June’s Title Pick for Children: Heidi by Johanna Spyri

‘But Heidi did not stir; she had no need now to wander about, for the great burning longing of her heart was satisfied; she was at home again on the mountain.’

I can’t remember a time I didn’t love Heidi. My parents recall having to listen to the book read aloud on cassette tape on long car journeys over and over when I was around four years old, and I feel as if the words, characters and scenes must have seeped through my skin as we travelled around in our Fiat Panda and become part of my inner anthology. Even though I have no way of playing it, I still have that cassette tape from 1988.

When thinking about the theme of ‘The Home We Carry’ for this year’s Bookshelf, Heidi came to mind immediately. And in re-reading the book aged 42, I found that I love it just as much as I did aged 4. The experience of re-reading it was itself a kind of coming home.

Heidi experiences a lot of change and movement in her young life. At the opening of the book, her Aunt, who has cared for Heidi since she was orphaned at a young age, is marching her up a hill to hand her into the care of her Grandfather who has a reputation for being antisocial, removing himself from fellow villagers to live up on the wild mountainside with only his goats for company. He is gruff. Unwelcoming. As a reader you might imagine this to be a hard transition for Heidi and wonder how she will cope. But Heidi carries with her an infectious openness and enthusiasm everywhere she goes. She is brave. She seizes joy wherever she finds it, and find it she does in her new life with Grandfather. In her cobbled-together bed of warm hay, in the way the rocky mountain peaks turn rose as the sun sets, in her adventures on the mountain with Peter the Goatherd.

Just as life seems settled and we even begin to have a glimpse of Grandfather’s ice cold edges beginning to soften, change shows its face again and Heidi’s life is transformed as she is whisked away to Frankfurt to be a companion for a young girl called Clara and be educated. Thrust into a new life with unfamiliar rules and regulations, Heidi faces the hardship of homesickness, longing to be back on the Mountain surrounded by nature and the people she loves. It is one of the best descriptions of homesickness I have ever read, and whenever I see a soft bread roll being served at a dinner table, I think of Heidi, hiding these precious treasures away in her room in Frankfurt in the hope of being able to give them to Peter’s Grandmother on her return home. In the very midst of her struggle, she is thinking of how she can bring joy to others.

‘Yes Grandmother, I am really here,’ answered Heidi in a reassuring voice. ‘Do not cry, for I have really come back and I am never going away again, and I shall come every day to see you, and you won’t have any more hard bread to eat for some days, for look!

 And Heidi took the rolls from the basket, and piled the whole twelve up on grandmother’s lap.

‘Ah child! Child! What a blessing you bring with you!’ the old woman exclaimed, as she felt and seemed never to come to the end of the rolls. ‘But you yourself are the greatest blessing.’

Reading the book again as an adult I noticed, alongside the effect of the homesickness on Heidi, the impact that her absence has on her Grandfather, and the way that Johanna Spyri gradually reveals the things he has gone through in his life that have shaped him and directed his path onto the mountainside. It made me think about other things that we might ‘carry’ with us. Experiences, memories, fears. And what it takes to unburden ourselves or be able to share these loads with others.

Whatever age you are, I would recommend this book. It has everything: adventure, the excitement and energy of a big city, the beauty of wild nature, true love, danger, mild animal peril, painful separations and the happiest of reunions. It will make you laugh and cry, and no matter how long you’ve been reading it, there are always new things to discover. For me this time around, that has been noticing that as much as Heidi loves her physical home on the mountain, it is the people, and the joy that she carries with her and shares with them, that enable her to make a ‘home’ wherever she is.

by Katie Clark, Director of Literature