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The Tulip Touch and The Devil Walks
Manage episode 297646864 series 2399987
In this episode we talked about the novels The Tulip Touch and The Devil Walks, both by Anne Fine.
If you want to follow us on twitter we are @stillscaredpod, and our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at makiyamazaki.com. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and their band Etao Shin are at etaoshin.co.uk Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com.
Transcript
Ren Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray and today we’re talking about The Tulip Touch and The Devil Walks by Anne Fine. And as many of you probably listen to this as a lighthearted distraction, please be aware that this is a more serious episode than usual, and touches on themes of child abuse and child murder, so if you're not feeling up to that, maybe skip this one.
Ren Good morning, Adam!
Adam Good morning, Ren.
Ren Hello, how are you doing?
Adam I’m doing alright! It’s like emerging from a mucky swamp into a slightly dismal wood, but it’s nicer than the swamp!
Ren Yeah! You know, suddenly the leaf-mould and lichen seems friendly.
Adam Well, you know, it’s fine.
Ren It’s fine, we can deal with it. So for once I think we’re actually talking about what we said we would in the last episode.
Adam Oh what? People will be really dissapointed!
Ren Which is The Tulip Touch by Anne Fine from 1996, and sort of supplementarily The Devil Walks, which is also by Anne Fine and from 2011. I think we just remembered the existence of The Tulip Touch at the end of the last episode and went, ‘ah we have to do that!’
Adam Yes, it does blip into my mind every few years.
Ren So, yes, Anne Fine is a very prolific English children’s book author who wrote a lot of books that a lot of kids in Britain read. Like Flour Babies, about a boy who has to look after a little flour baby as a parenting project and it gets chucked into the canal.
Adam It’s awful, yeah! You really grow attached to this sack of flour and it gets booted right into the canal.
Ren And Mrs Doubtfire she wrote as well —
Adam — oh, of course!
Ren Which wasn’t actually one of my favourites, I think because I watched the film and the book’s very different really. It always felt a little small and dowdy and English in comparison to the Robin Williams production.
Adam More wacky antics. Anne Fine tends towards these quite small, domestic but somehow troubling… even in these non-horror books like Flour Babies or Bill’s New Frock there’s these moments of disquiet. She likes dealing with these quite uncomfortable emotions.
Ren Yes, they’re down-to-earth but they’re quite sharp. They have pointy bits to them.
Adam That’s a good description. And a lot of them were favourites of mine, like Flour Babies and Bill’s New Frock, which made quite an impression on me. Which was about a boy who wakes up and — is he wearing a frock when he wakes up, or just that what’s in his wardrobe and he’s obliged to wear it?
Ren Yeah, he looks in the mirror and sees himself as a girl, and everyone treats him as a girl. And it’s one of those things where it’s not a trans story but it feels like a trans story in a way.
Adam A lot of it is about socialisation and about gendered assumptions made in the school system, like ‘girls should have smart handwriting and boys have messy handwriting’.
Ren There’s also Crummy Mummy and Me, and Google Eyes.
Adam Oh yeah, I don’t know if I read that one?
Ren That was good, it was about a kid whose mum gets a new boyfriend that she hates, and she comes to, if not like him at least accept him by the end. And ‘How to write really badly’.
Adam Oh that’s a great title!
Ren Yeah, that was one of my favourites. Which is about a class having an assignment to write a how-to book, and the protagonist is like ‘I’m rubbish at everything’, and his friend says, ‘Well, there’s one thing you’re really good at’ so he does this how-to book about writing badly.
So that’s an overview of the kind of books that she usually writes, and they are not usually like The Tulip Touch.
Adam Yes, The Tulip Touch is her cursed book.
Ren (laughs) Yes, it really is! It has a very different atmosphere to the rest of her books, it’s very unsettling. It’s one of those books I didn’t want to have too close to my bed.
Adam Yes, absolutely. To me it was alongside Roald Dahl’s The Witches as being a book by an author who I loved and normally felt pretty safe with, but this book was different. And I think I literally had it at the far end of my bedroom.
Ren Yeah, same.
Adam Near the door, so it could be thrown out if need be.
Ren I’m curious, what did you remember of it before you re-read it?
Adam I remembered the games, some of those titles came back to me, like ‘Stinking Mackerel’, for instance, these strange ritualistic games they play. I remember being scared of Tulip. I remember the cover I had with the flame in the eye, and I remember, probably unfairly, as he wasn’t that bad, but… I had one friend at school who didn’t play football, and he was sort of my Tulip? I don’t want to over-exaggerate that, and I don’t think he had nearly as troubled or deprived a background and he wasn’t cruel in the way that Tulip is, but he had a tendency to make up a lot of tall tales and lies that I kind of knew were lies but went along with.
And odd games, like I remember playing this game where he half-pretended, half really did tie me to a chair with skipping ropes. We had this shed on the playing field, a kind of toy shed and he put this stick across the door as if I was locked in there. And I wasn’t really, and kids would come in and give me a curious look and ask if I was alright, and I’d say ‘yeah, yeah’. But it was that odd liminal space where it was kind of a game, but kind of not, and kind of bullying but kind of not, as I was a willing participant. So kind of semi-imaginary power play and tall tales. He claimed that he played in these championships of bicycle football, and he was the county champion, and of course I should know about bike football — how could I not? So some of Tulip’s tall tales and lies kind of rang home for me. And I remember having that association when I read it, but finding Tulip much scarier, and this idea of how things could escalate.
How about you? What are your memories of it?
Ren I mean, pretty vague. I remember the cover, I remember being scared of Tulip, and I remember her being in a field, the image of her in a field which is actually where we first meet Tulip in the book. So pretty light on details, just atmosphere was what I remember really. But it’s very different reading it as an adult.
Adam Yes. As a child it reads as a horror story with Tulip as the monster, as an adult it’s deeply sad. It’s still a very distressing book but in different ways.
Ren (fumbles for words) I wonder how much I picked up on as a kid, like I don’t know if it all just went over my head or if partly what was disturbing about it was what it says about our society.
Adam I definitely think it is, but I feel that a lot of that went over my head.
Ren Yeah. So it’s a pretty unflinching exploration of the situation of a kid who is being abused and has no adults willing or able to protect her, and unlike in another kind of children’s book, Tulip doesn’t get miraculously rescued or transported to a magical realm, she just grows up into an increasingly troubled teenager and alientates everyone around her with her behaviour, which is a pretty dark direction for a childrens’ book!
Adam Oh yeah. I found a newspaper article about the Carniege winners of that year, and this came out as the same year as Junk, if you ever read that?
Ren Oh yeah, I loved Junk! I absolutely loved that book as a kid. I learned so much from it, I learned about heroin, I learned about sex work. It was great.
Adam Yeah, it was a very popular book. I read it and it made a big impression on me, probably around the same age. But it was definitely a book that a lot of adults and parents and educators weren’t very happy about.
Ren Yeah, I can imagine.
Adam But it was interesting because I found this article about the Carniege (children’s book award) winners for that year and it was a very dark selection about bullying, drug addiction and abuse. It’s interesting, because it’s easy to think of the ‘90s about this period of kids fantasy and forget that there was this real trend towards gritty social realism for young adult readers. And that’s not necessarily what you would have expected from Anne Fine at the time. There’s hints of it it in Flour Babies, but she’d never written anything this dark before, or something that makes you sit with these uncomfortable, troublesome and troubling characters.
As you say, Tulip is not the perfect victim. She clearly is a victim, and you can easily see that as an adult, but that doesn’t mean she’s always likeable, or nice, or not abusive herself, so what do you do with that?
But I read an interview with Anne Fine saying that the writing of the book was inspired by the murder of James Bulger. In which two older children lured away and murdered this younger child. And she said that obviously this case was very disturbing, but also the reaction in the press and the British public. That these kids were tried like adults, and there was lots of talk about ‘lock ‘em up and throw away the key’ and that these children were born evil.
And that’s the theme she’s really engaging with in The Tulip Touch. Is anyone born evil? And if someone is a victim of their circumstances, what do we do with that?
Ren Yeah, when I read that it was inspired by that case that made a lot of sense, putting it in context. It sounds like she was saying in that interview, that that case and a couple of other cases of child-on-child violence caused a kind of national crisis of ‘what is happening with society’, kind of thing. And her take is very much not, ‘it’s a few bad apples’ kind of thing.
She says in that interview: ‘I absolutely fail to understand what is so outrageous and so unthinkable about choosing to create a society that can order its priorities, its huge resources and energies, so that it can catch people before they fall. I mean, it would make the world safer for everybody, and meanwhile, we wouldn't all have to sit here and watch the boys and their toys. Are we going to send another probe to Mars? Are they going to spend another $90 billion? Who cares what’s on Mars?’
Adam I really want to say that to Elon Musk.
Ren I know, this is before Elon Musk! I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about prison abolition and police abolition, and what an abolitionist society is, and how you create a society where prisons and police aren’t needed, right? And I feel like this is very sympathetic to that kind of take.
