Bookworm

by Lucy Mangan

  And clearly it was the funniest children’s book ever written. I cleave even more firmly to this view three decades on. I reread it at least once every year and still have to have the emergency services on standby for the bit where her mam and dance teacher Fancy Nancy have to hold her down to get her into her costume for the town concert. The elastic in her knickers is too tight: ‘“I can’t breathe,” I said. And she said, “What do you want to breathe for? If them knickers fall down again, you’d be better off not breathing anyway, so just keep quiet and let me finish them.”’

  My parents became used to me sitting on the beanbag with tears of laughter rolling down my face as I tried to read the choicest bits out to them without choking to death. ‘Listen – listen – her brother’s just caught the girl who tried to burn her at the stake: “‘Come on then,’ he says, ‘you give her a good hiding’ and so I bash her as well and I think, ‘I hope she doesn’t live round here because when she’s untied, she’s going to come after me’, but I don’t let that stop me bashing her there and then. I think perhaps it might be the last chance I get.”’

  Private – Keep Out! should rank alongside Just William as an indispensable part of the children’s canon. Alas, and for no better reason that I can discern than the vagaries of chance and/or the misalignment of planets on publication, it has so far failed to find its rightful place.fn2 So let me state for the record: the public has been deprived of one (three, with the sequels, which have not yet, alas, been brought back into print) of the funniest children’s books ever written. I give it to every child and adult I care about and want to see laughing for the next twenty years.

  But it was more than just funny. In the episodic adventures of the Hall family was embedded something I had not known was missing from my other books – the very essence of my family’s way of life. I had for the first time a sense of sensibility. The Halls, too, lived by the creed that love and affection are best expressed through sarcasm (‘“Get that for me,” says our Lucy. “What did your last slave die of?” I says. “A broken neck,” she snarls, and I think oh yes, very nice’) and brinkmanship (‘I pulled a face at our Rose and she hit me on the head with a teaspoon. “I bet you think I’m an egg, don’t you?” and she said “If you were, I’d cut your head off with a knife and not just bash it with a spoon”’). The Halls understood what really matters: that when the chips are down, and being ignited at your stake-bound feet, family will come to your rescue, but absent a crisis not one word of warmth, friendliness or gesture of evident regard is ever to pass between you.

  C. S. Lewis found his Norse sagas and had his epiphanic vision of ‘Northernness’. I found Gwen Grant and had mine. At last I could see myself and my family from the outside in. At least part of our oddness – my oddness at school, their oddness every other bloody place – was explained. Born and bred in London I might have been but, for all of us – and my parents had been down south for ten years before I was born – London never truly ‘took’. We were still in some fundamental ways outsiders.

  Private – Keep Out!, then, was the book that, in addition to keeping me laughing until what I suspect will be the end of time, awakened me to the idea that discomforts in life might not be (just) down to me – they might sometimes in fact be down to Them. It did what books are supposed to do and broadened my horizons, almost literally. I wasn’t just a person moored in a family. That family was moored somewhere and that somewhere didn’t necessarily suit us best. But there were other places. The place my parents came from, to which we might one day return. There could even – and I had to brace myself as this thought rushed towards me – be other places that might suit me personally even better.

  I think of Private – Keep Out! whenever arguments about diversity and representation in books (or any other media) break out, as they periodically do. If I fell on that book (and its sequels) with such hunger and delight … imagine, I reason, if I’d been something ‘other’ in some more significant way than merely ‘ethnically northern in a southern world’. How much more would I have longed for and needed to see myself in my books if I’d been disabled, gay, black, non-Christian or something else outside the mainstream message?

  By this time – the mid-1980s – writers’ and publishers’ consciousnesses of matters of sex, race and representation had started to be raised. The first wave of concern had come in the 1960s and 70s, mainly – or perhaps just most successfully – over the matter of heroines. There were some. But not many. And certainly not enough of the right – feisty, non-domestic, un-Meg Marchish – sort. Efforts needed to be made to overcome the teeny imbalance caused by 300 years of unreflecting patriarchal history.

