13

'Suddenly there was a bright flash of HEAT and where there had been just one Uranian you could suddenly see two sparking little fellows in his place and a few little coloured balls that shot off into the sky. "Well that was a bit spontaneous," said Tom Atom, "but you two fizzy boys better stay away from the rest of us - you're a bit too active to be running around loose!" '

Ho ho! What could be more fun, eh kids? Pass the plutonium - and have you always been covered in those suppurating blisters?

Propaganda works best on the young and the dumb and this week's book was written for both. It was published in 1957 'with the assistance of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority'. It didn't bring them much luck -  Britain's worst ever nuclear accident took place that October at Windscale. 33 people are expected to die as a result. Ho ho indeed. 

Designed to poison minds rather than bodies, their attempt to portray fallout as fun is so poorly written that the real danger is dying of laughter. Even worse, there's no glossary or factual overview so the peculiar metaphors and bizarre events would be entirely lost on young readers. Tom Atom is a teacher who lives in Isotopia and is building a reactor. He goes off with Garry Graphite and Caddy Cadmium to find his friends the Uranians, who have a 'great magicky power' and who live in Mount Diox. One in every 140 of them are different, but then an ordinary ones explodes and changes colour. He gets a new name, Two-three-four, a reference to U234. Are you keeping up? 

It's deadly dull stuff - with the emphasis on deadly. At one point the human children beg to be 'magicked ' so they can be detected on Tom's Geiger counter, or Magic Wireless Set:

'So all the Atom Kids went into Tom's second Magic Dome and got themselves magicked. When they came out again they were glowing all over.' 

Not for long, presumably. I doubt if they'd even have the time to crawl into their lead coffins. What makes the whole thing particularly terrifying is the seal of approval from the Atomic Energy Commission, presumably entirely comfortable with the notion of allowing children to scamper into the heart of a nuclear reactor.

Propaganda and disinformation are more common in war time but every government fights a never ending war against the critical mass of public opinion. A collection of pamphlets and official tracts runs the risk of being pretty dry stuff but a collection of books written deliberately to mould the minds of children would be well worth putting together.

You'll have to choose your parameters carefully as there's a case for arguing that all children's books are propaganda: characters which exhibit 'good' behaviour, kindness and cleverness are always rewarded; nuclear families are always happy and nuclear reactors never leak. Children's books which deviate from a narrow conformist viewpoint are unusual and would make an interesting set. They remind us that until recently society used books to mould all its citizens and paid very close attention to the content of those books. Now it trusts to the screen - and pays no regard at all to what's on show.

Next week we'll stick with teachers and have a look at a book aimed at educators. The National Union of Teachers are soon holding their 2009 annual conference - but what was on the agenda in 1909? 

book 12 book 14 Library 2009 (see also 2010)

'Tom Atom And His Magic Domes' by Chris Schirmer was published in 1957 by Oldbourne. There are no copies for sale on the internet at the moment, which is slightly disconcerting. My copy is now on a very high shelf. I once saw a small collection of 1920s books about radiation at a book fair and it struck me that they could well be dangerously radioactive. Where did they come from? For much the same reason I always avoid books about skin disease.

You can read about that accident here.

Bought for £1.00 in 2008 from a charity shop.