What Katy Did

images

Introduction

JACQUELINE WILSON

New readers are advised that this introduction makes details of the plot explicit.

I was a shy, bookish only-child. Both my parents went out to work, so I was left on my own during the holidays from the time I started junior school. I wasn’t an outdoor sort of girl so I didn’t go downstairs to play ball or ride a bike round the estate. The children in my class at school lived too far away so I didn’t have anyone to tea. But I never once felt lonely. I played with imaginary friends.

I danced all round our flat with Pauline, Petrova and Posy from Ballet Shoes; planted bulbs in the carpet with Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden; waved red flannel petticoats with Bobbie from The Railway Children; chatted about Christmas with Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy from Little Women. I loved all these fictional girls, but I wanted Katy Carr from What Katy Did to be my best friend above all the others.

My mother had kept her own copy of What Katy Did and I read it myself when I was about seven. It immediately became one of my favourite books. I loved the story of naughty tomboy Katy who leads her siblings into all kinds of scrapes. Halfway through the book she has a serious fall from a swing and is bedridden for four long years before, at last, she learns to walk again. This was thrilling stuff indeed.

I identified totally with Katy, although I certainly wasn’t a naughty tomboy myself and I’d never had a life-changing accident. In fact, it was hard to see that we had anything much in common at all. Katy was twelve at the start of the story, quite a bit older than me. She was the eldest in a large family, with the sisters and brothers I longed for. They lived in a large house with roses round the porch, with an orchard, a kitchen-garden and a pasture with a brook and four cows. I lived in a cramped council flat without so much as a window box, and I’d never so much as seen a cow in real life.

Katy and I didn’t even look like each other. She was tall and I was small, her hair was always in a mess and she frequently tore her dresses, while my short hair was kept in place by kirby grips and I rarely climbed walls or leapt over fences, so my clothes stayed neat and tidy.

We had just one thing in common. We both had very vivid imaginations. Katy was forever making up stories and inventing amazing games. She had so many schemes and ideas for the future, mostly heroic. She wanted to save lives like Grace Darling and Florence Nightingale, or lead a crusade on a white horse. I knew these were worthy ambitions but I found it especially pleasing that Katy had a girly side, and ‘the person on earth whom she most envied was that lady on the advertising posters with the wonderful hair which sweeps the ground’. I’d always longed for Rapunzel-length hair too. I had a scrapbook full of pictures of story book princesses with long golden locks and actresses with luxurious tresses from my mother’s Picture Show magazine. I knew that Katy and I were soulmates.

I’d have been surprised if I’d heard a real Katy Carr talking, with an American accent. I could tell from the odd detail that the book was set in America (I’d still like to try a molasses pie with ‘a brown top and crisp candied edge, which tasted like toffee and lemon-peel’) but Katy spoke so like me that she didn’t seem remotely foreign. My common sense told me that my mother’s childhood copy was quite old, but the children seemed so natural and led such a carefree life that I imagined them as my contemporaries. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why What Katy Did is still in print.

The text doesn’t read as if it was first published in 1872. It didn’t seem like a ‘classic’ to me. It certainly wasn’t a struggle to read it.