Carnaby Street’s Great Uninvited – Around the World in 80 Years

Words are all we have – Samuel Beckett

"A lot of internet communication is written speech, or transliterated speech," says Tony Thorne, a language consultant at King's College London. "Social media is all about nudging and poking. It's a more amplified conversation."

Ultimately, finding written ways to express the visual—like shrugging—is a key component of internet communication and social networks, says Mr Thorne. "People introduce these light hearted conversational things which normally you only find in speech," he says.

In that way, he suggests, "hey-ho" could just be the new emoticon. – Laura Schocker, ‘Why has “hey-ho” made a comeback?’, BBC News Magazine, 1 September 2009

Evolution is all about the survival of the fittest and the fact is that some words are no longer fit for purpose and have been replaced. Is that such a bad thing? The English language still has more words available to us than any of us use. Does it matter that the days of words like ‘aerodrome’ and ‘charabanc’ are numbered? Just like the Yangtze Finless Porpoise and the Humphead Wrasse are on the World Wildlife Fund’s Endangered Species List so likewise ‘aerodrome’ and ‘charabanc’ are on Collins Dictionary’s endangered words list. As a kid I thought ‘charabanc’ was ‘charabang’ because that’s how my dad pronounced it. It was one of his ambitions—sadly, never fulfilled—to drive one. So it’s a word I’ll take to the grave with me but I wonder how long it’ll survive after that. Should we let it die a natural death or try to preserve it? Does it deserve our protection? What if some pop star called their next album Charabanc? Would that guarantee it respite for another generation?

This book was first bought for me when I was twelve. It changed my life. Better than a thesaurus, more comprehensive and easier to use, it expanded my vocabulary and was the foundation for the love of language I have never lost.

I am thrilled to see that it is still available. All budding rappers, poets, school kids and their teachers should possess this book!

Safia Shah—now Safia Thomas—is a British writer, editor and television news producer. She was born in London in 1966 and, for several years, ran a respected traditional delicatessen, A. Gold in London, specializing in entirely British fare. She now lives close to Casablanca in Morocco which explains, perhaps, why her latest book, Carnaby Street’s Great Uninvited – Around the World in 80 Years, is set there despite the rather British-sounding title. The title is misleading. Carnaby Street is a person, a young girl—she looks about seventeen—and the book’s narrator; her fez-wearing younger brother is called Oxford. Odd names in children’s books are not uncommon—Arrietty in The Borrowers, Hermione in the Harry Potternovels (the name’s popularity was at an all-time low in 2010 and now’s at an all-time high) or Horton from the Dr Seuss book which despite the film adaptation has still not proved that popular with parents)—but, perhaps because I’m a Scot, I didn’t much care for Carnaby Street as a name. On my first read I actually thought it was the boy—for some reason I expected the boy to be the narrator—and wondered why Safia didn’t call him Barnaby. We don’t learn what their parents’ first names are but we are introduced to a number of their relatives—the great uninvited of the title—such as Florence May Street-Macadam and the rather Harry-Potter-looking Carter Able-Street-Macadam sometimes called ‘Chasm’ “as that’s his initials.” The Streets have a number of pets: Martin the cat who, on page eight, abandons them to train as a milkman; ten unnamed tortoises, one of whom “fell off the roof, in what can only be described as ‘highly suspicious circumstances’” and an aardvark called Alice whose real name apparently is ‘Orycteropus’ which, we’re told, means ‘aardvark’.

In your copy of the book, you will find a bookmark with squillions of fantastic endangered words and a pocket magnifier. Use the magnifier to reveal some cunningly hidden, mind-boggling new words. Coloured text on the page is your clue that a definition is hidden nearby. Be warned: some are harder to find than others!

There are somewhere between 150,000 and a quarter of a million words sloshing around in the English language but we routinely get through our day using as few as 7,000 of them.

In the glorious age of the text and the tweet, some 20 percent of our endangered words may be slipping from usage; a sobering statistic for anyone with a love of language that extends beyond the telephone keypad.

Here at Carnaby’s Great Uninvited, we’re calling upon anyone interested in saving some of these dear, wise, elderly and enfeebled words to help us breathe new life into old. Let’s snatch begrumpled from the brink of obscurity, jazz up jargogle and massage poor sick kedge-belly back to life. We want to open our wink-a-peeps and with your help, champion their cause.