  It’s this memory that convinces me of the importance of role models and the rightness of including (or as critics of the practice call it, ‘crowbarring in’) a wide variety of characters with different backgrounds, orientations and everything else into children’s books. If it seems – hell, even if it IS – slightly effortful at times, I suspect that the benefits (even though by their very nature as explosions of inward delight, wordless recognition, relief, succour, sustenance, those benefits are largely hidden) vastly outweigh the alleged cons. And I’m never quite sure what the cons are supposed to be anyway. Criticisms usually boil down to some variant of ‘I am used to A! B makes me uncomfortable! O, take the nasty B away!’ Which really isn’t good enough.

  William – Melendy – Frisby

  I was getting pocket money by this stage. It basically functioned as a sequels stipend; the library, Dad or other benevolent figure would furnish me with a book, I would (generally) love it and disburse my savings to secure whatever else was in the series or other books the author had written. My first task was to build up a complete collection of Richmal Crompton’s books about William Brown, with whom I had fallen in love the very first time we met at the paperback carousel in Torridon Library.

  In the first chapter of the first of the thirty-nine books of the series (yes, thirty-nine. My finances would be put under severe strain, but a completist learns to live with it), William receives an entire shilling from a generous aunt and swaggers into his local sweetshop to buy an unprecedented sixpenn’orth of Gooseberry Eyes from the surprised owner. And then it reads ‘“Gotter bit of money this mornin’,” explained William carelessly, with the air of a Rothschild,’ whereupon I lost my heart to Crompton’s hero for ever. Oh, the exuberant confidence of it – the splendour! The magnificent insouciance!

  I did not know then, of course, that Crompton’s creation – based on her nephew Thomas – had been famed for his cavalier attitude to life and those who would seek to circumscribe his enjoyment of it ever since he first started appearing in Home and Happy magazines in 1919 (Just William, the first collection of these stories, was published in 1922). As previously noted, I did not know quite what a Rothschild was, but I deduced (and had confirmed later by my father) that it must be the name of a famously rich family, and it was actually this – this oblique promise of induction into a world of fluent and evocative expression – more than William’s notoriously lawless spirit, that drew me in.

  I realised, I think, even at that early age that opportunities for imitative anarchical exploits were going to be severely limited by my misfortune of having been born a particularly weedy girl in early 1980s suburbia instead of a sturdy village boy sixty years earlier. I didn’t have a gang of outlaws or a dog, there wasn’t a barn within a day’s hike and if I’d ever tried to dig up one of my mother’s flower beds she would have beaten me into a coma, not given a weary sigh of resignation and returned to her pile of mending. Why set myself up for failure? Serious injury, and failure?

  But the new possibilities for self-expression – well, they were something else. The books I had read so far had all stayed carefully within the semantic and grammatical comfort zone of their readers. But the magazines for which Crompton had first written her stories had been for adults, and she had chosen her language (and honed her satiric edge) accordingly. Now I saw that a
n author’s vocabulary should exceed her audience’s grasp – else what’s the bloody book for? That they were funny too was the icing on the cake. They sent me into paroxysms of delight and back again and again to the library for more sustaining doses of descriptions like that of the Brown family’s profoundly boring and unwelcome house guest, Mr Falkner, whose ‘accounts of his varied exploits of dauntless bravery and dazzling cleverness seemed to induce in William’s family a certain apathy of hopelessness, which William thought a very proper attitude on the part of a family. No one told him to go and wash his hands and brush his hair again … They simply had not the spirit. In fact such is the humanising effect of a common misfortune, they almost felt drawn to him.’ Richmal Crompton is the juvenile’s Wodehouse.fn3

  I was on a great polysyllabic spree, a grand tour round the glories of the subordinate clause. William was my guide, my inspiration and the gatekeeper to a new and better world. The suburbs suddenly expanded to infinity.

