Bookworm

by Lucy Mangan

  Twain – Coolidge – Montgomery

  Then I took a little break from my native land’s golden age and moved temporarily back to America, courtesy of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that glorious jumble of scrapes and japes that were apparently naturally a boy’s lot if he were able to bowl round a tiny Missouri town on the banks of the Mississippi in the middle of the nineteenth century. Tom explored caves, outwitted everyone from sheriffs to Sunday-school teachers and had as his best friend the only boy in St Petersburg with greater liberty than he: Huckleberry Finn, the motherless son of the town drunk.

  The boys’ audacity left me breathless. Daring enough to slip out at night to try a new cure for warts (involving moonlight and a dead cat), but to discover that you were presumed dead and keep quiet thereafter so that you could attend your own funeral – well! That took my breath away for longer even than the threats issued by the murderous Injun Joe. Alongside that was the touching evolution of Tom’s conscience and the glory of Twain’s wit and prose more limpid than the streams forever tempting Tom astray. I had never met an author who delivered so many revelations so accessibly. So accessibly in fact, that they didn’t even feel like revelations – they simply felt like things I had always known, hovering about on the edge of my consciousness until this kind man took the trouble to resolve them for me into words. The most interesting (and famous) one, perhaps, came in the very first chapter, when Tom, by pretending that it’s fun, persuades his friends to pay him for the privilege of painting the fence Tom has been told by his long-suffering Aunt Polly to whitewash as a punishment for stealing jam from the pantry. ‘He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it – namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.’ It was a book both funny AND informative. I hugged it hard to my breast until it was displaced by another cornerstone of American children’s literature; Susan M. Coolidge’s 1872 classic What Katy Did.

  What Katy Did followed in the wake of Alcott’s Little Women and was possibly suggested to Sarah Woolsey (Coolidge was a pen name) by the editor of Little Women himself, Thomas Niles, to capitalise on the newly forged appetite for lively, realistic girls and their exploits.

  The freckled tomboy in petticoats and heavy boots on the cover piqued my sister’s interest and it became one of the three books she read as a child. The other two were the BBC Micro computer guide and a Haynes car manual. It should have come as no surprise, perhaps, that when she reached the end of Coolidge’s tale, she hurled it across the room shouting ‘Katy did nothing!’ before stalking off to finish the kit car she was coding an automated build for behind the sofa.

  She had a point, in a way. Katy is the eldest but the most rambunctious of the Carr siblings when the story begins. After a few chapters of delightful adventures and mischief-making, she decides to play on the new swing Papa has put up in the barn, even though this has been Expressly Forbidden by Aunt Izzie, who has looked after them all since their fond mama died.

  Katy swings high. Too high. Astute reader spots metaphor. The swing breaks and Katy lands in a crumpled heap, injuring her back so badly that it is understood she will never walk again. Confined to bed, Katy rages impotently against fate until one day, the similarly physically afflicted Cousin Helen (the question of whether this is a coincidence too far even by the forgiving standards of nineteenth-century children’s fiction, or whether paraplegic women were in fact a common feature of shabby genteel Connecticut families in the 1870s strikes me only now) comes to visit her. By quiet example she shows the shamefully resentful Katy how she can transmute suffering into feminine grace, patience and understanding. Over the succeeding months and years, Katy learns to accept her lot and gradually transforms herself into a Good Girl, becoming the loving centre of the family – the wise, gentle, self-abnegating woman to whom all turn for comfort, advice and a deal of hair-stroking. And then, one day, she learns to walk again! Hurrah!

  After the first few chapters then, it is, as my sister indirectly pointed out, not so much what Katy did but what process of inner transformation she underwent. Naturally some of the ideals held up to Katy have dated – the cultivation of womanly passivity is now no more recommended than is the confinement of those with disabilities to a single room upstairs. Likewise the idea that disabilities will be lifted from you if you behave well enough is outmoded (and something Jacqueline Wilson was particularly careful to reject when she published a contemporary rewrite of the story a few years ago). But the idea that good can come of suffering intrigued me, and sowed a useful attitudinal seed for later life and the advent of maths homework that required you to do more than sort apples into groups of five. Whether its other lessons about the feminine virtues of choking down your inner torments and subjugating your every desire to the whim of God are quite so helpful to readers, I doubt.

  My sister, incidentally, now programs computers for a living and makes a fortune. She has no understanding of the human condition, but it turns out that this matters far less than you were ever promised. She gives me money for books. So the world turns.