Adam Yeah, this is a really angry book! It is an angry inditement of British society. And I think that Anne Fine really shares in some of Tulip’s anger. It’s interesting, I think in that same interview the interviewer assumes that she would relate to the protagonist, and she says ‘No, I was more of a Tulip growing up’. I found that really interesting.
And the copy of the book that I have here is published in this Penguin line called The Originals. It’s been grouped together, there’s four different groups: for thinkers, for lovers, for survivors and for rebels and it’s classics of Young Adult literature republished. So for example, ‘For Lovers’ you have I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, Postcards from No Man’s Land by Aidan Chambers; In ‘For Thinkers’ you have John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony, Dear Nobody by Berlie Doherty; In ‘For Survivors’ you have Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O’brein, and Stone Cold by Robert Swindels — which we’re going to have to cover at some point! — and this has been classified, alongside The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton and Steinbeck’s The Pearl, as ‘For Rebels’, and Tulip has been classed as the rebel.
It says, Rebel: Tulip, loner. Skills: Bizarre games. Cause: To befriend and destroy.
Ren Wow.
Adam And that very much situates Tulip as the anti-hero of this book, and almost as the protagonist. Which I thought was interesting.
Ren Yeah, definitely. We will get to the plot in a moment —
Adam — it’s such an interesting book!
Ren It really is. She also talks about the darkness of the book in that interview.
‘I really do try to be more cheerful in what I write for children. I have written four adult novels, and they are uniformly bleak, black comedies; I don't bother at all about the effect I have on my adult reader. But I've always tried to be protective of children, and I think Tulip Touch does come close to the edge. I would hope never to write a darker book than that for children. But I think that, in a way, it says, yes, things are this bad, but you yourself can make the decision both to go forward and make something of your own life and also to hold sympathy and responsibility for the ones that fall. I think that is the message of the book.’
Adam Yeah. Although, both Tulip and our nominally sympathetic protagonist fail at the second one, but we’ll get there at the end of book, and the last line of the book.
Ren Yes. So, with all that said I will describe the plot of the book.
Natalie the protagonist is nine years old at the beginning of the story, and her family have just moved to run a new big hotel called The Palace. Soon after they arrive, Natalie meets a girl called Tulip, standing in a field near the hotel, holding a kitten in her arms.
It turns out that Tulip goes to Natalie’s school, and so Natalie becomes her friend, which she quickly realises is a position that no-one else wants, and while Tulip is allowed to come and play at The Palace, Natalie is forbidden from going round to Tulip’s house, and when Natalie disobeys her parents and does, she finds a cold, dismal house with broken furniture and smashed bottles in the garden —
Adam Yeah, can I just read a little of that section? Because I think it’s very powerful.
‘I hated Tulip’s house. It wasn’t just that the carpets were stained and the furniture battered, it was that Tulip herself seemed different, just a shell, as if she’d slipped away invisibly and left a strange, strained imitation in her place to say to me ‘What shall we do now?’ or ‘Want another biscuit?’. I pushed the packet of damp crumbs aside. I would have suggested going to her bedroom, but the glimpse of a stained sheet spread over a chair to dry as she closed the door warned me that wouldn’t be welcome. ‘Shall we go into the yard?’. I wanted to get out of the kitchen. Tulip’s mother was giving me the creeps with her beg-pardon smile and her tireless, tuneless humming, as if in that horrible smelly sunless back room she had completely forgotten that a song was meant to have a melody, let alone a beginning and ending. Hearing that awful, interminable drone was like listening to a robot pretend to be a person. The back yard had clumps of weeds waist-high, but there were far too many smashed bottles lying about for us to play most of our creeping games, so in desperation I said ‘Let’s go and find your kitten’. She looked at me blankly. ‘Well’, I corrected myself, feeling foolish ‘Cat by now’. ‘We don’t have a cat’.
Ren Yeah, that’s a really evocative passage. And there’s also the looming figure of Tulip’s father as well, who’s bearing over the house. So Natalie makes her excuses and goes, and doesn’t go back.
Tulip invents games for the two of them to play, with names like ‘Rats in a Firestorm’ and ‘Road of Bones’, and is said to have the ’tulip touch’ by Natalie’s father, for inventing strange, plausible details in her outlandish lies. Such as: ‘And then this man went grey and keeled over. And as I was phoning for the ambulance his fingers kept twitching, and his wedding ring made a tiny little pinging noise against the metal of the drain’.
The story’s told by an older Natalie, and looking back on a photo of the two of them back at this time, when they were inseparable, she says that there is something ‘desolate’ behind Tulip’s smile. Which is a theme we come back to.
Natalie’s mum points out that Tulip’s games had ‘a habit of starting well for two, and ending badly for one’. Usually Natalie is the one who gets in trouble while Tulip gets away with it, although when they start to play a game tormenting Natalie’s little brother Julius, her mum puts a stop to it.
Tulip has a habit of saying strange threats in their games: ‘I’ll snatch you bald-headed’, ‘I’ll make your eyes look like slits in a grapefruit’ —
Adam Yeah, these phrases were my disquieting Textures of the Week, actually. So I don’t know if you want to do a quick jingle at all.
Ren Yeah, let’s do it.
Ren and Adam (high-pitched voices and odd noises) Texture… of… the… Week!
Ren So, these phrases of Tulip’s?
Adam Yeah, they’re really vivid and disturbing: ‘I’ll peel you alive like a banana’, ’Smile at me wrong today and I’ll crush you’, ‘I’ll make your eyes look like slits in a grapefruit’. And these are words that Tulip has heard first from her father and uses talking to Natalie.
Ren Yeah, my texture was actually the names of the games:
- Rats in a Firestorm
- Hogs in a Tunnel
- Fat in the Fire
- Malaria!
- Road of Bones
- Days of Dumbness
- Stinking Mackerel
- All the Grey People
- Along the Flaggy Shore
- Fat and Loud
- Guest-stalk
- Wild Nights
And we learn what some of these are, but some of them are just evocative words, and we can only imagine what is going on in these games.
Adam We hear about the rules for some of these games, like Stinking Mackerel is a game in which you walk past people in the street and wrinkle your nose as if you’ve smelled something disgusting at every person, to make them worry that they smell bad. But a lot of these are left to our imagination.
And as you were already hinting, the games grow more cruel and outlandish.
Ren Yes, we see Tulip’s cruel streak. She gives a classmate a gift-wrapped box of dog shit and smiles in satisfaction when she sees him cry, and is fooling around and laughing when Natalie injures her leg and is being taken to A&E.
Natalie’s parents ask the teachers to separate her from Tulip, and the headmistress gives Natalie a stern speech about how bad an influence Tulip is, and that Natalie will come to no good as Tulip’s ‘hold your coat merchant’.
But at the same time there’s this dual aspect of it, where the adults feel a kind of hands-off pity for Tulip, and are glad in a way that Natalie is playing with her so that Tulip has a friend. But at the same time they’re like, ‘Oh, don’t get too involved with that Tulip’, but she can salve their conscience a bit.
Adam And Natalie is quite aware of this hypocrisy.
Ren Yes, by the end of the book Natalie has very much cottoned-on to what the adults around her are doing.
At their new school they’re separated more, and Tulip starts a new game called ‘home or havoc’ after school. When Natalie choses Havoc they cause mischief, really. They flick mud pellets at people, or jam twigs into the spokes of prams. Natalie only stops her when Tulip lifts someone’s pet rabbit out of its hutch by its ears, and won’t put it back.
Adam And this is potentially the most triggering moment in the book, in which we get the clearest hint of sexual abuse.
Ren Oh.
Adam Yeah, I got that quite strongly. In what Tulip says to the rabbit. This completely passed me by as a kid, being lucky in that regard, but it’s quite clear as an adult. I’ll read the section but feel free to skip ahead.
“’Please’, I said. ‘Give him to me’. She grinned unpleasantly. ‘You don’t know he’s a he. He might be a she.’ ‘It doesn’t matter. You could just let me have a go at cuddling him.’ ‘Only if you’ve guessed right’. She upturned the squirming rabbit for no more than a couple of seconds. ‘She’s a she. So she’s mine’. ‘She’s not yours, Tulip.’ ‘She is now.’ Tulip was crooning into the rabbit’s ear. ‘Who’s a clever bunny? Who’s going to be a good girl? Who’s Tulip’s special one? She’s not going to make a fuss, is she? Oh no, she isn’t going to do that. Because she enjoys it really, doesn’t she? And if she starts struggling, she’ll get hurt.’ She finished up so savagely that I knew I was watching something horrible, nothing to do with the rabbit she was holding, but darker, much darker, and hidden, and coming from deep inside Tulip.”
Ren Woah. I don’t know how I missed that, because when you read that it’s —
Adam It’s a heavy piece of writing.
Ren Yeah, that’s really upsetting.
Adam It made me catch my breath, actually, when reading it.
Ren I mean, I did wonder if there was some suggestion hinting towards that earlier where it describes Tulip being ‘flirty’ with Natalie’s dad, in a way that suggests an awareness of sexuality beyond her age.
