Bookworm Read online

  These, then, are the moments I adduce as evidence of the value and wonder of reading, when people ask me (as they often used to when I was younger, and still, though less frequently now that time and inclination have enabled me to surround myself with more likeminded souls, do) why I spent – and spend – so long curled up with a book. It’s not the whole story, of course, but it’s a usefully tangible part if you’re preaching to the unconverted.

  Reading Milly-Molly-Mandy was a joy that transformed into an exquisite torture when I realised that although The Countryside did still exist (somewhere – I didn’t find out where until I was in my twenties and got a boyfriend who came from Kent. Apparently it was thirty minutes south of Catford the whole time. Who knew?fn2), the world in which these tiny, domestic non-adventures were set had already vanished. I would never live there, never buy that skein of wool for Grandma or wait for potatoes to bake in the village bonfire on Guy Fawkes Night. It all seemed deeply unfair. It was the first time a reading experience became infused with yearning – a lost art that makes most things sweeter. Milly-Molly-Mandy is proof that dictionary definitions lie. You can be nostalgic for a time you never knew.

  But maybe I was lucky. At least it was a way of life still culturally comprehensible to me. I’m about to start reading them to my son and there is every chance that he will turn a bewildered gaze upon me, mutely mystified by references to village post offices, cottages unsold to developers, and hollow tree trunks that haven’t been turned into branches of Tesco Express. He may, in an age that measures attention spans in nanoseconds, start writhing in frustration before we are even halfway through the chapter devoted to spending a penny on mustard and cress seeds or making a miniature garden in a china bowl.

  I think there’s reason to hope not. I think the power of Milly-Molly-Mandy to comfort and compel will endure. The stories are simple, not stupid. They provide succour, not sentimentality. And if they spark a flicker of yearning within a child for a lost world, you can always point out that they only have to turn back to the first page for it to live again. That is what books are for.

  It was maybe what the country as a whole was using Milly-Molly-Mandy for at the time. What better or more vital balm could there be for a wounded and shell-shocked nation? Like her post-World War One contemporaries Winnie the Pooh and Doctor Dolittle (the latter was based on illustrated letters the author Hugh Lofting sent to his sons from the trenches of the Great War imagining that the horses there could talk when, he said later, the truth was either too awful or too dull for them to bear), the little girl in the striped dress offered sanctuary, a quiet, idealised rural retreat from horror. It is almost a defining feature of children’s books, of course (especially for younger readers and especially before very recent years), that they offer a vision of perfect childhood that rarely exists in real life. But in times of need they are perhaps taken more fully into our collective hearts. Maybe this is why Milly-Molly-Mandy has survived so well while Joyce Lankester Brisley’s other creations have fallen by the wayside. Bunchy and Marigold, created in the 1930s, are not a million miles from Millicent Margaret Amanda as characters but their adventures have magical elements (Marigold’s godmother warns her not to go beyond the gate, where her enchantments will not work), while Adventures of Purl and Plain concerned dolls. None offers quite the solace or redemption of Milly-Molly-Mandy in her perfected but real-world idyll. Readers dearly wanted and needed an enchantment that didn’t end at the gate.

  I feel now that I should not have clung with such fierce insistence to books that recreated – with minor variations in time and form – the predictable, familiar and safe world I knew. I had undergone not a whit of upheaval in my own life, and I should have had plenty of capacity to cope with adventures and upheaval in imagined lands. I was the luckiest child I knew. We had a nice house (three bedrooms, terraced, in Catford. When I went to sixth form in the moneyed neighbouring borough of Bromley people would look at me as if I’d made it out of 1970s Detroit, but really, it was fine), enough money and my parents were still together. At school, we had some foster children – who seemed to arrive each day already running on empty but still expected to put in a full day’s civilised behaviour and absorb six hours of teaching – and people’s parents had begun to divorce. These days, I hope, things are handled better but back then the protocol seemed to be that parents (drawn, angry-looking fathers and tear-stained mothers) would come into the classroom, mutter a few words to the teacher – who would nod and make a note in the register – and then, walking stiffly and without touching each other, leave. The teacher would treat the quietly devastated child with brisk sympathy for the rest of the day and resume normal service thereafter.

