Bookworm Page 6
For light relief there was Richard Scarry, with his riotous, action- and character-packed tales of life in industrious small American towns who manage to stay pleasingly old-fashioned and homely despite their plethora of power plants, logging activities, paper mills, road-building, train stations, multiple car pile-ups, renegade gorillas and much, much more. Scarry’s books last you, as a reader, a pleasingly long time. In your earliest days, the pictures are more than enough. There are hundreds to pore over in his crammed pages, thousands of details to absorb. Finding Goldbug somewhere within every spread of Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go is, I assure you, a full afternoon’s work alone. Later, you can begin to puzzle out the words – the labels first, maybe, then the speech, then eventually the longer captions carrying the story itself underneath. If you are wired like me you will stop there. If you are wired like my sister, you will move on to understanding the diagrams showing how electricity and so on is made, graduate immediately to David McCaulay’s How Things Work and be able to rebuild society in the event of an apocalyptic crisis by the time you start school.
Later on, of course, if you have your own kids, you start breaking the books down into their component parts once more so you can build the stories anew with them. Look, there’s Goldbug.
Scarry’s books depict a very 1950s world so he has tweaked them over the years and revised them relatively extensively in the early 1990s to bring them up to date and address evolving concerns about gender roles and so on. Now father rabbits as well as mothers cook for their families, lady bears drive steamrollers and the cat labelled ‘beautiful screaming lady’ being rescued by a ‘brave hero’ in one of Busytown’s many conflagrations is the more prosaic but accurate ‘cat in danger’ being saved by a ‘firefighter’. I regret the loss of whimsy, but times change and what we lose in gently wry humour we gain in the next generation growing up to be not quite so rigidly sociosexually codified and casually racist as the one before, I guess. Good work, Lowly Worm and pals. Now if you could just take out that equally 1950s sense of optimism and can-do that also infuses Scarry’s anthropomorphic world and replace it with a more cautious, fearful sense that everything is about to fall apart, you will have a true reflection of the modern age and our children need not be perplexed or unsettled by the cheery faces on every page.
Or, of course, they can simply turn to Raymond Briggs, the man that gave the world Fungus, conscientious but dispirited bogeyman, a snowman that comes thrillingly alive but eventually melts away despite the magic and a grumpy Father Christmas. They all made a terrible kind of sense. Who said bogeymen had to be happy in their work? Snowmen melt. That is their nature, alive or not. And why on earth, when you thought about it, wouldn’t Father Christmas be grumpy? All that work, crammed into such an absurdly short space of time. The loneliness of the rest of the year, never able to share your secret or talk about your work with others. And the awful expectation of cheerfulness. Briggs’ sensibility was once described as Philip Larkin meets Hogarth, and it was one I warmed to immediately. It didn’t exactly introduce me to the concept of misanthropy but it gave form to the inchoate stirring in my own breast, an embryonic feeling that Other People were not a welcome addition to life but an energy-sapping intrusion into it.
I count myself very lucky to have got Raymond Briggs under my belt so young. I was about to start school. This is not a good time for a misanthropic, introvert bookworm. To deal with it I would need all the help from similarly tortured souls I could get.
School
My mother took me down to the big Victorian building, ten minutes’ walk from home, 200 or so away from the library (and built the year after it, finishing off the estate nicely), on my first day. Thirty-three of us were decanted into a single, separate classroom in the playground. It was a perfectly square, squat building with sides made almost entirely of huge glass windows which had then been spread with a thin layer of concrete to well over head height – an early health and safety measure, I presume. I like to imagine a world-weary teacher coming down with a mug of tea from the staffroom just as the architect finished his proud first circuit round the completed cube and saying to him: ‘Floor-to-ceiling plate glass housing three dozen mixed infants? Nice going, you modernist tit.’
I waved my mother off in relatively sanguine mood. I could read. I was keen to learn to write, and willing to have a crack at sums if need be. What else was there?
At half-three Mum picked me up. I staggered brokenly down the steps. What, she asked, with interest if not concern, was the matter? It was hard to put into words, but the writer Florence King managed it in her (scabrous, hilarious) autobiography Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. ‘Until I began school,’ she wrote, ‘I hadn’t realised I was a child. I thought I was just short.’
It was as new and terrible a revelation to me as it had been to her. My parents treated me and my sister as miniature adults – which is to say, they let us be ourselves. Not in a hippy way (I think my mother once bought some cheesecloth but in all other respects the Age of Aquarius passed my parents by) but in the old-fashioned way, born more of polite intergenerational disinterest than anything else. As a family we practised a sort of non-rugged individualism. We were thoroughly schooled in manners, ignored if we cried (absent free-flowing wounds or splintered bones), intimidated into a healthy respect for our elders, and if you wanted to ‘express yourself’ via any medium other than grammatically sound conversation held at a reasonable volume you were best advised to try it elsewhere.
