Bookworm Read online

  This was divided into two sections. In the one for older children, whom I longed to join, there was a long oak table with matching long-backed chairs where they could sit and do homework – so industrious! So focussed! So meaningful! I knew all that stuff with Uniblox and pipecleaners was just pissing about! – or read for pleasure with their big books propped up. It was still mostly hardbacks then (and no soft chairs). By the time I was taking my GCSEs, late 1980s economics and the revolution in publishing for teenagers combined to fill the place with carousels full of paperbacks in thick plastic covers, but for now everything was designed to endure. It added to the sense of security, of calm certainty that seemed to pervade the building. Stop a while, the safe, solid brick walls seemed to say, like generations of a certain kind of seeker after a certain kind of pleasure have done before you. Take your time. The books are here. You’ve got them. They’ve got you. What is it you’re looking for? An hour’s escapism? A quick explanation of a DIY problem that’s foxed you? A history lesson? A long investigation into some of the weightiest moral and philosophical issues that men have wrestled with down the ages? We’ve got ’em. And good radiators too.

  In the younger children’s section, I knew perfect contentment. Light streamed in through more stained-glass windows – bordered in amber, which for some reason used to fascinate me even more than the dome – and I would pick through the chunky wooden containers, appraising covers and titles, and putting aside possible candidates for taking home. When Dad had chosen his books, he would come and find me and we would sift through the shortlist – Another Topsy and Tim? Was I sure? Alright. And Usborne’s Understanding Dogs? Did I understand that this still didn’t mean I was getting a dog? Okay – and choose the final six. The Booker had nothing on us.

  Library books have not, however, stuck in my mind. I think I – possibly unwittingly nudged by Dad – must have used them as ‘filler’. The ones he bought me, the ones I was able to keep and read and reread (and reread and reread and reread and …) were the ones I loved. Partly, of course, this was because – well, they were the ones my dad had bought me and that I was able to keep and reread and reread and … Which is to say, I loved them as objects and the easy access led to familiarity and comfort and all the other things that make books important to children apart from content. And partly of course it was because, save the occasional Struwwelpeter-shaped misstep, everything he brought me was brilliant. And became more so every day because I was starting to be able to decode them myself. My father had availed himself of a box of flashcards and was teaching me, with his habitual patience, to read.

  I remember the cards vividly – lovely rounded black letters on bright white backgrounds, out of a teal-blue box – but to my everlasting regret I don’t remember any wondrous, epiphanic moment when I was transformed from Non-Reader into Reader. I know I could read before I went to school but I don’t remember a particular point at which the random scatterings of straight and slanted lines, circles and curves on the card or page began to resolve themselves into recognisable patterns, predictable arrangements – to become letters, then words, then sentences, then stories. I wish I could. Who doesn’t want to be there when a miracle takes place? When a finite number of marks on a page begin to yield an infinite number of meanings and carry you away to an infinite number of lands? But I have racked my brains, and my father’s, and we cannot pinpoint anything. It must have been a gradual evolution, the end result of which has brought so much joy to me over the years that it would be churlish to lament how it unfolded. But I do wish I could remember the transition. I remember later breakthroughs and lights dawning. Wordy, in the BBC TV series Look and Learn that we watched once a week at school (while, I presume, the teachers took a twenty-minute break for fags and/or gin as preferred), thrilled me with the news that ‘Magic E’ at the end of words could transform them into entirely new words: ‘hat’ could become ‘hate’, ‘cap’ could become ‘cape’, ‘tap’ could become ‘tape’ … The elegance and efficiency of such a rule pleased me no end. But I liked the quirks too. I came across George Bernard Shaw’s famous re-spelling of ‘fish’ as ‘ghoti’ in – of all places – Jackie magazine (it was in one of those kerrrazee ‘Did You Know?’ funky box-outs) and was entranced. It was a construction made to bolster the case for spelling reform, one of his pet causes. The ‘gh’ is the ‘gh’ from words like ‘tough’ and ‘cough’ and so functions as the initial ‘f’ sound. The ‘o’ is the ‘o’ from ‘women’, the ‘ti’ the ‘sh’ sound in words like ‘nation’ and so on. Also from Jackie I learned that you shouldn’t sleep using more than one pillow if you don’t want a saggy neck when you grow up. This has proved to be untrue. As indeed, I have just learned during fact-checking the ghoti derivation has the attribution of its invention to George Bernard Shaw. It looks like it was actually first invented by a man called William Ollier Jr, a year before GBS was even born. You live, wrinkle and learn, eh?

