What are the best secret hideouts in children’s books?
From toddlers right through to teenagers, children love secret places to play or rest or meet their friends. Or just a quiet place in which to think.
Sadly, parental anxiety and the amount of surveillance that most children experience today, and the danger with which roaming about outdoors is viewed, one of the greatest pleasures of childhood – building a den or having a secret clubhouse - rarely happens anymore. And when it does, the builders can find themselves in trouble, as happened recently to a group of teenage girls in Northumbria who were reprimanded by local police for “anti-social behaviour” after they built a den in some woods. Although they had not committed any offence the police felt the need to intervene after passers-by had complained.The result of this attitude is that dens have been taken out of the wild and made safe.
In titles such as Lynne Garner’s The Little Book of Dens or in the very attractive but nonetheless adult-led advice sheets from the Eden project or the den-building kits that are available for those who want help with construction, den building is controlled as part of organised play in schools with clear learning objectives.
This contemporary den-building approach is a long way from the den building the boys do in their free time in Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings’ Little Hut, one of the series of stories set in a boys-only boarding school which flourished from 1950 to the mid 1970s. Here, the dens were insubstantial constructions made in the boys’ down-time. No one looked at them with a view to thinking about what skills they were fostering. In fact, no-one looked at them at all and that was why they were special.
Here, and in the best fiction about dens or club house or barns or sheds or any other “private” place in which children can play unsupervised, children are free to behave as they like and so be “irresponsible” while also given the authority to behave as because they have to take responsibility for the hideouts durability and ability to remain upright.
In Sally’s Secret, Shirley Hughes creates one of the simplest and most satisfying dens for very young readers. Sally finds a little place among the bushes in the garden that she can just creep into and feel totally private. She loves imagining and transforming it into her own special space. Once she has made it, it really comes into its own when she invites her friends in to play too.
In Clive King’s classic Stig of the Dump Barney doesn’t need to build a den of his own because he finds the perfect place to play in when he falls down the cliff and discovers Stig’s den. What Barney loses by not building a den of his own is more than compensated for by the wonderfully inventive things that Stig has already created. With his use of string, jam jars and the rest, Stig was very keen on recycling long before it was fashionable.
It would be unthinkable for Richmal Crompton’s William Brown and his friends of friends known as “The Outlaws”, long seen as icons of boyhood, not to have a private place where they plot their next nefarious deed far from the prying eyes of the adults. The Outlaws are lucky enough to have the use of a shed where they also plot their next activity and are free to cook – in their own way! “The week before, they had cooked two sausages which William had taken from the larder on cook’s night out and had conveyed to the barn beneath his shirt and next his skin. Perhaps ‘cooked’ is too euphemistic a term. To be quite accurate, they had held the sausages over a smoking fire till completely blackened, and then consumed the charred remains with the utmost relish.” Anyone who has done the same will know how special that food would taste!
Got a favourite book with a den in it? Do share by emailing childrens.books@theguardian.com or on Twitter @GdnchildrensBks, where you can also ask The Book Doctor a question using #BookDoctor. Under 18, love reading and not a member of the Guardian children’s books site? Join here, we’re packed full of book recommendations and ideas.
Your fav dens:
@GuardianBooks @GdnChildrensBks Chas & co's hideout in Robert Westall's The Machinegunners
— Ian Banks (@shutupbanks) May 11, 2015
@GuardianBooks @GdnChildrensBks The house of the sartorial Mr Jeremy Fisher . Lead-light windows, right on the water. pic.twitter.com/vNkDzG6BYI
— Mycroft & Anthea (@AB_Mycroft) May 11, 2015
@GdnChildrensBks Skellig's hideout. Ok, it's a shed, but the most den-like shed there has ever been!
— Lucy Marcovitch (@Lucym808) May 11, 2015
@GuardianBooks @GdnChildrensBks Chas & co's hideout in Robert Westall's The Machinegunners
— Ian Banks (@shutupbanks) May 11, 2015
@GuardianBooks @GdnChildrensBks Eeyore Houses in the 100 Acre Wood. I write about them here: http://t.co/a2QDWxUb7a pic.twitter.com/bUaFLSGXH7
— Kathryn Aalto (@kathrynaalto) May 11, 2015
@GdnChildrensBks Surely the ur-den is that of Stalky & Co. from the classic comeuppance story "In Ambush"?
— Ravi Nair (@palfreyman1414) May 11, 2015
Definitely Enid Blyton's Hollow Tree House! @GdnChildrensBks pic.twitter.com/gFdKOl8Or3
— Helen Geraghty (@heleng42) May 11, 2015
