The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life

by Miller, Andy

  ‘You grew up there?’ asked Alex.

  ‘Sorry, I don’t mean that,’ I said. ‘I mean I was a boy there, or somewhere like it. It looks like the place I lived with Granny and with Granddad Mick when I was a little boy.’ And it really did, in spirit as well as substance – a suburban English high street of the late 1960s or early 70s, rendered as a child of those years might like to remember it. I wanted to fall into the book.

  In the foreground of the picture, Sophie and Daddy and Mummy walk arm-in-arm, laughing and chatting. They are dressed in raincoats and boots and Daddy is wearing a hat.2 On the pavement behind them, they have just passed a smiling marmalade cat and another pedestrian. But something is not quite right. The cat is arching its back, its tail pointing straight in the air. Is it stretching? Yawning? Perhaps it is getting ready to leap at something or someone, hissing, claws extended – perhaps it has been disturbed by the other pedestrian. He is a curiously unsettling figure. We cannot see his face; his back is turned to us, his hat pulled down, his jacket wrapped around his shoulders as he leans into a biting wind only he can feel.

  ‘Who is that?’ asked Alex, pointing at the hunched figure.

  Fig. 10: Sausages and chips and ice cream.

  (© Judith Kerr)

  ‘That is Death,’ I replied. ‘Night night.’

  I wonder what The Tiger Who Came to Tea is really about – is it a colourful metaphor for Mummy’s marital infidelity or addiction to shopping? Is it a critique of the fiscal underpinning of the traditional nuclear family, where there are three consumers but only one breadwinner? Or is it about the suppression of female desire, the Tiger a wish-fulfilment personification of the id, rampant, unleashed? Look again at the figures that walk arm-in-arm down the road. Mummy and Sophie are laughing and chatting but Daddy seems preoccupied, an impression reinforced by the tableau which follows: the family is in the café now, smiling and enjoying ‘a lovely supper with sausages and chips and ice cream’ – paid for by Daddy – but none of them are looking at one another. Daddy holds a half-pint barrel-glass of beer but he is not drinking, and the look on his face is one of sadness, wistfulness, regret. Perhaps he blames himself for the Tiger that ran amok while he was out. Or perhaps he is daydreaming the story we have just read, and the Tiger is his fantasy, not Mummy’s or Sophie’s, an irrational explanation of the life his wife and only child lead when he is not there.3

  ‘What do you think this book is about?’ I asked Alex this morning, a few years later.

  ‘It’s about a tiger,’ he said.

  That’s the problem with tigers. What immortal hand or eye can frame their fearful summit tea? Yeah?

  I think I must have read The Tiger Who Came to Tea at primary school, when it was still a new-ish book (it was published the year I was born). I have a memory of a hardback copy lying in the book box in the corner of the classroom. If it wasn’t there, then it was at the library in the town. Actually, there were two libraries nearby, one a large red-brick building on the main shopping street, and another smaller lending library, octagonal or circular in shape, next door to my school in the old town. I know we didn’t own a copy. My parents, though both dedicated readers, rarely bought books; but every Saturday morning they borrowed them, three tickets each, from the big library, and I went with them.

  How I loved the municipal libraries of South Croydon.4 They were not child-friendly places; in fact, they were not friendly at all, to anyone. They were large, dark, wood-panelled rooms full of books, in which visitors were expected to be silent, and the only sound was the clicking of school shoes on polished parquet floor. The larger building in the town had its own children’s library, accessible at one end of the hall via an imposing door, but what lay behind that door was not a children’s library as we might understand it today, full of scatter cushions and toys and strategies of appeasement; it revealed simply a smaller, replica wood-panelled room full of books. And this – the shared expectation of respect, the solemnity, the shelves crammed end-to-end with books, no face-outs or yawning gaps – is what I loved about these places and what I found inspiring. The balance of power lay with the books, not the public. This would never be permitted today.

  The smaller, octagonal library on the hill was lighter and brighter – but it too was bursting with books, politely demanded silence, and had a polished parquet floor. Forty years later, that tang, the heady perfume of parquet, affects me like Proust’s sacred madeleine. I am transported back to those rooms whose raison d’être, whose heart, was the books they housed. I have probably been trying to get back there ever since.

