by Ruskin Bond
RUSKIN BOND
Love among the
Bookshelves
Contents
Also by Ruskin Bond
Introduction
That Week in the Jungle
P.G. Wodehouse (Love among the Chickens)
From Love among the Chickens (1926) by P.G. Wodehouse
Holiday Reading: Classics and Comics
H.E. Bates
From The Best of H.E. Bates (1944, 1980)
Schooldays, Rule Days
W. Somerset Maugham
From Cakes and Ale (1930) by W. Somerset Maugham
That Year in Jersey
Charles Dickens
From The Pickwick Papers (1837) by Charles Dickens
Those Two Years in London
Richard Jefferies
From The Story of My Heart (1883) by Richard Jefferies
Favourite Books by Favourite Authors
Follow Penguin
Copyright
Also by Ruskin Bond
Fiction
The Room on the Roof & Vagrants in the Valley
The Night Train at Deoli and Other Stories
Time Stops at Shamli and Other Stories
Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra
A Season of Ghosts
When Darkness Falls and Other Stories
A Flight of Pigeons
Delhi Is Not Far
A Face in the Dark and Other Hauntings
The Sensualist
A Handful of Nuts
Maharani
Non-fiction
Rain in the Mountains
Scenes from a Writer’s Life
The Lamp Is Lit
The Little Book of Comfort
Landour Days
Notes from a Small Room
Anthologies
Classic Ruskin Bond: Complete and Unabridged
Classic Ruskin Bond Volume 2: The Memoirs
Dust on the Mountain: Collected Stories
The Best of Ruskin Bond
Friends in Small Places
Indian Ghost Stories (ed.)
Indian Railway Stories (ed.)
Classical Indian Love Stories and Lyrics (ed.)
Tales of the Open Road
Ruskin Bond’s Book of Nature
Ruskin Bond’s Book of Humour
A Town Called Dehra
Poetry
Ruskin Bond’s Book of Verse
Introduction
Just in case the casual reader is expecting this to be the story of a torrid love affair with a librarian, I will discourage him or her from reading further by confessing that I have never made love behind a bookshelf, with a librarian or anyone else. Tall bookshelves do afford a certain amount of privacy, but so do privet hedges and disused cupboards—probably more than hotel rooms, so many of them now rigged up with surveillance cameras.
I hereby confess that I am in love with books, and bookshelves are good places to keep them, if not hide them.
This little book is about the books I read and loved when I was a boy and a young man. Books that gave me enjoyment; books that banished loneliness or depression; books that inspired me to become a writer.
You, gentle reader, will probably have loved a different set of books and authors. Well, there are hundreds of thousands to choose from, so it should be quite easy to find a number of authors who will suit your own tastes and reading preferences.
I have written this memoir as a tribute of sorts to some of my favourite authors. Naturally enough, these are writers whose books were already classics or who came to prominence in the mid-twentieth century, and the years when I was growing up and reading everything that came my way.
I have enjoyed a fairly long life, and in my time I must have read close to ten thousand books. Many were forgettable, and have been forgotten. I have also written a few—some forgettable!
Now as I enter my eighties, I still read when the light is good and my easy chair well cushioned. My eyesight is not what it used to be, and sometimes the print dances before my eyes, and occasionally funny things happen . . .
Yesterday evening, as the sitting room grew dark, I was talking to Rakesh who stood in a far corner of the room. After several minutes of chatter from me, I realized that he was not responding; so I got up and approached him, only to find that he wasn’t there: I’d been talking to a Christmas tree that had been brought in by the children!
Never mind . . .
Trees are good listeners.
Ruskin Bond
December 2013
1
That Week in the Jungle
It wasn’t a bookshop, or a library, or a great-aunt’s hoard of romantic novels that made me a reader; it was the week I spent in a forest rest house, in what is now the Rajaji sanctuary, between Hardwar and Dehradun.
