Bookworm Read online

  They were of course Ladybirds, the little books that emerged over seventy years ago at Wills & Hepworth, a small printing firm in Loughborough, and swiftly achieved iconic status. To keep their presses rolling during the war, the firm devised a storybook for children that could be printed on just one sheet of paper. When one of their employees, Douglas Keen – a committed educationalist and believer in self-improvement – came back from the war he saw the format’s potential, sat down at his kitchen table and laid out the first factual Ladybird, about birds. It was the beginning of the longest series – Nature – Ladybird would run, and the genesis of the brand as we know it.

  The measure of the love and esteem in which the multiple series that eventually made up Ladybird’s output were held can be seen in the number of letters that appeared in various newspapers after Douglas Keen’s death in 2008. One correspondent remembered checking out the Ladybird Napoleon Bonaparte from the library to get him through his history A level. A minister wrote to the Guardian to say he still dishes out copies of – ahem – the Ladybird John Wesley as the perfect primer for anyone interested in Methodism. To which I can only say, God be with you. I tried again recently and still couldn’t get through it. Though this time possibly because my brain shut down as a protective measure after reading that he was one of nineteen children. Imagine giving birth nineteen times. Hundreds of years before epidurals, pethidine or anything other than a ‘Just say another prayer, Susanna, if it’s starting to sting!’ That’s one of the few things more exhausting and painful than ploughing through a primer on Methodism.

  Another person wrote in to say that the Ladybird Book of Printing Processes had been required reading on his design course, and the one about English spelling and grammar went on at least one university lecturer’s reading list for freshers. And the rumour persists that the Ministry of Defence put in a covert order for copies of The Computer: How it Works – to be delivered in special plain covers – when it came out in the 1970s.

  The application to my parents for more of these delicious, tiny books that felt so right in childish hands yielded over subsequent weeks and months the publishers’ gracefully filleted versions of Bible stories, Aesop’s Fables and, a touch more fancifully, the adventures of the Garden Gang, a series of short stories (really short – two per Ladybird) about Percival Pea, Bertie Brussel Sprout, Colin Cucumber and assorted other produce invented and illustrated by a twelve-year-old girl called Jayne Fisher. They, and the age of their author, transfixed me. I held the gang’s efforts to supply Polly Pomegranate with the ballet clothes she needed and solve Oliver Onion’s lachrymose problems in exactly the same esteem as Aesop’s finest and ancient Greece’s best efforts to limn the human condition. A good story is a good story is a good story. They were followed by Gulliver’s Travels, The Swiss Family Robinson and a number of other literary and folkloric – Stone Soup! – classics distilled into fifty-six pages a time.

  I ploughed my way through as many of the classical titles on my reading list as I could at university, but still all I will ever reliably know of Hercules and his labours, Andromeda and her rock, Perseus and his Gorgon comes from the 102 small pages comprising the two Ladybird volumes of classical myth and legends – thrilling text about minotaurs, moving cliffs, men holding up the earth, golden fleeces and goldener apples on the left, on the right pictures destined to live for ever in the mind’s eye. Baby Hercules strangling a snake in each hand, people. Each hand. Snake. Strangled. I note that these days, ladybird.co.uk offers you the chance to narrow your book choices by age range. Ignore it. How safe do your children really have to feel?

  While I was accumulating fairy tales and other filleted fiction, a boy 200 miles away unknown to me but whom I would one day, slightly against my better judgement, marry was industriously amassing with the zeal of a born fact-seeker and completist a complementary collection of the History and How To series. Looking at his collection now gives me a new and even deeper respect for the mighty minds behind the books. There is almost literally nothing of even the most fleeting interest to a child that they did not cover. There is the Story of the Cowboy, of Oil, of Houses and Homes, of Ships of Clothes and Costumes and everything in between. Want to learn about the history of the British Isles in 102 titchy pages? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you a brace of volumes called Our Land in the Making. They aren’t books, they are nuggets of pure knowledge that still glitter in the man’s mind thirty years on. It is my hope that our son will read our amalgamated collection and become the world’s first fully rounded person. My other hope – that Ladybird would revive the non-fiction series in order to fill the ever-growing gaps in my knowledge of the contemporary world – was fulfilled in 2017, with the publication of the first books in a new Ladybird Expert series, including volumes on climate change, quantum mechanics, evolution, the Battle of Britain and Ernest Shackleton. This is a good start, but I need much more. I need ones on Syria, Brexit and Putin’s Russia, along with new additions to the old How It Works series; Mortgages and Pensions, Antidepressants, Maintaining Your Sanity on Mumsnet Given the Impossibility of Staying Away from Mumsnet.fn3 Could someone see to it, please? Ta.

