bedtime Story" is clutching a golliwog. Animals with human dolls?)
"The Racey Helps Picture Book" was published in 1984, with illustrations by Helps and verses by Celia Barlow, who I also find as author of "Dinwald the Dragon" but is not, I suspect, the former Member of Parliament for Hove of the same name (though it could be; she would have been in her late twenties at the time of publication. Not to be confused with the very fine coloratura Cecilia Bartoli either). Here we see rabbits being packed off to school, and also some of their other pastimes - there's an egg and spoon race, a sack race (do frogs cheat at the sack race? Is this why their legs feature in some cuisines ...?), cricket (which of course dissolves into farce as the bunnies and squirrels decide rules are optional), and badminton (where it has really kicked off including using rackets as weapons). Then there are days at the seaside (presumably Devon or thereabouts) and on the river (the Avon or the Severn or one of their tributaries - fun days jumping in the water - watched by an irritated heron - or getting stuck in reeds in a punt). The modern world makes an entrance in the form of a car parked outside a 1930s-looking house,which the animals decide to wash (or rather, spray one another with the hose. At least at first, as the verse tells us they do later knuckle down and actually wash the car. The air of high-spirited fun is as ever tempered with a message of doing what you were supposed to do ... eventually). There are removals vans (Bun & Co), a bargain day at a draper's store (B Bun & Co again - in a hollow tree) and a queue at the doctor's burrow. A picture of rabbits buying vegetables is more detailed than most, with a realistically-drawn carthorse in the traces of the vegetable cart, autumn leaves falling and autumn primroses in flower. Elsewhere his foliage can have the bluegreen daze of summer and draw the eye to blue distant hills. Finally there is that "Moon Landing" picture, the mousetronauts and animals ... in ... space (no pigs, sadly) wearing bubble space helmets but just coats on their bodies and fur on their lower halves, no spacesuits. Must have been cold up there.
As a charming little book that is doubly nostalgic - an illustrator who is barely remembered these days, already harking back to an era before the war - this is a simple and inoffensive pleasure.
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