Adam Yes, Anne Fine’s a deft writer and a clever writer, so there’s nothing there that is going to be inappropriate for children to read, per se. But I think as an adult reading it that really pulled me up short. I can see why it’s there, and I think it’s powerful and important that it’s there. And it’s not really returned to, outside of giving you a sense that Tulip has really suffered and is really suffering, and has been abused in a way that Natalie’s not really aware of. Natalie goes to her house and thinks that it’s kind of cheap and smelly, and her dad is mean, but she doesn’t really get how bad things are.
And I don’t think we’re left to condemn Natalie for that, because her home life’s very different to that, but there is a great sense of guilt in this book. You get the sense that it’s being narrated by Natalie at the distance of some years, and you wonder if some of these realisations have come to her in the intervening time.
Ren It’s such a clever book because it is operating on so many levels at once. The young Natalie, and the older Natalie, and the young reader and the older reader.
Adam Yes, exactly, so as a reader your experience mirrors that of Natalie — or that of Tulip, depending on your experiences. So it is a very clever book.
Ren So yes, Tulip’s games are escalating. They start a game called Little Visits where they take it in turns to try and be invited into stranger’s houses on various pretexts, and then Tulip starts her last game, Wild Nights. Natalie says that Tulip has always been fascinated with fire, and now she’s starting fire, setting dustbins on fire, that kind of thing.
At this point Natalie’s relationship with Tulip is getting more ambivalent. As she reflects on it, Natalie says that she needed Tulip, to be rude and wild and rebellious and live the life that Natalie wouldn’t dare, even as Tulip swears and shouts at her, and swings doors in her face and is generally being pretty unbearable.
There’s a scene where they have an art class together and they have to paint a self portrait and the teacher makes Natalie look at Tulip’s afterwards: ‘Everything about it was dark and furious, and every inch of it seemed to suck you in and swirl you round, making you feel dizzy and anxious. And everywhere you looked, your eyes were drawn back, over and over, to the centre, where, out of the blackness, two huge folorn eyes stared out as usual, half-begging, half-accusing.’ All that Natalie can say when the teacher tells her to really look at it is ‘Oh Mrs Minniver, I’m just so glad I’m not her’.
Adam And there’s that moment where it’s not a fully understood realisation of Tulip’s situation, but it’s a moment where Natalie breaks out of just thinking about Tulip in relation to her — which is understandable, Tulip does treat Natalie really badly, so you can understand why she would be thinking about that a lot, but in this moment she does manage to see how Tulip is suffering.
Ren After Tulip hears that a sister of someone at their school drowned, she talks about it excitedly, and Natalie confronts her about the kitten she had on the first day they met, and accuses her of drowning it. Tulip eventually admits that she did, but that she had to, because if she didn’t her father would just put the kittens in a crock of water and leave them to slowly suffocate, whereas she could do it fast. Natalie overhears the staff talking about Tulip, and one of them comments on her mother saying that her sister ‘always gets the feeling that one day she might start screaming and never stop’.
So that’s all pretty dark stuff.
Adam Yes, there’s some very upsetting parts of this book.
Ren So they reach their last Wild Night, the point after which Natalie decides to cut off Tulip. And on this night, Tulip sets fire to a barn. And they’ve walked through it to check it’s empty, but when Natalie sees the blaze and thinks about how easily someone could have been hiding in that barn that Tulip poured paraffin all over, somehow that breaks the spell. She’s out from Tulip’s influence.
And as Natalie separates herself from Tulip, she starts to feel more like herself again, feels herself growing out from this shadow she’d be under, but as she reflects on this, coming into herself she grows into contempt for Tulip. But as she does better at school and gets more confident, the people around her start to ask why she’s not bringing Tulip round anymore, and why she didn’t get invited to Christmas when it’s Tulip’s favourite time of the year. They’re trying to make Natalie feel guilty, but if she suggests that they seek Tulip out themselves, they fall silent. So this is where she realises and resents the role that she’s been put in for years: everyone feel sorry for Tulip, but they wouldn’t want to involve themselves in Tulip’s life.
Adam Yes, obviously this theme of the hypocrisy of the adult world has cropped up quite a lot on our podcast, but it feels particularly pointed here.
Ren After this, Tulip has no friends and gets wilder. The police come to the hotel to talk to Natalie, telling her that Tulip has been repeatedly going to the house of the girl who drowned and asking if Muriel, would like to come for a walk. Natalie plays dumb, but is secretly in awe at the gall of Tulip’s new game, even as she knows its wrong. She tries to make the police promise they won’t tell Tulip’s parents, because her father will ‘half-murder’ her. The police say that they have to but they’ll take it gently, because ‘I think we all know about Mr Pierce’s temper’. And this is sort of where we get to at the end of the book, where Natalie realises that the adults around her knew a lot more about Tulip’s home life and abuse than they let on, but they didn’t do anything about it.
“’And you knew that. You’ve known it years and years. That’s why you never let me go round there, even at the start. Even back then I heard you telling Mum it was —‘ I imitated his stern voice. ‘“No fit place for a child’” ‘Well, then,’ he said rather smugly. ‘I was right.’ ‘But Tulip was a child, wasn’t she? If you were so sure I shouldn’t have been there, then Tulip shouldn’t have been there either.’ ‘Natalie, people can’t go round snatching children and giving them other homes just because their parents are awful.’ ‘She shouldn’t have been left,’ I said stubbornly. He tried to take my hand. ‘You really mustn’t think that nobody tried. I know for a fact we weren’t the only ones to make a few warning phone calls. And both schools were always well aware of Tulip’s background. The Pierces have had social workers round there time and again.’ So everybody was in on it! Everyone knew! ‘So what was the matter?’ I asked sarcastically. ‘Wasn’t it bad enough?’ He rose to his feet and looked down at me. ‘No,’ he said evenly after a moment. ‘It wasn’t bad enough. And I’m afraid that life’s a bit like that. It has to be a whole lot worse than bad to count as unbearable. And, till it gets to that point, people are on their own.’ I was disgusted. Utterly disgusted.”
Adam And that’s sort of the last we properly see of Tulip in the book. She’s almost cast out to the margins of the book itself.
Ren Yeah, the last interaction they have is when they bump into each other after Natalie’s received the academic prizes, and Tulip tells her to ‘move over, stupid’, Natalie turns their old game Stinking Mackerel back on her, and looks over Tulip’s stained and badly mended clothes and wrinkle her nose. She immediately realises that she’s gone too far, but Tulip has taken up the challenge and if Natalie’s going to play a game with her, she’ll play one too, and that it’ll be her turn to chose.
And Natalie’s on her guard, waiting for Tulip to spring something on her, but Tulip waits until Christmas, when no-one will notice her sneaking around outside the Palace, and she plays her last game of Wild Nights, and sets fire to the hotel. All the guests get out safely, and are outside watching the hotel burn to the ground.
So the family leave to got to a new hotel, and the ending passage reads: ‘People aren’t locked doors. You can get through to them if you want. But no one did. No one reached out a hand to Tulip. Nobody tried to touch her. I hear them whispering and they sicken me. ‘Bus seats!’ grumbles Mrs Bodell. ‘Locker doors!’ complain the teachers. ‘Chicken sheds!’ say the farmers. ‘Greenhouses! Dustbins!’ moan the neighbours. And Mum says, ‘A lovely old hotel!’ But what about Tulip? I shall feel sorry for Tulip all my life. And guilty, too. Guilty. ‘
Adam It gives me shivers!
Ren It really does. It’s really powerful, and I think it’s interesting bringing in the adults talking about vandalism and property damage and missing the point of the human being.
Adam Yes, and the way that last word, ‘guilty’, hangs in the air and asks who is guilty, and what does guilt mean in our society, British society in the late ‘90s. Because it’s easy to condemn Tulip and there’s times where she maybe should be condemned, but she’s already suffering and is probably going to have to suffer more than most of the adults in this book. And she’s already been made to live with the consequences of her behaviour, and often we’re given to believe, far beyond what she deserves at the hands of her father. Whereas there’s no real comeuppance for the lack of caring and hypocrisy from Natalie’s family, who are able to move to a different hotel and start again, and change their situation quite happily.
I think Anne Fine’s asking what price this comfort comes at, and does the price of this comfort mean deliberately looking the other way and pushing people off the raft or the lifeboat. It’s a very uncomfortable thing to sit with, particularly as we’ve been with Natalie as the narrator for the whole book and she’s kind of confiding in us, and maybe we find her relatable — I certainly related more to Natalie than to Tulip as a kid, and that was partly due to my comfort and having a nice home life. And that bond and maybe our sense of comfort as a reader is really shaken at the end of the book.
Ren Yeah, the ringing last word at the end of the book is ‘guilty’, and it’s saying -- ‘what are you guilty of? where are you complicit?’.
Adam Yeah, so it makes sense to me that you’ve been thinking of prison abolition alongside re-reading this book, because it never does it overtly but you could consider it a pro-prison abolitionist book. Because I think ultimately what it’s suggesting is that that system of punishment that was used to “resolve” the James Bulger case, what it did it really help? What did it solve?