  Of course, we had books at home but my parents were not bookish. They read for pleasure but I cannot recall them re-reading. There was little fiction and almost nothing in the way of classics, ancient or modern – no Eliot, no Dickens, definitely no French authors or Russians; no Iris Murdoch, John Fowles, Robert Graves; nothing published by The Bodley Head. That kind of literature was another country; we definitely lived on the outskirts of Croydon. Instead, we had Alistair Cooke’s America, The Moon’s a Balloon by David Niven, two AA motoring atlases, a Reader’s Digest Guide to Home Maintenance, and David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace’s The People’s Almanac, by some margin the most fascinating book in the house.5

  My parents’ books were kept in two places. The first was a massive multi-purpose shelving unit Dad had hammered together in the garage and installed in the dining room, incorporating a drinks cabinet, on which stood a blue metallic soda siphon, Poole pottery, smoked glass ornaments, my plaster-cast models of characters from Beatrix Potter books and The Muppet Show, and all the atlases and instruction manuals. The second was a wooden cabinet with a sliding glass front. This cabinet stored a set of uniform editions of novels by the likes of Ngaio Marsh and Alistair MacLean: Ice Station Zebra, Final Curtain and so on – the results of a subscription to the Companion Book Club some years before I was born. These were certainly never read in my lifetime. All the dust jackets had been thrown away.

  Nonetheless, my parents were always reading, whatever had been borrowed from the library, or paperbacks on holiday. My mother enjoyed, and still enjoys, historical romances set in Cornwall or at a royal court. When I was a boy, her favourite authors were Jean Plaidy (The Captive of Kensington Palace, The Thistle and the Rose) and Victoria Holt (Bride of Pendorric, My Enemy, the Queen). She slightly favoured Holt over Plaidy, but there was little to choose between them, not least because Jean Plaidy and Victoria Holt were the same person writing under different pen names.6 These days, she reads Philippa Gregory, Dick Francis and Alan Titchmarsh, again all the same person, probably Victoria Holt.

  To make use of a cliché, my mother does not know much about art but she knows what she likes. Actually, no, that is not quite correct. My mother knows enough about art but she prefers what she likes. Thus, in her late seventies, inspired by a trip to Castle Howard in Yorkshire, she read Brideshead Revisited and found it underwhelming. It was, she informed me, markedly inferior to Alan Titchmarsh’s most recent novel. When I begged to differ, she pointed out that I had not read it and suggested I was simply being a snob. ‘He has written some really super books, Andrew,’ she said. She thinks I could learn a thing or two about being a successful writer from Alan Titchmarsh; undeniably true.

  My father, for his part, liked to read about the First World War, the Second World War and/or the Cold War, either as fiction or fact, and so read the novelists everybody’s dad read in the 1970s: Frederick Forsyth, Len Deighton, John le Carré. He had been sent out to work at fifteen, up to the City every day while German bombs fell on London. In his early twenties, he developed severe diabetes and the pattern of his adult life was fixed. If Dad was bitter about these events, he never showed it to me, nor did he harbour thwarted academic ambitions, although he was well aware of the advantages and confidence such an education bestowed. ‘You always know when a person has been to Oxford or Cambridge,’ he used to say, ‘because they always tell you.’ This too has proven to be unden
iably true.

  Is it redundant to say I loved my parents? My father was wonderful company, intelligent, articulate, argumentative, and my mother was patient and talkative and loving. They were older parents with one cherished child, and we were undoubtedly an old-fashioned family, Dad taking the train to town every day while Mum stayed behind and made a home for us. My father’s ill-health meant he needed stability and routine; my mother worked hard to provide him with these things. The upheavals of the 1960s passed them by or they chose to ignore them – we knew no war, and my father continued to wear a bowler hat to work well into the next decade. There may not have been any Tolstoy in our house but what I want to say is that I did not care then and I do not care now. We were happy, and we were happy in our own way.

  But then I had to go to school, the catastrophe of my childhood. I stood in the playground on the very first morning, while all around children ran and shrieked and laughed, and though I did not yet know the word, I thought to myself: oh shit oh shit oh shit. And these first impressions proved to be correct. There was not a single school day for the next thirteen years when I did not think: oh shit. From the moment I arrived, I was waiting to leave.

