Six years old. 1926: the year of the General Strike. I heard and knew little enough about that at the time, even though we had just got a wireless. (I remember it had a lidded cabinet and inside it a small picture of a polar bear. No doubt some true radio buff will be able to tell me what sort of a set it was.)
Day by day, at winter’s end, the big field across from Monkey Lane was ploughed - the field which led across to the Bluebell Wood. If you were in the kitchen garden or the paddock, you would near the horses come jingling and clinking up to the top of the field, followed by the ploughman’s cry of ‘Log off!’ Then they would turn the plough and rest for a minute, until he called ‘Log on!’ and off they would set on the four or five hundred yards back to the Bluebell Wood. They did this steadily all day, with the plovers wheeling and calling above them.
In what seemed to me the early morning (while the Marguerite bird sang), I would hear the village children going by – walking down Wash Hill to school in Newbury, well over a mile away. Sometimes odd, ragged groups of adults and children were to be seen going the other way, pushing rough, home-made handcarts or old pram chassis.
‘Who are those?’ I asked my mother.
Those are the Penwooders,’ she told me.
Penwood is an extensive tract of woodland in north Hampshire (most of it’s still there), between the Enborne brook and Highclere. In those days it was common for poor people from Newbury to trudge the two or three miles up Wash Hill and out to Penwood to pick up and bring home as much ‘firing’ (e.g., The Tempest, II, 2,
Caliban: ‘No more dams I’ll make for fish,
Nor fetch in firing
At requiring,
Nor scrape trenchering, nor wash dish . . .’)
as they could handle. Hence the handcarts. But when you think how quickly wood burns, it still seems sad that they should have found these expeditions worth the time and trouble. They had little, if any, coal to keep in the bath. I used to feel uncomfortable and guilty to see them go by. They were hard-faced and ragged, and I knew I didn’t deserve not to be.
Still the time had now come when I too at least had to be up at a reasonable hour. I was going to school - to the mixed kindergarten of the Newbury Girls’ High School at the foot of Wash Hill.
The school, which charged moderate fees to the respectable Newbury bourgeoisie, was run by Miss Jane Luker and Miss Cobb. They were true blue-stockings in the tradition of Miss Buss and Miss Beale.
(‘Miss Buss and Miss Beale
Cupid’s darts do not feel.
How different from us,
Miss Beale and Miss Buss.’)
To a six-year-old, Miss Luker (‘Old Jane’) seemed a remote and formidable figure, inspiring awe and even fear by her reserve, her incisive manner and lack of humour. However, in the kindergarten I had little enough to do with her. The kindergarten mistress, Miss Binns, was a good teacher, with a kindly warmth to which we could all relate. She seemed ‘one of us’: she understood us. I owe her a lot, for with her I found that I liked learning and enjoyed the business of becoming literate, doing elementary arithmetic and finding out how to tell the time. My school-mates were either friends already - Jean and Ann were both in the class - or soon became friends. There wasn’t a bully or an enemy in the lot.
Whom else do I remember from those days? Well, principally Miss Langdon, perhaps the most sheerly kind-hearted person I have ever known. Miss Langdon surely deserves to be recalled. She was the Nature mistress, and she also taught us what I suppose must be called Divinity (Bible stories). In both these subjects she was, as far as I was concerned, completely successful; that is to say, she excited my interest by being herself committed. I can’t remember anyone ever wanting not to listen to Miss Langdon. That, surely, is the secret of good teaching. She was gentle to the point of simplicity; rather like Mrs Do-As-You-Would-Be-Done-By; and because she expected us to be good, we mostly were.
I remember her bringing into class a thick glass tank half-full of straw, from which she enticed a fine toad onto her hand. It had never occurred to me to take a toad onto my hand; but now I was eager to - and did. Spiders, too, I handled happily; and once, a mole. (They don’t bite.)
At one time, while I was in the kindergarten, I began, at home, to make a sort of ‘collection’ of butterflies. This could not have been more crude or useless. I simply caught the butterflies - cabbage white, peacock, red admiral, painted lady - killed them by pinching off their antennae and heads, and put them loose, all together, in a cardboard shoe-box. One day, when Miss Langdon came to tea, I showed them to her. Without actually saying an unkind word, she succeeded so well in conveying her pity and revulsion that I then and there gave up, and never killed another butterfly.
