Book Rummage - 6: Thelwell's Brat Race

I've known women who consider being caught reading The Daily Mail automatic grounds for divorce. And rightly so. And yet, from the very heart of middle England, comes the following inspired cartoonist...

THELWELL’S BRAT RACE
by Norman Thelwell
(Eyre Methuen, pub 1977)
One of the great unsung pleasures of middle England: alongside Giles’ Christmas cartoon collections, Richard Scarry, The Good Life and causing premature water shortages by leaving your bloody garden sprinkler on all summer. Thelwell’s mischievous children are like a cutesy cross between Ronald Searle’s nightmarish St Trinian’s girls, Dennis the Menace and well, Thelwell’s children really. He defines his own genre. In every panel – there’s only one or two to a page, allowing maximum space for enjoyment and reading ease – the children (babies, really) are causing their long-suffering parents conniptions by, for example, putting a hosepipe on an innocent dad’s barbecue, tearing pillows apart in a fight with the family dog, and tearing up the garden with a toy pick-up truck. Might not sound so funny here, but that’s why these are bloody cartoons, right? Thelwell’s cartoons hold wider implications for society: warning people off from having children lest they unwarily trigger an amoral, apocalyptic future where everyone under the age of five is an anarchist, causing only misery and suffering to their elder kin and any passing small furry animal. One presumes Thelwell must have been a dad, in order to paint such a vivid picture. One can only sympathise.
Cost: £2
Bargain value: 7 (hardback edition)
Cover: 8 (front and back full colour illustration)
Author’s authenticity count: 7 (smokes a pipe)