They didn’t see it as their job to intrude much on our actual selves or require us to pretend to be anything we were not. My sister is energetic, practical, gregarious, a born manager of others and as a child – at least before the computer arrived – most liked to spend her time building Lego behind the sofa, bringing in friends for company/quasi-military campaigns to annex the rest of the sitting room, or whenever there was a tricky engineering problem with the scale model of Porton Down she was building that she couldn’t solve alone. She was left, largely, to get on with that. I was bookish, inert, unsociable and could generally be found wherever you’d seen me eight hours ago. And I was left, largely, to get on with that. Sure, people wanted you to be tidier, not drop crumbs, be more sensible about where you plonked yourself to read for eight hours and would occasionally push you outside for some sunshine before your bones started to soften and that sort of thing, but these were just superficial adjustments to extrinsic house rules. You were not being asked for radical personality change. You could be yourself.
At school and out in the wider world things were different. Over the next six months in that cuboid, concreted pressure cooker I would discover that much, in fact, was expected of little girls. They should be polite, charming and lively, interested in everyone and everything and not afraid to show it. And, from a grotesquely early age, coquettish. If you were naturally bookish and showing early signs of being good at exams, you had to compensate for that by aping all the feminine graces you could even more intensely. As the novelist Henry Adams told his studious wife Marian, whom he felt didn’t own enough gowns – ‘Those who study Greek must take care of their dress.’ At five I was largely studying the difference between upper- and lower-case letters, but in my spare moments I was already having to contemplate tearing down my entire personality and starting again from scratch.
It seemed like a lot of work and I am absolutely sure that Raymond Briggs’ Father Christmas and Fungus the Bogeyman both aided me in my deliberations in the weeks, months and years to come. The outcome of which was that I decided I wouldn’t fucking bother. Passive resistance became my watchword. I would nod and say yes I had seen a TV programme, liked someone’s shoes, was looking forward to the infant school disco, fancied the fanciable boy but saw what others saw in the less fanciable one and then discreetly withdraw from the conversation before anyone could press me for details. I would memorise phrases people used about sports or personalities or pop songs I knew nothing about so
that I could drop them in at apposite moments to maintain a protective veneer of common knowledge. It was tiring, but not as tiring as either actively resisting everyone’s urgings to giggle and skip and run about and grow my hair and tilt my head and laugh and all the endless rest of it, and not nearly as tiring as giving in and actually doing it.
This is an important step in the evolution of the bookworm. Until then, you’ve just been a soft, larval mass of love for books and reading. Now, through repeated exposure to Other People you begin to acquire a carapace that will both protect and alienate you from them. I don’t say a cocoon or chrysalis. That would – as you know already from your Eric Carle – imply that there’s going to be a process of magnificent transformation. There isn’t. There’s just going to be more of the same. It’s bookworm, not bookbutterfly. This is your life now. It’s just your good or bad luck that this is the only way you’re ever going to be happy.
You will know the true bookworm, by the way, by its response to another of Raymond Briggs’ most famous books, When the Wind Blows, the story of retired Hilda and Jim Bloggs living through a nuclear attack on Britain and gradually succumbing to radiation sickness afterwards.
The greater part of the bookworm’s young mind will, of course, be consumed by the horrors therein and need to talk it through many times with whichever parent is best suited to the task. I knew where I should head. My dad was good for good things. But nuclear war? That was Mum’s department. I expressed concern that a door propped up against a wall might not be adequate protection against radioactive fallout. ‘If I put it up,’ she replied, ‘it will be.’ I was wholly reassured.
But part of the bookworm’s brain – the same part that will read Papillon twenty years later and not really get it, because it doesn’t immediately understand that solitary confinement is meant to be a punishment – will quietly consider that, given enough time to make proper arrangements for her own survival, a world suddenly purged via one sky-melting blast of the scourge of humanity has much to recommend it, and face the likelihood of nuclear holocaust within its lifetime with no little interest and almost perfect equanimity. As long as there are enough books in the bunker,fn2 how bad can it really be?
3
Now I am Six
Plop
I HAVE ENVIED my sister many things over the years. At this point, it was her cuteness, so much greater than my own. Partly, I knew, this was simply because she was younger, and that much I was willing to resign myself to. I must have had my moment in the sun at the same age, I figured, even if it was one too early to remember. But she also had a lovely, open face and fizzing energy that I lacked – and knew I would always lack – that drew people, already smiling, towards her. This I found harder to reconcile myself to.
I found a certain solace in the My Naughty Little Sister books by Dorothy Edwards.
These are written (for readers of about six or seven, just about the time younger siblings are really starting to encroach on your citadel) from the point of view of a responsible, long-suffering but essentially kind and generous-spirited older sister who recounts the crimes and misdemeanours of her – yes, you’ve guessed it – naughty but equally good-hearted little sister and her occasional accomplice Bad Harry, a child with a capacity for consuming stolen trifle that almost equals the little sister’s own.
The stories’ settings are quaintly endearing now. Written more than fifty years ago, they are set in a world of taffy pulling, Bonfire puddings, doctors with Gladstone bags, party frocks that must be kept too clean for fun, and red ink bottles (for faking chickenpox spots), all illustrated by the ever-wonderful Shirley Hughes’ warm, untidy drawings. But the themes are timeless – the charms and frustrations of having a younger child whose imagination periodically runs away with her and must be explained to the neighbours (yes, she picked your flowers but only because tulips make such very good pretend cups for pretend tea when you are a pretend lady out shopping in the lane), the fascination with a being who does not yet comprehend consequences, and the love for the incorrigible little bugger that infuses all.