  The silent ‘k’ at the beginnings of ‘knife’ and ‘knee’, and the ‘g’ in ‘gnome’, caught my attention one day at school. Why were they there? ‘Nobody knows,’ said the teacher. This again is not strictly true, as I would discover when I was doing my History of the English Language term at university (short version – they used to be pronounced. Over time, the pronunciations changed but the spellings did not, so you have little bits of linguistic history preserved in etymological aspic all over the place) but one of my great personality flaws has always been to accept without question whatever anyone in a position of authority tells me. This earned me a reputation as a model pupil when in fact I was nothing of the kind. I recognised myself perfectly years later, just after I finished my A levels, in a footnote in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days. ‘I learned that quietness could be used to personify not only goodness but also intelligence and sensitivity, and so I silently earned a small reputation as a [child] of superior intellect, a little scholar,’ recalls one of the characters, ‘while in fact I was smug and lethargic and dull as a mud turtle.’ That’s me, I thought, and hoped it would be enough to get me into university. And it was.

  While Judith Kerr was writing Tiger and Mog, her son Matthew actually taught himself to read from Dr Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat. I am impressed not just with the talent and industry required by this feat but by the emotional robustness he must also have sported. I took The Cat in the Hat down from Lucy Donovan’s bookcase and read – though the process at this point would probably be more accurately named ‘slowly, laboriously but technically independently deciphered’ – it. I thought I had hated Babar. No. It turned out I had merely disliked Babar. But The Cat in the Hat? That I hated. I hate it still. Cat in the Hate I call it. And a tip of the hat to you, Magic E.

  Theodore Geisel – the real name of Dr Seuss – was approached by publisher William Spaulding who had read a famous book at the time called Why Johnny Can’t Read, which criticised the ‘look-say’ method of teaching reading (what we would call ‘whole-word recognition’) and called for a return to the use of phonics and noted the growing wider dissatisfaction with the quality of reading material for young children, epitomised by the Dick and Jane books which, like the UK’s later Peter and Jane books from Ladybird, dominated the market and were boring children to tears. As A Game of Thrones writer George R. R. Martin put it once in an interview, ‘Dick and Jane and their little sister Sally and their dog Spot [were] the dullest family in the history of Earth … Oh boy they were boring. You know, the stories were stupid, even for a first- or second-grader … [T]hat couldn’t convince me to keep reading.’ So, legend has it, Spaulding challenged Geisel to ‘Write me a story that first-graders can’t put down’, to produce the anti-Dick and Jane adventure but still using only words drawn from the list of a few hundred that children of that age were expected to know.

  Geisel noticed that the first pair of words to rhyme in the list were ‘cat’ and ‘hat’. Some weeks later he had the tale of two children alone and slightly bored at home being visited by the rule-
breaking, chaos-loving, lanky feline in the stripy chapeau and all hell breaking loose.

  The child who regarded a tiger who came to tea not as a glorious intimation of the wealth of possibilities offered by the world and the imagination but a threat to suburban propriety, and who exhorted freedom-seeking elephants to stay caged for their own safety, naturally rejected the hatted cat entirely.

  He was malevolent. The anarchy was awful. The danger to life and limb was palpable. I was firmly on the side of the fish.

  I came to assume over time, as my awareness of the critical and personal esteem in which Dr Seuss’ most famous and enduring creation is held, that my feline animus must just have been childish prejudice, so I bought the damn thing a few years ago and sat down to read it with Alexander. But do you know what? I was right the first time. That cat is horrible, I would happily shoot Thing One and Thing Two, and the fish and I are more simpatico than ever. Alexander didn’t like it either. Now, obviously I work on the principle of working towards the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people and I’m glad it freed a generation of children from the tyranny of traditional primers, but give me Dick/Peter and his concomitant Jane any day. The Cat in the Hat can take his anapaestic anarchy and bugger off.

