Bookworm Page 7
Adults tend to forget – or perhaps never appreciated in the first place if lifelong non-readers themselves – what a vital part of the process rereading is for children. As adults, rereading seems like backtracking at best, self-indulgence at worst. Free time is such a scarce resource that we feel we should be using it only on new things.
But for children, rereading is absolutely necessary. The act of reading is itself still new. A lot of energy is still going into (not so) simple decoding of words and the assimilation of meaning. Only then do you get to enjoy the plot – to begin to get lost in the story. And only after you are familiar with the plot are you free to enjoy, mull over, break down and digest all the rest. The beauty of a book is that it remains the same for as long as you need it. It’s like being able to ask a teacher or parent to repeat again and again some piece of information or point of fact you haven’t understood with the absolute security of knowing that he/she will do so infinitely. You can’t wear out a book’s patience.
And for a child there is so much information in a book, so much work to be done within and without. You can identify with the main or peripheral character (or parts of them all). You can enjoy the vicarious satisfaction of their adventures and rewards. You also have a role to play as interested onlooker, able to observe and evaluate participants’ reactions to events and to each other with a greater detachment, and consequent clarity sometimes, than they can. You are learning about people, about relationships, about the variety of responses available to them and in many more situations and circumstances (and at a much faster clip) than one single real life permits. Each book is a world entire. You’re going to have to take more than one pass at it.
What you lose in suspense and excitement on rereading is counterbalanced by a greater depth of knowledge and an almost tangibly increasing mastery over the world. I was not frightened of the dark like Plop. But now I knew that some people could be. This was useful. I could be more sympathetic to people who suffered from the same affliction in the real world, and I could also dimly and in a more complicated way understand why some people might find it difficult to understand fears I had that they did not share. The philosopher and psychologist Riccardo Manzotti describes the process of reading and rereading as creating both locks and the keys with which to open them; it shows you an area of life you didn’t even know was there and, almost simultaneously, starts to give you the tools with which to decipher it.
‘There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristram Shandy or Shakespeare’s Sonnets,’ C. S. Lewis once wrote. ‘But what can you do with a man who says he “has read” them, meaning he has read them once and thinks that this settles the matter?’ Exactly. The more you read, the more locks and keys you have. Rereading keeps you oiled and working smoothly, the better to let you access yourself and others for the rest of your life.
I don’t mean to place too much of a burden on Plop’s tiny feathered shoulders, but if we were able some day to trace back a person’s development of kindness, toleration or compassion, or their willingness to entertain an alternative point of view, or lifestyle or decision – how much of it all wouldn’t come back to a myriad such tiny moments as learning that others can be afraid of the dark? In 1932, the French scholar and admirable optimist Paul Hazard wrote a book called Les Livres, Les Enfants et Les Hommes in which he reckoned children would learn about each other through books and that eventually this would end conflict. So far at least it hasn’t quite worked out like that, but the point he was making – that as soon as you begin to read, you begin to cultivate empathy, if only at first in the very smallest of ways – stands.
This is why it slightly frustrates me that my son has never really had a favourite book. Even when he was very young and we were reading picture books to him, he never demanded the same one night after night, and he hasn’t become impassioned about any others since. I imagine his mind littered with half-formed locks, and bent, useless keys. There is hope for a boy who has never read The Gruffalo or Come Away From the Water, Shirley – but what can you do with one who has listened to them a handful of times and then buggered off to his Tonka trucks and thinks that settles the matter? Ah well. We watch, keep trying new books, and wait.
Teddy Robinson and Mildred Hubble
My dad was still working long hours during the week, and in recompense had started coming home with a new book for five-year-old me every Friday. I’m sure he brought Emily something too. A ratchet spanner set or a carburettor, perhaps, or maybe a jar of depleted uranium depending on the project she was working on behind the sofa at the time. I don’t know. I was reading. Bliss it was to be alive every Saturday morning, when I would come down and find a shiny, pristine paperback on the breakfast table by my cereal bowl. Thus was Plop joined on his shelf by several biographical volumes about the life of ‘a nice, big, comfortable teddy bear with light brown fur and kind brown eyes’, owned by a little girl called Deborah and named Teddy Robinson.