  There is nothing stranger than the recent past.

  It’s possible that this awareness that my lovely life was the exception rather than the rule prompted me to try and shore it up with lovely safe stories about lovely safe families doing lovely safe things. More likely, I think, it was simply that the reactionary force, which is present in every child for sound evolutionary reasons (when you are the weakest, most vulnerable member of your tribe, any change to a currently survivable status quo is always a threat), was simply strong in me.

  ‘It’s because you were a midget,’ says my sister, when I make the mistake of musing upon this out loud in her hearing. So there’s that possibility too.

  I was able to remain comfortable and unchallenged because my tastes were so well served. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, publishers had not yet fully embraced the notion of looking outside or representing anything other than traditional (white, Christian, able-bodied, straight and so on) middle-class children. Children’s literature emerged originally in response to the rise of the new, and newly affluent, Victorian bourgeoisie, who were eager to spend the money the Industrial Revolution was making for them on improving and entertaining books for their children and it was shaped by their tastes from the beginning. Efforts were starting to be made to break this historical stranglehold with books for older children, and I would reap some of the fruits of these by the time I was ready for them, but nothing much had yet filtered through to the younger market. I carried on buffing my mud-turtle shell to a high shine. Mostly in the school library.

  The School Carousel

  A year or so on from my pedagogic/social baptism of fire, school was proving to have some redeeming features. It was still full of children but it also had old Beano annuals in a box in the assembly hall. Look and Learn and Wordy were introducing me to various orthographical delights. I had a special card that had my name on it in big black letters with little red arrows showing me which way the pen should go so I would never forget again. And there was, in half a classroom set aside for the purpose, a library. There, on the carpeted area reserved for the very youngest infants, I found a lot of books about caterpillars that weren’t a patch on Eric Carle’s, a lot of books about elephants that weren’t a patch on Sugarpink Rose, and a lot of books about dogs that weren’t a patch on Frank Muir’s What-a-Mess. Still, they were all better than going out into the playground and playing and so I stayed there as much as I could. Some of the dinner ladies let me (thanks, Mrs Hill) and some didn’t (thanks, Mrs Bananaface. You had a face like a banana, I hope you know).

  As you got older and more sophisticated – and I was thinking about turning six by this stage – you were allowed to move beyond the carpeted area, towards the shelves where the proper books were kept. That was where I found Allen and Janet Ahlberg’s perennially charming Happy Families series and worked my way happily through the stories of Master Bun the Bakers’ Boy, Mrs Wobble the Waitress, Mr Tick the Teacher, Mr Cosmo the Conjuror et al., and longed to visit them in their cartoonish yet cosy little houses in their cosy little town where everything was suffused with the Ahlbergs’ trademark warmth. Then there was a run of Antelope books, a series of small hardbacks aimed at readers just about happy to be left alone with a chapter book. They were short enough that you could finish them but long eno
ugh that you still felt a sense of achievement when you did, and my favourite was Adventuring with Brindle. It was a riveting story about a boy who runs away from home with his Great Dane Brindle, when he fears she is about to be sent away. I took it out so many times I was eventually forbidden to have it any more. I wept. In the early 2000s I found a second-hand edition on the Internet and bought it – my own copy at last! It was stupidly expensive, but you can’t put a price on justice.

  Finally, there was Maggie Gumption by Margaret Barry. It was another book about dolls in a doll’s house, but an altogether simpler, more rambunctious affair than Godden’s tour de force. Maggie was a periodically furious plain wooden doll who stomped about her untidy house eating sago pudding and hoping that her mimsy, snobby neighbour Pinky Dars (which may be the best name in all of literature, incidentally), or indeed anyone else, wouldn’t come round. I liked her very much.

