Bookworm

by Lucy Mangan

  In addition, such changes collapse time and remove all sense of history. But placement in time is important. As a child you naturally believe that the world around you is immutable. A gradual realisation that people once spoke, dressed and even thought differently from the way we do is a profound pleasure. ‘Queer’ once primarily meant ‘odd’. How weird. A tunic and a boater comprised a uniform. One day, of course, our children will be asking, ‘What’s a uniform?’ and we will have to revise again. ‘The honour of the school’ was once a real and motivating force. I remember asking a teacher about the last one. She gazed at me with such sadness that I wished I had one of those handkerchief things I’d also read about. It struck me they would have been as good for mopping tears as they were for binding gorse-wrenched ankles during cliff-top rescues.

  Without a sense of time, the integrity of the book begins to break down. More changes will soon be needed to make sense of ‘mums and dads’ who let their children roam free on Kirrin Island. Of girls who ‘get lonely’ because they are forced to stay behind and make bracken beds and tea for the boys. Root out ‘jolly’ and you have to root out all these oddities – and the gorse bushes, too. How likely is it, after all, that our increasingly urbanised young population has ever seen one of them? And then you’ll be left with an awfully queer set of books indeed.

  It was with a great sense of satisfaction, therefore, that I greeted the recent announcement that the updated books are to be discontinued. Parents, who still buy the bulk of books for children of Blyton-reading age, were apparently staying away in droves. I suspect this was for nostalgic reasons rather than philosophical principle, but hey – whatever works, right?

  Perhaps years and years and years from now, Blyton’s 1950s idioms will be truly impenetrable and change will be genuinely necessary if she is to continue to be fit for her particular purpose, which is to serve perfectly the purely narrative appetite of a child that precedes more sophisticated tastes – and which must be stimulated and satisfied if those tastes are ever to develop. If the gap between her written and their modern language becomes wide enough to deny children this inestimable good and this incalculable pleasure, then by all means let us throw our handkerchiefs, uniforms, mothers and fathers to the wind. But we are not there yet.

  *

  All that said, when I look ahead to my son’s Enid Blyton yearsfn1 I am divided. On the one hand, I long simply for him to be reading independently (and not just because it will leave me with much more time to read myself, though this is a large part of it and also a large part of what makes me a terrible mother) and to find as much happiness there as I did. On the other – if he finds his reading feet amongst more modern fare, less riven with outmoded attitudes and almost certainly better written (as virtually all contemporary writing for children is, the market and level of competition having changed beyond all recognition since Blyton’s day), there would be relief in that.

  But imagine having a child who had never raced around Kirrin Island with the Five, or crammed into the meeting shed with the Secret Seven, or teased the village policeman with Fatty (‘What’s a village policeman, Mummy? And couldn’t even Enid have come up with a less profoundly literal, deadeningly prosaic title for a series than “the Five Find-Outers and Dog?”’), or swum in the rock pools of Malory Towers with Darrell and the gang. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh he may be, but could we ever really be close without that?

  My parents did their duty unquestioningly and unhesitatingly, simply shovelling the necessary volumes at their grateful (albeit wordlessly – sorry about that) offspring for the two years or so the enchantment held and trusting that something would eventually come along to break the spell. I can hardly do less for my own.

  I won’t even have to spend the money that they did. All my paperbacks are here waiting for him. They are mostly horrible Knight editions – not like Becky’s – with stills from various television seriesfn2 on the covers instead of proper illustrations, a practice I abhorred then and abhor now because there are some prejudices we should never give up. The remainder have awful 1980s drawings of schoolgirls in modern uniforms and clutching modern pencil cases, but they are mine. I may now read ’em and weep with boredom, but it was not ever thus. Every volume is a slice of my heart. How can my son, who is all the other bits of my heart, not take them down from the shelf and complete the circle? What else do we have kids – or keep our horrible Knight editions – for?

  I wish I could say that a particular book came along and broke the spell. It would be much more dramatically pleasing if I suddenly happened across a set of Dickens or something – calfskin-bound in a dusty attic I was exploring one Sunday at a friend’s house, why not? Or on the book stall at the school fete – whose fragile, ancient pages revealed to me a whole new world, a transformative understanding of what life and literature could be. But I didn’t. Wrong kind of friends (none), wrong kind of houses (modern, non-rambling) and wrong kind of school.

  Instead, I came out of my Blyton phase slowly, as one emerges from a fog, until I stood blinking dazedly in the sunlight, ready for something new. My eight-year-old mind wanted something more. It didn’t know precisely what. But something.

  While I’d been away, several new additions had been made to my bookcase by my dad and occasional visiting relatives. They had been bought as tokens of faith in a non-Blyted reading future, looked for a long time like hostages to fortune but now they took on the sheen of sound investment as I turned my avid, covetous gaze upon them. What was there? A golden age.

