Colm O'Regan: A shortcut to the past — a Facebook group of iconic covers from the Ladybird archive

Irish Examiner

25-04-2025

Regular readers! You have my sympathies but also you may have spotted a pattern with this column. I write a lot about nice Facebook pages. These might be groups of niche interest such as The Wire, 2000AD, strange maps and runes or just the places where it's just all good news.
The videos with the special offers from the Wrekenton Poundzone with its pallets of Diet Coke and exotic flavour Monster Munch. It changed hands in the last couple of years. Graham and Lewis sold up and Sanjiv took over but he's kept the spirit going.
At the moment they're rushing out the flavoured Lost Marys before 'the ban in June.'
I'm on a mission to soothe. If you are dopamine addicted and doom-scrolling, you really should get off social media. But if you can't, you need as many pleasing distractions as possible. Call it listening to the orchestra on the Titanic.
So here's another one to add. After the Dull Mans Club and Old Aerial Photography Of Ireland, should you find yourself getting into an argument about Tucker Carlson in Crumlin, it's time to Fly Away Home.
Fly Away Home is the online base of Helen Day, who collects, curates and minds hundreds of old Ladybird books. They might be fairy tales, Peter and Jane, history, wildlife, How Stuff Works (or at least How Stuff Used To Work).
Each day Helen puts out at least one picture up from a book. Last week it was from Ladybird version of the Rapunzel fairy tale. The picture is of the woman with the pregnancy craving is looking out the window into the witch's garden at the witch's lettuces.
Ladybird book: Mervyn Mouse.
You know how it is when you're pregnant and you see lettuces growing next door. You just gotta have em. It was like a jolt of supercharged nostalgia injected right into the endocrine system. I smelled Junior Infants crayons in old glacé cherry pots, jigsaws stored in our teacher's husband's old tobacco packets. It was so vivid.
If you don't remember the exact Ladybird book, the post may trigger you for other reasons. It could be an exquisite painting of sandals or a field being ploughed by a comparatively tiny tractor or a machine we don't use any more, like the conductor's ticket machine on the bus.
You won't remember the writing. Or most of it, see below. It's the illustrations that have burrowed into us. They were painted by proper artists and at that stage when colour illustrations were rarer and we weren't the art gallery-ing types, they were probably the best paintings we'd ever seen.
The names Charles Tunnicliffe or John Leigh Pemberton may mean nothing to you but if you're above a certain age, they probably painted the first bullfinch or kestrel or barley field you saw in a book.
The ladybirds weren't just about ladies and birds. They ventured into history as well with tens of books on all aspects of history. I wouldn't say it's the best history. It is after all the source of the infamous quote about Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell was also a good man.
He was deeply religious, and neither greedy nor - except in Ireland- cruel. The phrase 'except in Ireland' doing a lot of heavy lifting. The writer had clearly never been to Drogheda or probably Ireland.
There is a tinge of regret about Fly Away Home. I feel it myself and it's often expressed in the comments underneath the Facebook and Instagram posts.
We HAD those books. And what did we do with them? Why did we get rid of them? How did we not see the value of them?
This year I bought a shortcut to the past. 'Ladybird a cover story. 500 iconic covers from the Ladybird archive.' I binge on that and I'll have to imagine the rest.
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