The figures loom out of pitch black, heavy boots kicking up in thick smudges, hands roughly smeared above their heads as they dance to the music of the balalaika, which is only a suggestion on the page, scratched into the thick paint of John Burningham’s illustration. This 1964 picture book, about how a mouse called Trubloff comes to travel with Gypsies, listen to their music and learn to play the balalaika, is a well-known classic. But the heart of the story lies unspoken on the page: the fiery Gypsy music that inspires Trubloff to leave his family and that will eventually save them all.
Trubloff is one of a family of mice who live behind the panelling of the Parlour Bar, an inn in “part of a little village in central Europe where the winters were cold and snowy”. He comes to fall in love with the music played by the wandering Gypsies but when old Nabakoff, the craftsman mouse, makes him a balalaika of his own, Trubloff is disappointed to find that “playing the balalaika was not easy”. A kindly old Gypsy says he would have offered the young mouse lessons if they weren’t leaving that night – so Trubloff stows away and his travels across the frozen fields begin.
The richly textured colour images – full-bleed landscapes of a baleful orange sun setting over the steppe, or a blizzard daubed in gobbets of white – put Burningham at the cutting edge of printing technology when Trubloff was first published. The deep browns and purples of the barns and houses, walls and faces highlighted in mustard yellows and pond greens, make it sing out in memory among the paler pages of my 70s childhood reading. But when I read it with my own children, Burningham’s baritonal palette marks it out as the product of a different era from that of the rainbow brightness of Axel Scheffler or Korky Paul – a period as remote to 21st-century children as Trubloff’s icy Mitteleuropa was to me.
Some things are still the same. Like children everywhere, Trubloff is scolded for staying up late, “but when his mother came for him, he had to go”. The mice disturb the innkeeper’s sleep, evoked by Burningham in a charming little picture of the man squinting despairingly at his pocket watch in bed, who, like any grumpy landlord, eventually decides to bring in some “fierce farm cats” to drive the Trubs out of the inn.
But that night there’s no sign of the musicians who are due to play at the inn, and the Parlour Bar’s patrons are getting restless. Trubloff dares to approach the innkeeper and ask if he can play instead. The patrons clap and cheer in a medley of browns and yellows, a man at the back waving his glass as if drunkenly singing along, while Trubloff perches on the bar and plucks at his balalaika, eyes closed in concentration.
And it is Trubloff’s hard-earned skill that convinces the innkeeper that the family can stay. In the end, his brothers and sisters join him to form a band that becomes so famous that customers travel great distances to hear them play. There’s something magical about Trubloff’s story of leaving everything behind to follow his dream – and finding it right back where he started.