  Dahl

  Eventually, and in the safety of my own home, I broke – after a fashion – the tyranny of the ‘safe’ story. I discovered Roald Dahl. Dad had brought home The Magic Finger, which – looking back – was an odd one for him to choose. It’s not one of the famous ones, perhaps because it’s not ‘pure’ Dahl. It’s the story of an unnamed eight-year-old girl who is deeply angered by her neighbours, the Greggs, who hunt animals for pleasure (Dahl was an ardent anti-bloodsporter all his life). She possesses a magical power to transmogrify people, so she changes the Greggs into ducks. They find themselves threatened with their own guns by the birds whose children they killed on their last hunt. It was written in 1962 as one of a series of books that the publisher had planned for beginner readers, using words only from approved vocabulary lists, which were very much in educational vogue at the time. So although many Dahl touches are there (there’s a twist at the end as befits the writer of the dark adult short stories he was then most famous for, and the vengeance theme is treated as robustly as it is in all his other children’s books), it was at least in part an exercise for him rather than the usual explosion of anarchic brilliance touched off by a moment of natural, inner inspiration. No matter. I liked it, I looked out for the writer’s name and I soon found it – on Fantastic Mr Fox and James and the Giant Peach from Lucy Donovan’s bookshelf, George’s Marvellous Medicine from Dad and on The Twits, which our teacher read to us at school.

  I enjoyed them all, with reservations. The Twits and Fantastic Mr Fox gave me no one to root for (the Twits were irredeemably vile and all the other characters were simply ciphers; Mr Fox’s stealing was bad and the fact that Boggis, Bunce and Bean were worse didn’t really pull the universe into alignment for me). James and the Giant Peach fell foul of my talking animals rule (also, rereading it now with Alexander it does – by Dahl’s standards especially – take an AGE to get going) and I adored my own grandmothers so unconditionally that George’s Marvellous Medicine simply made no sense to me.

  But then came Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had everything. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory WAS everything.

  Perhaps it most spoke to me at the time because, like its hero, I wasn’t getting enough chocolate either. Or sweets. Not because we were poor, like Charlie, and not because my parents – and I need to be very clear about this again, because they will sue – were hippy, anti-sugar, pro-wholegrain types, but because in their minds rationing still hadn’t ended. In our house, butter was only for grown-ups. Children got margarine. We weren’t allowed a drink with soup, because my mother insisted that soup was a drink AND a meal. And so on. So chocolate, sweets, biscuits and so on were rarely seen, especially in comparison to the abundance in which they existed in my schoolmates’ houses. I was allowed to take a decorous few (OR a fairy cake) at part
ies, or a chocolate digestive after lunch on a Saturday and Sunday, and my beloved grandmas each gave me a Cadbury’s Buttons egg every Easter. Outside that, it was lean pickings. I knew intimately Charlie’s experience of watching children wolfing down seemingly illimitable quantities of chocolate, and yes indeed, it was pure torture; I could only imagine how much more intense the longing to have your mouth filled with that rich, creamy sweetness would be for someone on a pure cabbage diet.