  The paperback carousels in the school library also yielded such delights as Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown, and Henry and Ribsy by Beverly Cleary – both American authors, which makes me hope that the books turned up in a care package from some former pupil who’d made it big in the States, along with nylons for the teachers and cigarettes for the headmaster (‘Who knew we’d ever hear from little Kevin Glaxosmithkline again!’) but which I sadly suspect is no more than coincidence.

  Flat Stanley is the tale of Stanley Lambchop whose giant bedroom pinboard falls on him during the night, rendering him completely – you may be ahead of me here – flat. It is, like a secret garden, or a magical chocolate factory, or a race of tiny people living under the floorboards, the kind of perfect, simple, fertile conceit that every author longs to come up with and which delights every reader. And, once again, in later years it turns out to be hilarious. ‘How do you feel?’ Doctor Dan asks the newly squashed Stanley. ‘Sort of tickly for a while after I got up,’ says the patient. ‘But fine now.’ ‘Well, that’s mostly how it is with these cases,’ replies the doctor.

  Henry and Ribsy is a collection of stories about a boy called Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy, a stray whom he acquires in the first chapter. This was my introduction to Beverly Cleary’s books – appropriately enough, since writing it had been her introduction to authorship too. She wrote it in 1949, with the boys she had met ten years ago as a children’s librarian in mind. They had been deposited with her by their school and told to find books they liked in order to write a report on them later. It couldn’t be done. There were simply no books catering to that market. She empathised particularly with them because she too had been a reluctant reader as a child. At first this had been because of a heavy-handed approach to its teaching at home and school. ‘I wept at home while my puzzled mother tried to drill me on the dreaded word charts,’ she remembers in her autobiography A Girl from Yamhill. ‘By second grade I was able to plod through my reader a step or two ahead of disgrace’. Then, once the ability kicked in and she started ploughing her way through the children’s side of her branch library, her reluctance grew again because she became bored and critical of the books on offer. ‘Why couldn’t authors write about the sort of boys and girls who lived on my block? Plain, ordinary boys and girls I called them when I was a child. Why couldn’t authors skip all that tiresome description and write books in which something happened on every page? Why couldn’t they make their stories funny?’

  The childhood thought was father to all Cleary’s books. They all centre round ordinary children – Henry, his friend Beezus and her younger sister Ramona, a peripheral character in the early books but soon to star in a series of her own – having small, realistic adventures in the suburban streets of Portland, Oregon, where Cleary herself had grown up after leaving the farm in Yamhill at the age of six. Cleary’s ear for naturalistic dialogue and succinct and heartfelt evocations of childhood frustrations, passions and arguments made every page so clear and fresh and lively that there were times when I honestly believed I was living on Klickitat Street.

  When news of my latest discovery reached Dad’s ears, he started furnishing me with something even better – that Ramona series. She is four when we first meet her, in Beezus and Ramona, wiping her paint-smeared hands on the neighbour’s cat in Klickitat Street, slowly learning to negotiate the monkey bars in the park and the maddening world of school and grown-ups, and she is ten (or ‘zeroteenth’ as she dubs it in order to secure the respect she feels moving into double figures demands) by the time we leave her – monkey bars mastered, wider world semi-conquered – in Ramona’s World.

  The eponymous heroine has ‘brown eyes, brown hair and no cavities’. Cleary did indeed skip all tiresome description, leaving only good stuff behind. A chapter in Ramona and Her Mother contains the most glorious account of what it feels like to squeeze an entire (large economy-size) tube of toothpaste into the sink. ‘How fat and smooth it felt in her hand … She squeezed the tube the way she had been told she must never squeeze it, right in the middle. White paste shot out faster than she had expected.’ It continues for another whole page as Ramona fully relieves her frustrations at not being able to sew slacks (‘American for trousers,’ explained Dad, and into my mental file it went) for her favourite soft toy. I don’t think I read anything quite as satisfying again until I was twenty and Dr Iannis works that pea out of the old man’s ear in Captain Correlli’s Mandolin.