I was eight at the time, it was the winter of 1944–45, and it wasn’t a sanctuary then. Everyone with a gun fancied himself a great shikari, and the jungle resounded with the sound of gunfire as tigers keeled over and deer of all kinds bit the dust. My stepfather was a keen shikari, and my mother had also accounted for a couple of big cats—one would think that an eight-year-old boy would be thrilled at the prospect of accompanying a shikar party on a safari, but I had to be forced into going. I disliked guns; I was afraid of them, I don’t know why—some ancestral memory, perhaps. And I did not derive any pleasure from watching an animal twitching on the ground as it bled to death.
On that first day in the jungle I’d been persuaded to sit on an elephant—one of the two or three that took us deep into the forest. A chital—a spotted deer—strayed into our path, and the man beside me immediately raised his rifle and fired. The chital took some time to die. Two or three more shots were fired before it finally lay still. But its struggles had unnerved the elephant (elephants are sensitive creatures), and it turned and ran from the spot, crashing through small trees and shrubs. The branch of a tree caught me across the face and nearly swept me off the elephant. Fortunately, the mahout got it under control, and apart from a few scratches I was none the worse for the experience.
But I hadn’t enjoyed it. Shooting animals for sport did not make much sense to me. For one thing, they couldn’t shoot back. The man who shot the defenceless chital did at least deserve to have an antler up his behind.
Next day, I declined an invitation to another excursion into the jungle. I was left in charge of the khansama while the hunting party went off in search of more victims.
I had the rest house to myself. And while exploring it, I discovered a wall cupboard with a couple of shelves full of books. Up till then I had read just a handful of books—R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, a school reader, a poetry reader, Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, retold, abridged versions of Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, and of course my father’s stamp catalogues,
which had been his favourite reading. They did at least give me a penchant for geography. But this was the first time I was discovering books for myself.
How did they get there? They weren’t new books. They’d been there for some time, according to the khansama. Some forest officer’s secret hoard, perhaps. Or maybe there was a time when shikaris too read books.
None of them were about shikar or even wildlife or forestry.
The first one that I took from the shelf was P.G. Wodehouse’s Love among the Chickens. And it has nothing to do with hunting wild fowl. It was a romantic comedy about chicken farming, and it featured the incorrigible Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, who was to bec
ome one of Wodehouse’s most popular characters—an optimistic entrepreneur who never allowed any of his commercial disasters to keep him down. I think I learnt something from Ukridge—resilience! Anyway, I read the book in a day, pausing only to partake of the khansama’s dal-and-rice lunch and pakoras for tea.
In the evening the shikaris returned looking tired and out of sorts. Apart from a couple of partridges, they hadn’t shot anything. I said nothing, but inwardly I gave three cheers. There was a lot of grumbling about poachers and villagers decimating the wildlife, quite forgetting that they were the biggest culprits in this regard—often going out at night in jeeps equipped with powerful lights, turning the lights on confused and blinded animals, and then shooting them without any difficulty. Not many ‘brave’ hunters went into the jungle on foot; it was the jeep or the elephant for everyone from VIP to poacher.
Off they went again, and I was happy to be left behind, free to explore the bookshelf and its literary treasures.
The second of my discoveries was M.R. James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, a set of stories by a master of the supernatural. These tales were really aimed at adult readers with some sort of academic background (as most of them were set in English colleges or universities), but I had no difficulty in reading and enjoying them. They turned me into an aficionado of the ghost story, and over the years I was to indulge in the works of Algernon Blackwood, Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan Le Fanu, E.F. Benson and others who specialized in the genre—and then go on to write ghost stories myself.
Fortunately, I did not see any ghosts in the rest house, although the old khansama insisted that on certain days, as dusk fell, one could hear the groans of a famous shikari as he was being savaged by a man-eating tiger. ‘Served him right,’ was my unfeeling comment, as I returned to M.R. James and the haunted corridors of an old English castle. Ghosts were really British inventions. In India, we had prets and churels, who were not the same but probably scarier . . .