Ren Yeah, that’s such a stark example of the whole issue. The fact that it was so horrific, but then it had people calling for the death penalty for 10 year-olds.
Adam Something’s gone pretty wrong in a society when that’s happening.
Ren Yeah, and the James Bulger case… it’s not something that happens very often, but there have been other children who have murdered children, and there was a case that was comparable somewhere in Scandinavia, and the children in that case were never identified, and they were given some kind of intensive treatment rather than a punitive response.
Adam Because you can’t just treat children as adults when it’s convenient to society, and say ‘this child is no longer a child because they’ve transgressed’. That child doesn’t magically become an adult with an adult brain even if they’ve done things that are genuinely horrible. And things that we think no child should do, or have the idea to do. Their brain development is still going to be that of a ten year-old, and you can’t magic that away and it’s not right or just to do that. And Tulip does some really awful things, she does, your sympathies are tested, but she doesn’t magically become anything other than a child who’s being horribly abused.
And also, real justice needn’t be about whether you like someone! You don’t need to like Tulip! That’s not the point!
Ren Yeah, you don’t need to think that she’s a lovely person to think that she shouldn’t be punished for the rest of her life without remission.
Adam Yeah, exactly that! But it’s interesting that these themes do come into play in a different way, and probably not as interesting and progressive a way, in The Devil Walks.
Ren Yeah, it’s interesting — I don’t think you did that on purpose choosing this book!
Adam I absolutely didn’t! I looked through other Anne Fine books and it seemed like one of the most obvious horror picks, because it is a gothic horror.
Ren But it’s certainly interesting that it ends up touching on the same themes, but not really going there at all.
Adam So the character in The Devil Walks who was an evil child and grows up to be an evil man really does seem as if he was a bad seed.
Ren Yes, The Devil Walks is a much more straightforward kind of book. It’s genuinely creepy and a good gothic horror story but it does seem like it is actively avoiding addressing the topic that is at the centre of The Tulip Touch.
Adam It’s very beholden to the restrictions of that genre. And I’m sure there are lots of interesting and progressive gothic novels, and Frankenstein had progressive elements, for the time, for instance. So it’s not as if the gothic novel is not given to philosophically questioning things, but it’s a bit of pot-boiler, if a very enjoyable one.
This is from a Guardian review of the book from when it was released in 2011, and as a warning it does have some uh, not great language in it about mental illness, but we can talk about that:
‘Daniel Cunningham's childhood has been stolen by his mother. Although he isn't ill, she has raised ("lowered" might be a better word) him as a bed-ridden invalid, denied all society other than her own. Pallid, friendless, deprived of experience, he is, like a character in a Paul Auster novel, almost without identity. Indeed, his name isn't really Cunningham. He is a blank page upon which anything might be written. Then in early adolescence he is rescued, suddenly and unwillingly, by the life-affirming Doctor Marlow and embraced by his lively family. Apparently shocked into insanity by this benign kidnapping of her son, Liliana Cunningham hangs herself in the local asylum.
There is little for Daniel to inherit, other than a very large, exquisitely made doll's house – a fastidious scale model of the great house in which Liliana grew up. This doll's house is the engine of the story. It is also its driving metaphor, for this plaything has a hidden and evil inhabitant. By publishing a drawing of the model, Marlow discovers that its original is High Gates, in Sussex, and that Daniel has a surviving relative, Uncle Jack, who still lives there. With the best of intentions, the doctor dispatches Daniel to the Downs to be reunited with his uncle. Unfortunately, Captain Jack Severn is a schizoid psychopath and a serial murderer. And his nephew will be his next victim once he has surrendered the thing that the captain most desires.’
Adam Eurgh.
Ren Yeah, so that’s… this reviewer is just deciding to diagnose this Captain Jack character based on his behaviour in the novel, we don’t get anything as blunt as that in the text.
Adam No, and I don’t think it’s a deeply psychological novel, not really. It’s interesting, right, because one thing our protagonist does enjoy about his childhood, which is obviously very deprived, is that he really enjoys reading and adventure stories. And this book is totally like an Edwardian adventure story. If it reminded me of anything, it was Treasure Island. And the captain is like Long John Silver. He’s utterly ruthless, but has a bit of charm to him, he’s a mercurial figure who is quite exciting, but is really a cackling villain. But I think we are meant to enjoy him as a pantomime villain. This story is set in an unspecified, vaguely Edwardian past —
Ren — Ah, you can imagine him played by Tim Curry, can’t you?
Adam Absolutely! It’s a genre book, and it’s pretty much a love letter to Treasure Island and those kind of children’s adventure classics. It’s not going to stay with me anything like The Tulip Touch, but it’s an enjoyable romp with some nasty bits in it.
Ren It’s a very good gothic horror for kids.
Adam Some similarities with Rebecca, too.
Ren So it does feel a bit unfair to compare it to The Tulip Touch, as they’re not going for the same thing at all.
Adam Although, and this is a bit of a spoiler but you do know where The Devil Walks is heading, what is really interesting is that they both end on a fire, and the fire of the central house or manor, or Hotel, being burned to the ground.
And in The Tulip Touch this is a kind of howl of pain and anger from Tulip that doesn’t really hit the mark. It doesn’t really provide any catharsis for Tulip or anyone else — Tulip’s just destroyed the only place she’s ever loved, as the narrator points out. And the family, who she wants to hurt, because she feels abandoned and let-down, which on some level is fair because she was allowed there every Christmas and it was probably the highlight of her life, and she no longer gets to go. And her once best friend is looking at her with abject disgust, so she burns down the hotel.
And they move, and take on a different hotel.
Ren A nicer, more up-to-date one.
Adam And they’re fine! The mother grumbles a bit but the father and the brother are just like ‘cool’. So there is no catharsis here, it’s a howl of empty rage really, that doesn’t achieve anything. Which is why it’s really sad. The arson burns bright in this moment, but then it’s nothing.
Whereas in The Devil Walks, the fire is cathartic and it does give closure. Burning down the mansion is this satisfying cathartic end to the novel.
Ren Yeah, yeah.
Adam And our protagonist will quite justly move on to a happier life, because he’s a thoroughly decent sort. And the antagonist, the kind of grown-up Tulip of the novel, is a nasty sort and his dead body is engulfed in the flames and that’s the end of it.
And that’s fine. I wouldn’t take The Devil Walks as a sociological textbook.
Ren It’s not, it just kind of funny how it accidentally provides a complete counterpoint.
Adam Yes, I’m glad we accidentally paired them. But I would recommend them both. The Devil Walks if you’re in the mood for a really sharply written, very genre-beholden piece of gothic adventure lit, maybe some problematic elements but probably nothing that will really upset people.
Ren It’s schlocky.
Adam It’s schlocky, but good schlock. The Tulip Touch if you want something that will stay with you but is a hard read, and at points a really upsetting read. It’s an impressive piece of work, but be warned, it is a hard read, even alongside many adult novels. Not in terms of difficulty reading, but the difficulty of the issues raised.
Ren What it asks of you as a reader.
Adam Any final thoughts?
Ren I don’t know, I did just want to give a shout-out to a screaming peacock in The Tulip Touch, you’ve got to love a screaming peacock for setting a tone of unease.
Adam Oh, I thought that was a Twitter username!
Ren ‘Shout out to screamingpeacock’ — that would be a good twitter username, or maybe just a twitter bot that screams.
Adam Do we still have followers on twitter? I abandoned all social media at the start of the first lockdown so I don’t know.
Ren We do still have followers! They’re still there.
Adam Yeah, yeah, give us a review, we’re needy people.
Ren Thank you to people who are listening to our extremely sporadic output.
Adam Yes, thank you for bearing with us. Hope you’re having fun.
Ren And we do appreciate suggestions, we were going to do Moondial, and we will do it at some point, just as soon as we decided to do it it became unavailable on YouTube.
Adam I think we’re both a bit cash-strapped at the moment.
Ren Yeah, we were like ‘£12.99 for the DVD? I don’t know about that’. We will come back to it. I got The Devil Walks for £1.99 including postage, Adam!
Adam That’s great.
Ren So you can contact us on Twitter at @stillscaredpod, I say us, it’s just me because Adam left Twitter, which is probably a very good idea.
Adam I think it made the last year and a half more bearable, to be honest. I’m not completely adverse to self-care.
Ren And you can also email us at stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com. Our intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and our outro music is by Joe Kelly, both very talented musicians whose links are in the show notes, and artwork by the very talented artist Letty Wilson who I cannot recommend enough if you want to commission someone to draw you a monster.
Do you have a sign-off for us, Adam?
Adam Well, I was going to do one of Tulip’s threats as a sign-off, but they’re quite nasty to be honest, I don’t want to outright threaten our listeners. I know what I’ll say, ‘Don’t commit arson!’ no going and setting fires, creepy kids.
Ren Yeah, don’t commit arson creepy kids. Maybe just get a candle and dip your fingers in the wax, that’s quite satisfying.
Adam Yeah, be chill.
Ren Catch you next time! Bye!