When I picked them up again a year ago to read to Alexander, I remembered them simply as delightfully domestic micro-adventures about a bear who accompanies his owner on a bus, goes with her to hospital or accidentally stays out all night in the garden that managed both to thrill and soothe me. But it turns out that in later life, like Plop, Teddy R is hilarious too. In one story he performs magic for an audience that includes a noisy toy spotted dog who has seen it all before. ‘“The marble’s gone under the other bowl, the white one. That’s not a new trick!”’ I recounted to Alexander one evening. ‘Teddy Robinson waited, looking mysterious and important. Deborah lifted up the white bowl. There was nothing there. Then she lifted up the red bowl. There was the marble! “You see,” said Teddy Robinson, “it IS a new trick.”’ I paused. ‘It’s the lack of exclamation point at the end there that gives it its true genius,’ I explained. ‘Stop talking, more story,’ Alexander instructed succinctly. ‘Fair enough,’ I said, turning to Teddy Robinson Goes to the Fair. ‘But thirty years from now, this stuff is going to slay you.’fn1
More Fridays passed and more delights accumulated on my top shelf. Amongst them was a purple-covered volume with a black silhouette of a girl with a broomstick, pointy hat and cauldron on the front. She was The Worst Witch.
Long before J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and Hogwarts, there was Jill Murphy, Mildred Hubble and Miss Cackle’s Academy. Murphy was fifteen when she first sketched the gangling girl whose adventures she would still be writing half a century later. She wrote the first story to accompany her drawings three years after that, employing her experiences of attending an Ursuline convent, whose fearsome teacher-nuns no more enjoyed or embraced their artistic, scatty pupil than Miss Hardbroom does scatty Mildred, and it was published in 1974 by a new publishing company Allison & Busby. Several older outfits had rejected it on the grounds that children would be frightened by the idea of a school for witches. Its first print run sold out within two months and it has been a bestseller ever since.
I had many favourite moments in this consistently charming book. Mildred breaking her broomstick two days into her first term and having to fly it thereafter with a giant bundle of sticky tape in the middle. Mildred accidentally turning spiteful teacher’s pet Ethel into a small pink and grey pig. Mildred being given a tabby who hates flying on the broomstick even before it gets broken and simply clings on for dear life underneath the twiggy end. (The endearing illustrations of this by the author have, incidentally, left me with a lifelong yearning for a tabby kitten of my own, which, I note ruefully, has still yet to be fulfilled even though I am now 802 years old.) And of course the climactic, triumphant enchanting by Mildred of Miss Cackle’s evil sister and her coven, who are all turned into snails after she uncovers their plot to take over the school. The whole thing fizzed with energy and invention and held me spellbound.
The book’s deeper attractions emerged over time. In the patient loyalty of Maud, the slightly older reader can see her ideal best friend. Mildred’s combination of incompetence, resi
lience and unapologetic eccentricity resonates and inspires. I have pretended to buy the umpteen sequels for nieces, nephews, godchildren and now my own child over the years but somehow they have all ended up in permanent residence on my shelves. The enchantment endures.
Mildred was soon followed by a host of other companions. Ginnie by Ted Greenwood (who took a dislike to her frizzy hair and cut it off in handfuls. I thrilled to the courageous depravity of such an action. I could never be so brave. But then I did have a mother who would have cut my own hands off if I’d tried, so maybe it was all for the best). Catherine Storr’s Lucy and Lucy Runs Away (which sparked a lifelong commitment to always having a running-away fund and a running-away bag. My first was a matter of 5p pieces in a china toadstool and Victoria Plum satchel filled with Panda Pops stashed under the bed. Now it is three ISAs and an Asos rucksack filled with cash, and I advise all women to keep a similar set of provisions handy). And then, head and shoulders above them all – yes, even those that doubled as survival manuals – there was Tottie: The Story of a Doll’s House, the first book to break my heart.
