Author: Janet Ellis

Does a book change your life? It’s a subtle process, reading. It may take years to understand the effect a book has had. These are five books for your Humanist Bookshelf that have stayed with me, though. And five books I often return to, for different reasons.

Mary Plain series, by Gwynedd Rae

Let’s start with the Mary Plain series by Gwynedd Rae. They’re still in print but I had my mother’s wartime editions, printed on stiff paper. Mary Plain is a bear from the Bear Pits at Bern. She lives with the Owl Man (he wears glasses) and behaves like a small child. She communicates in rebuses (early emojis, kind of). Her adventures are small in scale and there’s no sentiment and plenty of humour in the stories. She is not a teddy bear.

The Swish of the Curtain by Pamela Brown

If this book didn’t change me, it certainly reinforced and confirmed my life choices. I’d wanted to be an actress from the age of five – despite not really knowing what it meant and with no family background in any of the arts. I read this when I was ten. Here were the children of three families, the Halfords, the Darwins, and the Faynes, who all shared my ambition and successfully put on plays and acted in them. It was possible! I could do it! I did! The author, Pamela Brown, was fourteen when she started writing the book and that was another marker along the way for me. I was published some 40-plus years older than she was when she managed it.

English Passengers by Matthew Kneale

Ambitious storytelling – there are 20 narrators – combined with lightly introduced historical events and attitudes, it’s a wonderfully funny and deeply affecting book. When I came to write The Butcher’s Hook, set in 1763, I appreciated all the more the way Kneale weaves in his research without clobbering the reader with facts. It’s a brilliant example of something obvious yet sometimes concealed – people in different times shared our appetites, faults, feelings and fears. I chose it for A Good Read on BBC Radio 4.

The Cut-Out Girl by Bart van Es

Speaking of A Good Read, here’s my second choice for that show, when I was a guest several years later. Ostensibly the story of van Es’ grandparents (among many others) sheltering a young Jewish girl in Holland during the Second World War. Hers is a moving and extraordinary life. It’s also about families, fracture, human kindness, cruelty, and revelation and, in particular, van Es’s own journey from diligent and careful investigator to someone whose heart is permanently opened. 

It sparked a fascination in me with the occupation of Amsterdam by the Nazis which in turn eventually led me to Steve McQueen’s extraordinary film, Occupied City. Revealing the layers of that time under the present-day city it shows again (there’s a theme here) that history is not only under our feet but that we could be those people. Read the book then set aside four hours to watch the film.

The Boy with the Knapsack by Lord Alf Dubs

If I was asked to nominate an exemplary humanist, it would be this man. Alf Dubs – he doesn’t like being called Lord – has an extraordinary compassion, combined with a razor-sharp intellect and a robust ability to see what needs doing and take action. That combination would be remarkable in anyone; it’s more remarkable still given that his childhood, during the Second World War, was anything but conventional or secure.  But he came to England aged six on the Kindertransport of Jewish children (masterminded by Nicholas Winton). 

Reunited with his parents, he then endured the early death of his father and life in a country riven with deprivation and difficulty for any refugee. The book charts his rise through local politics to becoming an MP and his eventual elevation to the House of Lords as a Labour peer. He is involved with the Refugee Council, was deeply embedded in the Northern Ireland peace process and much else besides and continues to fight for the care, and nurturing the futures, of child refugees. If I say he writes with a humble and grateful tone, he simply doesn’t know any other way to be. Despite his numerous achievements, he’s never one to boast. He is a warm and amiable companion, gossipy and funny along the way.