The shikar party continued for another three days, at the end of which several cheetahs and sambars had been shot, as well as a hyena and a jackal, but no tigers were shot or even seen.
During this time, I devoured my first Agatha Christie (Peril at End House), Jack London’s White Fang, Conrad’s Typhoon (which held me enthralled), and a book on gardening—Down the Garden Path by Beverley Nichols. This last stimulated my interest in gardening as a hobby, and when we returned to Dehra, I made an attempt at growing various decorative plants—with limited success, as I usually forgot to water them.
In the fast-fading evening light I was sitting on the veranda, reading, when a large animal crossed the clearing in front of me. Before I could get up, it had disappeared into the forest. The old khansama had seen it too.
‘Was it a tiger?’ I asked excitedly. ‘It was very big.’
‘Not a tiger, baba. A leopard. The leopard is the more silent of the two.’
When the shikaris returned, empty-handed this time, I mentioned that I had seen a leopard. They found this terribly amusing.
‘The boy has imagination,’ observed Major Kohli, a family friend. ‘Here we are, beating the jungle for tigers and leopards, and he sees one while sitting on the veranda!’
‘Not active enough,’ said my stepfather. ‘Should get out more often—join the party.’
In time I was to learn that it’s the onlooker who sees more of the party than the partygoer; that it’s the man on traffic duty who sees more of the passing show than the man behind the wheel; that the man on the hilltop sees the curvature of the earth better than the man on the plain; that the hovering vultures know who’s winning the battle long before the opposing armies; and that, when all the wars are done, a butterfly will still be beautiful.
I did not know all this at the time, but I was learning.
‘He reads too much,’ said Uncle Harry. And of course he was right. I just couldn’t get enough to read.
P.G. Wodehouse (Love among the Chickens)
Love among the Chickens was one of Wodehouse’s earliest novels. It was first published in 1906, when he was twenty-five. Twenty years later, finding it had dated a little, he brought out a revised edition and it is from this 1926 edition that the following extract is taken.
Stanley Featherstonehaugh (pronounced Fanshawe) Ukridge was one of Wodehouse’s most delightful creations—a genial, happy-go-lucky scamster who came up with the wildest schemes for making a fortune, always with the most disastrous results; but his optimism never wavered, his joie de vivre could not be suppressed.
You can read more about Ukridge in the ten short stories that make up the collection called Ukridge, first published in 1924 and still one of Wodehouse’s most popular books. It tells of the time when Ukridge sets up an insurance syndicate with his friends, the success of which depends on one of them breaking a leg. His attempts at managing a boxer named Battling Billson, who has a tendency to lie down on the first round, form the bedrock of three of the most hilarious stories, along with another favourite of mine, ‘Ukridge’s Dog College’.
Amongst Wodehouse’s great comic creations, there are other rivals for my affections—Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, probably his most popular characters; Lord Emsworth, the benign owner of Blandings Castle, where prize pigs get stolen and young men fall in love with damsels in distress; Mr Mulliner, who is always ready to tell a story over a pint of beer; and the fatuous members of the Drones Club—Bingo Little, Pongo Twistleton, et al.
P.G. Wodehouse had a long innings. He began writing in Queen Victoria’s reign, and continued to do so through the reigns of Edward VII, George V, George VI and Queen Elizabeth II. He spent almost half his life in America, but his novels and stories are firmly set in an England that appears to have been untouched by War or Socialism. All is sunshine and happiness in a never-never land of amiable earls, eccentric aunts and supercilious butlers. And we wouldn’t have it otherwise. When I wanted realism I turned to Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham. When I wanted romance, I turned to R.L. Stevenson and Daphne du Maurier. When I wanted mystery, I turned to Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, and dozens of clever crime writers. But when I wanted escape—from the routine of boarding-school life, or the conflicts at home—I turned to Wodehouse.