  But Charlie transported me with other delights, too. First published in 1964 it remains, I think, Dahl’s masterpiece. The conceit is simplicity itself; a poor but deserving child wins a golden ticket to a semi-magical chocolate factory run by a mesmerisingly maverick inventor, Willy Wonka. His fellow winners are uniformly awful and (this being a traditional fairy tale with modern trimmings) justly punished for the various sins they embody. And Charlie inherits the factory. Narratively, it is all as richly and deliciously satisfying as a bar of Whipplescrumptious Fudgemallow Delight. I also remember vividly that unexpected and at the time unprecedented breaking of the fourth wall at the beginning of the book: ‘This is Charlie. How d’you do? He is pleased to meet you.’ That sense of a supportive hand reaching out from the book to take yours is very comforting to a young reader.

  But it was the energy and invention underpinning it that kept me going back and back for more. The chocolate river, mixed by waterfall. The edible meadow (mint grass! Of course). A boat made out of a boiled sweet. The idea of the gum alone I could sit and contemplate for hours. A tiny stick of gum! That held a three-course meal! Imagine! The amount of detail in the drawing on the front cover, by Faith Jaques, of the machine that produced it suggested that even if it wasn’t quite a possibility yet, it soon would be. Clearly someone only had to retro-engineer her design.fn4 These inventions were all perfect examples of Dahl’s unerring ability to craft ideas that slotted perfectly into the waiting imaginations of childish minds.

  And then of course there’s Willy Wonka. He’s an avatar of Dahl himself – maverick, unpredictable (it is his irresponsible-adult reactions to his child visitors and their fates that gives the story its torque), teetering on the brink of arrogance, but always so charismatic that you forgive him everything and follow him anywhere. And of course, they were both devoted lovers of chocolate. To the end of his life, Dahl kept a red plastic box of all the chocolate bars he considered the best (mostly the ones that were invented during chocolate’s heyday in the 1930s, when the Quaker families of Rowntree, Cadbury and Fry were pouring all the innovation their religion forbade them applying to the alcohol or caffeinated beverage industry into sweet production and coming up with the likes of Dairy Milk, KitKat, Maltesers and all the delicious rest) that would be pulled out at the end of however posh a meal and however grand the guests who had enjoyed it, as a final course.

  Dahl’s ego being what it was (healthy – as an adored eldest son and a boy of genuine charisma and sporting talent Dahl always had a fair degree of self-confidence and his subsequent life as a wartime fighter ace, spy, famous author and husband of the film star Patricia Neal did nothing to dent it), he is probably his own inspiration for the father in the next Dahl book I read: Danny the Champion of the World. This is one of Dahl’s quieter affairs, but still with another wonderful conceit at its heart: a carefully planned and brilliantly executed mass sedation – via sleeping-pill-stuffed raisins – and evacuation of a horrible local landowner’s stock of pheasants before his annual shoot, and a truly touching evocation of the loving relationship between a boy and a father who at first seems blandly competent but is revealed to be a fascinating well of hidden passions, quirks and recondite knowledge who is willing to induct his son into a life of glorious adventure.

  I remember being surprised that my very staid, reliable teacher Mrs Robson read The Twits to us. But now it makes more sense to me. For all their inventiveness and surface anarchy, Dahl’s stories are, at bottom, quite safe. The good are rewarded, the bad are punished. Charlie, The Twits, The Witches et al. are all ancient fables in modern dress, innovative in content, not form. They were all fun and bracing reads that occasionally butted up my conservative, Tiger-wary boundaries, but they never breached them.

  Strangely, I cannot say quite the same today. Reading Dahl to Alexander as I am just starting to do, I find myself not exactly in sympathy with (all) the critics he has had over the years, but certainly less than as wholly sanguine about him as I was. I don’t mind the frequent swiftness and brutality of his narrative justice, unmuddied by any modern nonsense about moral relativism (Dahl’s was very much a pre-1960s sensibility), unconcerned about the possible bruising of young readers’ tender psyches. This is an intrinsic part of fairy tale and fable, and children are well able to understand it as a literary convention, not instruction or benediction.

