Bookworm

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Lucy Mangan

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Introduction

  1. The Very Hungry Reader

  2. To The Library

  3. Now I am Six

  4. The Blyton Interregnum

  5. Through a Wardrobe

  6. Grandmothers & Little Women

  7. Wonderlands

  8. Happy Golden Years

  9. Darkness Rising

  10. A Coming of Age

  Acknowledgements

  Lucy’s Bookshelf

  Copyright

  About the Book

  When Lucy Mangan was little, she was whisked away to Narnia – and Kirrin Island – and Wonderland. She ventured down rabbit holes and womble burrows, into midnight gardens and chocolate factories. She wandered the countryside with Milly-Molly-Mandy, and played by the tracks with the Railway Children. With Charlotte’s Web she discovered Death, and with Judy Blume it was Boys. No wonder she only left the house for her weekly trip to the library or to spend her pocket money on amassing her own at home.

  In Bookworm, Lucy revisits her childhood reading with wit, love and gratitude. She relives our best-beloved books, their extraordinary creators, and looks at the thousand subtle ways they shape our lives. She also disinters a few forgotten treasures to inspire the next generation of bookworms and set them on their way.

  Lucy brings the favourite characters of our collective childhoods back to life – prompting endless re-readings, rediscoveries, and, inevitably, fierce debate – and brilliantly uses them to tell her own story, that of a born, and unrepentant, bookworm.

  About the Author

  Lucy Mangan is a columnist for Stylist magazine and a features writer and reviewer for the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and many other publications. She broadcasts frequently on radio and occasionally on television, and is the author of My Family and Other Disasters, The Reluctant Bride, Hopscotch & Handbags and Inside Charlie’s Chocolate Factory.

  Also by Lucy Mangan

  Hopscotch & Handbags: The Truth about Being a Girl

  My Family and Other Disasters

  The Reluctant Bride: One Woman’s Journey

  (Kicking and Screaming) Down the Aisle

  For Alexander, whom I love more than books

  BOOKWORM

  A Memoir of Childhood Reading

  LUCY MANGAN

  Introduction

  ‘People say that life is the thing but I prefer reading.’ (American essayist and entirely correct person Logan Pearsall Smith.)

  I STILL HAVE all my childhood books. In fact, I have spent some of my happiest hours in recent months arranging them on the bespoke bookcases I had built under the sloping ceiling of my study for their ease and comfort. I may no longer imagine them, as I did thirty years ago, whispering companionably together at night when I have gone to bed, but I love them still. They made me who I am.

  ‘Pallid,’ says my sister, peering over my shoulder as I type this. ‘Bespectacled. Friendless.’ Which is also true. And yet, who needed flesh-and-blood friends when I had Jo March, Charlotte, Wilbur and everyone at Malory Towers at my beck and call?

  Remember hiding a book on your lap to get yourself through breakfast? Remember getting hit on the head by footballs in the playground because a game had sprung up around you while you were off in Cair Paravel? Remember taking yourself off to the furthest corner of the furthest sofa in the furthest room of the house with a stack of Enid Blytons and praying that everyone would forget about you till bedtime? Come bedtime, do you remember waiting four nanoseconds after the door closed before whipping out your torch and carrying on where parental stricture had required you leave off until tomorrow? Was your first crush on Dickon instead of Johnny Depp? Do you still get the urge to tap the back of a wardrobe if you find yourself alone in a strange bedroom, or keep half an ear out at midnight for the sound of Hatty in the garden?