  Books became more important to me then. For the first few weeks of school, I spent as much time as I could sitting inside, reading, until my teacher, Miss Twitchit, told me gently that I was banned from the classroom during break times and I had to go outside and play with what she called ‘your friends’. And though I did make friends eventually, I always preferred indoors to outdoors because indoors was where the books were kept.

  Although I was predictably inept at PE, and average at most other subjects, it is correct to say I was exceptionally good at reading. What rewards did this bring? The good opinion of Miss Twitchit, on the one hand, and, on the other, the bemusement and contempt of ‘my friends’. In the summer term, the advanced readers in the class were allowed to take their little chairs out onto the grass, form a circle, and talk about what they had been reading. I was the only boy in this group. Every week, the little girls would be furious that their book club had been infiltrated by a boy – and a girly boy at that. Every week, the clever girls would make me cry and run indoors, establishing the pattern of my relationships with women into my adult life, up to and including when I met my wife, the cleverest girl of all.

  What was it I got from reading as a child? It fired my imagination and provided me with an escape – that much is corny but true. Everything in the world of stories was harmonious and fair and I often found it easier to spend time there than in the muddy, idiotic, confusing world of other people.7 However, what I really got from reading was this: it was the one thing at which I truly excelled. It was my natural talent, my golden voice, my prodigious goalscoring gift; and although it did not carry the same institutional prestige or heroic status as football skills and virtuosity on the descant recorder, it was enough to be good at something – not just good, better than you. By my penultimate year, I had exhausted all the books in the school and my parents were asked to send me in with new books from home or from the library nearby. Did I really read every single book in the school? My mother maintains I did. Maybe I just told the teachers I had and they all believed me. Maybe this is where the lying about books really began. Where were the checks and balances? I blame the authorities.

  So, my parents gave me a love of reading; Croydon Borough Council, via its libraries, gave me a love of books; and schooldays ensured I became emotionally dependent on both. But only one person taught me how to collect books, how to covet them and hoard them, how to buy them. That was all me, autodidact, infant bibliolater. From the age of seven, it was my dearest wish to build a library of my own, all donations greedily accepted; and every Asterix or Tintin book that came home, every Dahl or Blyton or Fisk taken out on loan, was never returned without regret and a mental note to acquire a copy for the collection when funds permitted. I wanted to possess all the books I had already read, as well as all those I had not – every book in the whole wide world, in other words. Where did this mania come from? It was the tiger who came to tea and never left.

  I also wanted to be a palaeontologist.

  I read a piece in a magazine recently which rated book tokens as one of the most disappointing Christmas presents of the 1970s, just below home-knits and any bicycle which wasn’t a Chopper or a Tomahawk. This was not my experience. I liked receiving toys as much as the next tank-top-wearing kid but, in my eyes, book tokens were every bit as ‘skill’ as, say, Evel Knievel or Ker-Plunk!. A book token was a golden ticket to a land of pure imagination, and also the big branch of WHSmith in Croydon’s Whitgift Centre.8

  And what did I spend my book tokens on? Asterix and Tintin, Roald Dahl, Nicholas Fisk and Littlenose. The How and Why Wonder Book of Dinosaurs. Mr Men books (original set, pre-Little Miss). Beatrix Potter. Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. Now We Are Six and When We Were Very Young. The Dinosaur Encyclopedia. Selected adventures of Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators. I-Spy books. Pop-up books by Jan Pieńkowski. The Guinness Book of Records. Fattypuffs and Thinifers, Fungus the Bogeyman, Masquerade by Kit Williams. Spike Milligan, the Rev. W. Awdry, How to be Topp. The Secret Seven and the Famous Five (I did prefer the Secret Seven). Emil and the Detectives. Stig of the Dump. Blue Peter annuals, Beano annuals, Rupert annuals – jumble sales were good for old annuals. Arabella’s Raven. The Wind in the Willows. How to Be a Junior Palaeontologist. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World.