  I was reading so much and so quickly by this point that it was only if a volume triggered a truly obsessive number of rereads that my dad’s attention would be caught. So it was with Katy and soon that god amongst men supplied two sequels, which followed the now-ambulant heroine on adventures further afield.fn2 What Katy Did at School sends her and Clover off to boarding school in New Hampshire where they make firm friends with lively, plucky Rose Red, politely distance themselves from their awful cousin Lily and gradually thaw the icy demeanour of one of the mistresses with their warm, unaffected Midwestern ways and good hearts. The sequel to the sequel, What Katy Did Next, is the tale of her year’s tour of Europe as a companion to her father’s patient, Mrs Ashe. I, having no urge to travel myself, didn’t like this one as much but I was happy for Katy and I did enjoy seeing London through the eyes of a nineteenth-century American. She is particularly impressed with Westminster Abbey and my sense of time and scale warped with hers as we gazed together at its ‘dim, rich antiquity [with] eyes fresh from the world which still calls itself “new”’. It was a tiny illustration, though as neat a one as you could hope to find, of reading’s limitless power to expand and transport you through history, space and in and out of others’ consciousnesses, and I sighed with satisfaction.

  Soon after that, handsome young naval officer Lieutenant Worthington arrives and the book lost a great deal of its hold for me as Katy fell in love. Nevertheless, I persevered to the end, noting in a detached way that if you had to fall in love, their stiff, unsentimental method was probably the way to do it: one mention of it being ‘very nice’ if the lieutenant were to escort them to Genoa, one off-screen conversation before she heads back to Connecticut, and a single telltale blush when Clover mentions ‘that brother’ of Mrs Ashe once she’s home, and they were done. But overall What Katy Did Next definitely took the bronze, What Katy Did the silver and School the gold.

  Somehow, somewhere – I can only think there must have been a biographical or autobiographical gobbet or two about the author in my copy of Tom Sawyerfn3, chosen to encourage us to pick up other books – I read Twain’s assertion that the eponymous heroine of Anne of Green Gables was ‘the dearest and most loveable child in fiction since the immortal Alice’. I tracked a copy down at the library and read it eagerly, only to discover that my idol had steered me wrong. Anne Shirley made me as sick as a dog.

  At first she had my sympathy. She was an orphan and, while I was prepared to hope that they arranged things slightly better in Canada, I knew from Mandy, Bunty and Sarah Crewe that this was a grim lot to be handed in life. But this sympathy rapidly wore off. Relentlessly cheery was Anne Shirley. Relentlessly talkative.
Relentlessly uplifted by the sight of apple and cherry blossom. Relentlessly enthusiastic about poetry and puffed sleeves. I returned my copy to the library after an unprecedented single reading and went to tap Grandma for whatever medications she had in her capacious handbags for treating childhood nausea.

  We must reach for another Mark Twain quotation. ‘When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.’ I had come to the book too young. When I picked it up again a few years later, I too was astonished at how much it had improved – and shortly thereafter secretly devastated by the fact that not only could I be an idiot in all matters sporting, artistic and practical I could also be so when it came to reading too.

  On rereading, then, I learned that Anne Shirley is indeed a dear and most loveable child. Who could not, after all, adore anyone who insists that her name be spelled with the ‘e’ – ‘so much more distinguished. If you’ll only call me Anne with an e I shall try to reconcile myself to not being called Cordelia.’ However could I have not? She is not twee and Pollyanna-ish (it suddenly occurs to me that I should almost certainly reread Pollyanna too) but a doughty survivor of a harsh upbringing who has refused to let circumstances crush her spirit. She arrives at Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert’s farm in Avonlea with the odds stacked against her – orphaned, unwanted (they are expecting a boy) and, her greatest and most lamented trial, red-haired and freckled.

  She proceeds, through her odd way of seeing things, through her patently honest love of beauty and endearing attempts to master her various jealousies and yearnings, to win over the Cuthberts, their neighbours and millions of readers who have met her over the years since the book was first published. When I settle down with it these days, it is the gradual softening of Marilla that seems to me the true miracle of the book, but this only reminds me again of the great truth that you are never too young to start rereading.

  As my cornflake-packet dependency attests, by this point reading had evolved from a simple pleasure to an actual need. It wasn’t just my preferred activity any longer but an addiction, albeit of the most benign and valuable kind. It was almost physically painful to be kept from it. Every other activity was an interruption, a depredation on time that could be better spent. Birthday parties and going for tea at people’s houses was always awful. School was a necessity, playing with my sister was okay and television had its moments (not many – there were only three channels and Mum naturally had entire charge over what we watched and when) but … I was just always happiest reading.

  Dad understood entirely.

  Mum didn’t, quite, but rolled her eyes and tried to accept that there were some things even she couldn’t change and her child’s constitutional make-up was one of them. I’m not saying she wouldn’t have dived into my DNA and started replumbing my double helix if technology had allowed, but as things stood it was one of the few things in life she had simply to grit her teeth and bear. She would wear those teeth down to nubs over the next ten years.

  Other people, however, got strangely angry. A certain percentage of adult visitors would greet me with a disapproving ‘Every time I see you, you’ve got your head in a book!’ or ‘Don’t you ever go out in the fresh air?’ or some variant thereof. A much higher percentage of children hated it. If I tried to read at playtime, the book would be batted out of my hand. If I tried to read secretly during lessons with the book hidden on my lap, it would be reported with undisguised glee.

