Bookworm

by Lucy Mangan

  In lessons, alas, we were still murdering books aloud, this time on a grander scale. Lord of the Flies. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Jane Eyre. Wuthering Heights. Out loud. In their entireties. Page by seemingly infinite page at a time.

  On the upside, by the time we finished, the first year of school was over and my dad was better. Weak, thin, still bald and looking almost as battered as our copies of Wuthering Heights, but cancer-free, as he has remained ever since. So hurrah, may I say – and, while I’ve got an audience, a big thank you to modern Western medicine – to that.

  10

  A Coming of Age

  I HAD ALSO by the end of that first year – hold onto your hats here – made a friend. No, a real-life friend, made out of flesh and blood and everything. Although not much flesh, now I think about it.

  Sally was – and is – a gangling wreck of a human being. She was tall, thin, had giant goggly eyes in a tiny face and was mostly out to enjoy herself. This usually took the form of pulling faces and periodically making a reverberating ‘Oooourrgh’ noise which could express joy, disappointment or interest as the mood took her, but it was usually done just to unsettle people. With only the paltry resource of the written word at my disposal, I can neither reproduce nor do full justice to its jarring effects as it emanated from her fragile frame. She was kind, she was funny, she was ten types of idiot and I insisted that she became my friend. I called her Pinhead because of her tiny head (which was responsible for her tiny face – I don’t know what was responsible for the eyes) and she called me Bubblehead because, she pointed out, my skull was not round like normal people’s but had a big lump at the back that made it look like it was blowing a bubble. We commended each other’s honesty and accuracy and were inseparable from then on.

  She also, it emerged, liked books. Not quite as much as she liked people – this was at first baffling but would become increasingly useful over the yearsfn1 – but she read them, lots of them, and she liked them. Our tastes overlapped rather than matched. Sally was a romantic rather than sensible person like me. She liked poetry, which only ever made me go hot with embarrassment at all the naked emotion on display.fn2 She even liked Jane Eyre and the roiling lunacy that was Wuthering Heights.

  But we both loved Jill Paton Walsh’s Fireweed. It was a love story sufficiently full of feeling to engage Sally but short and sparing enough with its emotions not to embarrass me. The tale of Bill, an unhappy evacuee during the Second World War who returns to London to fend for himself until his soldier father comes home, and Julie, a fellow fugitive whom he meets while sheltering in a tube station during an air raid, was the first time since Goodnight Mister Tom that a book had caught me off guard.

  As the Blitz shatters London around them, Bill’s feelings for Julie deepen and flourish like the fireweed that takes root in the bomb sites all over the city. When Julie is eventually injured and hospitalised, her parents find her, and the intrusion of adults and their all-consuming concerns about class and propriety destroy Bill’s fragile idyll. They whisk her back home and Bill is left to wander the ruins of London alone, watching the plant take hold everywhere. ‘They will build on this again someday,’ he says in the final lines. ‘But I like it best like this. Grown over. Healed.’

  We both clutched our adolescent chests – me metaphorically, Sally literally – as our hearts swelled and threatened to burst with the repressed passion and nobility of it all. It was glorious. All the more so for the feeling being shared. Maybe this was what those Puffin Post-ers had been enjoying all those years. Hmm.

  I was quietly devastated to discover a few years ago that the author is no longer terribly enamoured of her book. I went to a lecture (about Philippa Pearce) and at a gathering afterwards someone pointed out Jill Paton Walsh to me. I had had just enough white wine to give me the courage to tell her how much I loved Fireweed. She listened gravely to whatever idiotic fragments of introduction and explanation made it out of my mouth and then proceeded to tell me briskly (I remembered then that she had been a teacher before turning to writing for a living) that she did not like Fireweed at all any more, that the parents’ intervention was crass (‘They seemed to come from another book’) and that although she had considered it all right at the time, she now looked on it more or less as juvenilia.