  If so, this is the book for you. But then, most books are. You are, like me, a bookworm. Little more needs to be said, apart from: I hope you enjoy this memoir of my own childhood reading and that it brings back happy memories of your own. It is a look back at the books I loved – needed, depended on – as a child. I’ve tried to contextualise them, give their backgrounds (why, for example, was The Family from One End Street considered shocking by some when it first appeared? Who was the first author to use a first-person narrative in a children’s book?); potted biographies of their authors (which hugely successful female children’s writer whose name was not J. K. Rowling began writing only because she was desperate for money? What did E. B. White’s colleagues at the hallowed New Yorker think of him producing, of all things, a children’s book about a spider and a pig?); and a sense of where they come in the history of children’s literature. But this is a personal account of the classics and not-so-classics that shaped my world and thoughts, and so necessarily incomplete. I read omnivorously but not well and certainly without a thought for posterity. I read because I loved it. I read wherever I could, whenever I could, for as long as I could. At birthday parties – not least my own – I would stealthily retreat as soon as the games began, to the most hidden corner of whatever house I was in, gathering any available volumes on the way and reading furiously through them until a hateful adult found me and demanded my return or, if I was lucky, told me it was home time. In the summer holidays, I could read literally from dawn till dusk, unaware of anything until forcibly recalled to real life.

  Those were the days, my friends. Those were the days. Do we ever manage again to commit ourselves as wholeheartedly and unselfconsciously as we do to the books we read when young? I doubt it. I have great hopes for retirement but for the moment, as an adult of working age and a mother of a five-year-old, life is unfortunately too much with me to allow such gorgeous, uninterrupted stretches of immersion in a book.

  But let us relive, for the next few chapters at least, a little of those glorious days when reading was the thing and life was only a minor inconvenience.

  1

  The Very Hungry Reader

  I SPENT MOST of my early years – aged one to three, say – being trodden on.

  ‘It was your own fault,’ my mother explains. ‘You were too quiet. You used to stand by my feet, not making a sound while I was washing up or doing the ironing, so I’d forget you were there. What toddler does that? So I’d step back – and step on you. And you still,’ she adds accusingly, ‘didn’t make a sound.’

  The same tone of mingled confusion and denunciation attends her telling of another story, of the day she put me in the baby bouncer she had bought (a sort of nappy-shaped harness attached to elastic cords that you hang from a door frame) ‘and you just hung there. You didn’t even TRY to bounce. Just hung there! What kind of baby does THAT?’

  I think the explanation lies in the fact that I wasn’t really a baby. I was a bookworm. For the true bookworm, life doesn’t really begin until you get hold of your first book. Until then – well, you’re just waiting, really. You don’t even know for what, at that stage – if you did, you would be making more noise about it and be less covered in court-shoe-shaped bruises. But it’s books.

  My parents, I should say now, are northern. And Catholic. They came down south in the late 1960s to look for work. My dad, to the bafflement of his upper-working-class family, had wanted to work in the theatre since he were knee-high to the family whippet. Or ferret. I forget. Once the most pressing of his parents’ many attendant anxieties upon this fact were relieved by his acquisition of a wife, they did all they could to help him realise his dream, eventually waving him, a bottle of dandelion and burdock and a bagful of clean underpants off at Preston stati
on to start a new life as a stage manager at the newly formed National Theatre in That There London. Mum, a recently qualified doctor, went with him. Mainly to make sure he got off at the right stop.

  My dad was – and is – a reader. Not great at school – I once unearthed in a boxful of photographs that passed to me as de facto keeper of the family archives (once you get a reputation as bookish, all sorts of admin falls to you) a school report of his full of barely average marks and which read, under his failing grade for Religious Instruction, ‘Neglects to learn his catechism’. Father Paedophile’s thunderous fury was still evident, sixty years later, in every thick black stroke of his pen. But he was a great reader. There wasn’t much money in the family so there weren’t many books in the house, apart from a few precious bound collections of Boy’s Own comics given to Dad and his 800 siblings by a family friend after their own children grew out of them. Whoever had the most life-threatening lung disease at the time got to read them in bed until he or she got better or expired. However. In the centre of Preston sat the Harris Public Library (and museum and art gallery), the result of a £300,000 bequest from local lawyer and beneficiary of family railway investments Edmund Robert Harris in 1877. It’s still there, performing all the functions its founder hoped for, a monument to civic-mindedness and one of the countless buildings and establishments across the country that make you shake your head and wonder how much worse a state we’d be in now if we hadn’t had the Victorians. And it was to the Harris library that Dad took himself every week, working his way gradually through its offerings until he went to the local grammar school and transferred his allegiance to the panelled library room there, where he discovered Shakespeare, Marlowe and loads of other people who had written strangely formatted books called plays.