  That said, I bought Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? at the same time, which Geisel wrote in 1956 (it was published then in Red Book magazine and as a children’s book in 1973), and fell immediately, wholly and irrevocably in love with the brilliantly sustained monologue by a wise old man sitting on top of a cactus and cheering up a child with a riotous procession of examples of how much worse off he could be. He could be a Hawtch-Hawtcher bee-watcher watcher, or poor Herbie Hart who has made the mistake of taking his Thromdibulator apart, or Mr Potter, the t-crosser and i-dotter at an ‘i and t’ factory out in Van Nuys (although, truth be told, I would quite like to have Mr Potter’s job). It’s a bravura display of wild and wonderful invention and the only book I actively enjoy reading aloud. In it I find all the joy and generosity that other people seem to find in The Cat in the Hat. I allow it as a bedtime book even though it goes on forever because it is such an unassailable treat. How lucky am I!

  Blake – Burningham – Scarry – Briggs

  I was now coming up for five and my sister was nearly two and much improved. I liked her fluffy hair, enormous eyes (so sweetly babyish until you looked closer and saw the fierce roving intelligence that would in a few years’ time settle on the BBC Micro computer Dad brought home from his office and be channelled into building Catford’s answer to Skynet) and, above all, the fact that she now stopped screaming for whole minutes at a time. You could also push her sideways on the sofa and she would slowly topple over without changing position, like Del Boy falling through the bar. Look, even bookworms occasionally had to make their own entertainment, okay?

  Mum had gone back to work within ten minutes of giving birth (‘Stitch me up! Let’s get on!’) and Dad had just started a new job, teaching at a drama school in Sidcup.

  One day he brought home a book by an author and illustrator he had never heard of but who was on sale everywhere near the school because it was the creation of someone who had grown up nearby. His name was Quentin Blake.

  Today, of course, Sir Quentin – as he is now – is virtually synonymous with Roald Dahl and has been since they first united in perfect harmony on The Enormous Crocodile in 1978, but for me he was the man who created Patrick (a book about a man whose violin music floods everything with colour. It was born at the end of the 1960s out of Blake’s frustration with the fact that he was at that point seen as a black-and-white illustrator. So he wrote a story that would give himself free, polychromatic rein at last) and – above all – the stories of Lester, and his boon companions Otto, Flap-eared Lorna (always on roller skates), and a variety of other idiosyncratic and captivating characters who live in a land where everything you need – including general hardware – grows on trees. Who else but Blake would conjure up The String Thing (what does it look like? It looks like a string thing. Brown potato-y blob – not to be confused with the potato animal, you understand, whose low singing is often the only way you can distinguish it from a non-animal potato – with a thin black line running out of it) and make you love it?

  Blake drew his first cartoons on the backs of his school exercise books and was selling them to Punch before he had left sixth form. After university and national service he was soon producing covers for the Spectator but realised that what he really wanted to be was an illustrator of children’s books. So he asked a friend of his, John Yeoman, if he would write a book that Blake could illustrate. Yeoman could and did – it was called A Drink of Water, and they have collaborated many times since. Mouse Trouble, about mice that save a cat brought in by the owner of the mill in which they live from being drowned because he has pleasingly little interest in catching any of them, is this household’s current favourite, though the household has had to reach an understanding that it is a little too long to qualify as a bedtime book. Downstairs only. Mummy would like to get to her dinner before midnight.

  Blake’s spiky, kinetic line is always unmistakeable. It united disparate books wherever you came across them as easily as Shirley Hughes’ did. His drawings’ sense of movement, the energy alone, makes them compelling. Many illustrators draw parallels between their work and theatre or film but most of them liken it to set design or, at the outside, direction. It is telling, perhaps, that when he was interviewed by the principal of Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama in his native Sidcup at an event celebrating his status as a local lad made good, Blake likened his work more to the most dynamic element – acting. And like an actor, he thinks himself into the part of the child reader. ‘I never think of myself as an adult and ask “What do they want?”’ he says. ‘It’s more a feeling of being a child with them.’