  Suitably chastened, I slunk away. But now (at a safe chronological and geographical distance) I find that my marginally mutinous teenage self is stirring and I wish to say – so what? A book belongs as much to the reader as to the author. I have reread it recently, and although I can see what she means now about the parents’ intervention, it didn’t matter to me then and I am sure that it won’t matter to any young reader who takes it down from the shelf at any point during that happy time when romantic longings are still outpacing critical faculties, and that they will find it as illuminating, moving and satisfying as I did. I hope they have a Sally to share it with too. That really is a good feeling.

  As a final flourish at the end of that triumphant year, I won a prize. Nominally for Effort and Achievement, probably in fact for Having a Dad with Cancer. No matter. All winners were allowed to choose any book they wanted, as long as that book was under £2, and one Friday lunch hour they bundled the twenty of us down to the children’s section of Catford shopping centre’s WHSmith, where we were allotted ten minutes to make our choices.

  I scanned the shelves. There was not much there, and what little there was I – fortunate, indulged child that I was – already had. I was about to settle for a treasury of something or other (the completist in me already hated treasuries with a passion that has not abated over the years. Give me a whole book, or give me nothing. Either’s fine. But don’t give me extracts. Don’t tease me) when I saw them. The Macmillan William Brown books. White spines, red lettering, a full set of Richmal Crompton’s finest taking up at least half a yard of an upper shelf. My prize money allowed the purchase of two. Did they have the ones I needed to complete my collection – William and Air Raid Precautions and William and the Evacuees? They did. I floated out of the shop on air.

  To my surprise, my parents shook their heads in disappointment at my choice. I should have gone for a hardback, something more classic and uplifting than William Brown, apparently, as a prize. This notion of book-as-object rather than mass-of-content was new to me. I considered it with interest, and rejected it entirely. There was, I reasoned, a finite amount of cash and number of opportunities for acquisition in this world and neither should be wasted on getting a book that was beautiful but that you didn’t want to read. Quantity of content over quality of livery has been the philosophy I have clung to ever since, which is why when I die second-hand book dealers (in the unlikely event that they have survived that long) will not be looking over my accumulated library with a covetous eye but advising my surviving relatives on how many skips to hire.

  (I was once interviewed by a man from a book-collecting magazine because he refused to believe that I had 10,000 books in my house that were all merely – in the parlance of the trade – ‘reading copies’. He came. He saw. He left. He wrote that it looked like I ‘had a jumble sale hoisted on my walls’. I was hurt on my books’ behalf, but couldn’t argue.)

  Back home, things were better in the sense that my dad wasn’t ill (just convalescing) but worse in the sense that, having failed to get better in the time decreed reasonable by his boss, he had lost his job. And things were the same in that, as my parents were the nonpareils of rainy-day savers, this did not plunge us into penury, although as time wore on we did start taking in foreign students from the TEFL place down the road as lodgers. Which was fine. They used all the hot water and I had a lot of cold showers, but generally they stayed out of my way and I stayed out of theirs. One of them once tried to help me with my Spanish homework but she was Brazilian and it turned out that they spoke an entirely different kind of Spanish from school Spanish so we went back to just nodding and smiling as we passed each other on the landing after another hot/freezing shower.


  It would make more sense if at this point I developed a taste for fantasy. But I went the other way instead and discovered Bernard Ashley’s 1974 novel The Trouble with Donovan Croft.

  Donovan Croft is what was then called ‘the product of a broken home’ – his mother has had to return to Jamaica and his father cannot work sufficient hours at his low-paid job and still look after his son, so he is put into foster care. His trouble, by the time he arrives to be looked after by thirteen-year-old Keith’s family, is that he doesn’t speak. That, at least, is the trouble with Donovan Croft for everyone else. A number of them also consider the fact that he is black to be equally bothersome, but for everyone who has his welfare at heart – his despairing father, his stymied foster family, his frustrated head teacher and social workers – it is the retreat into silence that matters.