  But there IS something quite aggressive about his treatment of George’s grandma that goes beyond childish exaggeration or burlesque. To call it misogyny, a charge that has been levelled several times at Dahl over the years, particularly after the publication of The Witches, I would still say is going too far. If you’re going to call Dahl a misogynist, you have to ignore the heroic grandmother in The Witches itself, Matilda, Miss Honey, and a number of other matters – including the fact that those who damn him for the awfulness of James’ aunts must also be required to damn everyone from Richmal Crompton to P. G. Wodehouse for their similar dependence on ill-favoured kinswomen. But. But. There IS a touch of sadism about some of the punishments doled out, and it IS disproportionately often that fat people and vulgar people are their recipients. I see now, for the first time, why he has always made some adults feel uncomfortable – and indeed some children. The writer, and editor of the Author magazine, James McConnachie remembers reading Dahl as a six- and seven-year-old and feeling uncomfortable and ‘dirty’ afterwards. He was unquestionably a preternaturally mature and sensitive reader, as befits a man who would grow up to be a writer and the editor of the Author magazine, but still – it gives another pause for thought.

  All that said – I must discount here, as I must discount in many areas of life, the oversensitivities brought on by motherhood. I am these days basically someone who would crawl into a lead-lined bunker with my child for the rest of my and his days, because my being is secretly strung to the single desire to keep him safe rather than allow him any quality of life at all. Once that underlying pulse of madness is controlled, I can see that Dahl is still, surely, a force for good. With my rational side to the fore, I cannot honestly feel that Alexander is likely to be damaged by even repeated exposure to Charlie et al., even if I am nevertheless quietly glad that he currently prefers Dahl’s later books – The BFG and Matilda – by which time Dahl had mellowed, just slightly, with age and started to let some kindness in.

  *

  But all these critical complexities lay far in my future. For now, all was mindless, glorious consumption. Dahl, Ladybirds, Ramona, Flat Stanley, Happy Families and myriad Antelopes – all in all, I was evolving a diverse and flourishing mental landscape. In between all the books I remember in detail at this distance were dozens more about which I retain only hazy – though equally happy – memories. The slim paperback biography of Louis Braille, housed in the classroom bookcase, which told how as he was punching through leather with an awl one day as a child it slipped and stabbed him through the eye. It became infected and the infection soon spread to the other eye too, leaving him blind. By the age of fifteen he had developed a tactile alphabet using six raised dots arranged in different patterns, and opened up a way to transform millions upon millions of lives. (And, incidentally, to give bookworms something to cling to on the nights when they wake up gibbering in fear at the thought of losing their sight and not being able to read again.) The Bears’ Bazaar (bears, making things for a bazaar). A Giant Book of Fantastic Facts. Joke books. Pop-up books (including Jan Pienowski’s magisterial Haunted House). A tiny little book about the origins of sayings and proverbs. It’s Not the End of the Worl
d, Danny about a boy with epilepsy and a teacher who was frightened of him. A proto-survival manual in the children’s section of Torridon Library that taught you how to live off the land (or, in my case, taught you that it all sounded like very hard, time-consuming work and that if there ever was a global disaster you would, all things considered, probably just prefer to read until all the food in the kitchen was gone and you quietly starved to death). There was also a story about a girl’s family moving house (which I read and reread trying to understand why she wasn’t having a nervous breakdown at the prospect), one about the exciting parts of history that had an eye-opening chapter on dungeons, thumbscrews and iron maidens, and after that, dozens of others which have vanished from conscious memory altogether, though I like to think somewhere in my deep unconscious they all did their bit, tilling the soil, fertilising it, making it ready for other books, words and ideas to take root in time.

  This was all about to end. A species of invasive megafauna was about to arrive and colonise my mind. Enter Enid.

  4

  The Blyton Interregnum

  I CAN BARELY bring myself to talk about my Enid Blyton years. Who wants to let daylight in upon magic? Like generations of children before me (Blyton published her first book – of poems for young readers – in 1922 and her first full-length book for them in 1937) and like generations since (she still sells over 8 million copies a year around the world) I fell head over heels in love. No, not love – it was an obsession, an addiction. It was wonderful.