A PAIR OF BOOTS (LESSOULIERS) 1887 (33Cm X 40.9cm) Vincent Van Gogh Baltimore Museum of Art

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Enid Blyton, that writer adored by children and despised by the middle classes for her straitened vocabulary and unimaginative plots, once wrote a story called "The Brownie Biddle's Boots". It was read to me from a children's omnibus during the 1950s in Sheffield, when I lay a-bed at nights, and I always wanted it to be repeated again and again by my mother because, being an afflicted child of (presumably) imaginatively straitened, working-class parents, I found it imaginatively inexhaustible. It told the story of a pair of old boots that took matters into their own hands one day by going off on their own without a pair of legs to lead them. They were stout, wilful items of well …