  Bernard Ashley’s story was part of a movement that started in the 1970s towards providing children with stories about modern protagonists facing contemporary difficulties (or old difficulties with a contemporary spin). A lot of these so-called ‘problem novels’ dealt with single issues (divorce, bullying, sexism, racism) in fairly basic, one-note ways. Perhaps aided by his years of experience as a teacher (his first stories were written for the children in his special-needs class; they were seen by an educational publisher visiting his school and published in 1966 – Croft was his first novel) as well as his natural talent, Ashley’s wasn’t one of them. His book is the story of what happens when the normal patterns of life are disrupted, about the effects of insecurity and unhappiness on children, particularly, and on those around them, compounded in Croft’s case by racism.

  All this is woven in and out of a pitch-perfect evocation of the wordlessly growing friendship between Donovan and the Chapmans’ son, Keith (despite Keith’s own frustration with his mute foster brother, and his own ostracism that follows from his association with the weird new kid in the playground) and of Donovan’s profound sense of being an afterthought in a grown-up world (familiar to all children, though usually to a lesser extent). I remember the strange feeling of having privileged access to his inner monologues and the urge, which grew to almost unbearable proportions as the book continued to refuse to yield easy answers to a boy’s despair, for him to speak, speak, to Keith, to his father, to anyone about a misery lying too deep for either tears or words.

  It was further proof, to add to End of Term’s, that people contained multitudes. But more than that, The Trouble with Donovan Croft made it clear that people’s perceptions of each other were rarely pure and never simple. When Donovan’s authoritarian form teacher reacts with violent hostility to what he (aided by a degree of racism) perceives as his new pupil’s ‘dumb insolence’, it started to become clear to me for the first (conscious) time that we might all be looking at each other through the distorting prisms of our own limited understanding and various prejudices. This was both interesting and infuriating. Life, it seemed, could turn out to be a lot more complex, and frankly exhausting, than I had originally thought.

  I then went on a little 1970s-gritty-realism spree. I polished off a few more Ashleys, including Break in the Sun and Running Scared. Break in the Sun (which was on television at the time though I refused to watch it as I refuse to watch all book adaptations on the grounds that nobody should be encouraged to mess with perfection) almost broke me. That a child could be driven to running away from home for real – by, in this case, a violent stepfather – rather than Catherine-Storr’s-Lucy-style seemed to me about the most awful thing imaginable. Running Scared, a novelisation of the 1986 TV drama he wrote for the BBC which didn’t suffer the drop in quality most novelisations do and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, was less harrowing. I writhed in delicious agony throughout this tense thriller that posed endless questions about divided loyalties and matters of conscience that rereading now I find the intervening thirty years have done nothing to simplify.) Then came Sylvia Sherry’s A Pair of Jesus Boots and its sequel, A Pair of Desert Wellies, whose (anti?) hero Rocky O’Rourke, growing up in a poor part of Liverpool, gradually comes to realise that the wayward big brother he idolises is not as worthy of his adoration as he thought and that he must choose whether to follow the family’s or his own path.

  Sally and I both read Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia, a beautifully written story of a friendship that grows between two school outsiders Jesse and Leslie who establish their own private kingdom – Terabithia – by a stream in the woods. While Jesse is away, Leslie goes there alone, falls and drowns. Sally was shattered. I was not. Upon questioning, it turned out that I had not understood what had happened. The denial Jesse moves into had confused me; I didn’t understand what he was doing and thought therefore that everyone else must have got it wrong and Leslie was indeed, as Jesse insisted, still alive. Sally, both a better reader and more emotionally literate than I was, instructed me to re-read the end and this time, with Paterson pulling me gently on and Sally pushing valiantly from behind, I got it. I was shattered in my turn, and Sally was satisfied. I began to see how maybe, just occasionally, books and people could work in harmony. Maybe it wasn’t always necessary to reject the one in order to embrace the other. It would be many years before I acted on this thought, but still, I was glad to have it.