Tottie And Milly
It’s a masterpiece. First published in 1947 as simply The Doll’s House, Rumer Godden’s story concerns a family of dolls and their owners, Emily and Charlotte, who are bequeathed their great-aunt’s magnificent Victorian doll’s house after she dies. Tottie is the little ‘farthing doll’ made of wood, as old as the house itself and who used to live there years ago but who now takes care of Mr Plantagenet (a nervous doll, after years spent with other, far more careless, owners), Birdie, a flighty celluloid doll upon whose noble sacrifice the book ultimately turns, chubby boy-doll Apple, and Darner the dog, in the two-shoebox house Emily and Charlotte have made.
Within a story as beautifully and finely worked as the little tapestry chairs the dolls sit on in their lovely new home, acts of loyalty, betrayal, courage, vanity and folly play out somehow on a grand scale in their tiny rooms. The dolls’ happiness is shattered by the arrival of one of the house’s original residents. Unlike Tottie, however, she is a very grand doll, made of kid and china and clothed in lace. ‘Marchpane is a heavy, sweet, sticky stuff like almond icing,’ explains Tottie to Apple who, like me, didn’t understand the word. ‘You very quickly have enough of it. It was a good name for her.’
A new lock. A new key. Like the doors of a doll’s house swinging open to reveal all the hidden rooms inside, this sentence opened up a new space in my mind. The cleverness of this sentence, the allusiveness, the indirection – not that I knew those words either at the time – took my breath away. I read on even more furiously than before, eager for the first time not just to find out What Happened Next but to discover more of these brilliant, brilliant things that words and writers could do.
Marchpane drives a wedge between Emily, who wants to turn the whole house over to the beautiful doll and make the others her servants, and the younger Charlotte, who struggles to articulate her sense of injustice until – spoiler alert – the tragedy of Birdie’s death towards the end of the story reveals the truth. So you see, it’s not about dolls at all – it’s as neat a portrait of humanity as you could ever wish.
Soon after Tottie came another small figure, flesh and blood this time instead of wood but with almost as unvarying a wardrobe – Milly-Molly-Mandy.
Oh, Milly-Molly-Mandy. Until she came along, I didn’t know that either the countryside or the past even existed. But by the end of the first story in Joyce Lankester Brisley’s collection of tales (published in 1928) about the little girl in the nice white cottage with the thatched roof I was wholly possessed by the desire to live in both. So great was my need for fuel for this fantasy that, for the first time ever, Dad bought me the rest of the series – five whole books! Count them! Five! Whole! Books! – at once. We were on holiday, which was already happiness enough, comprising as it always did two weeks with our beloved grandma in her flat in Preston (or ‘home’ as my mother, now fifty years a resident of the capital, still calls it) eating chip butties under lowering skies and drinking deeply of the philosophy that has sustained Mangans for generations: ‘If we had some ham we could have ham and eggs, but we’ve no eggs.’ It wasn’t exactly restorative but it was fortifying. Then suddenly, in flagrant contravention of all family tradition, there they were – Milly-Molly-Mandy books in lavish excess, waiting for me in a pile on the sideboard when I woke up in the morning. I am forty-three years old as I write this, and still waiting for a moment of greater joy.
Every Milly-Molly-Mandy story is a miniature masterpiece, as clear, warm and precise as the illustrations by the author that accompanied them. They are crafted by a mind that understood the importance and the comfort of detail to young readers without ever letting it overwhelm the story. Maybe the creation of this calm, neat, ordered world was a comfort to the author too. In 1912 when Brisley was sixteen her parents had – very unusually for the time – divorced and she had been helping to support the family ever since, by illustrating Christmas cards, postcards and children’s annuals. Those illustrations were, she once said, ‘bread and margarine for a good many years’.
Milly-Molly-Mandy began life as part of a doodle of a family group done on the back of an envelope – yes, really – as Brisley was, in a struggle familiar to many writers and artists, trying to come up with ‘a speciality’ that would ‘earn something or other’. She then wrote a story to go with it. It was published in the Christian Science Monitor in 1925, followed by others, and young readers from around the world (the Christian Science Monitor was an American magazine with a wide readership) started to write in asking for more.
