Bookworm

by Lucy Mangan

  Encouraging reading in this day and age is like trying to create a wild-flower meadow. Most of the job is just about clearing and preserving a space in which rarer and more delicate plants can grow, planting the seeds and just hoping to God they take root. As I say, they have not – yet – done so in Alexander. But I keep digging up bindweed and hacking back the brambles, trying to keep the way clear. What else can you do? Eh, Mary? Eh, Dickon? What else can you do?

  8

  Happy Golden Years

  Puffin

  MANY PEOPLE I have met in my adult life – friends, many of them, after I started to get the hang of people in my early twenties – have assumed I was a member of the Puffin Club. This was an institution set up in 1967 by the then new and indefatigably sociable editor of Puffin Kaye Webb when she took over from the (decidedly old-skool) Eleanor Graham.

  I was not a member of the Puffin Club.

  Webb set up the club to encourage like-minded children to get together. To this day, the idea of a sociable bookworm sounds to me like the oxymoron to end all oxymorons, but apparently they were out there and they descended on her club in droves. It promised – and delivered – all sorts of events, day trips and get-togethers and had soon gathered over 200,000 members, several of whom nearly drowned when Webb took them sailing round Lundy Island off the Devon coast after mishearing the skipper’s advice not to set out.

  Twenty years on, by the time I was reading about membership in the backs of all my Puffin books, the original frenzy of activity had abated somewhat but the threat of companionship and conviviality – if not drowning – seemed to linger. ‘Psst,’ said a speech bubble issuing from the beak of a puffin in a cloak at the back of The Borrowers, The Family from One End Street et al. ‘Heard about the Puffin Club?’ He promised a badge, a membership book and delivery of a quarterly magazine called Puffin Post. ‘It’s a way of finding out more about Puffin books and authors, of winning prizes (in competitions), sharing jokes, a secret code, and perhaps seeing your name in print!’

  Innately unclubbable anyway, and daily assured by my schoolfellows that bookworms were the lowest of the low, I could not imagine anything worse than being in touch with more of me. At the very least, talking to them would be almost as much of a waste of good reading time as entering competitions would be. And imagine a magazine largely made up of contributions from other children. My own creative offerings, be they drawing, writing or trying to bend pipe cleaners into recognisable shapes, left me profoundly depressed. I wouldn’t shell out for either more of the same or – worse – evidence of others’ far greater brilliance in the field. Although I probably didn’t actually need to worry too much – The Borrowers’ back pages were already out of date. Puffin Post closed in 1982, though the club itself continued in various relaunched forms until very recently.

  That said, I now suspect that I was unwittingly some kind of proxy member of the club. My school had started holding a weekly book sale and although I have consulted both Puffin and their archivists and none of them can find any evidence for it, I think it must have been part of Webb’s web. Every Friday lunchtime, a classroom’s tables were pushed together and covered with books. Shiny, beautiful, mesmerising new books. You could wander round and browse for whatever remained of the hour after your lunch sitting (the dinner hall was small, we went in shifts) and no one would chase you out, insisting you got some stupid fresh air before afternoon lessons began.

  You got a savings card and once you had chosen your book, the teacher in charge put a slip of paper with your name on inside it and it was reserved for you. No one else. Unless someone nefarious took that slip of paper out and had theirs put in instead. This happened to me twice. Yes, I know who did it. I won’t say who, but when I die you will find the name ‘Claire Stephens’ engraved on my heart. Anyway. Every week thereafter you would bring in money towards it, and have your card stamped in 5p increments until you had paid in full. Then the book was yours.

  I bought Stig of the Dump this way, which was Webb’s own first commission for her new Puffin Originals series. She set this up in 1962, wanting to move on from simply buying the paperback rights to previously published books, and Stig was one of the books she always said she was proudest of publishing. It had been rejected by many other firms but became a bestseller for Puffin and hasn’t been out of print since. It cost me 90p and took forever. I measured out my life in Fridays and 5p stamps. At last it was mine. And it was brilliant. The story of Barney and his befriending of a Stone Age boy who lives at the bottom of the local chalk quarry-cum-dump (what? Why, where would you live if you’d been left behind by the Stone Age? How else would you access the tin cans and jam jars you need for your flues and windows? Hmm?) was worth every penny and every exquisitely agonising minute of deferred gratification.

