One Short For Football (Vicky Angel - Jacqueline Wilson)

Member Name: jillmurphy

Product:	Vicky Angel - Jacqueline Wilson
Date:	03/04/01 (225 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Honest, moving and truthful.

Disadvantages: Um...grammar, if you're picky.

We were just picking the teams for football. Away on a family and friends weekend there should have been plenty of people to choose from. We had Conor, Kieran, Dominic, Olivia, Marnie and four volunteer adults but suddenly all the other grown-ups had found various but incredibly pressing tasks – unpacking, cooking, that sort of thing. Swines. We were one short for five-a-side.

“Where’s my sister?” shouted Dominic. He was quite right, we were a child missing. Sophie usually likes football so I went to look. I found her hidden in a corner of one of the caravans, reading. “I can’t come yet,” she said, “I have to finish Vicky Angel. I won’t be long – only ten more pages to go.” I let her be and bribed my brother with the promise he could be striker – unfortunately for him he ended up being referee because it didn’t take Sophie long to finish her book and come out to join the game – ha ha ha, served him right, I say.

Later on, after lights out for little ones, I picked up Vicky Angel. It’s by Jacqueline Wilson - I keep seeing her name around, she’s won respected awards for children’s writing, she gets rave reviews in all the papers, and this very book had been used as the starting point for a project on bereavement by the older children at Conor and Kieran’s school. They’d obviously loved it if the samples of their work displayed on the wall in the school hall were anything to go by. So I thought I’d better read. When babysitting volunteers were called for later I didn’t mind at all. After a couple of hours, when the others came back from the bar and wanted a fourth for Scrabble, I said, “I can’t come yet. I have to finish Vicky Angel. I won’t be long – only a few more pages to go.” Oops.

Jade and Vicky have always been best friends – ever since they were really,
really little. They’re inseparable and walk around in that way young girls have, arms linked, shutting out everybody else. Vital, dynamic Vicky is the dominant one of the two, she’s popular and outgoing and loves to take the lead. She’s not above a bit of manipulation and emotional blackmail to get her own way though, and get her own way she invariably does because her friend Jade is a quiet, shy, unassuming little girl who loves Vicky in a way that borders on hero-worship.

Then one day Jade and Vicky have a tiff on the way home from school. Vicky pulls away from Jade and runs straight out into the road:

and then she’s in the road
and then
and then
a car
a squeal of brakes
a scream
a SCREAM

silence

An ambulance is called and Jade goes with Vicky to the hospital. She’s not allowed to stay with her though, she’s ushered into a waiting room. She’s so afraid she can’t think straight and reverts into one of those childish counting games. She counts to a hundred, stands up, turns round, sits down. If she can only get to a thousand without interruption everything will be alright. Just as she gets to the last hundred the door of the waiting room opens and in come a doctor, a nurse and Vicky’s parents who are both in tears. Vicky has died.

Jade is distraught, she can’t take it in. She feels like she herself will die of grief and she turns and runs from the hospital back to the spot where the accident happened. Already there is a floral tribute laid at the side of the road a la Princess Diana - Vicky’s only been dead an hour. Suddenly Jade hears a laugh, a laugh she knows better than any other, it’s Vicky’s laugh. She whirls around and sees her. Vicky isn’t going to let a little thing like being dead spoil her fun and she’s certainly not going to let a little thing like being dead stop her bossing Jade a
bout either.

Vicky haunts Jade but, lost in grief, Jade is glad of it. She clings to the dead Vicky just as she did to the living one. When she’s not there Jade is helpless, time slows and she feels like she’s watching events unfold around her but can’t take part. She can’t eat or sleep or think clearly at all and she lives for the times when Vicky appears. But slowly, slowly, Jade starts to feel suffocated and frightened by her friend. Vicky is not happy she’s dead - she needs a companion, and she needs Jade, a companion she can manipulate as easily as she always did. Vicky won’t let Jade go, she won’t allow her to move on, or to make new friends, or have any interests at all. Jade feels responsible for the accident and so she allows Vicky to rule her, just as she too always did.