One day in class she was telling us the story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis, Chapter XX). ‘And,’ she finished, Abraham was so glad that God had said he hadn’t got to sacrifice his dear son Isaac after all.’ My friend Denis Hodder put up his hand. ‘Yes, Denis?’ ‘I bet Isaac was jolly glad, too.’ I felt that Miss Langdon - dear, kind Miss Langdon - had rather asked for it.
She was a great stickler for correct, clear, rounded diction on all occasions, whether appropriate or otherwise: my sister, up in the sixth form, once told me how she - Miss Langdon - was directing a school play in which some people had to be shut up in a locked cupboard. They were beating on the door and calling, under Miss Langdon’s tutelage, ‘Let - us - owt! Let - us - owt! This, too, became a family catchword.
Singing we learned, of course: and here I remember one experience which had a great effect on me. One morning I was called up by Miss Binns and given a note to deliver to Miss Luker in her study. This involved walking the whole length of the school while classes were going on. The long corridor was empty and very quiet, but from behind doors and frosted glass walls, as I passed them, came murmurs which showed that lessons were in progress. It was like hearing the Niebelungs working underground: nothing to see, but evidence enough that hundreds of people were close at hand and concentrated.
Suddenly I heard, though from a distance, a louder sound; the sound of singing. As I approached, I could recognize the tune. In the silence filling the school, a class were singing ‘Dashing Away with the Smoothing-Iron’. I stood entranced. It seemed unbelievably beautiful, like the song of angels.
All the brio of the song, its immediacy and delightfully happy melody, hit me as few other musical experiences have ever quite done. I stood and listened entranced. It was all just for me; or that was how it seemed.
‘’Twas on a Thursday morning
And there I saw my darling.
She looked so neat and charming
In every high degree.’1
‘Now then, young Richard, what do you think you’re doing?’ It was Miss Muirhead, the gym. mistress, on her way down the corridor. I hurriedly explained and then I, too, went speedily off.
I said I had no enemies; but perhaps I had a sort of one. Anyway we didn’t get on, and I reckon it was mostly my fault. Ruth Hubbard was a hefty little girl, a bit older than I. She was the daughter of our village policeman, and so bitter sometimes was our scrapping that I rather wonder, now, that he didn’t step round and have a word with Dr Adams. Small children, of course, always tend to quarrel unless they are restrained; but Ruth and I would often go at it, restrained or not. I discovered that although Ruth was bigger and stronger, with her it was mostly tongue. She didn’t punch much. However, the tongue could be mortifying and painful, as I knew from dealings with my big sister. I reacted to Ruth with anger and resentment. Usually it was I who got the reproof from Miss Binns, partly because I deserved it and partly because I was a boy. In those days boys were taught that girls were to be teated with courtesy, looked after and protected. (I hope they still are, but Ah whiles hae ma doots.)
One day our lot were taken out for a nature walk. Miss Binns, not Miss Langdon, was in charge. We went along the Buckingham Road and so to the Enborne Road, with its gravel pits on waste land west of the Grammar School. Here the ground was rough, broken by low mounds of left-over gravel and corresponding pits full of stinging nettles and brambles. Yellowhammers and greenfinches flew up from bushes and yellow-and-black cinnabar moth caterpillars throve on groundsel and ragwort.
It was here that Ruth and I began to quarrel once again. I can’t remember what about; only that this time it was unusually bitter. It grew worse and worse, until I lost my temper completely. Reckless what I did, I took a step forward and pushed Ruth. What happened next had been no part of my intention. She staggered backwards, lost her balance, screamed and went over the edge of a pit into the nettles.
I was aghast. It seemed — and perhaps was — the worst thing I had ever done. Whatever would happen? Somehow Ruth scrambled out, sobbing bitterly. There was no fight left in her. Her face was all covered in white lumps, and her arms and knees too. I had never seen such a sight. She was obviously in horrible pain.
And now came something which I still feel to have been unjust. Miss Binns refused to take Ruth’s part. ‘It was your fault, Ruth,’ she said. ‘You started it.’ I didn’t think she had, but seeing which way the wind was blowing, I kept quiet. So did the others. All the way home poor Ruth was crying and pressing her lumpy face, but Miss Binns remained like flint.
Ashamed, I had no more quarrels with Ruth for a long time.