  Then I was allowed to choose another book. The loosening of credit restrictions that was causing the property market to go nuts had not yet reached primary school economies and you had to pay off your first one in full before you could lay claim to another. Which to choose, which to choose … The one with the cartoon of the pig and the spider on the front looked interesting. I took a look at the first page. ‘Where’s Papa going with that axe?’ Those six words – one of the most famous opening lines in children’s literature – told me I was in the hands of a master and I demanded my reservation slip for E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web forthwith.

  Papa is about to kill Wilbur, the runt of a litter of piglets just born on the farm. After Fern’s heartfelt protests, his execution is stayed and Fern is allowed to raise him. In the cosy barn he shares with an assortment of other creatures Wilbur’s most constant companion is the beautiful, dignified, noble, intelligent spider Charlotte. She weaves glowing endorsements of Wilbur into her web, making him a valuable attraction at the farm and saving him from slaughter a second time when he grows up. In 1948, White – already famous as a contributor to American literary magazine the New Yorker and as the writer of another book for children, Stuart Little (about the adventures of a mouse born to a human family in New York City) – had published an essay entitled ‘Death of a Pig’, about his failure to save a sick beast that he had bought for his farm. Though he never admitted as much, it is hard not to see the book he started a year later, after resigning from his job at the New Yorker, as an oblique attempt at redemption. The idea of a spider as saviour came to White as he watched one building a web and hatch an egg sac on his dresser while he pondered a way to prevent his fictional pig suffering the traditional fate.

  A farm. A cosy barn. A plump, endearing hero and a watchful, clever friend. Sounds charming, doesn’t it? It is. It was. I set my prejudice against talking animals aside and read on delightedly. It was so clear, succinct and yet evocative (White was a famously elegant, economical author and essayist, whose rules for writing were enshrined in the language guide written by his former teacher William Strunk, The Elements of Style, which White later edited and updated so thoroughly that it has been known as Strunk & White ever since, at least amongst those of us nerds who like to chat about these things) and it seemed to speak directly to me. White once referred to his younger self as – and I think my heart will break as I type these words – ‘a boy I knew’, and Charlotte’s Web, even more than the earlier Stuart Little or the later Trumpet of the Swan, seems always to be speaking through and to that child.

  But TURN AWAY NOW, PLEASE, children who have not read this book – and adults who have read this book but whose prepubescent homunculus is not dead but only sleeping and will feel the wash of unbearable horror and misery anew if it wakes again now – because the end of Charlotte’s Web is nigh and the truth of the matter is this: Wilbur lives. But Charlotte dies.

  I. Could. Not. Believe. It.

  Yes, the tone of the book had been becoming ever more darkly suggestive. The barn had been filling with foreboding. But even unto the last twenty pages I had been deliciously anticipating the sudden twist that would surely swoop in and reprieve such a kind an
d valiant friend from what would in real life be her certain fate. Even if White had kept the original title of the final chapter – ‘Death of Charlotte’ – instead of changing it to ‘The Final Day’ I would have remained firmly optimistic.

  The reprieve did not come. Though her children live on, thanks to Wilbur rescuing the egg sac she leaves behind at the county fair, Charlotte dies, as spiders do, at the end of the summer.

  I was beyond appalled. I took the book and my outrage to Dad, who accessed his inner lay preacher and told me that Charlotte had lived well and died free, playing her part in the grand scheme of things. In the midst of life we are in death, apparently, and to everything there is a season. ‘I know people die in real life,’ I shrieked. ‘But why do they have to die in books?’ He couldn’t answer me. Nor could he come up with a satisfactory balm for my secondary sense of authorial betrayal. Better to have axed Wilbur at the beginning, I raged, than allow me to grow to love the protagonists and then give one of them the chop in the end. But perhaps it was good to read a book that sought to prepare you rather than protect you from some aspects of life, he suggested. I suggested not.