  My mother was not a reader. She was – and is – a doer. For most of my life, until she retired a few years ago, she was a gynaecologist, specialising in gruesome anecdotes and family planning (my mother is the only Catholic in history to have thrown off her upbringing utterly and never looked back). She presided over a dozen different clinics a week, swiftly building a reputation as the fastest, most efficient doctor in south-east London. ‘If they want to have their hands held and chat,’ she used to snarl at anyone who occasionally wondered if she couldn’t afford to take a little more time with patients, ‘they can go somewhere else.’

  At home she was an equally efficient plumber, electrician, cleaner, laundrywoman, gardener (actually more of an operator of a scorched-earth policy across the little patch of lawn and potentially herbaceous border behind our three-bed terrace, but no matter – neatness was the goal, not beauty), cook (burgers, Findus Crispy Pancakes, whaddyawantchipsormash, and gravy) and chauffeur as needed, in ceaseless, indefatigable rotation, singing, talking to herself or shouting orders to others all the while. My sister in later years dubbed her the Noisemaker 2000. My own theory is that if she ever has an unexpressed thought, she’ll die.

  She was – and is – a marvel, not least because there was no martyrdom at all in any of this. Firstly, she did it because it suited her temperament, not because it fed some deep-seated complex. She is seventy-four at the time of writing and still cannot be quiet or sit still for more than twenty seconds unless she’s eating her tea and Coronation Street’s on. Second, it was the only way she could get things done exactly to her specifications (in their utility room is a nine-volume laminated set of instructions solely about towel folding for Dad to follow if she ever goes away or he disobeys his own instructions and outlives her). And third, everyone else was required to pitch in as much as they could too. I put my toys away. And Dad … Dad just helped with everything. Buffered everything. Calmed everything. Mediated everything. Made sure Mum got a run out in the park every now and again to burn some energy off. Theirs was – and is – a marriage of true opposites. He will die if he ever has an expressed thought. It all works very well.

  When I was tiny I didn’t see him much because stage managing at the National Theatre takes you way past toddler bedtime. But at the weekends, once lesser activities such as eating, having baths and playing with visiting infants were out of the way, we would have a splendid time together. I am assured there was colouring, Play-Doh moulding and endless games of riding horses to Banbury Cross, but my first real memory is of Dad tucking me in beside him on the long, brown floral sofa that sat on a rug dyed three increasingly violent shades of orange that sat on top of an orange carpet (oh, the 1970s. May you never, never return) and opening a book almost as colourful as our sitting room. It was The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle’s paint ’n’ tissue-paper collaged account of the larval lepidoptera’s metamorphosis, fuelled by choice morsels of American culinary classics, into butterfly.

  And yet although this is the first book I remember there must have been other books before it, because what entranced me, and millions of other readers since it was published in 1969, was the fact that it was so different from them. The caterpillar had eaten little holes through all the pages for a start. And the pages were all different sizes. Some were narrow enough to make turning them a fiddly business, some large enough to make them flappily unwieldy in tiny hands, and some were just right.

  They had all been a fiddly business for the publisher. The Hungry Caterpillar’s life began when Carle was using a hole punch on a stack of papers at his home. The little circles made him think of a bookworm and he created a story, using different-sized pages – a familiar device in Germany, where his family had moved when he was six – called A Week with Willi the Worm. His editor Ann Beneduce suggested that a caterpillar might be more likeable than a worm. Carle shouted ‘Butterfly!’ and got cracking on a rewrite that took narrative advantage of his new hero’s transformative properties. Beneduce then had to scour the globe searching for a printer that could cope with producing variously sized pages AND put holes in them without bankrupting themselves or her. She eventually found one in Japan, the book emerged and has been beating its wings all over the world ever since.

