A childhood memory

 I saw this - about the Wieliczka salt mine in Poland - on a website today and I suddenly remembered a book I read as a kid - intrepid mice, venturing down to a mine where salt had been carved into fantastic dollhouse-like structures, to rescue Teddy-aged-Eight.

I'm talking about one of Margery Sharp's "Rescuers" books - there were I think eight or nine in total; five of which I had as a child, and read many, many times. I *think* I got the books for Christmas the year the Disney movie came out.

Yes, the movie is good and fun, but the books are a lot more complex. And they're *scarier* - there is real danger involved, and real horribleness in the villains (the woman who kidnaps the girl in "Miss Bianca" only does so because she wants an orphan to be mean to, not because a child with small hands can retrieve a giant diamond from a pirate's skull, like in the movie). 

Also, a bit of false advertising there - they use a movie still as the cover image on "The Rescuers," but I remember being disappointed when I read the book that it was NOTHING like the movie. ("Miss Bianca" is a lot closer, but it has its differences from the movie as well). But I liked them - I liked her use of language, and I liked the characters of the mice. And I loved Garth Williams' drawings; somehow his Bianca and Bernard are more distinctive and yet more mouselike than the Disney creations. 

(The last book - which I suspect has aged worse than the others - "Miss Bianca in the Orient" - I don't really remember it and also, it has drawings by Erik Bleglavd; I don't know if Willaims had passed on, or was busy, or just didn't want to illustrate it. I don't like those drawings nearly as well as Williams'). 

My favorite is probably "Miss Bianca in the Salt Mines," partly because of the unusual setting (and now I really do wonder if that Polish salt mine was the inspiration - surely Sharp at least knew of it, if she had not actually traveled there). And the two grumpy professorial mice - the unnamed (?) math professor, and Caerphilly - a geologist - who, as the math professor notes, "Grandmother, Welsh" - a joke I didn't get until I was a bit older. 

I hunted around a bit for any confirmation of my new hypothesis (that the setting was indeed the Wieliczka salt mine) and didn't find a lot - you have to dig way past the first few pages of ads for copies of the book on an online search - but I did find this nice appreciation for the series by Aussiemoose. And Mari Ness, at Tor, gives a bit more background - and makes me think maybe I should re-read them as an adult, given my greater historical knowledge (I was thinking earlier, before reading that article "Maybe the "Norwegian poet" was actually someone historical, just fictionalized a good bit" but maybe it was more generally a reference to Stalin's tendency to imprison (if not outright kill) anyone whose art didn't toe the party line). 

One of the reasons I remembered liking the books was the elaborate language - I always loved new vocabulary as a kid - and the fact that the author put in asides and things that seemed slightly conspiratorial - not so much talking down to the reader but talking *aside* to them, so to speak.

And of course: talking mice. And what's more, heroic talking mice. Miss Bianca is yes, very feminine (Leaves and Pages described her as "Miss Bianca is a very “feminine” character, in the most awfully stereotyped way possible, but there are enough little asides by the author that we can see that this is not a recommendation for behaviour to be copied but rather a portrait of a personality who uses the resources at hand (her charm, her beauty, her effect on others) to get things done." and I don't know about the "awful" part of it so much; we are all different, and some of us just kind of ARE that way. And she's found a way to use it to her advantage, in dangerous situations. I was rather charmed by her as a child; the idea that someone could be girly AND brave; love comfort but be resourceful in situations of little comfort)

And yes, the Disney movie is different - considerably bowdlerized in regards to violence and danger. I suppose things that are less scary on the page are more scary put up on the screen.  Or, as I opined once before - children are more resilient to that kind of thing in stories than adults are. I remember that when I read "The Hobbit" (because I saw the Rankin-Bass adaptation and wanted to read the novel), my dad asked me if I found it "scary," and I remember being baffled - it's not scary, it's exciting - but when I re-read it as an adult, I found the "underground" parts kind of scary. (And re-reading it as a "comfort read" late last summer - well, I had to stop at the point where Thorin Oakenshield - well, you'll know what happened if you read the book). I do think children - at least children like me, in a safe and loving family, who had not seen the horrors the world can dish up - can vicariously enjoy things an adult, who has lived with death and seen bad news and violence, might find a bit much. 

But the movie (at least the original; I never saw the sequels) is an enjoyable movie in its own right. I might not have chosen the Gabor sisters for the voice of Bianca (I think of her more as a Mid-Atlantic accent; if they were going to reboot the movie they could do worse than getting Tabitha St. Germain to do a Rarity-style voice for her). I will say that Bob Newhart was a good choice for Bernard; his self-effacing quality worked well (though I might have liked for Bernard to have been a bit sterner in the clutch, so to speak). 

But still. It's a fun movie, and one I remember fondly from childhood - and I liked it how a "feminine" character like Miss Bianca could also be canny and fairly tough and go out and have Adventures - you didn't see as much of that in children's entertainment then.

And I laugh, now, thinking about the Rescue Aid Society, and how the meetings of it are.....not all that unlike the AAUW and Christian Women's Fellowship and other do-gooder type groups I belonged to and went to meetings of (in the before-times; if we meet at all now it is virtually). But yes, the same busy-body types, the same people who pooh-pooh ideas, the same "you know what we should do"-ers who will nominate anyone but themselves to do some arduous task....