The Cresta Bear Books

It seems centuries ago that we used to visit a bookshop in Liguanea Plaza in Kingston, Jamaica, to buy books to read with our three-year old daughter. There, in the latter part of 1974, we discovered these little books, just four of them all published in that year, which featured Cresta the polar bear.

At the time, we didn't realise that the books were part of an advertising campaign run to promote a fizzy, fruit-flavoured drink called Cresta - it didn't matter anyway because we fell in love with the humour and the characters in the books.

Cresta is a cool, laid-back polar bear who is motivated by moments of enthusiasm to do things which, inevitably, turn out badly but which, in a gentle way, promote a moral. So, in 'The Smile of Cresta Bear', on a miserable, grey polar day Cresta makes considerable sums of money by selling a smile to other polar bears, and is then admonished by his wise friend Brian for selling something that should be free - resulting in Cresta returning all the money and ending up a much happier bear.

I used to love reading these books to my children. It's not often that an adult laughs heartily while reading a children's book, and there were times when I wondered if the recipient of my bedtime story efforts doubted my sanity.

The books were never reprinted and seemed to disappear from the market. How, I asked myself, could these wonderfully funny books fail to find the immense success of some of the much inferior children's books of the time - the Dr Seuss books being an example? My view was that they should have been just as successful as the Mr Men books.

The other day the daughter for whom these books were bought almost fifty years ago lent them to me to re-read. All the years fell away and I was back in Jamaica, sitting on the edge of her bed in that sweaty bungalow, laughing and laughing....