The Herald
When I was seventeen someone suggested creating a magazine, which I would edit. In the 1930s there had been a Caldecott magazine called the Herald. There were still some covers for the Herald which had not been used, so we decided to use them and give the new magazine the same name.
I was assisted by Elspeth Aitken, the Caldecott Secretary, and we printed the magazine on an ancient Gestetner machine. As I type this on the keyboard of my Apple Mac, it all seems almost as remote as Caxton’s printing press.
We had stories, poems and articles from several of the staff and children, and I wrote some of the contents myself. Some stories were contributed by Carolyn Vines, who later hosted several Caldecott parties at her home in Enfield, and will be remembered by many of us for the immortal line “I stiffly stood and stumbled on.” Sadly, Carolyn died of cancer a few years ago. I think the contributions with the greatest claim to artistic merit came from Elizabeth Lloyd; who could forget her poem Tess or her ode to a swabber? She was also Auntie Peg, the agony aunt who purported to answer questions from anxious readers, while gently poking fun at the foibles mainly of the girls in her care, but also at some of the boys [no individual was identified, of course].
Tess was Miss Leila’s golden retriever, the daughter of another golden retriever named Silver, who belonged to Miss Dave. She was a beautiful dog, good-natured, placid and considerably overweight, whose retrieving days [if any] were obviously long over. She was often to be seen on the front steps, and at mealtimes would take her place on the floor beside Miss Leila’s chair. In the late 1950s she was so overweight that she would struggle to get up from lying down; raising herself into a sitting position, she would rest her weight on her front paws, only to have her legs slide forward on the polished floor, and would repeat this manoeuvre two or three times before she succeeded. She was popular among children and staff; as Elizabeth Lloyd wrote in a eulogy to Tess after her death, ‘she was loved, and in return gave love. There was none she harmed, and no harm to her was ever done’.
Miss Elizabeth