  I have far more sympathy with my enemies – as I unequivocally categorised them – now than I did then. I used to argue (inwardly. I did everything inwardly) that everyone should be free at playtime to pursue their own favoured hobby. Those who wanted to skip could skip,fn4 those who wanted to play British Bulldog, kiss-chase or Feet-Off-London could do that and those who wanted to pinball round the place screaming for forty minutes could do that. I wasn’t stopping them. Why were they intent on stopping me? Let a thousand fucking flowers bloom, dudes. But of course this is asking too much of children. It is infuriating to see someone determinedly wall him or herself off from you, from the group, whether it’s by books, headphones, video games, smartphones or anything else. It is absolutely a form of rejection and nobody likes being rejected.

  The adults, I think, could have held their tongues. They got their due – I always stood up, said hello, answered questions politely. Then I escaped, like any child does, as soon as I could – just back to my book on the sofa instead of the garden or the television or a friend’s house or whatever they would have preferred. I suspect their attitude was fed more by the hostility we feel for precocity (it seems to mess with the natural economy) and the anger or envy we feel for anyone getting pleasure from something that we cannot. I feel this for lovers of music and art – neither of which I ‘get’ – though I try to pretend to myself that it is a higher feeling; an appreciative longing to be like them, a yearning for their gifts and insights. But actually it’s low-level, infantile (primitive) rage that I can’t see what they see or hear what they hear. That these avenues of pleasure are, by as random a selection and arrangement of genes and circumstances that opened the way of reading to me, closed. It IS infuriating. But I do hold my tongue.

  A generation on, things are different for my son because he is a different child from me, in a different time. Alexander can read, he likes to read, but it does not (yet? I cannot tell you how much aching longing I pack into that single syllable) have him in the vicelike grip that it did me by his age. He is not – yet? – a bookworm. The four minutes or so of reading he voluntarily does in a week are not likely to perplex or anger anyone (except me, and I am still holding my tongue). And so the idea of banning him from reading in certain places is laughable. If his father or I happen across him reading anywhere – bedroom, sitting room, bath, sitting naked in his own filth while strangling a cat – we brake hard and back away as silently and unobtrusively as possible. Then we run and find the other and deliver, in hushed, awed tones the joyful news: ‘He’s reading!’ More often than not, I tiptoe back to watch. I can practically see the stream of glittering words flowing into his mind, giving him new names for new things, teaching him in some fundamental way that nothing else can manage how words fit together, how sentences work, how language can be bent this way and that to conjure worlds, feelings, arguments, everything. I want to find a way to grab it in my hands and join the book in stuffing more of it into him because I know it’s not going to be long before he lifts his head and rejoins us in the real world. Whenever he shifts position I hold my breath – is the spell about to break, or will it hold? If it holds I sigh with relief. If it breaks, I scarper before discovery.

  It is, I agree, pathetic.

  And of course my son lives, like all children today, surrounded by temptations literally unimaginable in their parents’ childhoods. ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,’ the science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote. But I think that even if we’d been invited as children to think up the most extraordinary possibilities that could be afforded by the most powerful wizardries, we would have struggled to come up with the Internet, the iPad, smartphones. Portable screens that can show you anything you want, anywhere and anytime you like, for free (mostly), at the touch of not-even-quite-a-button. The world’s art, culture and music accessible through a device smaller than a wallet. Even if you do only use it, in the end, for cat videos. Or, in Alexander’s case, Tractor Tom and Scooby Doo.

  We have kept him, so far, from video games and suchlike (adherence to principle here being massively aided by our genuine and total inability to download apps or hook up a PlayStation) but there is only so long we can beat back the waves. Soon they will engulf us and bear him away on their pixellated currents.

  Sometimes I make an attempt to read through the research about the effects of screen time on children, but my heart is never in it.
I know what screen time does to me, and unless someone in authority can prove to me that my brain chemistry is unique in the annals of human history, I will take my individual experience as representative of the whole. And my experience is that watching telly is easier than reading a book. Even for me, who loves to read, who finds it second nature, who is surrounded by books to suit her every mood and has literally only to reach out a hand anywhere round the house to pick one up. That’s why at the end of the day, I switch on Netflix instead of opening a paperback. I have a restorative, mindless few hours on the sofa with a box set and then I go to bed and read. One activity is unavoidably passive, the other unavoidably active.

  My near-pathological love of reading made me unnaturally resistant to the siren call of the screen (although that was markedly weaker back then, coming as it did via only three channels, only one and a half of which even acknowledged children as a viewing demographic) but which is a normal, healthy child today going to plump for, given the option? And given how hard and – though we forget this over the years – fundamentally unnatural reading is in your early years? Reading the simplest book is more difficult than letting the most complicated programme unspool before you.

  Obviously in an ideal world you would be able to explain to children that while reading might be hard at first, the rewards throughout life are proportionately large. Unfortunately, most children stubbornly resist the concept of deferred gratification (‘I’ll take that double sundae now, Mother,’ they insist, ‘heedless of the consequences for my appetite for lunch’), and so you have to shape their world accordingly. Thus you learn not to let them see the sundae, the PlayStation or – oh, if I had my time again – Scooby Doo too early or too often.