Adam Bye!
62 episodes
Manage episode 297646864 series 2399987
In this episode we talked about the novels The Tulip Touch and The Devil Walks, both by Anne Fine.
If you want to follow us on twitter we are @stillscaredpod, and our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at makiyamazaki.com. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and their band Etao Shin are at etaoshin.co.uk Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com.
Transcript
Ren Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray and today we’re talking about The Tulip Touch and The Devil Walks by Anne Fine. And as many of you probably listen to this as a lighthearted distraction, please be aware that this is a more serious episode than usual, and touches on themes of child abuse and child murder, so if you're not feeling up to that, maybe skip this one.
Ren Good morning, Adam!
Adam Good morning, Ren.
Ren Hello, how are you doing?
Adam I’m doing alright! It’s like emerging from a mucky swamp into a slightly dismal wood, but it’s nicer than the swamp!
Ren Yeah! You know, suddenly the leaf-mould and lichen seems friendly.
Adam Well, you know, it’s fine.
Ren It’s fine, we can deal with it. So for once I think we’re actually talking about what we said we would in the last episode.
Adam Oh what? People will be really dissapointed!
Ren Which is The Tulip Touch by Anne Fine from 1996, and sort of supplementarily The Devil Walks, which is also by Anne Fine and from 2011. I think we just remembered the existence of The Tulip Touch at the end of the last episode and went, ‘ah we have to do that!’
Adam Yes, it does blip into my mind every few years.
Ren So, yes, Anne Fine is a very prolific English children’s book author who wrote a lot of books that a lot of kids in Britain read. Like Flour Babies, about a boy who has to look after a little flour baby as a parenting project and it gets chucked into the canal.
Adam It’s awful, yeah! You really grow attached to this sack of flour and it gets booted right into the canal.
Ren And Mrs Doubtfire she wrote as well —
Adam — oh, of course!
Ren Which wasn’t actually one of my favourites, I think because I watched the film and the book’s very different really. It always felt a little small and dowdy and English in comparison to the Robin Williams production.
Adam More wacky antics. Anne Fine tends towards these quite small, domestic but somehow troubling… even in these non-horror books like Flour Babies or Bill’s New Frock there’s these moments of disquiet. She likes dealing with these quite uncomfortable emotions.
Ren Yes, they’re down-to-earth but they’re quite sharp. They have pointy bits to them.
Adam That’s a good description. And a lot of them were favourites of mine, like Flour Babies and Bill’s New Frock, which made quite an impression on me. Which was about a boy who wakes up and — is he wearing a frock when he wakes up, or just that what’s in his wardrobe and he’s obliged to wear it?
Ren Yeah, he looks in the mirror and sees himself as a girl, and everyone treats him as a girl. And it’s one of those things where it’s not a trans story but it feels like a trans story in a way.
Adam A lot of it is about socialisation and about gendered assumptions made in the school system, like ‘girls should have smart handwriting and boys have messy handwriting’.
Ren There’s also Crummy Mummy and Me, and Google Eyes.
Adam Oh yeah, I don’t know if I read that one?
Ren That was good, it was about a kid whose mum gets a new boyfriend that she hates, and she comes to, if not like him at least accept him by the end. And ‘How to write really badly’.
Adam Oh that’s a great title!
Ren Yeah, that was one of my favourites. Which is about a class having an assignment to write a how-to book, and the protagonist is like ‘I’m rubbish at everything’, and his friend says, ‘Well, there’s one thing you’re really good at’ so he does this how-to book about writing badly.
So that’s an overview of the kind of books that she usually writes, and they are not usually like The Tulip Touch.
Adam Yes, The Tulip Touch is her cursed book.
Ren (laughs) Yes, it really is! It has a very different atmosphere to the rest of her books, it’s very unsettling. It’s one of those books I didn’t want to have too close to my bed.
Adam Yes, absolutely. To me it was alongside Roald Dahl’s The Witches as being a book by an author who I loved and normally felt pretty safe with, but this book was different. And I think I literally had it at the far end of my bedroom.
Ren Yeah, same.
Adam Near the door, so it could be thrown out if need be.
Ren I’m curious, what did you remember of it before you re-read it?
Adam I remembered the games, some of those titles came back to me, like ‘Stinking Mackerel’, for instance, these strange ritualistic games they play. I remember being scared of Tulip. I remember the cover I had with the flame in the eye, and I remember, probably unfairly, as he wasn’t that bad, but… I had one friend at school who didn’t play football, and he was sort of my Tulip? I don’t want to over-exaggerate that, and I don’t think he had nearly as troubled or deprived a background and he wasn’t cruel in the way that Tulip is, but he had a tendency to make up a lot of tall tales and lies that I kind of knew were lies but went along with.
And odd games, like I remember playing this game where he half-pretended, half really did tie me to a chair with skipping ropes. We had this shed on the playing field, a kind of toy shed and he put this stick across the door as if I was locked in there. And I wasn’t really, and kids would come in and give me a curious look and ask if I was alright, and I’d say ‘yeah, yeah’. But it was that odd liminal space where it was kind of a game, but kind of not, and kind of bullying but kind of not, as I was a willing participant. So kind of semi-imaginary power play and tall tales. He claimed that he played in these championships of bicycle football, and he was the county champion, and of course I should know about bike football — how could I not? So some of Tulip’s tall tales and lies kind of rang home for me. And I remember having that association when I read it, but finding Tulip much scarier, and this idea of how things could escalate.
How about you? What are your memories of it?
Ren I mean, pretty vague. I remember the cover, I remember being scared of Tulip, and I remember her being in a field, the image of her in a field which is actually where we first meet Tulip in the book. So pretty light on details, just atmosphere was what I remember really. But it’s very different reading it as an adult.
Adam Yes. As a child it reads as a horror story with Tulip as the monster, as an adult it’s deeply sad. It’s still a very distressing book but in different ways.
Ren (fumbles for words) I wonder how much I picked up on as a kid, like I don’t know if it all just went over my head or if partly what was disturbing about it was what it says about our society.
Adam I definitely think it is, but I feel that a lot of that went over my head.
Ren Yeah. So it’s a pretty unflinching exploration of the situation of a kid who is being abused and has no adults willing or able to protect her, and unlike in another kind of children’s book, Tulip doesn’t get miraculously rescued or transported to a magical realm, she just grows up into an increasingly troubled teenager and alientates everyone around her with her behaviour, which is a pretty dark direction for a childrens’ book!
Adam Oh yeah. I found a newspaper article about the Carniege winners of that year, and this came out as the same year as Junk, if you ever read that?
Ren Oh yeah, I loved Junk! I absolutely loved that book as a kid. I learned so much from it, I learned about heroin, I learned about sex work. It was great.
Adam Yeah, it was a very popular book. I read it and it made a big impression on me, probably around the same age. But it was definitely a book that a lot of adults and parents and educators weren’t very happy about.
Ren Yeah, I can imagine.
Adam But it was interesting because I found this article about the Carniege (children’s book award) winners for that year and it was a very dark selection about bullying, drug addiction and abuse. It’s interesting, because it’s easy to think of the ‘90s about this period of kids fantasy and forget that there was this real trend towards gritty social realism for young adult readers. And that’s not necessarily what you would have expected from Anne Fine at the time. There’s hints of it it in Flour Babies, but she’d never written anything this dark before, or something that makes you sit with these uncomfortable, troublesome and troubling characters.
As you say, Tulip is not the perfect victim. She clearly is a victim, and you can easily see that as an adult, but that doesn’t mean she’s always likeable, or nice, or not abusive herself, so what do you do with that?
But I read an interview with Anne Fine saying that the writing of the book was inspired by the murder of James Bulger. In which two older children lured away and murdered this younger child. And she said that obviously this case was very disturbing, but also the reaction in the press and the British public. That these kids were tried like adults, and there was lots of talk about ‘lock ‘em up and throw away the key’ and that these children were born evil.
And that’s the theme she’s really engaging with in The Tulip Touch. Is anyone born evil? And if someone is a victim of their circumstances, what do we do with that?
Ren Yeah, when I read that it was inspired by that case that made a lot of sense, putting it in context. It sounds like she was saying in that interview, that that case and a couple of other cases of child-on-child violence caused a kind of national crisis of ‘what is happening with society’, kind of thing. And her take is very much not, ‘it’s a few bad apples’ kind of thing.
She says in that interview: ‘I absolutely fail to understand what is so outrageous and so unthinkable about choosing to create a society that can order its priorities, its huge resources and energies, so that it can catch people before they fall. I mean, it would make the world safer for everybody, and meanwhile, we wouldn't all have to sit here and watch the boys and their toys. Are we going to send another probe to Mars? Are they going to spend another $90 billion? Who cares what’s on Mars?’
Adam I really want to say that to Elon Musk.
Ren I know, this is before Elon Musk! I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about prison abolition and police abolition, and what an abolitionist society is, and how you create a society where prisons and police aren’t needed, right? And I feel like this is very sympathetic to that kind of take.
