Remembering a book from childhood
In a furniture superstore, an overheard mother warns her child to stop swinging on a wardrobe, lest he ‘end up like Flat Stanley’. You haven’t thought of him, of that book, in twenty or more years. Immediately, you can picture its cover – the eponymous hero emerging from a musty yellow envelope dressed in a shirt and tie, in front of a wallpaper-pattern background reminiscent of a beehive. You recall how the story gave you a sense of abject fear (clearly, what happened to a little boy like Stanley Lambchop could happen to a little child like you) and of acute jealousy (how you wished that, like Stanley Lambchop, you could slide beneath doors and be a kite). You cannot remember when or where it was read to you, or if you did the reading, but the object itself and its story were woven within, obscured until now but most definitely there. While the furniture surrounding you when coming to know this story has slipped from your mind, the book’s furniture has stayed. How remarkable and profound that the slightest of brushes against a memory should plunder such rich returns.
Childhood books that dwell within us are dormant and can be snapped awake by fleeting references, most joyfully in a communal setting. In a café, a book about dragons and knights is mentioned, and within minutes its perky cherry cover and the violent spikes which pierce the Lambton Worm’s flesh are discussed. ‘A dark, dark house’ is mentioned in the workplace, and soon skeletons dancing through the night and a book jacket with butter-yellow edges are spreading warm recollections, spreadsheets abandoned. Illustrated heroes and villains lurk inside every head.
Then comes a hallowed day when a childhood book crosses from memory into possession. It may be in times sad, happy or neither; the clearing of a childhood home, the choice of the young reader you are raising, or a routine afternoon in a bookshop. When held, a silent charge pulses through the book and shrinks you backwards in time. Everything is familiar and reassuring – the feel, the cover, the drawings, the chins of the villagers, the deep-thinking cat, the peril and the end.
In the most jubilant instance this is the same copy first read, when gods and monsters first snuck into some beguiled corner of your mind. ‘This Book Belongs to . . .’ reads its label, and the answer is ‘you’, both then and now.