Bookworm

by Lucy Mangan

  She always understood completely.

  When the first bloom of Blume was over for me, I filled the void with Puffin Plus books. If you are slightly older than me and remember the Puffin Peacocks books – well, this is what that series evolved into. Whereas Peacocks had gone quite heavy on the historical fiction,fn7 Puffin Plus was a bit more progressive. A bit cooler. But, like Blume, they were precursors to what is today known as YA (young adult) fiction, and as nearly young-adult persons Sally and I lapped them up.

  Some, like The Best Little Girl in the World (about a girl with an eating disorder, written by an American psychologist who specialised in treating – but not, I must sadly note on rereading, in writing terribly well about – eating disorders) were ‘issue’ books, to be read with interest but rarely good enough to be loved. Some were passed around, like the Jilly Coopers had been, for their rude bits (one had a blow job scene but – in recognition of how little interested we were in the Not Rude bits of Rude Books, I cannot remember the title. It may have been I’m Kissing As Fast As I Can. It rings a bell and sounds plausible), and one – just one – was funny.

  That one was June Oldham’s comic teen romance novel Grow Up, Cupid. It was easily the funniest book I had read since Private – Keep Out!. We are introduced to the lead character, seventeen-year-old Margaret Dermot (Mog to her friends) thus: ‘Ever since the day Margaret had been observed in the Infants’ playground lifting her dress and showing her knickers to a circle of uninterested boys, Mrs Dermot had feared for her daughter’s morals. The subsequent twelve years spent in tremulous vigilance had done nothing to relieve her anxiety.’ I laughed till I cried.

  Mog, when we meet her a few pages later, has (to the only cautious relief of her mother) dumped her boyfriend Keith for spending too much time writing poems to her, and sworn off men. Instead, she throws herself into a variety of more rewarding pursuits, including recruiting students for a writer’s after-hours class and gently terrorising the college head (‘old enough to have lost, as hostages to the years, much of his cerebral hair and an athletic figure. That is how he referred to what others called bald and fat’) into organising a crèche. She also starts writing a Mills & Boon novel to earn some cash.

  One cannot write a book requiring a convincing representation of the Perfect Man without at least a modicum of research, of course, and so Mog does a spot of fieldwork with one of the fathers from the crèche, Denis from the writing class, a quick but ultimately unsatisfactory re-try with Keith, before finally taking a run at punk-haired fellow student Bysshe (his mother had a crush on Shelley) who, though a Mills & Boon heroine might faint at the very sight of him, proves to be the perfect man for Mog.

  At fourteen I loved the book for being funny. Now, although there is still something to make me laugh on every page I love it even more for having such a bright, inquiring, active, charming heroine, full of life, anarchy and sarcasm – a perfect rendition of the true teenage spirit. The capturing of that spirit – and of teenage humour, without which we would surely none of us have made it past fifteen – is still rare, at least for the upper age range of YA readers at which Mog and Puffin Plus were aimed. Slightly younger readers have, these days, the likes of the late, great Louise Rennison, whose heroines are full to the brim with a zest for life and one-liners. And whenever I am feeling down, I reach for any of Holly Smale’s Geek Girl series about oddball Harriet Manners, fact-collector-and-regurgitator extraordinaire who nonplusses everyone around her, especially when she manages to fall backwards – almost literally – into a modelling career. All six books are miracles of perfectly pitched and maintained tone – Harriet is so idiosyncratic and naïve that she could easily become frustrating and unreal, but the whole is so funny and engaging she never falls off the tightrope – and leave me with a daft smile on my face for hours afterwards. But comic fare for older teens seems thin on the ground still.

  Summer of My German Soldier

  I was buying most of my books for myself now. It wasn’t like I had a social life making any demands on my purse, and Dad had to start saving for a pension at some point. But he would still occasionally bring me a surprise present. One of them was Summer of My German Soldier, by Bette Greene. This dense, beautiful, astonishing, intricate portrayal of love, friendship, hatred, prejudice and sacrifice packs so much pain, beauty and wisdom into its compass that when I reread it now, I have to put it down every few pages and walk around for a bit to let it all bed down before I am ready for the next chapter. There is a whole cadre of books, especially from the 1970s, that attempted to show the inhumanity of war from all sides and show the grey areas within it, rather than deal simply in Goodies and Baddies, but never was it better done than in Greene’s debut novel about Patty Bergen, a twelve-year-old Jewish girl living in the Deep South of America. Her family is barely tolerated by their neighbours and she is barely tolerated by her family. Her mother finds her constantly wanting – in femininity, in social graces and all the other things that would make her worthy of the role of daughter, especially when set against her younger, prettier and more biddable sister Sharon. Her father – in some of the most expertly, vividly, unsensationally rendered scenes of violence you’ll read this side of the boy Cromwell being battered in the opening of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall – frequently beats her senseless, and senselessly. Her grandparents and the family housekeeper Ruth do what they can to protect and to love her, but it is not enough.