Adam Yeah, this is a really angry book! It is an angry inditement of British society. And I think that Anne Fine really shares in some of Tulip’s anger. It’s interesting, I think in that same interview the interviewer assumes that she would relate to the protagonist, and she says ‘No, I was more of a Tulip growing up’. I found that really interesting.
And the copy of the book that I have here is published in this Penguin line called The Originals. It’s been grouped together, there’s four different groups: for thinkers, for lovers, for survivors and for rebels and it’s classics of Young Adult literature republished. So for example, ‘For Lovers’ you have I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, Postcards from No Man’s Land by Aidan Chambers; In ‘For Thinkers’ you have John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony, Dear Nobody by Berlie Doherty; In ‘For Survivors’ you have Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O’brein, and Stone Cold by Robert Swindels — which we’re going to have to cover at some point! — and this has been classified, alongside The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton and Steinbeck’s The Pearl, as ‘For Rebels’, and Tulip has been classed as the rebel.
It says, Rebel: Tulip, loner. Skills: Bizarre games. Cause: To befriend and destroy.
Ren Wow.
Adam And that very much situates Tulip as the anti-hero of this book, and almost as the protagonist. Which I thought was interesting.
Ren Yeah, definitely. We will get to the plot in a moment —
Adam — it’s such an interesting book!
Ren It really is. She also talks about the darkness of the book in that interview.
‘I really do try to be more cheerful in what I write for children. I have written four adult novels, and they are uniformly bleak, black comedies; I don't bother at all about the effect I have on my adult reader. But I've always tried to be protective of children, and I think Tulip Touch does come close to the edge. I would hope never to write a darker book than that for children. But I think that, in a way, it says, yes, things are this bad, but you yourself can make the decision both to go forward and make something of your own life and also to hold sympathy and responsibility for the ones that fall. I think that is the message of the book.’
Adam Yeah. Although, both Tulip and our nominally sympathetic protagonist fail at the second one, but we’ll get there at the end of book, and the last line of the book.
Ren Yes. So, with all that said I will describe the plot of the book.
Natalie the protagonist is nine years old at the beginning of the story, and her family have just moved to run a new big hotel called The Palace. Soon after they arrive, Natalie meets a girl called Tulip, standing in a field near the hotel, holding a kitten in her arms.
It turns out that Tulip goes to Natalie’s school, and so Natalie becomes her friend, which she quickly realises is a position that no-one else wants, and while Tulip is allowed to come and play at The Palace, Natalie is forbidden from going round to Tulip’s house, and when Natalie disobeys her parents and does, she finds a cold, dismal house with broken furniture and smashed bottles in the garden —
Adam Yeah, can I just read a little of that section? Because I think it’s very powerful.
‘I hated Tulip’s house. It wasn’t just that the carpets were stained and the furniture battered, it was that Tulip herself seemed different, just a shell, as if she’d slipped away invisibly and left a strange, strained imitation in her place to say to me ‘What shall we do now?’ or ‘Want another biscuit?’. I pushed the packet of damp crumbs aside. I would have suggested going to her bedroom, but the glimpse of a stained sheet spread over a chair to dry as she closed the door warned me that wouldn’t be welcome. ‘Shall we go into the yard?’. I wanted to get out of the kitchen. Tulip’s mother was giving me the creeps with her beg-pardon smile and her tireless, tuneless humming, as if in that horrible smelly sunless back room she had completely forgotten that a song was meant to have a melody, let alone a beginning and ending. Hearing that awful, interminable drone was like listening to a robot pretend to be a person. The back yard had clumps of weeds waist-high, but there were far too many smashed bottles lying about for us to play most of our creeping games, so in desperation I said ‘Let’s go and find your kitten’. She looked at me blankly. ‘Well’, I corrected myself, feeling foolish ‘Cat by now’. ‘We don’t have a cat’.
Ren Yeah, that’s a really evocative passage. And there’s also the looming figure of Tulip’s father as well, who’s bearing over the house. So Natalie makes her excuses and goes, and doesn’t go back.
Tulip invents games for the two of them to play, with names like ‘Rats in a Firestorm’ and ‘Road of Bones’, and is said to have the ’tulip touch’ by Natalie’s father, for inventing strange, plausible details in her outlandish lies. Such as: ‘And then this man went grey and keeled over. And as I was phoning for the ambulance his fingers kept twitching, and his wedding ring made a tiny little pinging noise against the metal of the drain’.
The story’s told by an older Natalie, and looking back on a photo of the two of them back at this time, when they were inseparable, she says that there is something ‘desolate’ behind Tulip’s smile. Which is a theme we come back to.
Natalie’s mum points out that Tulip’s games had ‘a habit of starting well for two, and ending badly for one’. Usually Natalie is the one who gets in trouble while Tulip gets away with it, although when they start to play a game tormenting Natalie’s little brother Julius, her mum puts a stop to it.
Tulip has a habit of saying strange threats in their games: ‘I’ll snatch you bald-headed’, ‘I’ll make your eyes look like slits in a grapefruit’ —
Adam Yeah, these phrases were my disquieting Textures of the Week, actually. So I don’t know if you want to do a quick jingle at all.
Ren Yeah, let’s do it.
Ren and Adam (high-pitched voices and odd noises) Texture… of… the… Week!
Ren So, these phrases of Tulip’s?
Adam Yeah, they’re really vivid and disturbing: ‘I’ll peel you alive like a banana’, ’Smile at me wrong today and I’ll crush you’, ‘I’ll make your eyes look like slits in a grapefruit’. And these are words that Tulip has heard first from her father and uses talking to Natalie.
Ren Yeah, my texture was actually the names of the games:
- Rats in a Firestorm
- Hogs in a Tunnel
- Fat in the Fire
- Malaria!
- Road of Bones
- Days of Dumbness
- Stinking Mackerel
- All the Grey People
- Along the Flaggy Shore
- Fat and Loud
- Guest-stalk
- Wild Nights
And we learn what some of these are, but some of them are just evocative words, and we can only imagine what is going on in these games.
Adam We hear about the rules for some of these games, like Stinking Mackerel is a game in which you walk past people in the street and wrinkle your nose as if you’ve smelled something disgusting at every person, to make them worry that they smell bad. But a lot of these are left to our imagination.
And as you were already hinting, the games grow more cruel and outlandish.
Ren Yes, we see Tulip’s cruel streak. She gives a classmate a gift-wrapped box of dog shit and smiles in satisfaction when she sees him cry, and is fooling around and laughing when Natalie injures her leg and is being taken to A&E.
Natalie’s parents ask the teachers to separate her from Tulip, and the headmistress gives Natalie a stern speech about how bad an influence Tulip is, and that Natalie will come to no good as Tulip’s ‘hold your coat merchant’.
But at the same time there’s this dual aspect of it, where the adults feel a kind of hands-off pity for Tulip, and are glad in a way that Natalie is playing with her so that Tulip has a friend. But at the same time they’re like, ‘Oh, don’t get too involved with that Tulip’, but she can salve their conscience a bit.
Adam And Natalie is quite aware of this hypocrisy.
Ren Yes, by the end of the book Natalie has very much cottoned-on to what the adults around her are doing.
At their new school they’re separated more, and Tulip starts a new game called ‘home or havoc’ after school. When Natalie choses Havoc they cause mischief, really. They flick mud pellets at people, or jam twigs into the spokes of prams. Natalie only stops her when Tulip lifts someone’s pet rabbit out of its hutch by its ears, and won’t put it back.
Adam And this is potentially the most triggering moment in the book, in which we get the clearest hint of sexual abuse.
Ren Oh.
Adam Yeah, I got that quite strongly. In what Tulip says to the rabbit. This completely passed me by as a kid, being lucky in that regard, but it’s quite clear as an adult. I’ll read the section but feel free to skip ahead.
“’Please’, I said. ‘Give him to me’. She grinned unpleasantly. ‘You don’t know he’s a he. He might be a she.’ ‘It doesn’t matter. You could just let me have a go at cuddling him.’ ‘Only if you’ve guessed right’. She upturned the squirming rabbit for no more than a couple of seconds. ‘She’s a she. So she’s mine’. ‘She’s not yours, Tulip.’ ‘She is now.’ Tulip was crooning into the rabbit’s ear. ‘Who’s a clever bunny? Who’s going to be a good girl? Who’s Tulip’s special one? She’s not going to make a fuss, is she? Oh no, she isn’t going to do that. Because she enjoys it really, doesn’t she? And if she starts struggling, she’ll get hurt.’ She finished up so savagely that I knew I was watching something horrible, nothing to do with the rabbit she was holding, but darker, much darker, and hidden, and coming from deep inside Tulip.”
Ren Woah. I don’t know how I missed that, because when you read that it’s —
Adam It’s a heavy piece of writing.
Ren Yeah, that’s really upsetting.
Adam It made me catch my breath, actually, when reading it.
Ren I mean, I did wonder if there was some suggestion hinting towards that earlier where it describes Tulip being ‘flirty’ with Natalie’s dad, in a way that suggests an awareness of sexuality beyond her age.