  His actors, conveying as much in two dimensions as their fleshly counterparts do in three, are probably the dominant images of any young modern reader’s childhood. As well as being hugely attractive in their own right – so colourful and full of life, fun and happiness – they look completely spontaneous and chime with a child’s sense of immediacy. ‘I like to work in a lot of rapid bursts, with much sitting about in between!’ he says. The results are exactly the drawings you want when you live, as children do, in an eternal present. He retains all his original instincts and early experience as a cartoonist who had deadlines to meet and topical events to distil but which have become married to a talent for narrative exploration. He still distils characters – the Twits’ supreme awfulness conveyed as much by the exact degree of their squints and pop-eyedness as by Dahl’s words or the close-up view of the rotting food bits in Mr T’s beard – but everywhere else he adds detail that expands the text and leaves books pulsing with vitality. And so his work propels you helter-skelter through the book, ‘the focal point frequently a little ahead of the drawing’ as Douglas Martin puts it in his essay on Blake in The Telling Line, until you fall exhausted and exhilarated across the finishing tape.

  I have often wondered whether he must be a pathological optimist to produce such endlessly witty, cheerful, energetic drawings. I was almost relieved when I read an interview with him in which he said ‘I can draw much more cheerfully than I feel.’

  My other great love brought home by Dad was John Burningham. He had become famous with his first book, Borka: The Adventures of a Goose with No Feathers, which won the 1963 Kate Greenaway Medal, but it was the two Shirley books that captivated me.

  In Come Away From the Water, Shirley, her parents unfold their deckchairs and drab lives in equally drab line and wash on the left-hand side of each spread while our heroine stands at the shoreline and lets her imagination carry her off into colourful adventures on the right. In Time to Get Out of the Bath, Shirley she goes on medieval quests within the confines of the tub. Both books juxtapose imagination and reality without comment. The contradiction stands like a riddle, waiting for the moment the child r
eader is ready to solve it.

  Elaine Moss once carried out an experiment with Come Away From the Water, Shirley, reading it to different groups of children between the ages of five and eleven. She found that roughly the same proportion of listeners in each age group realised (or didn’t realise) that Shirley was off in her imagination while her parents remained obliviously rooted in reality on the beach. I don’t remember my own eureka moment, only the delight of being in on the joke, but one librarian remembers being there at the moment light dawned for one little boy. ‘Her think,’ he suddenly exclaimed, ‘is on THAT side!’

  But at whatever age that realisation dawns, when it does it is like being let in on one of the great secrets of the universe – which, I suppose, you are. A door of perception opens. Dude, a door of perception opens into your own perceptions. You see that your mind can respond to reality, or it can escape from it. Engage or ignore. Your thoughts can bear no relation to what other people are thinking about or to what other people think you are thinking about. You contain multitudes. And so – bizarrely, bogglingly, terrifyingly and yet thrillingly – does everyone around you. Except those silly, prosaic parents of yours and Shirley’s, obviously. Imagine!

  In similar fashion, Burningham also opened up the eternal horrors and pleasures of the thought experiment to me, via his Would You Rather … The book’s premise is simple – make a choice. Would you rather … be crushed by a snake, swallowed by a fish, eaten by a crocodile or sat on by a rhinoceros? (Fish.) Would you rather … jump in the nettles for £5, swallow a dead frog for £20 or stay all night in a creepy house for £50? (Nettles.) But why? And why not? And why does the person reading it to or with you disagree? Why do they fear the fish but you fear the snake? Why do they envisage one set of consequences and you see entirely another? Oh, it is a book of fathomless depth and endless wonders, to be debated long into the night with your ever-patient father. It was one of the few books I kept begging Dad to read to me again long after I could read it for myself, and the only one he, my sister (in a few years’ time) and I would ever read together. It was so good that even Mum got involved occasionally, though to be honest she never got wholly into the swing of teasing apart intricate philosophical conundra; ‘Easy!’ she’d exclaim. ‘You’d stay in the creepy house of course. Anyone would. There’s no such thing as ghosts’.