  Patty’s intense need and vulnerability lead her to help hide a German soldier, Anton Reiker, after he escapes from a nearby POW camp. He is a conscript into the army, the son of a historian who spoke out against Hitler until it became too dangerous (‘He chose acquiescence and life rather than resistance and death. Not a very admirable choice, but a very human one’) and his mother was a gardener from England. Anton teases Patty, teaches her and appreciates her. Everything that brings her hostility and bruises at home – her intellect, her curiosity, her unbiddability, her ‘unfemininity’ – brings her happiness and growing friendship in the soldier’s hideout. She learns that she, just as she stands, just as she is, is worth something.

  It ends brutally. But the book – originally rejected by eighteen publishers, who presumably took fright at the thought of how inflammatory a depiction of a non-evil Nazi befriending a Jewish girl could be – was another landmark one for me. It was my first exposure to the idea that even something as irredeemable as Nazism could contain nuance and complexity (at the very simplest level, I hadn’t even known about conscription before – were you as culpable if you’d been forced to join up as those who did so voluntarily? This alone caused my brain to stutter) and my first step along the road to answering the simple question that arises in every child’s mind when they first start learning about Hitler and the Holocaust: how did it, how did he, happen? Anton’s explanation to Patty of how Hitler succeeded is still my go-to reference as I’m reading the headlines about the rise of whichever new (or ancient) evil is dominating the news cycle that day. ‘His first layer is an undeniable truth, such as: the German worker is poor. The second layer is divided equally between flattery and truth: the German worker deserves to be prosperous. The third layer is total fabrication: the Jews and the Communists have stolen what is rightfully yours.’ Evil builds in increments. Your understanding of this basic truth may grow in sophistication and detail over the years, but the earlier and harder you grasp the simple, unchanging bastard fundamental, the better off you’ll be.

  *

  It is impossible, of course, to say exactly when childhood reading stops and adult reading begins. I was coming up to sixteen and my intake was already fairly evenly split between both groups. I was still rereading old favourites like The Family from One End Street and Tom’s Midnight Garden, especially when tired, under stress or on holiday. But I was also turning increasingly (and as gleefully and as indiscriminately as I had with all my other reading) to John Irving, Maeve Binchy, Stella Gibbons, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Mitchell, Thackeray (I still ha
ven’t touched Dickens), J. G. Ballard, Daniel Defoe, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Swift, Philip Roth, David Lodge, Josephine Tey and Peter Tinniswood. In a year or so’s time, I would discover Jane Austen and a whole new level of adoration. Summer of My German Soldier was, I think, one of the last children’s books I read for the first time as a child. After that, I would continue to reread old favourites, but my new acquisitions would tend to come from the adult shelves of bookshops and the library.

  Adult reading – by which I mean reading adult books at a roughly adult age – is different from reading children’s books as a child. It is still my favourite thing to do, it is still absolutely necessary to me, I still become fractious and impatient if I do not get my daily ‘fix’ – but the quality of the experience is different. I do not get absorbed as easily or as fully. I am more pernickety. Where once any book would have done, I now frequently have to try a few to find one that suits. The joy, once guaranteed simply by opening a cover, is now more elusive. As an adult, your tastes (and/or prejudices) are more developed and particular, your time is more precious and your critical faculties are harder to switch off. As an adult, worries are greater and it takes a more powerful page to be able to banish them for the duration. Perhaps you appreciate it all the more when it comes, but I miss the days of effortless immersion, and the glorious certainty of pleasure.

  Even today, my greatest chance of recapturing those heady days comes with sitting down with a children’s – or YA – book. The ones that were around when I was young but which I somehow missed, like Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle or the books that followed on from Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chasefn8 have all recreated those early joys despite my late discovery. And of the books written long after I reached my majority – well. The piledriving power of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy or Michael Grant’s Gone series will keep you up all night at any age. The delicate tracery of a Frances Hardinge story will make you hold your breath until the end, lest you disturb the perfect balance of it all. You cannot help but start pressing copies of Patrick Ness’ thrilling, heartbreaking, altogether extraordinary Chaos Walking trilogy on everyone you know as soon as you’ve finished it. Meg Rosoff makes you wish she had been writing for the last forty years instead of just fourteen. Everything Melvin Burgess writes crackles with genius. And I spend long hours wondering whether I wish J. K. Rowling had been around when I was young or whether I’m more grateful to have her now, so that Harry Potter can catapult me back and let me read, in that headlong, careless rush once more whenever I am most in need.

  When I look back, I come out in a cold sweat of relief at all the lucky breaks being a bookworm gives you. Beyond the pure and simple joy it brings, a love of reading grants you an easy life at school. It pleases teachers, who also assume you are clever (I was not) and hard-working (I was, but only because giving into my natural laziness would have earned me a solid beating at home). It gives you a facility with language which means all essay-based exams halve in complexity (and later makes covering letters and job applications a great deal more persuasive than they should be) and altogether eases your passage through life far more than any lucky break should.

  Once you’re out of the education system, things even up a bit. The genuinely clever people get the promotions and the money, which is as it should be (and sometimes they will buy you a bottle of nice wine if you help them with their applications and covering letters). We bookworms don’t mind, because we only need enough money for books, and promotion would mean longer working hours and less time to read.