My own sister wasn’t naughty – though, dear God, she liked her own way – but Edwards’ tales showed me that you simply couldn’t fight nature. Older and quieter was always going to lose to younger and livelier, even when the latter was bent on destruction. The older sister was telling the story and even then the younger was the star of the show. Such was the natural order of things. It helped – in an odd and roundabout way, but it helped.
Still, sibling rivalry can come rushing back to you at odd, unguarded moments.
A few years ago I mentioned to my sister that I was planning to visit Penshurst Place in Kent for the first time. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Dad and I went there once, when I was little.’
‘Without me?!’ I said, ever alert to potential acts of favouritism and not about to let an intervening three decades dampen my outrage.
‘Yes, of course,’ she said, looking baffled. ‘We used to go every weekend.’
‘To Penshurst Place?’ I said, equally baffled in my turn. My sister is not known for a love of either Philip Sidney, Renaissance poetry or Elizabethan architecture. She likes computers, dogs and Mythbusters on the Discovery channel.
‘No, turd,’ she said – she has never quite shown me the full measure of respect I feel is due to elder sisters – ‘different places, on the Mangan Magical Mystery Tour.’
It transpired that she and Dad used to set off in the car every Saturday and take it in turns to choose whether to go left or right at each junction and see where they ended up.
‘And where was I?’ I asked.
‘Where do you think you were?’ she said. ‘You were at home. Reading. We told you we were going every time and you never broke eye contact with your stupid books. Sometimes you’d wave goodbye as you turned a page.’
I have wracked my brains, but I truly do not remember them going. I would question her veracity but a) I’m scared of her, and b) there’s no point. They surely went and I as surely didn’t notice. Such was the hold of a book back then. The intensity of childhood reading, the instant and complete absorption in a book – a good book, a bad book, in any kind of book – is something I would give much to recapture.
And it all began with Plop. He was the hero of the very first book I remember being wrenched out of my hands by a bellowing mother as she marched me towards a plate of burnt fish fingers and chips – The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark by Jill Tomlinson. It had been published only about ten years earlier, in 1968, but it hasn’t been out of print since and is now (God, I am so old) an acknowledged classic for young readers. Modern folk can get it in heavily illustrated picture book, audio and abridged board book form as well as the original paperback that was my delight.
Tomlinson’s book is the story of a baby barn owl called Plop (and have you ever come across a more perfectly appropriate name for a character? What else could a fat and fluffy baby owl with ‘a beautiful heart-shaped ruff … enormous, round eyes … and very knackety knees’ possibly be called?) who suffers from the eponymous affliction. In vain does his mother explain to him that he is a night bird. ‘Nocturnal,’ said Dad, who though no longer storyteller-in-chief maintained his vital role of explicator and synonym supplier. He would be constructively dismissed the day I found out what a thesaurus was. I still feel bad about that.
Anyway. Plop wants to be a day bird. ‘You are what you are,’ says Mrs Barn Owl firmly. ‘Yes, I know,’ agrees Plop. ‘And what I are is afraid of the dark.’ I read this now to my son and it makes me howl with laughter, though I don’t remember laughing then. Perhaps reading was too serious a business still, or perhaps I just didn’t know enough about grammar to appreciate the joke. But I loved it all, nevertheless. In the course of seven beguiling chapters, including ‘Dark is Exciting’ (in which Plop sees fireworks for the first time), ‘Dark is Necessary’ (where he meets a little girl who explains to him about Father Christmas) and ‘Dark is Wonderful’ (when he meets an astr
onomer who identifies the stars for him), Plop gradually loses his fear and eventually comes to feel that Dark is Super.
I was careful of my books – I was careful of everything; mud turtles are like that – but that late-1970s copy of Plop’s adventures is undeniably battered. It became a fiercely private possession and reading – and re-reading and re-reading and re-reading – an intensely personal experience.
It was with The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark that I truly fell in love with the act of reading itself. I had adored being read to, enjoyed the stories, but the ability to take down a book off a shelf, open it up and translate it into words and sounds and pictures in my head, to start that film rolling all by myself and keep it going as long as I pleased (or at least until the next meal, bedtime or other idiotically unavoidable marker of time’s relentless passage in the real world was announced) – well, that was happiness of a different order. When I was reading, the outside world fell away completely and it required the application of physical force to break my concentration. Though my mother, as one for whom fiction could never assume any kind of reality, never believed me (any more than she would believe in the years to come that her children were hungry, thirsty or tired outside the appointed hours) I never deliberately ignored her calls to come to lunch or dinner or to start cleaning my teeth and get ready for bed. Like every bookworm before and since, I simply and genuinely didn’t hear them. Wherever I was with a book – on the sofa, on my bed, on the loo, in the back seat of the car – I was always utterly elsewhere.