  5

  Through a Wardrobe

  THE FIRST BOOK I picked out of the waiting row was pale pink and earned my respect immediately because, like Milly-Molly-Mandy’s adventures, it had been both written and illustrated by one person – in this case, a former art student called Eve Garnett. She had been commissioned in 1927 to illustrate a book called The London Child by the suffragette and social reformer Evelyn Sharp about working-class conditions in the capital. The book I was holding in my hands fifty years on had grown out of the research Garnett did for that commission. It was called The Family from One End Street and told the story of the Ruggles family – two parents (dad a dustman, mum a laundrywoman) and seven children, Lily-Rose, Kate, Jim, John, Jo, Peggy and William – who lived at number 1, One End Street in a small town called Otwell-on-the-Ouse. I was captivated by it from the start, including and especially the drawings – as sweet, strong and deceptively simple as the book itself – because I knew, as I had known with Milly-Molly-Mandy, that they depicted the ‘real’ thing, straight from their creator’s pen. (I was, I see now, bound to end up the person I have indeed become – one who screams herself hoarse before the television screen and seeks to bring down the blackest curses upon any casting director who has deviated from the on-page description of anyone in a book’s adaptation).

  Unlike Blyton, The Family from One End Street was episodically structured – each chapter is a little self-contained adventure had by one of the children – and all the characters were all rendered equally lively and interesting but all utterly different from each other and all utterly real. It was the first book I had loved for a long time for its characters rather than its plot.

  It was also the first book – not only for me, but for all of its readers when it was first published in 1937 – to make urban, working-class children its heroes. It was almost universally lauded for this upon publication. Some critics later came to discern a patronising tone from Garnett towards her characters, but others praised her for avoiding both sentimentality and condescension and replacing them with what one called ‘a careful truthfulness’ instead.

  Not that I knew or cared about any of this at the time, of course. I just knew it was a strange relief to spend time with book-children who, like me (whatever the technical differences in our respective classes were), had more experience of a world bounded by building sites, patches of grubby parkland and knackered working parents than they did of one strewn with rolling moors, private is
lands and spies.

  The Family from One End Street won the Carnegie Medal in 1937/8. It beat – and this gladdens my heart more than it should, for reasons we’ll come to soon – The Hobbit. Eve Garnett should, as far as I was concerned, have had at least another two medals under her belt. Because even better than her first book, I soon discovered, was the sequel – Further Adventures of the Family from One End Street – in which Peg, Jo and Kate go to recuperate from measles in The Countryside, the place I longed to be and which I was still unaware lay barely a dozen miles south of Catford. The rest of the family remain in Otwell having almost equal fun raising a pig on the allotment. Even better than that was its sequel, when Kate gets to return sans siblings to the picture-perfect village of Upper Cassington and stay for the whole summer with the Wildgooses, owners of the local hostelry, in Holiday at the Dew Drop Inn. This seamless progression gave me a wholly misguided sense of life as a process of cumulative improvement, which would take several painful years of experience to dispel, but on the plus side, Holiday at the Dew Drop Inn trod the pleasures of reading even deeper into my soul than Enid had.

  It was as if, with the story of Kate Ruggles’ summer-long stay and enthusiastic embrace of village life in Upper Cassington, Eve Garnett had peered into my mind and written down exactly what she knew would delight me most. It was Milly-Molly-Mandy writ longer and with a character I could feel in my very bones. Kate, you see, was bookish. She was the reader in the family and had her heart set on a scholarship to the local grammar school. And she longed to live in the country, not the town. I didn’t know exactly what a scholarship or grammar school was, but I knew that they were things from The Past and that I too would have wanted both if I had not had the towering misfortune to have been born in The Now. She was me and I was her and when, in the midst of my devotion, the Mangan family rented a cottage in Cornwall for our fortnight’s summer holiday for the first time instead of staying with Grandma in her Preston flat for a fortnight, it was as if the already porous boundary between books and reality had finally done the decent thing and collapsed completely. I looked up from Kate’s collection of wild flowers and water lilies for the village fete and saw them as well. She wandered in awe along overgrown lanes and I totally would have too if I hadn’t been so busy reading. But I could see them. My sister went down them and reported back (‘Yeah – plants. Fields, both sides. Brown things in one of them. I wanna say – horses?’). By the end of the holiday I knew what Kate meant by cow parsley, stiles and haystacks. I’d seen a thatched roof. It was more than enough.

  I identified less thoroughly with the heroine of the next book Dad brought home, but I loved her nevertheless. It was a book by Mary Norton who once described herself as ‘a fits and starts writer … I love just living – unless some wonderful idea suddenly appears.’

  Here in my hand, thirty years after it was first published in 1952, was her most wonderful idea: The Borrowers – the story of Arrietty and her parents Homily and Pod Clock, who belong to the race of tiny people who live secretly in the houses of ‘human beans’, under the floorboards (in the Clocks’ case), above the overmantel or behind the pictures on the wall. They use drawing pins as candleholders, stamps as pictures on their own walls, small coins as plates and cotton reels as stools – oh, the joy the skewed perspective conveyed by these repurposed objects gave me! – and that is why you can never lay hands on any of these vital items, no matter how many you know you bought.