  As I have got older, I have occasionally questioned whether it is possible to take the bookworm thing too far. ‘People say that life’s the thing but I prefer reading.’ Yes, I have thought in my weaker moments, but you really do need to live some life, don’t you?

  But then I come back to myself and think – no. No, I don’t. I have lived so many lives through books, gone to so many places, so many eras, looked through so many different eyes, considered so many different points of view. The fact that I haven’t had time to do much myself seems but a small price to pay. I live my life quite as fully as I want, thank you. Books have not isolated me – they have connected me. What non-bookworms get by meeting actual people, we get from reading.

  C. S. Lewis believed in reading as spiritual consolation – or at least the best substitute for it – and whatever depredations time, the outside world and adulthood have wrought (the cruellest of these being that the Little House on the Prairie books now read like prepper manuals for the coming apocalypse instead of charming, nostalgic tales of days gone by), it is still mine. Books remain what they have been to me since that first awful awareness dawned that I was an individual, separate from everyone else and, until and unless you come to know better, alone: they have been an endless comfort. Books connect you to others. It sounds trite but it is true. You are kept company by characters, by a story and by the consciousness – held literally in the hand, seemingly entire – that wrote the book. They all speak to you now across time and space, a commonality of minds, a sharing of experience, a proffering of thoughts and philosophies effortlessly spanning dimensions that would otherwise defeat all such efforts. They are insurmountable proof that the bundle of flaws, fancies, idiocies, instincts, anxieties and aptitudes that is you is neither unique nor alone. A man in Brooklyn can think up a story about a boy riding through a purple tollbooth – a purple tollbooth, for heaven’s sake! – and twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years later (and counting) it can delight and boggle the mind of an eight-year-old in Catford, a ten-year-old in Canberra or anyone at any point in between. You can share the adventures of a large family in Otwell or a tiny one under the floorboards just by knowing how twenty-six letters variously combine and which way up to hold a book. A boy and a garden that exist only on the page can intimate as long as that page endures that all of humanity yearns for the past, needs to know where it comes from in order to know where it’s going. If that doesn’t strike you as a near-divine miracle, nothing will.

  I do have – in case you were wondering, or worrying – some real, flesh-and-blood friends too. We don’t meet very often and when we do we talk mainly about books we have read or are thinking of reading, but that is exactly how we like it.

  If you’re a parent of a bookworm without being one yourself – first of all, may I say: better that than the other way round. I have serried ranks of books waiting for my son, untold joys patiently biding their time on the bookshelves all round the house, but he is nearly six at the time of writing and is showing no signs of following in the footsteps of his two bookworm parents. I literally don’t know what to do with him. By this age, I didn’t need parenting, just feeding and rotating every few hours on the sofa to prevent pressure sores. I am entirely adrift. Please send help.

  Second of all – I can see that bookworm offspring can be a bit of worry. We are rare and we are weird and no parent wants that; we want our children to have the safety of the crowd. But – and let this FREE you – there is nothing you can do to change us, any more than I can force my son to be like me. Really – don’t try. We are so, so happy, in our own way. Just be glad we are not into something actively harmful, like smoking, or noisy, like almost everything else a child cares to do. Be glad of all the benefits it will bring, rather than lamenting the fresh air avoided, the friendships not made, the parties not attended, the exercise not taken, the body of rewarding and potentially lucrative activities, hobbies and skills not developed. Leave us be. We’re fine. More than fine. Reading’s our thing.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to everyone at Square Peg, especially Rowan Yapp, Susannah Otter, Harriet Dobson, Lucie Cuthbertson-Twiggs and the whole design team. You are all as patient, kind and perceptive as any writer could want. Thank you to my wonderful agents, Juliet Pickering and Louise Lamont, for your knowledge, your fortitude and in particular your ability to interpret half-sentences sobbed down the phone and consequently sort vast portions of my worki
ng life out with a few brief, beautifully worded emails.

  Thank you to my godmother Anne Precious. To my friends Emily Church, Sian Evans, Claire Harrington, Theresa and Al Lyons, Sali Hughes, Michael Hogan, Mark Forsyth, Jason Hazeley, Jenny Colgan, Katy Cooper, Tom Rippin, Pete and Ange Harris, William Carslake, Jenny Milligan, Esther Schutzer-Weissmann, Maya Lester and Judy Byrne and to many more for the moral support and for the memories of your favourite children’s books that did so much to restore mine.

  Obviously I owe more than I can say to my family – my parents, my sister and my virtual sister Lucy Donovan – and my oldest, gangliest, dearest friend Sally Wright who all make appearances in these pages, though I have done none of them justice. I owe slightly less to my husband Christopher and son Alexander because I haven’t known them as long. On the other hand, I couldn’t write anything without their love, support and willingness to play Battleships quietly while I type on and neglect them utterly. Thank you all so much. I love you.

  Lucy’s Bookshelf

  1. The Very Hungry Reader

  The Very Hungry Caterpillar

  A Week with Willi the Worm

  Sugarpink Rose

  The Tiger Who Came to Tea

  When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit

  Mog the Forgetful Cat

  Janet and John

  Mog’s Christmas

  Mog in the Garden

  Goodbye Mog

  Nursery And Clinic