Quarrelling parents, disapproving relatives, censorious schoolmates, all faded into the distance once I was immersed in Leave it to Psmith, The Inimitable Jeeves, Meet Mr Mulliner or The Crime Wave at Blandings.
When Wodehouse died at the age of ninety-three, he had produced around a hundred novels, and I must have read at least two-thirds of his output. His plots and characters might have been repetitive, but it was language—his command of the English language and all its nuances and flexibility—that was his real strength. Never a dull sentence. The world of his creation is conjured up in a few lines:
The village of Market Blandings is one of those sleepy hamlets which modern progress has failed to touch, except by the addition of a railway station and a room over the grocer’s shop where moving-pictures are on view on Tuesdays and Fridays. The church is Norman, and the intelligence of the majority of the natives Palaeozoic. To alight at Market Blandings Station in the dusk of a rather chilly spring day, when the south-west wind has shifted to due east, is to be smitten with the feeling that one is at the edge of the world with no friends near.
(Something Fresh, 1915, the first of the Blandings Castle saga)
And so we read on . . .
From Love among the Chickens (1926) by P.G. Wodehouse
Chapter II: Mr and Mrs S.F. Ukridge
I have often thought that Who’s Who, though a bulky and well-meaning volume, omits too many of England’s greatest men. It is not comprehensive enough. I am in it, nestling among the Gs:
‘Garnet, Jeremy, o.s. of late Henry Garnet, vicar of Much Middlefold, Salop; author. Publications: “The Outsider”, “The Manoeuvres of Arthur”. Hobbies: Cricket, football, swimming, golf. Clubs: Arts.’
But if you search among the Us for Ukridge, Stanley Featherstonehaugh, details of whose tempestuous career would make really interesting reading, you find no mention of him. It seems unfair, though I imagine Ukridge bears it with fortitude. That much-enduring man has had a lifetime’s training in bearing things with fortitude.
He seemed in his customary jovial spirits now, as he dashed into the room, clinging on to the pince-nez which even ginger-beer wire rarely kept stable for two minutes together.
‘My dear old man,’ he shouted, springing at me and seizing my hand in a grip like the bite of a horse. ‘How are you, old buck? This is good. By Jove, this is fine, what?’
He dashed to the door and looked out.
‘Come on, Millie! Pick up the waukeesis. Here’s old Garnet, looking just the same as ever. Devilish handsome fellow! You’ll be glad you came when you see him. Beats the zoo hollow!’
There appeared round the corner of Ukridge a young woman. She paused in the doorway and smiled pleasantly.
‘Garny, old horse,’ said Ukridge with some pride, ‘this is her! The pride of the home. Companion of joys and sorrows and all the rest of it. In fact,’ in a burst of confidence, ‘my wife.’
I bowed awkwardly. The idea of Ukridge married was something too overpowering to be readily assimilated.
‘Buck up, old horse,’ said Ukridge, encouragingly. He had a painful habit of addressing all and sundry by that title. In his schoolmaster days—at one period of his vivid career he and I had been colleagues on the staff of a private school—he had made use of it while interviewing the parents of new pupils, and the latter had gone away, as a rule, with a feeling that his must be either the easy manner of Genius or due to alcohol, and hoping for the best. He also used it with perfect strangers in the streets, and on one occasion had been heard to address a bishop by that title, rendering that dignitary, as Mr Baboo Jaberjee would put it, sotto voce with gratification. ‘Surprised to find me married, what? Garny, old boy’—sinking his voice to a whisper almost inaudible on the other side of the street—‘take my tip. Go and jump off the dock yourself. You’ll feel another man. Give up this bachelor business. It’s a mug’s game. I look on you bachelors as excrescences on the social system. I regard you, old man, purely and simply as a wart. Go and get married, laddie, go and get married. By gad, I’ve forgotten to pay the cabby. Lend me a couple of bob, Garny old chap.’