With Covid-19 and self-isolation, I’ve spent a bit of time clearing out old papers. Financial documents from 20 years ago, old letters and newspaper clippings. File folders from the 80s and 90s when I was teaching emergency communicators at Mohawk College in Hamilton and Internal Auditing at police colleges in Aylmer and Ottawa. For the most part, a benign, nostalgic trip down memory lane.

Coming across a seemingly innocuous little red textbook stopped me in my tracks, though.

The John and Mary Readers Introductory Book was published around 1935, but obviously the text was still in use in the mid-50s, when I attended elementary school. The stamp on page 5 reads: “Property of School Section No.4, LOUTH”. Louth township is in the Niagara Region.

I did a Google search and found this on Wikipedia:

” John and Mary are the subjects of a series of children’s books written by Grace James. The series started in the 1930s and finishes in the 1960s. They form part of the ‘realistic adventure’ tradition in children’s literature…

John and Mary are educated at home by a governess called Miss Rose Brown, although they spend about half their time in Rome, and indeed are bilingual in English and Italian. Smockfarthing carries a full complement of servants…

…Although the series covers about thirty years, John and Mary are never allowed to grow up (only from about the ages of four to twelve) and nothing ever changes very much in their surroundings. This leads to situations such as the war and rationing being discussed during the 1940s, and television and washing machines being mentioned in the 1960s. (One can only assume that Grace James wished to appeal to a constantly fresh readership, although children of the 1960s could possibly have found it rather odd that John and Mary would still have a governess and maids running around after them, in that era.)”

The John and Mary stories involve the children doing fairly normal and day-to-day things within their environment (mainly the countryside), although James makes sure that they meet unusual people and have adventures along the way. The stories are written in a realistic way and the adventures are the kind of adventures that any children could have under the same circumstances.”

Good grief!! Aside for the anachronistic setting – maids and governesses – the entitled children are pictures going about their mundane daily lives, described as “fairly normal and day-to-day”. Ugh.

The publisher is still in business in the U.K. What horrifies me is that generations of impressionable children (now seniors, if still living) in the British Commonwealth grew up learning to read with these words and ugly stereotypical images.

It wasn’t acceptable back then but so much more shocking now, especially with the global protests against inequity.

But when you see this in the context of images from the U.S., where the President is actively stoking hatred of the ‘other’ and racial dissension, you get a glimmer of how some folks could be so wrong-headed in their thinking. They haven’t evolved from these old ways of thinking and they cling to traditions that normalize discrimination, especially against People of Colour (POC).

So what do I do with this old time-bomb? I’m not sure yet.