We called Great Aunt Amelia ‘Gr- AAH’, which began as her names and somehow ended in the exclamation we made as she introduced us to her pet, Josie Shranks [a snake]. Globetrotting companions for almost half a century, they had little good to say of one another. 

[Graah says,] “I don’t much care for her but she has been with me for a very long time.” 

Graah had seen most of the world and had the baggage to prove it. 

We gave her the best room in the house because she’d come all the way from Matabeleland. And we were unaware that she was just the first of many guests to arrive. 

If only there had been some sort of a sign that so many more relatives were on their way. [A drawing of the cat holding a postcard suggests why.] 

Graah’s arrival caused the tortoises to momentarily consider a change in domicile. But the greatest strain was felt by Alice. Who had no fondness for reptiles. And who would have preferred that relatives and their reptilian pets refrained from coming to live with us. 

Being a python, Josie Shranks made Alice zigzag. That’s what aardvarks do when they see a predator– they zigzag.

As far as content goes there’s not really much of a story here. Aunt Sylvia and her family arrive followed by Great Aunt Amelia who “seamlessly replaced our regular cook”, as Carnaby puts it. Like we all have cooks that can get so easily replaced. Reminded me of Enid Blyton’s worldview as Amelia cooks a meal made entirely out of different coloured potatoes (one of which manages to look and taste like chicken), shows a slideshow of her travels, has a knitting competition with Carnaby’s mum before heading off to bed with stories still to tell and we’re left—this is the age of the sequel—wondering which relatives will turn up next. Like I said, not much of a story. We are told at the end, however, that this is to be “the first of a series of books that will centre on Carnaby Street and her madcap relatives.”

Now back to the illustrator, Mark Reeve. From his agency’s website [a few illustrations are available here too]:

Mark has been a commercial artist for twenty years. 

His first drawing was of a red elephant aged 5 and an intensive study of Marvel and DC Comics ensued, and Art college beckoned. First he attended Great Yarmouth College of Art and, in his own words, ‘achieved the rare distinction of failing the course and obtaining a confidential report so bad no other place would touch him’. Eventually however, he got his degree in Graphics at Kingston Art College and he has since produced a plethora of work, his folio comprising everything from DC comics, book covers, storyboards and film visuals, animation, political cartoons (he was political cartoonist on the Mail On Sunday for three and a half years and was awarded the Gillray Cup by The Political Cartoon Society 2004), sculpting and drawing the heads for Spitting Image and more recently, designing some sixty characters for ITV1′s satirical animated show Headcases (2008).

His comic book art’s not on a par with Bernie Wrightson or Joe Kubert or anything but there are nods. It’s obvious the man knows how to draw. But can he draw for kids? [NB: I do distinguish between comic book art and book illustration; they are far from being the same thing.] He does okay actually. What I especially liked was his careful use of colour. None of the illustrations are entirely in colour and so draw your eye to the important bits—exactly like highlighting in text. And there’s a mix of style—some are comic-booky (I’m think more Beano and Dandy comics here) whereas others (the father in particular) veer towards caricatures of real people (one of the many things Reeve does for a living—see here). The artwork here isn’t lush like the likes of Anthony Browne—Voices in the Park­ was one of the books I remember buying for one of Carrie’s grandkids—it veers more towards the cartoony style of Quentin Blake and there’s definitely a touch of Ronald Searle in the little girl and a bit of Charles Addams in their cat—it’s the eyes—or maybe Edward Gorey. There’s a lot on most of the pages to keep a kid’s interest over repeated viewings and, as I indicated above, the storytelling is not restricted to the words which is good because it feels more like a collaborative venture that way.

My biggest problem with the book is all to do with age. I’m really not sure what age range it’s aimed at. The language involved would need an older child to get to grips with it but he or she might feel they’re a bit old for a storybook. Then again I personally can’t imagine sitting a reading this to a child at the end of the day. There’s simply not enough meat to the words. So it’s a tough call. All parents know their own kids so they’d be best placed to decide what their children might appreciate. I had a look at some reading evaluation tests online and I reckon you’d need to be about eight or nine to cope comfortably with the level of comprehension needed here.