  It has taken thirty years for me to be able to contemplate this book with relative equanimity. I see now that the ending is as beautiful, bold and full of integrity as Charlotte herself. White wrote it as he turned fifty, as his son moved out of boyhood, as his beloved editor at the New Yorker Harold Ross died and everything was changing. He saved the pig, but something had to give – or be given up – instead. White’s story is agnostic but it makes plain that in the midst of life we are in death. But it also makes clear that life goes on. Charlotte’s hundreds of children scrambling round the barn tell us so. I have gradually come to find comfort in its simple acceptance of the world the way it is and the lack of striving for an answer that would explain it all. It is what it is. We are born, we die and if we’re lucky we make some good friends along the way who will remember us when we’re gone. It’s enough. Not least because it has to be.

  Maybe this means that if Alexander ever comes up to me, book in hand and eyes wide with horror at what he has just witnessed and demanding explanations and justice, I will remain sanguine enough to use the opportunity to explore the notion that fiction can confer immortality of a kind – ‘Look!’ I say in my roseate dreams, ‘Charlotte can be made to live again by turning back to page one! Such is the magic of books!’ But I doubt I will manage it. I think we’ll just have to sob wordlessly into each other’s shoulders and wait for another quarter-century to do its healing work. A reader I knew tells me so.

  Tolbooths And Gardens

  But if the weekly book shop was my living pig – hurrah! – another school innovation lay on my soul like a dead spider. Boo! Boo to whoever it was decided that reading aloud in class was a way to inculcate a love of literature.

  We murdered many books this way. They were mostly school primers but also and bizarrely The Starlight Barking. Why on earth we were reading the semi-mystical, largely demented sequel to The Hundred and One Dalmatians instead of the brilliant original (Pongo! Missus! Perdita! 98 spotty puppies holed up in Hell Hall and waiting for rescue! Was there ever a more pleasing notion for a book? That, you know, wasn’t about a race of tiny people under the floorboards?) I have no idea. Maybe they thought everyone would have read the book or seen the cartoon film of the original that had recently been reissued to cinemas. Maybe someone had bequeathed a job lot to the school. Maybe someone had a tiny bit of budget left over at the end of the tax year and had to get rid of it quickly. We will never know.

  Anyway. It was utter torture. Torture when you were the one doing the reading (I at least didn’t have to suffer the humiliation of not being a fluent reader, but I was pathologically monotonous and winced as every word out of my mouth fell dead. They were so wonderful in my head) and worse when you were sitting in silence listening to people struggling painfully through a story that seemed like it would never end.

  Eventually, however, this black pall passed. Sunlight broke through. Someone, in his or her infinite wisdom, replaced reading aloud with story time. For half an hour every day, thirty children would sit cross-legged on a piece of thin polyester matting, and peace and a modest kind of communal rapture would reign. Being read to was not as good as reading to yourself, I reckoned, but it was a lot better than nothing. And maths. I did not then nor have I yet seen the point of finding the area under a graph.

  I remember only two books from this glorious time, but what a pair they were. Do you know that e e cummings poem that goes ‘i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)’? More than any others, perhaps, I carry these books in my heart and my heart is in these books. They could hardly be more different, but they are two of the three poles (we’ll meet the other one shortly) around which my prepubescent soul was – is now and ever more shall be – slung.

  My beloved teacher Mrs Pugh was on maternity leave. I was unsure of her replacement, Miss Dobbs, until she began reading us Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth.

  Milo, a languidly bored, cynical child and the first unlikeable central character I had ever come across in fiction, is sent ‘an enormous package … not quite square … definitely not round, and for its size it was larger than almost any other big package of smaller dimension that he’d ever seen’. It is, in fact, a miniature purple tollbooth and when he drives past it in his toy car, he embarks on a series of adventures in Dictionopolis (with a grand marketplace where letters are bought by the handful) and Digitopolis (whose land is mined for numbers, while rubies, emeralds and diamonds are thrown away with the earth). These are the two capital cities of the Kingdom of Wisdom, governed by two warring brothers – King Azaz the Unabridged and the Mathemagician – who have exiled their two sisters, Rhyme and Reason, for refusing to judge whether words or numbers were the most important. Since then, the kingdom has descended into chaos.

  In thirty-minute chunks, we followed Milo and his helpmeets Tock the faithful watchdog and the annoying but endearing Humbug through the Doldrums, up and down the Foothills of Confusion and Mountains of Ignorance, and jumped with him and his companions to the Island of Conclusions. On the way, they – and we – met, among many manic others, Faintly Macabre (the Not-So-Wicked Which), the tallest dwarf in the world (who looked remarkably like the shortest giant in the world), the Awful Dynne (who collects sounds for Dr Kakofonous A Dischord) and the .58 boy, who is the fifth member of the average American family (at least in 1961, the year of the book’s publication) with its two parents and 2.58 children. With help from some and hindrance from others, Milo restores Rhyme and Reason to their proper place and returns home (whereupon the tollbooth vanishes) no longer languid and never again to be bored. His tollbooth may be gone but, he realises, the books he once regarded with disdain will function as portals to other worlds and adventures just as well.

  There are obvious shades of Lewis Carroll here, although Norton Juster himself cites his father – an inveterate punner – and the Marx brothers’ films as his greatest influences. At nine, I had never read or met any of these splendid entities. I came to The Phantom Tollbooth fresh and it rocked my tiny world.

  In 1960 Juster was a 31-year-old architect living in a Brooklyn basement flat. He received a Ford Foundation grant of $5,000 to write a book for children about cities but instead he found himself scribbling down sections of Milo’s story. Above his apartment lived an artist called Jules Feiffer. He became interested in Juster’s writing and started to illustrate it with the drawings that are now as inseparable from The Phantom Tollbooth as John Tenniel’s are from Alice.

  Juster took Feiffer’s illustrations with him when he went to show the first fifty pages of his book to various publishing houses. It was a tough sell because the received wisdom of the time was that children’s books should not contain anything that children did not already know. ‘Everyone said this is not a children’s book, the vocabulary is much too difficult, the wordplay and the punning they will never understand
, and anyway fantasy is bad for children because it disorients them,’ remembered Juster half a century later. But Random House saw its merits and agreed to publish it.

  Two decades on, that Brooklyn manuscript and drawings done on handfuls of cheap tracing paper (‘Had Norton told me he was writing a classic,’ Feiffer said in an interview years later, ‘I would have used nicer paper’) was still delighting children, especially one in a Faintly Dismal corner of a Definitely Dismal patch of south-east London.

  The pace, the wit, the invention were dizzying – even if we did only fully understand about .58 of it at the time. There was action aplenty, and if you didn’t get one joke or pun or piece of wordplay, another would be along in a minute. They fell from the pages like sweets tumbling from a bag. Maybe it was because Juster was a synaesthete who felt intensely intimate connections between words, colours and numbers, that his first book for children (he would not go on to write many more, alas) was so vivid and resonated so strongly even with readers more loosely wired. But it was a book that, aside from the obvious pleasures of the story, also revelled in and made gloriously explicit and true what I had previously only vaguely intuited: that words weren’t just markings on a page to be passively absorbed and enjoyed but could be tools, treasures and toys all in one. They could be taken out and played with, and even bent to one’s own will in their turn. At one point, travelling across the no man’s land between Dictionopolis and Digitopolis, Milo comes across the orchestra whose music is what floods the world with colour, a different instrument for every hue. Violins tip the grass green, ‘trumpets blare out the blue sea’ and at dawn while the conductor Chroma sleeps, Milo dares to take the stand and crook a finger. ‘A single piccolo played a single note and off in the east a solitary shaft of cool lemon light flicked across the sky.’ I knew none of this could really happen. Violins couldn’t tip grass green, a piccolo couldn’t summon a single shaft of lemon light, but words, I saw for the first time, could conjure up both. Reading The Phantom Tollbooth was like watching the translucent paper being peeled off a transfer, revealing the true colours beneath. The world of every book would glow a little brighter ever after.