Adam Yes, Anne Fine’s a deft writer and a clever writer, so there’s nothing there that is going to be inappropriate for children to read, per se. But I think as an adult reading it that really pulled me up short. I can see why it’s there, and I think it’s powerful and important that it’s there. And it’s not really returned to, outside of giving you a sense that Tulip has really suffered and is really suffering, and has been abused in a way that Natalie’s not really aware of. Natalie goes to her house and thinks that it’s kind of cheap and smelly, and her dad is mean, but she doesn’t really get how bad things are.
And I don’t think we’re left to condemn Natalie for that, because her home life’s very different to that, but there is a great sense of guilt in this book. You get the sense that it’s being narrated by Natalie at the distance of some years, and you wonder if some of these realisations have come to her in the intervening time.
Ren It’s such a clever book because it is operating on so many levels at once. The young Natalie, and the older Natalie, and the young reader and the older reader.
Adam Yes, exactly, so as a reader your experience mirrors that of Natalie — or that of Tulip, depending on your experiences. So it is a very clever book.
Ren So yes, Tulip’s games are escalating. They start a game called Little Visits where they take it in turns to try and be invited into stranger’s houses on various pretexts, and then Tulip starts her last game, Wild Nights. Natalie says that Tulip has always been fascinated with fire, and now she’s starting fire, setting dustbins on fire, that kind of thing.
At this point Natalie’s relationship with Tulip is getting more ambivalent. As she reflects on it, Natalie says that she needed Tulip, to be rude and wild and rebellious and live the life that Natalie wouldn’t dare, even as Tulip swears and shouts at her, and swings doors in her face and is generally being pretty unbearable.
There’s a scene where they have an art class together and they have to paint a self portrait and the teacher makes Natalie look at Tulip’s afterwards: ‘Everything about it was dark and furious, and every inch of it seemed to suck you in and swirl you round, making you feel dizzy and anxious. And everywhere you looked, your eyes were drawn back, over and over, to the centre, where, out of the blackness, two huge folorn eyes stared out as usual, half-begging, half-accusing.’ All that Natalie can say when the teacher tells her to really look at it is ‘Oh Mrs Minniver, I’m just so glad I’m not her’.
Adam And there’s that moment where it’s not a fully understood realisation of Tulip’s situation, but it’s a moment where Natalie breaks out of just thinking about Tulip in relation to her — which is understandable, Tulip does treat Natalie really badly, so you can understand why she would be thinking about that a lot, but in this moment she does manage to see how Tulip is suffering.
Ren After Tulip hears that a sister of someone at their school drowned, she talks about it excitedly, and Natalie confronts her about the kitten she had on the first day they met, and accuses her of drowning it. Tulip eventually admits that she did, but that she had to, because if she didn’t her father would just put the kittens in a crock of water and leave them to slowly suffocate, whereas she could do it fast. Natalie overhears the staff talking about Tulip, and one of them comments on her mother saying that her sister ‘always gets the feeling that one day she might start screaming and never stop’.
So that’s all pretty dark stuff.
Adam Yes, there’s some very upsetting parts of this book.
Ren So they reach their last Wild Night, the point after which Natalie decides to cut off Tulip. And on this night, Tulip sets fire to a barn. And they’ve walked through it to check it’s empty, but when Natalie sees the blaze and thinks about how easily someone could have been hiding in that barn that Tulip poured paraffin all over, somehow that breaks the spell. She’s out from Tulip’s influence.
And as Natalie separates herself from Tulip, she starts to feel more like herself again, feels herself growing out from this shadow she’d be under, but as she reflects on this, coming into herself she grows into contempt for Tulip. But as she does better at school and gets more confident, the people around her start to ask why she’s not bringing Tulip round anymore, and why she didn’t get invited to Christmas when it’s Tulip’s favourite time of the year. They’re trying to make Natalie feel guilty, but if she suggests that they seek Tulip out themselves, they fall silent. So this is where she realises and resents the role that she’s been put in for years: everyone feel sorry for Tulip, but they wouldn’t want to involve themselves in Tulip’s life.
Adam Yes, obviously this theme of the hypocrisy of the adult world has cropped up quite a lot on our podcast, but it feels particularly pointed here.
Ren After this, Tulip has no friends and gets wilder. The police come to the hotel to talk to Natalie, telling her that Tulip has been repeatedly going to the house of the girl who drowned and asking if Muriel, would like to come for a walk. Natalie plays dumb, but is secretly in awe at the gall of Tulip’s new game, even as she knows its wrong. She tries to make the police promise they won’t tell Tulip’s parents, because her father will ‘half-murder’ her. The police say that they have to but they’ll take it gently, because ‘I think we all know about Mr Pierce’s temper’. And this is sort of where we get to at the end of the book, where Natalie realises that the adults around her knew a lot more about Tulip’s home life and abuse than they let on, but they didn’t do anything about it.
“’And you knew that. You’ve known it years and years. That’s why you never let me go round there, even at the start. Even back then I heard you telling Mum it was —‘ I imitated his stern voice. ‘“No fit place for a child’” ‘Well, then,’ he said rather smugly. ‘I was right.’ ‘But Tulip was a child, wasn’t she? If you were so sure I shouldn’t have been there, then Tulip shouldn’t have been there either.’ ‘Natalie, people can’t go round snatching children and giving them other homes just because their parents are awful.’ ‘She shouldn’t have been left,’ I said stubbornly. He tried to take my hand. ‘You really mustn’t think that nobody tried. I know for a fact we weren’t the only ones to make a few warning phone calls. And both schools were always well aware of Tulip’s background. The Pierces have had social workers round there time and again.’ So everybody was in on it! Everyone knew! ‘So what was the matter?’ I asked sarcastically. ‘Wasn’t it bad enough?’ He rose to his feet and looked down at me. ‘No,’ he said evenly after a moment. ‘It wasn’t bad enough. And I’m afraid that life’s a bit like that. It has to be a whole lot worse than bad to count as unbearable. And, till it gets to that point, people are on their own.’ I was disgusted. Utterly disgusted.”
Adam And that’s sort of the last we properly see of Tulip in the book. She’s almost cast out to the margins of the book itself.
Ren Yeah, the last interaction they have is when they bump into each other after Natalie’s received the academic prizes, and Tulip tells her to ‘move over, stupid’, Natalie turns their old game Stinking Mackerel back on her, and looks over Tulip’s stained and badly mended clothes and wrinkle her nose. She immediately realises that she’s gone too far, but Tulip has taken up the challenge and if Natalie’s going to play a game with her, she’ll play one too, and that it’ll be her turn to chose.
And Natalie’s on her guard, waiting for Tulip to spring something on her, but Tulip waits until Christmas, when no-one will notice her sneaking around outside the Palace, and she plays her last game of Wild Nights, and sets fire to the hotel. All the guests get out safely, and are outside watching the hotel burn to the ground.
So the family leave to got to a new hotel, and the ending passage reads: ‘People aren’t locked doors. You can get through to them if you want. But no one did. No one reached out a hand to Tulip. Nobody tried to touch her. I hear them whispering and they sicken me. ‘Bus seats!’ grumbles Mrs Bodell. ‘Locker doors!’ complain the teachers. ‘Chicken sheds!’ say the farmers. ‘Greenhouses! Dustbins!’ moan the neighbours. And Mum says, ‘A lovely old hotel!’ But what about Tulip? I shall feel sorry for Tulip all my life. And guilty, too. Guilty. ‘
Adam It gives me shivers!
Ren It really does. It’s really powerful, and I think it’s interesting bringing in the adults talking about vandalism and property damage and missing the point of the human being.
Adam Yes, and the way that last word, ‘guilty’, hangs in the air and asks who is guilty, and what does guilt mean in our society, British society in the late ‘90s. Because it’s easy to condemn Tulip and there’s times where she maybe should be condemned, but she’s already suffering and is probably going to have to suffer more than most of the adults in this book. And she’s already been made to live with the consequences of her behaviour, and often we’re given to believe, far beyond what she deserves at the hands of her father. Whereas there’s no real comeuppance for the lack of caring and hypocrisy from Natalie’s family, who are able to move to a different hotel and start again, and change their situation quite happily.
I think Anne Fine’s asking what price this comfort comes at, and does the price of this comfort mean deliberately looking the other way and pushing people off the raft or the lifeboat. It’s a very uncomfortable thing to sit with, particularly as we’ve been with Natalie as the narrator for the whole book and she’s kind of confiding in us, and maybe we find her relatable — I certainly related more to Natalie than to Tulip as a kid, and that was partly due to my comfort and having a nice home life. And that bond and maybe our sense of comfort as a reader is really shaken at the end of the book.
Ren Yeah, the ringing last word at the end of the book is ‘guilty’, and it’s saying -- ‘what are you guilty of? where are you complicit?’.
Adam Yeah, so it makes sense to me that you’ve been thinking of prison abolition alongside re-reading this book, because it never does it overtly but you could consider it a pro-prison abolitionist book. Because I think ultimately what it’s suggesting is that that system of punishment that was used to “resolve” the James Bulger case, what it did it really help? What did it solve?