  Essentially, provided it had nothing to do with football, war or girls, I liked everything. I read the Radio Times and ‘The Robins’ in my mother’s Woman’s Weekly. I read the four-panel cartoons in the Daily Express and flicked through the Croydon Advertiser in search of more. I was addicted to comics, the jokey comics like Whizzer and Chips, Buster, Cheeky Weekly and Whoopee!, or the 12p American imports of Marvel and DC titles: The Amazing Spider-Man, The Uncanny X-Men, The Mighty Thor, with their action-packed advertisements for Sea Monkeys, Hostess Twinkies and GRIT, ‘America’s Greatest Family Newspaper Since 1882’. To a British child growing up in the 1970s, these adverts were every bit as amazing and uncanny as the adventures of the adjectivally-endowed superheroes.9 My parents indulged me in all of the above. My mother took an uncharacteristically liberal ‘as long as they’re reading’ approach, though there was one notable exception: I was not allowed to bring Look-in (aka The Junior TV Times) into the house.

  At school, reading won me my first and only prize, for which I received a certificate and, fortuitously, a book token. In the cub Scouts, though the swimming and athletics badges were beyond me, I could earn the readers’ badge by talking about a book I had enjoyed and explaining how a library works – dur. And, inevitably, I was a member of the Puffin Club, with a shiny enamel pin, my Puffineers’ codebook and a pink plastic binder for back issues of Puffin Post.10 In 1976, I pleaded with my mother to take me up to the ICA for that year’s Puffin Exhibition, the Club’s annual jamboree. We queued in the Mall for ages to get in but it was worth it; we saw Quentin Blake and Bernard Cribbins and Fat Puffin. I would not set foot in the ICA again for ten years, not until an NME-sponsored gig by The Wedding Present, The Servants and a pre-ecstasy Primal Scream. This seems fitting because, with its badges and its cryptic messages, the NME in that period operated like a Puffin Club for students. And I would not meet Fat Puffin again until 1991, when Penguin loaned one of their Fat Puffin costumes to the shop I was working in and I volunteered to wear it and some youths in the street told Fat Puffin to fuck off and punched him in the stomach. But I digress.

  A few books and authors stand out as my absolute favourites from childhood. Both Winnie-the-Pooh books, of course. Tove Jansson’s Moomin stories, which have undergone a kind of merchandised revival over the last few years, were fabulous (as in fable) and reassuringly unsentimental; I liked the dark, windswept Moominpappa at Sea the best. The Eighteenth Emergency by Betsy Byars, with its Quentin Blake cover, whose hero Benjie ‘Mouse’ Fawl
ey must learn to take a beating from the school bully, Marv Hammerman. And thirty or so thin Coronet paperbacks of Peanuts strip cartoons by Schulz called things like You Can’t Win Them All, Charlie Brown and You’re On Your Own, Snoopy, which I read, and read again, and still read today, whose sheer brilliance is all the more apparent now I have a child of my own.11

  The above does not represent an editorial sampling, these really were my favourites. Or perhaps these are the books that have stayed with me most vividly from that time, both in imagination and in reality. I carry the impression of them in my head – but I also still have physical copies of most of them somewhere in the house.

  Fig. 11: ‘From the library of Andrew Miller’: Puffin Club bookplate, circa 1977.

  (birthday card from Julian Cope)

  I loved the humour in these books, of course, but they are a melancholy bunch. Eeyore spoke louder to me than Tigger; I think I instinctively felt this was realistic. Life could be fun but mostly it wasn’t, and between times there was an awful lot of hanging about in gloomy places, ‘rather boggy and sad’. In these books, children like Linus and Lucy, Mouse and Hammerman, Little My and Moomintroll, all seemed to behave like children really behaved, even the ones who were Moomins, beagles or piglets: playing, bickering, watching TV, feeling sorry for themselves and ‘slugging’ one another. These characters got bored and frustrated and scared; sometimes they laughed so hard they fell off their doghouse. And they had wild imaginative lives and alter egos. In their heads, Mouse and his friend Ezzie know precisely how to deal with Crocodile Attack (Emergency Four) or Seizure By Gorilla (Emergency Seven), but not the Eighteenth Emergency – how to defeat the school bully. In Peanuts, Charlie Brown often appears depressed and withdrawn (‘I can’t stand it . . .’) but his dog is irrepressible, Snoopy the World War I Flying Ace; the World-Famous Astronaut, Attorney or Author; Joe Cool.