Milly-Molly-Mandy leads a delightful existence in a pink-and-white striped dress (red serge in winter, but the books are set in an eternal summer). Her time is largely taken up with buying eggs for Muvver and Farver (these spellings are the closest Milly-Molly-Mandy comes to subversion), stripping village-fete stalls of home-made cakes, courtesy of sixpences bestowed by munificent grandpas, fishing for minnows in the stream and having picnics in hollow tree trunks with Little Friend Susan and Billy Blunt. You could ask for literally nothing more out of life, except, possibly, another dress. She never seemed to do anything on laundry day and I suspected she had to sit naked on an upturned bucket until her single frock was dry again, which seemed a waste of a day’s gentle village adventuring. Who bought Grandma’s skeins of wool then?
Ah – ‘skein’. This was my first meeting with the word. It looked strange then and it looks strange now. But I stomped off to ask Dad what it meant and so bent it to my will. It has not come in particularly useful since, but if you make usefulness your metric for life it will not be much of a life. I know this because in all fields other than words it is my metric, and I have had no life at all.
But words I seized on, always, gloating over new acquisitions like Silas Marner over his chestful of gold coins. I remember so many of our first meetings.
I learned ‘Lumme!’ from The Wombles, upon which there has been even less call in the subsequent 30 years than there has been on ‘skein’.
Knowing what ‘blueing’ was came from doing laundry with a well-intentioned Ramona in one of Beverly Cleary’s ebullient books. Again, this has not been too useful in real – pah! – life but proved an invaluable little nugget of knowledge when my passion for historical fiction and autobiographies of people who had lived in the ancient days of the 30s and 40s hit a few years later.
The Phantom Tollbooth – well, where to begin? Amongst a billion other gifts it gave me ‘dodecahedron’, ‘din’ (via the Awful Dynne, Dr Kakophonus A Dischord’s genie assistant, whose grandfather the Terrible Raouw died in the Silence Epidemic). ‘Humbug’ as something other than a sweet (which I’d learned about in Enid Blyton). The hitherto unknown ‘piccolo’ and the ‘crooking’ of a finger arrived in the very same sentence. As you might expect from a book set largely in a city called Dictionopolis, it was a treasure trove.
‘Peculiar’ in the sense of ‘particular’ �
� that one came from Little Women (as would the discovery of ‘Atalanta’ a few chapters on). Jo had a peculiar sense of something that didn’t seem at all strange to me, so I applied again to Dad for further elucidation and he explained that words can change their meanings over time. Well! Who knew? [Many years later this single tiny instant gave me a small but appreciable and much appreciated headstart in understanding at least the part about semantic shift when it came to studying for my linguistics paper at university.] It also caused Dad to lead me for the first time to the dictionary, where I found that some kind person had charted its evolution in minute detail for my delectation. I would discover similar kindness in the ‘Ms’ for marchpane.
Later he showed me that the family dictionary could also teach me the correct pronunciation of ‘skein’ and ‘lumme’ and – a moment’s further investigation soon revealed, ALL OTHER WORDS TOO. It could even unpack the likes of ‘dodecahedron’ for you. ‘Dodeca’ – twelve, because ‘do’ and ‘deca’ mean two and ten – ‘hedron’ giving it faces. I don’t think I’ll ever get over the amazement of realising that a word could contain such multitudes and explain its own meaning to you as it went about its daily business.
If memory serves, I think the only time the dictionary failed me was with ‘Atalanta’ (oh, and on the occasion of William Brown’s swaggering in to the local sweetshop with a whole shilling to spend and ‘the air of a Rothschild’), causing me to realise that proper nouns are, of course, the mighty tome’s Achilles’ heel. But it turned out that there were variants on the form. Classical dictionaries – Atalanta was a runner, apparently – yielded endless delights (though alas, no Rothschilds. I had to return to Dad for that) including a very useful story about Achilles and his heel.