  One typically compact descriptive line in another story captivated me for hours – ‘Ramona chewed a nail as painful as her thoughts.’ I still don’t quite know what this technically is – it seems to hover at the border between simile and zeugma – but I loved this yoking together of words to make something entertainingly more than the sum of their parts. It was of the same order of linguistic magic as Marchpane and her metaphorical powers and dazzled me accordingly.

  But if I loved the writing, I loved Ramona more. I loved her stubbornness, her inexhaustible curiosity, the noise she made, the exuberant fun she had and the space she unapologetically took up. I knew I would never be able to emulate it, but reading about her was like running through a strong, fresh breeze. She was also an antidote to the girls at school who were changing all around me and making me more and more uncomfortable. They had started wearing strappy sandals instead of solid school shoes. Looking out from under lowered lashes instead of directly into boys’ faces. No longer throwing their hands up in class. Pretending they couldn’t do sums. Unwritten rules were changing fast, and from what little I could gather as they flashed past me, they were an exercise in humiliation. I was confused, yet fascinated and in some strange way envious, although I didn’t yet know what I was envying. It turned out to be embryonic arts that would one day make those who had mastered them sexually attractive. Ah well. Ramona’s spirit ran counter to it all. She hadn’t got the memo either, and still preferred to wear trousers, still threw herself at the monkey bars and still sported the resulting scabs on her knees with pride.

  But the greatest thing about Ramona was that unlike Milly-Molly-Mandy – though I mean this as no criticism of my cotton-frocked beloved – she had an inner life. Between Milly-Molly-Mandy’s 1920s origin and Ramona’s birth in 1955 psychology had been invented and Cleary’s great talent was to make Ramona not just lively, but recognisably alive. She came from a happy family but still burned with a need for as much love and attention as they could possibly spare. She was boisterous but never meant to be naughty – her thoughts and motivations simply worked to a purer logic than those outside could be counted on to understand. Thus on her first day of kindergarten she produces a delicate snore at resting time – not to be a pest, as the teacher assumes, but to try and prove what a good rester she is. And she was, as every child is, frequently the victim of simple misunderstanding. The injustice of the telling-off she gets when she refuses to move from her seat (because Miss Binney does not realise that she told Ramona to sit there ‘for the present’ and Ramona doesn’t want to lose her chance of a gift), is a moment that will resonate with children forever. It was good to know that the
re was no such thing as perfect understanding in the world for anyone. You hear a lot about books expanding the mind – less gets said about its occasional usefulness in battering your expectations of life down to manageable proportions. But it really ought to be credited with both. High hopes are the thief of time, and contentment.

  Ladybirds

  There was one other very important carousel in the school library. It was full of hardbacks, yet they were the size of paperbacks and even slimmer. I had a couple at home but they were learning-to-read books about Peter and Jane that were now in use with my sister. These were different. They seemed to be about everything. There was one about computers. One about a man called John Wesley. One about knitting. These I did not go a bundle on. The one about John Wesley in particular haunted me. It seemed to have more words per page than was physically possible. And although I could literally read them all – ‘Me-th-od-is-m’ – I could not make sense of them. I could not hold the sentences in my mind. By the time I got to the end of one, the beginning had vanished like one of those tracing games where you press down with a stylus and then lift the top sheet to erase everything and start again. Or like shaking an Etch A Sketch, if you come from a home slightly better stocked with basic contemporary entertainments.

  Better – much better, put-in-a-request-to-the-parents better – were the ones full of princes (in funny trousers), princesses (in lovely gowns), flaxen/ebony-haired children, brave hens, foolish chickens, lively gingerbread men and talking pancakes, who variously became embroiled with wicked witches, evil stepmothers bearing poisoned apples, furious goblins, menacing bears, hungry villages, wily foxes, murderous wolves and enchanted spinning wheels against a backdrop of dark woods, shining castles, thickets of thorns and doorless towers.