  My father read it to me so many times that he swears when he dies we will find ‘one slice of cake, etc., etc.’ engraved on his heart. You will find it written all the way through mine, like a stick of rock. Not only did I absorb it when young, I have read it many times since – many, many, many times, enough times to begin to appreciate at last the fathomless depths of my father’s patience – to my son.

  With no conscious effort on my part, The Very Hungry Caterpillar was his first book too – at least if you discount the cloth and crackly things he gummed on as a baby. His Caterpillar was a fancy-dan edition, though. It had a finger puppet attached which can be pushed through the holes. I was not at all sure I approved of such interactive frivolity, but he was two, it was a christening present I’d put in the cupboard until he was older, and I was still too unsure of my authority as a parent to question anything too closely. It was fun, though. If you got your fingertip in there just right, you could make the puppet look almost as impudent as the real thing. I tucked my son in beside me on the sofa and we cocooned ourselves, the ghost of my toddler self and the spirit of my thirtysomething dad in a shared delight.

  Another delight was shared even more literally. Sugarpink Rose was so large a hardback that it had to rest on both our laps at once. Its huge soft pink and soft grey pictures of girl elephants, boy elephants, anemones and peonies filled my entire field of vision. Written by Adela Turin and Nella Bosnia and published by a 1970s feminist collective, Sugarpink Rose told the story of a baby girl elephant called Annabelle who simply wouldn’t turn pink like all the other baby girl elephants, no matter how many anemones and peonies she dutifully ate. (These, the reader was informed, tasted disgusting. I found this hard to fathom because both the words and the pictures were so beautiful.) And instead of being happy to be shut safely in a pen and wearing a pink bonnet and pink booties like all the other girl elephants, she would look longingly at the boy elephants, who were ‘a lovely elephant grey’ as they got to eat whatever t
hey wanted, play wherever they wanted and to roll about in mud to their hearts’ content. Annabelle tries her best to turn pink and not long for freedom, but eventually can stand it no more and bursts out of her pen, casting booties and bonnet to the wind, to join the boys. Gradually, the other girl elephants follow suit and soon everyone is covered in mud, their tummies are full of sweet green grass and they have turned the lovely grey elephant colour that nature intended.

  Looking back, it’s just possible someone was trying to make a point. Unfortunately, it was slightly lost on me because a) I wouldn’t get allegory until many years later, when I read The Last Battle and suddenly realised that C. S. Lewis had been plotting Christian shenanigans all along, and b) though I shared her dislike of pink, I did not understand Annabelle’s desire to leave the pen or to roll around in mud like her brothers. I liked things clean, and I liked things safe.

  But I loved Sugarpink Rose even if the finer points of the story eluded me and, four decades on, I love my dad for buying his three-year-old a feminist tract. He bought my mum The Female Eunuch at about the same time. I found it on a shelf many years later and took it to university with me. On the flyleaf he had written ‘You can read this while I’m giving birth to the twins.’ She never did, of course. Who has time or inclination to read about the theory of feminism when you’re busy putting it into practice every day? You might as well hold someone’s hand and chat.

  A little later Dad brought me another classic – or at least a classic in embryo. Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea (1968) was probably only about ten or twelve years old by the time I got my hands on it – too young yet to qualify fully as canonical. It was Kerr’s first book – she had trained as an artist and was then working as a television screenwriter – and a massive, instant success. It had begun life as a bedtime story invented for her two-year-old daughter Tacy. ‘I told it to her again and again and again, and she used to say “Talk the tiger”’, Kerr remembers in her autobiography. She wrote it down and a friend recommended that she illustrate it in bright indelible inks rather than her customary watercolours. The tiger sprang vividly to life and rapidly into homes up and down the land.