  Unlike Enid Blyton, you can reread Crompton’s William books at any age and still not only enjoy them but marvel at the craft and the gift of grandiloquent expression she had. It’s saddening to think that, although she was never bitter about the two outputs’ relative successes, she always felt her adult fiction (she wrote forty-one novels and nine collections of short stories) was her ‘real’ work and regarded the William books as ‘potboilers’. Perhaps, like Streatfeild and her Ballet Shoes, she did not find him difficult to write and distrusted what came so easily. Or perhaps comedy is never taken as seriously or appreciated as much as it should be even by those who create it. Those of us who love the boy and his books can only be grateful that, whatever her frustrations, she continued with both to the end of her life – and even a little beyond. The last volume of William stories – William the Lawless – was published in 1970, a year after she died. It includes ‘William’s Foggy Morning’, which was completed from her notes by her niece and literary executor Richmal Ashbee.

  Alas, long before I reached William’s last, foggy morning, I had to rejig my fiscal policy. I had the first dozen or so volumes, but the project was simply leaving no slack in the system. So I sent out (to myself, you understand) the edict that from now on birthday and Christmas money/tokens would be allocated to William. Pocket money would be for other procurements. It was a necessary adjustment. I had Melendy books to buy.

  Dad had brought home one Friday The Saturdays, the first in a series of four volumes written and set in the 1940s by Elizabeth Enright about the Melendy children. There is the embryonic actor Mona, dry-witted piano-playing Rush, exuberant Miranda (Randy) and the youngest, Oliver, the calmest, most meditative Melendy. Cooped up in their family brownstone in New York (I did say this was the 1940s. Even non-Vanderbilts could do that kind of thing then) on a rainy weekend, the children form the Independent Saturday Afternoon Adventure Club and for the next month pool their allowances to allow each of them in turn to take him or herself off into New York to do, for $1.60 or less, whatever suits the club member best.

  There is no plot to speak of – the chapters describe each child’s solo trip and the characters they meet on the way – but the episodic structure allows each child a chance to shine. In between times, the rough and tumble, the fun and the frustrations of family life are brilliantly drawn and instantly recognisable.

  The following two books – The Four-Story Mistake, in which the Melendys move to an architecturally challenged pile in the country, and Then There Were Five, when the Melendys absorb into the family a neglected boy living nearby – are more substantial stories even better told. The final part of the quartet, Spiderweb for Two, I could not find. It was The Phantom Tollbooth all over again. Out of print and nobody had any idea when or if it would be published again. This saddened me greatly. And then inspiration struck and I took myself off to the library to look for it. I hardly dared hope for success. I would surely have noticed it before now if it was there. But I was wrong. Just as you don’t see a word until you come to know a word and then you can’t stop seeing the word everywhere, so you don’t see titles until you know you want them. There was Spiderweb for Two, in the Es, in crinkly-covered hardback. I stood there, disbelieving. As I recall it, a light shines from the book and a choir of angels sings, but this may be a trick of memory. I pulled it down, got it stamped and renewed it every three weeks for a year. Aptly, it was about a treasure hunt – designed by Mona, Rush and Mark to keep Randy and Oliver occupied after the three older siblings go away to school. Truth be told, it wasn’t quite as good as the preceding three – nothing that splits a favourite cast up ever is, though the remaining pair were as real and funny and vivid as ever – but even a sub-par Melendy book was better than just about anything else I could think of, and I would have loved it even without the attendant thrill of discovery and completion.