Ren Yeah, that’s such a stark example of the whole issue. The fact that it was so horrific, but then it had people calling for the death penalty for 10 year-olds.
Adam Something’s gone pretty wrong in a society when that’s happening.
Ren Yeah, and the James Bulger case… it’s not something that happens very often, but there have been other children who have murdered children, and there was a case that was comparable somewhere in Scandinavia, and the children in that case were never identified, and they were given some kind of intensive treatment rather than a punitive response.
Adam Because you can’t just treat children as adults when it’s convenient to society, and say ‘this child is no longer a child because they’ve transgressed’. That child doesn’t magically become an adult with an adult brain even if they’ve done things that are genuinely horrible. And things that we think no child should do, or have the idea to do. Their brain development is still going to be that of a ten year-old, and you can’t magic that away and it’s not right or just to do that. And Tulip does some really awful things, she does, your sympathies are tested, but she doesn’t magically become anything other than a child who’s being horribly abused.
And also, real justice needn’t be about whether you like someone! You don’t need to like Tulip! That’s not the point!
Ren Yeah, you don’t need to think that she’s a lovely person to think that she shouldn’t be punished for the rest of her life without remission.
Adam Yeah, exactly that! But it’s interesting that these themes do come into play in a different way, and probably not as interesting and progressive a way, in The Devil Walks.
Ren Yeah, it’s interesting — I don’t think you did that on purpose choosing this book!
Adam I absolutely didn’t! I looked through other Anne Fine books and it seemed like one of the most obvious horror picks, because it is a gothic horror.
Ren But it’s certainly interesting that it ends up touching on the same themes, but not really going there at all.
Adam So the character in The Devil Walks who was an evil child and grows up to be an evil man really does seem as if he was a bad seed.
Ren Yes, The Devil Walks is a much more straightforward kind of book. It’s genuinely creepy and a good gothic horror story but it does seem like it is actively avoiding addressing the topic that is at the centre of The Tulip Touch.
Adam It’s very beholden to the restrictions of that genre. And I’m sure there are lots of interesting and progressive gothic novels, and Frankenstein had progressive elements, for the time, for instance. So it’s not as if the gothic novel is not given to philosophically questioning things, but it’s a bit of pot-boiler, if a very enjoyable one.
This is from a Guardian review of the book from when it was released in 2011, and as a warning it does have some uh, not great language in it about mental illness, but we can talk about that:
‘Daniel Cunningham's childhood has been stolen by his mother. Although he isn't ill, she has raised ("lowered" might be a better word) him as a bed-ridden invalid, denied all society other than her own. Pallid, friendless, deprived of experience, he is, like a character in a Paul Auster novel, almost without identity. Indeed, his name isn't really Cunningham. He is a blank page upon which anything might be written. Then in early adolescence he is rescued, suddenly and unwillingly, by the life-affirming Doctor Marlow and embraced by his lively family. Apparently shocked into insanity by this benign kidnapping of her son, Liliana Cunningham hangs herself in the local asylum.
There is little for Daniel to inherit, other than a very large, exquisitely made doll's house – a fastidious scale model of the great house in which Liliana grew up. This doll's house is the engine of the story. It is also its driving metaphor, for this plaything has a hidden and evil inhabitant. By publishing a drawing of the model, Marlow discovers that its original is High Gates, in Sussex, and that Daniel has a surviving relative, Uncle Jack, who still lives there. With the best of intentions, the doctor dispatches Daniel to the Downs to be reunited with his uncle. Unfortunately, Captain Jack Severn is a schizoid psychopath and a serial murderer. And his nephew will be his next victim once he has surrendered the thing that the captain most desires.’
Adam Eurgh.
Ren Yeah, so that’s… this reviewer is just deciding to diagnose this Captain Jack character based on his behaviour in the novel, we don’t get anything as blunt as that in the text.
Adam No, and I don’t think it’s a deeply psychological novel, not really. It’s interesting, right, because one thing our protagonist does enjoy about his childhood, which is obviously very deprived, is that he really enjoys reading and adventure stories. And this book is totally like an Edwardian adventure story. If it reminded me of anything, it was Treasure Island. And the captain is like Long John Silver. He’s utterly ruthless, but has a bit of charm to him, he’s a mercurial figure who is quite exciting, but is really a cackling villain. But I think we are meant to enjoy him as a pantomime villain. This story is set in an unspecified, vaguely Edwardian past —
Ren — Ah, you can imagine him played by Tim Curry, can’t you?
Adam Absolutely! It’s a genre book, and it’s pretty much a love letter to Treasure Island and those kind of children’s adventure classics. It’s not going to stay with me anything like The Tulip Touch, but it’s an enjoyable romp with some nasty bits in it.
Ren It’s a very good gothic horror for kids.
Adam Some similarities with Rebecca, too.
Ren So it does feel a bit unfair to compare it to The Tulip Touch, as they’re not going for the same thing at all.
Adam Although, and this is a bit of a spoiler but you do know where The Devil Walks is heading, what is really interesting is that they both end on a fire, and the fire of the central house or manor, or Hotel, being burned to the ground.
And in The Tulip Touch this is a kind of howl of pain and anger from Tulip that doesn’t really hit the mark. It doesn’t really provide any catharsis for Tulip or anyone else — Tulip’s just destroyed the only place she’s ever loved, as the narrator points out. And the family, who she wants to hurt, because she feels abandoned and let-down, which on some level is fair because she was allowed there every Christmas and it was probably the highlight of her life, and she no longer gets to go. And her once best friend is looking at her with abject disgust, so she burns down the hotel.
And they move, and take on a different hotel.
Ren A nicer, more up-to-date one.
Adam And they’re fine! The mother grumbles a bit but the father and the brother are just like ‘cool’. So there is no catharsis here, it’s a howl of empty rage really, that doesn’t achieve anything. Which is why it’s really sad. The arson burns bright in this moment, but then it’s nothing.
Whereas in The Devil Walks, the fire is cathartic and it does give closure. Burning down the mansion is this satisfying cathartic end to the novel.
Ren Yeah, yeah.
Adam And our protagonist will quite justly move on to a happier life, because he’s a thoroughly decent sort. And the antagonist, the kind of grown-up Tulip of the novel, is a nasty sort and his dead body is engulfed in the flames and that’s the end of it.
And that’s fine. I wouldn’t take The Devil Walks as a sociological textbook.
Ren It’s not, it just kind of funny how it accidentally provides a complete counterpoint.
Adam Yes, I’m glad we accidentally paired them. But I would recommend them both. The Devil Walks if you’re in the mood for a really sharply written, very genre-beholden piece of gothic adventure lit, maybe some problematic elements but probably nothing that will really upset people.
Ren It’s schlocky.
Adam It’s schlocky, but good schlock. The Tulip Touch if you want something that will stay with you but is a hard read, and at points a really upsetting read. It’s an impressive piece of work, but be warned, it is a hard read, even alongside many adult novels. Not in terms of difficulty reading, but the difficulty of the issues raised.
Ren What it asks of you as a reader.
Adam Any final thoughts?
Ren I don’t know, I did just want to give a shout-out to a screaming peacock in The Tulip Touch, you’ve got to love a screaming peacock for setting a tone of unease.
Adam Oh, I thought that was a Twitter username!
Ren ‘Shout out to screamingpeacock’ — that would be a good twitter username, or maybe just a twitter bot that screams.
Adam Do we still have followers on twitter? I abandoned all social media at the start of the first lockdown so I don’t know.
Ren We do still have followers! They’re still there.
Adam Yeah, yeah, give us a review, we’re needy people.
Ren Thank you to people who are listening to our extremely sporadic output.
Adam Yes, thank you for bearing with us. Hope you’re having fun.
Ren And we do appreciate suggestions, we were going to do Moondial, and we will do it at some point, just as soon as we decided to do it it became unavailable on YouTube.
Adam I think we’re both a bit cash-strapped at the moment.
Ren Yeah, we were like ‘£12.99 for the DVD? I don’t know about that’. We will come back to it. I got The Devil Walks for £1.99 including postage, Adam!
Adam That’s great.
Ren So you can contact us on Twitter at @stillscaredpod, I say us, it’s just me because Adam left Twitter, which is probably a very good idea.
Adam I think it made the last year and a half more bearable, to be honest. I’m not completely adverse to self-care.
Ren And you can also email us at stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com. Our intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and our outro music is by Joe Kelly, both very talented musicians whose links are in the show notes, and artwork by the very talented artist Letty Wilson who I cannot recommend enough if you want to commission someone to draw you a monster.
Do you have a sign-off for us, Adam?
Adam Well, I was going to do one of Tulip’s threats as a sign-off, but they’re quite nasty to be honest, I don’t want to outright threaten our listeners. I know what I’ll say, ‘Don’t commit arson!’ no going and setting fires, creepy kids.
Ren Yeah, don’t commit arson creepy kids. Maybe just get a candle and dip your fingers in the wax, that’s quite satisfying.
Adam Yeah, be chill.
Ren Catch you next time! Bye!
Adam Bye!
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