I’ve discovered an amazing(ly impossible) anti-aging secret: Become a fictional character!

Unlike the Botox-ridden celebrities who are only trying to delay the inevitable, fictional characters really do stop aging as and when the author tells them to. Especially in children’s books, when nothing really bad ever happens to any of them, the bastards. They get to be forever young AND get rewarded at the end.
When I was younger, I was totally into reading the classics, a habit which I wish I’d taken with me as I got older. I wish I could say that that was because I was oh-so-sophisticated, but in reality, there was a bargain bookstore on the high street of the London borough I pretty much grew up in, specialising in copies of books whose copyrights had long expired, or ones that the general public had forgotten existed. I soon realised that my pitiful pocket money could get me a lot more in this store than in a sweet shop or in the Waterstone’s up the road. I continued to make weekly visits to this bargain bookstore until 2001, when my high street was hit by an IRA bomb, taking my beloved shop with it.

My reading used to revolve around two classic authors: E. Nesbit and Susan Coolidge. I’d spend hours upon hours (to the detriment of my eyesight, some would say) imagining myself in scenarios set in an old-fashioned London, or in a small village on the outskirts of an American town. It’s been over 200 years since the Five Children and It series and the Katy Did series were written, but the characters in them haven’t aged a day since I turned the last page. I’ve even outgrown the majority of them.

There’s just something extremely depressing about growing older than the characters in your books. These wretched fictional characters remain blissfully unaware of how lucky they are, frolicking in that fantasy world I wish to go back and inhabit so much.

When I finally got around to picking up books actually written in a recent century, I was in for a surprise. Gone were the bonnets and india rubber hot water bottles (sorry Katy), and in were the many Jacqueline Wilson tales of woe, diaries of reluctant princesses with pop culture references I had a hard time understanding, and lastly, wonderful stories of an angel who time-travelled into different eras of history. For some reason, something completely thrilled me about the latter, and I completely devoured what I had of the series in one go. I wanted more of these angel books immediately, but none were forthcoming.

Herein lies the problem. I’m a very impatient person. I could read series upon series of books that were completed hundreds of years ago, knowing that the sequels were sitting on the shelves waiting for me to take them home. But with books written in the present day, it will sometimes be years – even decades – before the entire story is finished. Whilst I was waiting for authors to finish writing books I loved (especially keeping an eye out for Annie Dalton and ‘my’ angel stories), I grew up, not being able to stop the aging process as a fictional character would. I began to get different interests, meet new people, and read less and less every day. It was the same for pretty much all my peers.
Former childhood fictional ‘friends,’ both classic and present day, were soon banished to that cupboard where my grandmother suspected something slightly mouldy was growing, or shipped abroad for storage and promptly forgotten about.

When I did remember the many books I never finished, it was already at the stage where it was embarrassing to be reading books aimed at children. I didn’t even bother trying to find the other books I had hoped to read when I was younger, writing them off as lost causes. There was only one exception to this. I really did love those angel books, and decided to hunt them down to see how the story had finally ended. Imagine my horror when I realised they were now out of print (and the public library had copies of every one except the last one, GRR).

So, I did the unthinkable. I found the email address of the author, Annie Dalton, and shot off an email about how much I really did love her angel books, and asked how the rest of the story ended. Imagine my surprise and delight when she told me she’d send me the rest of the books for free. A couple of weeks later, they arrived, and I was so so happy to be able to finish the series once and for all.

Reading the books, it was like a long-term relationship coming to an end. I’d held on so long, but I just wasn’t the same person any more. I was now irritated by Dalton’s repetition of words such as “burbled,” “huskily” and “OMIGOSH,” the replacement of the word “very” with “très” (I’m not kidding), and Mel’s – the main character – obsession with clothes. What would have charmed me as a kid now annoyed me. It was like Dalton was trying to hard to appeal to her target audience, the tween I once was. Ah well.
BUT (and this is a very big “but”), the adventures were still made of the same stuff I’d grown up loving, the research was very nicely done, and the characters were still the same ones I remembered from previous books – Mel Beeby hadn’t aged a day since the last time I’d read her. I was the one who had changed.

Although I may be older than Mel Beeby will ever be, I will always remember how these books developed my love of history (only faded when I had to take exams for History and actually REVISE), and how, most importantly, she, and the rest of the other books I used to read, shaped my childhood for the better.