  I handed over another 75p to the Greenwich Book Boat and bought Enright’s most famous book, Thimble Summer, for which she won the 1939 Newbery Medal. This is the tale of Garnet Linden who finds a silver thimble that brings her luck all summer long on her Depression-era Wisconsin farm. It didn’t knock the Melendys off their perch but it did contain something that fascinated me. On the farm during the harvest, Garnet would drop an occasional watermelon on purpose so that it would burst open ‘rosy red and cold as a glacier’ and she could use it to slake her thirst. At home, watermelon was a fabulously expensive, exotic thing you saw sold in single, carefully wrapped slices in the supermarket. The idea that somewhere they were so common, so plentiful that they could be treated quite differently woke in me some tiny flicker of appreciation that the way of the world I knew might not be the way of the world all over. Different places, different people, different contexts, different circumstances could all work on each other and produce different results, different values from the small batch familiar to me. This glimmer of insight seemed quite a good return on my 75p investment.

  Another library find shortly afterwards yielded a similar epiphany. Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH was a relatively insubstantial if gripping tale of a field-mouse family that helps a colony of super-intelligent former lab rats to move to a new home where they can live independently instead of simply tapping nearby humans’ electricity and food supplies. But one line burst onto my consciousness like a watermelon dropped from on high. When wise old rat Nicodemus is talking to Mrs Frisby about how they live compared to humans, he says: ‘A rat civilisation would probably never have built skyscrapers, since rats prefer to live underground. But think of the endless subways-below-subways-below-subways they would have had.’

  I read that huddled in the story corner of Mrs Pugh’s class, and it felt like fireworks going off in my head. It wasn’t just watermelons but the whole world that could be different. It wasn’t preordained, or immutable or, indeed, even anything special. Just ours. Built and organised for us, by us, developed to serve our needs. I closed the book gently, almost reverently, almost as awed by its power to provide me with such new, previously unthinkable thoughts as I was by the thought itself. I was just about catatonic with the shock of these revelations, but fortunately one of the eighteen Darrens in our class picked that moment to start throwing Lego at my head, so mental crisis was averted.

  Nicodemus, his subways and his skyscrapers are the reason this is still the book I hold up during the periodic rows that break out among adults of a certain stripe about the worthlessness of certain children’s books (and I write this in the full knowledge that I will be coming out, and coming out hard, against Gossip Girl and Stephenie Meyer, but, believe me, I would be going a lot further were it not for Mrs Frisby’s gently restraining paw on my psyche) and assure them that you simply never know what a child is going to find in a book (or a graphic novel, or a comic, or whatever) – what tiny, throwaway line might be the spark that lights the fuse that sets off an explosion in understanding whose force echoes down years. And it enables me to keep, at bottom, the faith that children should be allowed to read anything at any time. They wil
l take out of it whatever they are ready for. And just occasionally, it will ready them for something else.

  School Stories

  I was getting ready for something else now. Secondary school was looming. I had, though it seems risible now, high hopes. I had, after all, done much research about it in the library. Just as the pony story, I felt, had left me well prepared for any equine emergency or sudden relocation to the countryside, so must the school story for – well, school. And again, Torridon’s shelves were for some reason heaving with them, despite the fact that their popularity – although their heyday outshone and outlasted pony books’ – had undoubtedly been similarly on the wane for years.

  I am referring specifically, I should say at this point, to the girls’ school story. The genre began, because the schools themselves did, with boys. Tom Brown’s Schooldays, published in 1857 and based on the author Thomas Hughes’ years at Rugby School in the 1830s, is generally lauded as the first of its kind. Though there had been other stories set in boarding schools, this was the one that really made the school aspect a central feature rather than simply a setting against which traditional literary adventures and moral lessons played out. Although it didn’t stray far from its roots as a moral lecture (in the preface to the sixth edition, Hughes states with the certainty that blessed the age that although many people had said to him that they hoped he would preach less in the next one, ‘this I most distinctly decline to do. Why, my whole object in writing at all was to get the chance of preaching! When a man comes to my time of life and has his bread to make, and very little time to spare, is it likely that he will spend almost the whole of his yearly vacation in writing a story just to amuse people? I think not’) it – and its portrayal of ‘muscular Christianity’ – was massively popular and established the school story as a definite genre.