Margaret Lenta (2000, 42) of the University of Natal observed, in an article in English in Africa, that I must have been “momentarily confusing” two books by Pauline Smith – Platkops Children (1935) and The Little Karoo (1925) – when discussing South African English children's fiction of the first half of the twentieth century (Jenkins 1993, 49). Her difficulty was that I said that Platkops Children is a book for adults, when she was expecting me to say it was a book for children. It was kind of her to make excuses for me, but I can assure her that I knew what I was doing. From when I first read The Little Karoo at the age of twelve in 1952, I could not have confused it with any other book; as for Platkops Children, I first read it when I was in my forties, so it was still fresh in my mind.

Platkops Children is a collection of short stories, written in the first person by a girl, about the lives of herself, her younger sister and two boy playmates. The writer of their “book” is about twelve years old. Pauline Smith, in her persona as “the Paoli one”, writes in a literary, stylised – and sentimental – version of children's spoken language: “An’ then she kissed us all good-bye an’ tole us to be good chil’ren, jes like a or’nary mother. … Wasn’ it instrornery?” (Smith 1981, 43). Presumably there are two reasons that would prompt a reader to think that the book is a children's book: its subject matter, and the language in which it is written.

On the whole I would agree with Lenta that the book works at two levels – one of entertainment, which can be enjoyed by both adults and children (if they are able to get past the language barrier), and a more profound level of social commentary. Perhaps it is just a matter of definition. Certainly, the profundity that Lenta detects in the stories is more appropriate to an adult than a children's book. In this chapter I look at some of the ways that one can identify South African “children's books” and whether Platkops Children fits the bill.