  Shut up underground, with only a grating to give a glimpse of garden and sky, Arrietty (for years I thought it was a misheard ‘borrowing’ of ‘Harriet’, but a musical friend of mine thinks it’s meant to recall ‘arietta’ – a little aria) longs to be taught to ‘borrow’ and to be allowed outside, despite her people’s fear of being seen by their giant, unwitting hosts. This is why our protagonist/reader identification broke down. I could think of nothing worse. Being outside, being actively engaged in honest and/or physical toil does not a happy bookworm make. To this day I cannot relax unless I am wholly enclosed by four sturdy walls and a proper roof, where the wind will stop messing with my clothes and blowing my hair across my face so I can’t see the page, and the sun will not cause me to be distracted from full reading-immersion by worrying about skin cancer. My husband puts the fact that I won’t even have a window open, even at the height of summer, down to my Irish peasant ancestry. ‘It’s always raining in your DNA,’ he explains. Which may also be true.

  But Arrietty is made of braver and livelier stuff and eventually convinces her parents to relent on the borrowing front. She is soon spotted by the lonely boy who has come to stay in the house. They become friends, but when the rest of the household discovers his secret, the Borrowers are no longer safe and and the little family must flee.

  The perfectly realised miniature world is, naturally, people’s strongest memory of the book. Norton was very short-sighted her whole life and the Borrowers’ environment, whether under the floorboards, out and about in the house’s drawing room and nursery or in the fields and furrows across which they travel in the sequels, always has an absolute authenticity about it – the textural truth of someone who has spent her life with her nose squashed up close to things. ‘Where others saw the far hills, the distant woods, the soaring pheasant,’ she once wrote in an essay, ‘I, as a child would turn sideways to the close bank, the tree-roots, and the tangled grasses. Moss, fern-stalks, sorrel stems, created the mise en scène for a jungle drama … One invented the characters – small, fearful people picking their way through miniature undergrowth; one saw smooth places where they might sit and rest; branched stems which might invite them to climb; sandy holes in which they might creep for shelter.’

  And of course that kind of detail, with which The Borrowers is strewn, is both memorable and delightful. But I suspect that it is often cited simply because it is also the easiest element to put into words. Because if you first read it as a child, you cannot put a name to the uneasy feeling within you that the book evokes, and so perhaps as the years pass, the memory falls away. I had forgotten it myself until I reread the book a few years ago. Beneath the melody of Arrietty’s story – the fun and adventures swinging across curtains with your hatpin, meeting the Boy and evading capture by exterminators – there is a haunting strain of melancholy compounded of her hunger for freedom, the fragility of their essentially parasitical lives (part of Arrietty’s journey to maturity involves her facing up to what the Boy sees as a self-evident truth – that the Borrowers are dying out) and the ceaseless circumscription of their activities by the need for secrecy and the concentration of generations of fear under the floorboards.

  Looking back, I can see that this dark undertow, tugging me in a different direction from where I thought the book should be taking me, was a milestone in what I suppose we should call, though it feels unsuitably clinical, my reading development. Even if I didn’t understand fully at the time what was going on, it prepared me at some level for the fact that good fiction – future fiction – might not be just about the story, but that it could and would give a voice and a shape to larger, wider truths. That it could, in short, be greater than the sum of its tiny, perfectly proportioned parts. Now that was indeed a wonderful idea.

  The Borrowers was my first foray into fantasy. Technically – and appropriately enough for a beginner who was also temperamentally very much inclined against abrupt change and preferred gradual introductions to new things, if new things had to be introduced at all – it was what is called ‘low fantasy’. In other words, very little magic is used – and sometimes, as in The Borrowers, none at all. A thing that could not actually occur in reality – like little people living under the floorboards – is simply presupposed to exist and normal life goes on around it. High fantasy is stuff set in alternative ‘secondary’ worlds, which will have their own internal rules and logic but differ vastly from the real ‘primary’ world. Lord of the Rings is generally held up here as the ne plus ultra and possibly the sine qua non of the genre a
nd we’ll come back to that, even though I get tired just thinking about Tolkien.

  Thus I was primed by the little people to take the next step, a little further up, a little further in – to Narnia. I went through the back of a wardrobe, of course.

  Narnia

  ‘Here,’ said Dad awkwardly, when he handed me a paperback showing a lion and two girls capering on the greensward with a garland of flowers, ‘I think you’ll like this.’ I knew what this kind of impassioned speech signalled. This was not just a book my dad thought I would enjoy. It was a book he had enjoyed as a child. I said thank you and added a nod to show that I had understood. He nodded equally eloquently back. My watching mother rolled her eyes and poured a gin.

  The book was called The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. ‘The Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood,’ its author C. S. Lewis once wrote. ‘This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: “Let’s try to make a story about it.”’