  The library yielded Cynthia Voigt’s Dicey’s Song and I slogged through it. It was the first time I ever found myself unable to suspend my disbelief. The idea of four children, abandoned by their mentally-ill mother in a Connecticut car park making it all the way to their aunt’s and then grandmother’s house umpty-billion miles away without getting kidnapped, killed or at least picked up by the police and sent straight to the foster homes they are desperate to avoid seemed to me, in such an otherwise acutely realistic book, impossible. Somehow, though you would think my incredulity would have inoculated against it, it was nevertheless harrowing. They reach their destination and are eventually taken in by their grandmother, but their mother remains in a catatonic state in a Boston hospital. It seemed to me that without your mother – in a functional state – there could not, should not even be an attempt at a happy ending. With the great continent slowly flooding, how would you be able to do anything but try and beat back the rising tides of anxiety, fear and misery? No, Cynthia – your American optimism was not for me. It was all deeply unsettling.

  I took a brief break in the light-hearted world of Hangin’ Out With Ceci – about a rebellious teen who travels back in time and ends up becoming friends with her own, now also teenage, mother – by Francine Pascal (whose Sweet Valley High series I was – O happy California summer’s day! – very soon to meet). Then I returned, slightly gingerly, to the fray with some Betsy Byars from the paperback carousels in Torridon and the school libraries. The Pinballs, The Cybil War, The Eighteenth Emergency, The Cartoonist – the last was my particular favourite, though less for its lightly, but beautifully and accurately sketched depiction of the family dysfunction caused by an immature mother and her preference for one son over the rest of her children, than for the protagonist Alfie’s attic. A room of your own (soon under threat from the return of the prodigal son, Bubba, who their fond mama insists needs the attic to live in) was my dream and I lusted over Alfie’s as I had Jo March’s a few years before. Alfie drew cartoons and pinned them up all round him. I planned to write and keep everything hidden, but other than that we were soulmates.

  I have a room of my own now, incidentally, and it is every bit as good as I thought it would be.

  SVH

  Hey, d’you know what? I’m getting a bit of a rush of blood to the head and wanting to go crazy for a moment. Let’s take our own break from these tales of misery, maternal favouritism and child roadside abandonment and turn our faces to the bright, glorious, gloriously stupid sunshine of Sweet Valley High right now. I don’t know what’s happening – the wild, carefree spirit of Jessica Wakefield seems to be moving through me – but let’s do it!

  This was the first book craze ever to hit school. Sud
denly, everyone was reading. Pink, yellow and lilac paperbacks blossomed like flowers across the playground. Everyone loved them. I loved them. It was a heady time. Nobody could get enough of them. Especially me, as I wasn’t allowed to buy them.

  Well, that’s not quite true. My parents never forbade me to buy any book. But they made their feelings known. And somehow, when my mother made her feelings known, I never really felt like butting up against them any more than I have ever felt like butting up against an electric fence or bundle of razor wire.

  Also they were, compared to other books, fantastically expensive. £1.75 a throw in 1986 was serious money. I presume now that this was a result of the fact that the books were not books in the traditional sense, written by A Writer and published by a normal firm in the normal manner but part of a sprawling industry creating merchandise rather than Art. Brighter sparks in the playground might have realised that producing a dozen books a year was beyond the scope of even the most prolific authors, but I did not. Astute observers might have noted that the covers read ‘Created by’ rather than ‘Written by’ Francine Pascal, but I did not. It was only in recent years that I realised they were composed by conglomerate.

  I always like to imagine Pascal sometime in the early 1980s suddenly sitting bolt upright in the middle of the night and a satin-sheeted bed and crying ‘Twins! The same! Yet so different! And lavaliers!’ before falling fast back to sleep again, the better to birth her creation, refreshed, in the morning. I am delighted to tell you now that that is basically what happened.