Her schoolwork starts to suffer, family, friends and teachers worry, but Jade, under Vicky’s instructions, pushes away her would-be comforters. Vicky doesn’t want anyone to be happy any more, even her parents, and least of all Jade. She plays on Jade’s guilt to keep her hold and Jade for a long time is completely in her thrall. We also discover that Jade is vulnerable in other ways – her parents marriage is not a happy one and money is a problem at home. She’s trying to deal with a lot of things all at once and unsurprisingly it’s proving too much. Eventually, with the help of an unoffical grief counsellor Jade begins to realise that she must free herself from Vicky or she’ll never be happy again.

Vicky Angel is a novel for fairly young children. Jade and Vicky are portrayed as secondary school girls but the discussion group at my children’s school was one of ten and eleven year olds. I reckon confident readers of about eight would be able to take it in. So it has a happy ending – it’s not all bleak. On the back of the book there’s a quote f
rom a review describing Vicky Angel as a sort of “Truly, Madly, Deeply” for kids. I’m not particularly keen on that film but I do think it’s a great theme for a children’s book – death isn’t an easy topic for any child, let alone any adult, and yet this metaphor of ghost-for-grief is handled superbly well by Wilson. Even Sophie, at nine, had realised that Vicky’s ghost may or may not be real – she may perhaps be a visualisation, a desperate clinging-on by Jade to the friend she once had.

Wilson captures Jade’s feelings perfectly, she describes them with understanding and sympathy but she’s never less than honest, never patronisies and never gives way to mawkishness or treacly sentiment. Some of the passages which show how grief is so numbing, the way it makes time seems irrelevant, the way it can obsess a person, are not easy to read, even for me, a grown-up:

“Time is slowing down until I stop believing my own watch. I’ve slowed down too. Each step is like wading through thick mud, each mouthful of food remains in my mouth like chewing gum.”

“And it doesn’t hurt the way I thought it would. It’s not sharp all the time. It’s dull, dull, dull. I want it to hurt more.”

“There’s a scary moment when she seems to blot out my brain, taking over my mind altogether.”

Shocking stuff for eight year olds isn’t it? Yet the book has a lightness of touch, lent by its humour - yes, humour – you’re thinking “Truly, Madly, Deeply”, remember. Vicky is as funny and full of jokes dead as she was alive. She laughs at Jae and pokes fun at everyone else in her usual witty way. It’s not easy to add lightness to a subject such as this but Wilson’s managed it in Vicky Angel. This book is about a dark subject but it isn’t dark at all. It’s a story of sad
ness but also a story that sadness can have an end.

The prose isn’t clever or pretty – it’s almost completely lacking in metaphor, simile or anything else literary. It’s highly colloquial and not even grammatical most of the time, yet it dragged me in immediately. Somehow that easy, vernacular style is full of emotional truth and and an almost frightening honesty. You read and read, even as an adult, hoping that Jade will be alright, recognising and feeling desperately sorry for her pain and confusion and yet realising that it’s inevitable, that it’s something that must be if her sadness and grief is to be understood, worked through and finally left behind although never forgotten.

I was amazed by Vicky Angel, it blew me away – I suppose I expected something good after the awards and the rave reviews, but I really wasn’t expecting anything this good. I don’t believe in hiding sadness, or anything else for that matter, from children however hard it is. I don’t think Jacqueline Wilson does either and I’ll be sure to be reading more of her. I don’t blame Sophie at all for putting off the game of football, she was quite right. I notice that Wilson’s written a couple of books for beginner readers like Conor, one of them has a dinosaur theme (his current obsession). I’m just off to Amazon to order it and I’ll be sure and let you know if it’s as good. In the meantime I think you should be off to Amazon yourself, ordering Vicky Angel for all the children of your acquaintance. Go on, do it.

Jacqueline Wilson Doubleday £10.99 ISBN 0-385-60040-2

Summary: