Bookworm

by Lucy Mangan

  By its fiftieth anniversary in 2011 The Phantom Tollbooth was estimated to have sold about 4 million copies.

  In 1983, however, none of these was being sold in the UK. I know this because as soon as Miss Dobbs had closed the covers on the final instalment, I begged my father to buy me my own copy (I had started searching school and local libraries as soon as the first chapter was over and found nothing). We went to the Greenwich Book Boat, which had become a recent favourite haunt – nothing there. We went to Dillons in Bromley – which had a COMPUTER! As if it was already the FUTURE! – that told us it was out of print. For some reason we didn’t then start scouring second-hand bookshops – maybe Dad didn’t think they dealt in children’s books – so after the ensuing bout of panic and grief wore off, I accepted my fate. There was, in those benighted, Internet-free days, nothing to be done.

  It is easy to forget how many gatekeepers there are between us and the books we want – or do not yet know we want – even as adults. And as children we are at the mercy of even more. In addition to every reader’s dependence on publishers, buyers, stockists, retailers, knowledgeable sellers, librarians and friends (and of course on the writers at the very beginning of the process to come up with the lovely, lovely goods in the first place), children have parents, teachers and their own ignorance of how the world and its retail outlets work, and a lack of control over their own circumstances and finances. I wonder – if Miss Dobbs hadn’t lifted the barrier, how many of the thirty of us sitting on the carpet in front of her would have come across this shiningly glorious book? Almost certainly after the perfect age to meet it and, more likely, never.

  I have diligently acquired several copies since as a hedge against further deprivation. I can see three as I sit at my desk. There’s the blue-covered edition I took out a parental loan to buy for £1.95 in 1986 when it returned to Dillons’ shelves three seemingly endless years after my devastation, the red-spined edition identical to the one Miss Dobbs read from which I picked up for a pound in a second-hand bookshop in Norfolk a few years ago, and a 1970 hardback edition that I bought from another Norfolk dealer for £5 and turned out to be ex-Lewisham Library stock. It must already have been withdrawn from circulation by the time I was scouring the place, but clearly we were meant to be together. And it is a beautiful copy – perhaps the only attractive thing to have come out of the 1970s. Bury me with it please. It remains a masterfully wrought, glorious, hilarious, life-affirming read – a celebration of words, ideas, sense, nonsense, cleverness and silliness but also of a love of learning for its own sake. I suspect, in a world in which education is increasingly being reduced to futile box-ticking and forcible rendering into measurable quantities that which can never be made tangible, this is a message that will become only more revelatory and valuable to those lucky enough to hear it. The piccolo sheds light everywhere.

  *

  When we eventually finished The Phantom Tollbooth I was bereft. Back to spelling tests, to something called long division and to building a papier mâché trench to learn about the First World War. Oh, and we had to grow broad beans in jam jars filled with damp blotting paper. The paper held them against the glass, so they looked like eyes watching you balefully from the windowsill. You could see their roots reaching down, desperately sending out further tiny furry offshoots searching for greater sustenance than wood pulp and water. I looked back at them equally balefully. Everywhere was metaphor.

  Eventually we were allowed to take them home and plant them in pots/throw them in the bin as levels of parental interest dictated. Mine went in the bin. ‘We’d only have to keep looking after it otherwise,’ said my mother. My sister and I regarded each other silently and renewed our inner vows never to cross her until we had both attained our majority and secured a shared lease somewhere.

  My own gasping search for readerly nourishment at school was soon to be rewarded in full. I was about to be flung into the rich, loamy soil of Tom’s Midnight Garden. The roots of me are down there still. If you tried to pull them up I would scream like a mandrake. Like The Phantom Tollbooth, it is necessary to me.

  Miss Dodds had read The Phantom Tollbooth to us at the end of morning lessons, before lunch. Mrs Pugh, back from maternity leave and who was otherwise a woman of infinite sense and wisdom, read Tom’s Midnight Garden to us for the half-hour before home time. Not until the day’s work was complete would she begin.

  So I spent every day for months in an agony – or was it an ecstasy? – of waiting and most of 1984 wishing a short but painful death on my fellow nine- and ten-year-olds who kept delaying us by mucking about and cutting into the twenty-five minutes (Mrs Pugh also insisted on stopping five minutes before official home time so that we could put our chairs on the desks before we left as school rules commanded) on which my day’s happiness had come to depend.

  Because the story of Tom Long, who is sent away to stay with relatives while his brother is ill, is exquisite. Lonely and bored, Tom discovers that when the grandfather clock in the communal hallway – on whose casing is carved the words from Revelation: ‘Time no longer’ – strikes thirteen, the magnificent garden that once belonged to the house before it was divided up into flats is restored to it – along with the equally lonely Hatty who used to play there as a child and who becomes Tom’s night-time companion. Tom gradually realises that he is returning to the nineteenth century, but it takes a visit from his convalescing brother, who accompanies him on one of his nocturnal adventures, to make him realise that time in the garden is moving on and Hatty is growing up. One night, he at last becomes as invisible to her as he has been to everyone else in her world. Soon after that, the garden disappears too and it is almost time for Tom to go home.

  There is one last twist, which I am not going to spoil for you, partly because I cannot bring myself to rob you of its power and pleasure by baldly summarising it, and partly because if I had to learn, through Mrs Pugh’s meagre apportionments, the painful lesson of deferred gratification, I am most certainly going to force the experience on to others too, wherever I can.

  At the time, however, I was so firmly locked in a battle of wills with my teacher that I restrained myself from asking my father to buy the book for me so that I could read on ahead. But as soon as Mrs Pugh had turned the final page, I dragged him down to Dillons so that I could read the whole thing for myself – in one sitting, free from the desire to stab Darren Jones in the heart with his ever-clattering pencil – a process that yielded a better sense of the finely honed shape of the book and its careful, masterly pacing and let me linger over the beauty of the prose and the wealth of possibilities offered by its suggestion that the past and the present could merge into each other if only you knew where to look. And there were no nasty surprises at the shop – not only was the book still in print, it was still Mrs Pugh’s edition that was on sale, with its properly glossy green cover, Susan Einzig’s beautiful illustrations inside and out.

  I see now and delight in the fact that those tortured days of waiting meshed beautifully with the mood of the book. My own hungry anticipation mirrored Tom’s impatient wait for his nightly doses of magic perfectly.

  More profoundly, I responded to the sense of longing – for companionship, for adventure, for people and places long vanished – that permeates the whole of Tom’s Midnight Garden. My distance from it – again, being read to is far, far better than nothing but it does not compare to reading to yourself – gave me a heightened sense of how impossible it is to absorb the books we love as fully as we want to. I bet even the Sendak fan who ate the card the writer sent him felt a sense of anticlimax afterwards. We can read, and read, and read them but we can never truly live there. It is an approximation so close that it borders on the miraculous, for sure, and – unless perhaps you are an actor, and a good actor at that – there is nothing else that even comes near it, which is what keeps the bookworm going. But still – you are not in Narnia. You are not actually beneath the floorboards with the Clocks. You are not roaming the prairi
es with Laura, Mary, Ma and Pa. And yet … and yet … Tom’s Midnight Garden is suffused with the pain and the pleasure of yearning. Even as he’s playing contentedly in the garden with Hattie before his brother arrives, its nightly appearance and morning disappearance already points to its evanescence. There is always a suggestion that everything is in flux, that nothing can last. The best we can hope for is to live there for a while. And accept that if yew hedges and towering trees cannot endure, happiness too is best understood as fleeting.

  C. S. Lewis once discussed the concept of Sehnsucht – German for what we would call ‘yearning’fn1 – and reckoned this ‘unconsolable longing’ in the human heart for ‘we know not what’ was an intimation of the divine. ‘If I discover within myself a desire which no experience in this world will satisfy,’ he says in Mere Christianity, ‘the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.’

  But perhaps we’re more often just made for reading. Each book was to me another world, and none more so than Tom’s Midnight Garden, then or now. Because I have reread it countless times since Mrs Pugh closed the covers for the final time, and within three pages, I am my ten-year-old self again. Within six, I am with Tom in his 1950s world and after that we are both in the Victorian garden again with Hatty and the yew trees and hedges that preceded and will outlast them all. I still believe, deep in my heart, that if I wake up at the right moment one night, I, too, will be able to step out of this world and all its inconsolable longings and run wild forever in the gardens of the past. But the best I can do is live there again for a while. Which is, almost, enough. After all, if you are as close to something as you were in childhood, then you have your childhood back again, don’t you? Time no longer.

  Goodnight Mister Tom

  Shortly after Tom’s covers closed, I turned ten and received as one of my presents (and thank you, always, everyone who responded to my annual plea that they all be books, or book tokens – I don’t know how I would have managed without you) my first ever hardback. ‘To Lucy,’ it had written inside it by the givers, because this apparently is a thing you do with hardbacks, ‘With lots of love for a happy birthday from Mummy, Daddy and Emily’. It was Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian. As well as being impressive – so thick! So weighty! So altogether grown up! – it was beautiful. The impressionistic cover in lovely muted tones (I go very maiden-aunt these days when I see how LOUD and GARISH children’s covers have become – I do not admire this side of myself) showed a little boy walking down a country lane, looking back over his shoulder at an avuncular white-haired man with an eager dog at his side, under a canopy of autumnal leaves. Another gently bucolic tale of Life Way Back When (‘Two days before the declaration of war in 1939,’ began the blurb on the inside flap. How exciting! I’d never had an inside flap before!), I thought. Just right for someone whose heart had recently been shredded in a midnight garden. And I dived delightedly in.

  You might know now, of course, what I found instead. In the thirty-plus years that have elapsed since then, Goodnight Mister Tom has become revered as a modern classic, embraced as a staple of the English syllabus in school and made famous by the television adaptation starring John Thaw as the not-quite-as-avuncular-as-an-autumnal-watercolour-cover-would-have-you-believe Mr Tom. The story of William Beech, who is evacuated during the Second World War and comes to live with the reclusive Tom Oakley, long mired in grief for the wife and child he lost as a young man (‘He watched helplessly as the old, familiar colour of scarletina spread across both their faces’ is a line that will never leave me), is no gently nostalgic tale. It is a dense, potent, perfectly paced and endlessly compelling exploration of what damage life and other people can do to us, and of the healing too.

  I felt that I was reading a different order of book as I watched William’s relationship with his reluctant host shift and grow and the boy gradually stand revealed as an unloved and – at the hands of his mentaly ill mother – abused child. And it did feel like I was watching, so vivid were the pictures in my mind’s eye that Magorian – an actor specialising in mime before she turned to writing and poured all the words she had saved up into her perfect debut novel – conjured.

  William and Tom’s fear and wariness gradually fall away and a fragile trust is established between them which deepens slowly – so slowly, so painfully and truthfully that to this day I don’t know how I stood it – into love. Fellow evacuee Zacharias Wrench (‘My parents had a cruel sense of humour’) inducts William into the joys of boyhood friendship and gives him a taste of the unfettered childhood he has missed.

  There are some harrowing scenes – Zach is killed in an air raid, and later William is forced to return briefly to his mother, who locks him under the stairs with no food or drink and her new baby, who dies of starvation – and I wonder sometimes whether, if my parents had read the book when they bought it they would have hesitated before giving it to me. There would have been no need. It was never melodramatic, voyeuristic or depressing. It never bewildered or upset me in that truly distressing way that comes only with feeling unmoored in a sea of new facts or feelings. Magorian held my hand all the way. She stretched and tugged at my heart and soul, for sure – but she pulled them into a better shape. It is one of the few books I can honestly point to and say – I was different by the end. More than that, I was better. I understood more and it pulled me along the road to empathy. In its delicate portraits of friendship, its careful delineation of the effects of past experiences, good and bad, on the present, Goodnight Mister Tom asks in a way children can understand whether it is better to have loved and lost or never to have loved at all, suggests that we can hope to deal with grief and cultivates the first glimmerings of appreciation of what a strangely robust yet infinitely fragile thing the human spirit is. Optimism and compassion power the book. They give it truth and beauty and never steer it – or you – wrong.

  I loved it so much that it became the first book I ever pressed upon someone else – Miss Powell, who had taught me a few years lower down and several times commented how interesting the book looked when she saw me reading it in the playground. She was young, kind, pretty and had sorted out the difference between ‘q’ and ‘p’ for me, so I lent it to her when I had finished. It was like handing over an organ. She thanked me and then kept it on her desk for weeks. I couldn’t believe it. I used to find excuses to pass her classroom door at least three times a day and gaze at my treasure mournfully through the window. How could she resist reading it at once? How could you get a new book and not read it straight away? Hadn’t she heard what I’d said about how wonderful it was and how much it meant to me? What was wrong with people? I pestered her every day to see if she had read any of it while I hadn’t been looking. Eventually she read it. She liked it. She said it was indeed very good. She gave it back to me. We never spoke of it again. She looked slightly less pretty to me after that. I shouldn’t have let it get to me. I certainly shouldn’t let it get to me still.

  However. Times do change and we, however exhaustive our efforts, change slightly with them and three decades on, the memory of Miss Powell pains me a little less than the thought that Goodnight Mister Tom is now part of the school curriculum. Because imagine – imagine reading this impeccably worked, subtle tale under duress, with the dread hand of coursework or examination on your shoulder. Imagine having to sit down and dissect Magorian’s ‘use of language’ instead of immersing yourself in a story in which a small, abused and loveless boy and an old, bereaved and bitter man gradually start to heal each other. It’s like asking someone to gas a butterfly and pin it to the card before they have even seen it fly.

  I occasionally try and comfort myself with the thought that at least this way the book is brought before many hundreds of thousands of children who would otherwise never see it at all. And I do have faith that even in fragmented form its power is such that some greater sense of it will lodge in some forced-readers’ minds and they will later seek it out in order to piece it back together fo
r themselves and enjoy it as God and Magorian intended. But as someone who still cannot fully enjoy Pride and Prejudice for the ghosts of annotated underlinings that still appear before my GCSE-affrighted eyes more than twenty years on, I fervently hope that I am able to slide Magorian’s masterpiece in front of Alexander before his teachers deem it time, and let him feel the joy and the agony of a full heart unconstrained by the bonds of pedagogy. With lots of love for a happy life, from Mummy.

  Private – Keep Out!

  ‘I suppose,’ said my mother whenever she spotted me crawling up the stairs or leaning against the wall too weakened by laughter to have full control over my gross motor functions, ‘it’s that book again?’

  It always was. My dad had recently come home with Private – Keep Out! by Gwen Grant. It was the third strut that would, with Tom’s Midnight Garden and The Phantom Tollbooth, prop up my personality for years to come.

  The heroine and narrator of Gwen Grant’s masterpiece has no name but is the youngest of six children growing up in the Hall family, in a Nottinghamshire colliery town just after the Second World War. She is beset on all sides by siblings (‘If I didn’t know my own brothers personally, I wouldn’t believe such a horrible bunch could exist and they make me sick’), Les Dawsonish matriarchs, grudge-bearing neighbourhood children, pitiless dance teachers (‘She keeps wanting me to bend one of those bits of my legs that don’t bend. I said to her, “They don’t bend,” and she said, “They will by the time I’ve finished with them”’) and the general illogicality of life. It has bred within her a blend of determination, fatalism and misanthropy that warmed my heart like nothing else.