Yet this episode taught me something else besides. When you think - or even if you feel sure - you’re in the wrong, keep quiet. You may be lucky – even inexplicably lucky. If there is a judge and a ruler over you, you’re under no moral obligation to blame yourself. The thing will be sorted out and if they blame you, then you can start, if you feel it, admitting wrong. But to start by admitting wrong - is wrong. You may not have been. You may have a natural tendency to think yourself in the wrong whether you are or not. Leave it, initially, to the judge, who is detached. (Unless, of course, you have reason to think he isn’t.) I’m still sorry for Ruth: I think she was unjustly blamed, and considering her serious pain, unkindly treated (which was unlike Miss Binns). But perhaps I’m still wrong?
Martin Butcher was something else. He gave most of us the willies. No one could make him out. I think he must have been one of the unhappiest people I have ever known. Solitary, subservient and silent, he kept himself apart, even in playtime. He seemed life-defeated: there was no least go in him. Invitations to join in play he would quietly refuse. No one ever knew him to sing. When you could hear him - which wasn’t often, for he seldom spoke - he had a low voice and a noticeable Berkshire accent, which put us snobbish little middle-classers off. The quality of his work was poor. At kindergarten level we weren’t in competition, but you couldn’t help knowing about Martin, from the way Miss Binns would look over his shoulder and say ‘No, not quite like that, Martin,’ or again ‘Come along, Martin, don’t copy Richard’s book any more.’ But he was sly and unscrupulous in his efforts to keep out of trouble, and would not only copy your book but, as though desperate, pinch your india-rubber to copy your later corrections. (We worked in pencil, of course.) The flesh-creeping thing about him was that he so obviously hated the whole set-up and was beyond any attempt to fit in or make friends. He lived in another world, where he simply suffered. Lacking all aggression, he had no resort but to keep his head down. We let him. It might, we felt, be Miss Binns’s job to try to break the barrier and get him out. It certainly wasn’t ours.
One episode I recall about Martin may, I think, throw a swift, momentary shaft into a murky woodshed. One day Miss Binns, going round the form to look at our work, stopped at Martin and said ‘Not coloured, Martin? Where are the crayons you had on Tuesday?’ In a low, expressionless voice he replied ‘Dad took ‘em away.’ (We didn’t refer to our fathers as ‘Dad’.) It was, plainly Miss Binns rather than Martin who felt embarrassed and anxious to end the conversation. What I have never understood - setting other considerations aside - is why, given that Martin’s father had presumably agreed to send him to the High School, he should take away his crayons. But Martin’s world was beyond guessing or comprehension.
He represented something new to me — something hitherto unexperienced. I suppose all of us – a few consciously but most unconsciously - felt the same. I had never before come up against someone who was openly unhappy all the time, as though that were his natural condition. Martin didn’t try to do anything about his unhappiness; he merely endured it; for him it was normality. As a child of six or seven years old I had always, unthinkingly, taken it for granted that happiness was the natural condition of myself and all children - all those whom I knew, anyway. Martin was unhappy as a matter of course. In all actuality he had neither will nor power - so it seemed - to take a step to meet you. In such a case children feel no particular obligation. Faced with something they don’t understand, they do their best to ignore it. If Martin had some strange gestalt of unhappiness, it was no business of ours to go out of our way to penetrate or mitigate it. The class distinction thing made it worse. Since we didn’t fear him, his presence embarrassed and irritated us. We felt no particular pity for this poor creature who had nothing to say to us, whose home was, one could infer, very different from any of ours and who patently disliked his life. But beneath this - to me, at any rate - lay something more frightening. It was possible for a boy - here it was, before your eyes - to be wretched all the time and to have no way out. What did he want? What would he have liked? No one knew: he didn’t know himself. He’d never known anything he liked. This actuality was disturbing and best avoided. However - as will be plain by now – I never, from that day to this, entirely got Martin off my mind. Things ought not to be like that for anybody: but they are. To come up against this — and instinctively to duck - is part of growing up.
Becoming literate was also part of growing up. I can’t remember any particular moment when I realized that I could read – read anything I wanted to and read for pleasure. Nor can I recall any particular book as being the first I read. Nevertheless, before I was eight I had become a passionate reader. This was better than having to go to parties and getting into trouble for saying the wrong thing: better than the uncontrollable world of real people and their crushing remarks which often hurt so much more than they can have been meant to. A printed story was predicted. It was there, in the book, and my pleasurable task was simply to follow it, to experience it as though it were real, to seek it out to the end. Poetry was also predicted, but here there was the added delight of memorability. If you read a poem often enough, it stuck in your mind. The sound, the metre and the mood they generated were what came across to me. The meaning — the real meaning — often escaped me: it didn’t matter. For example, a poem I discovered for myself and have more or less had on board ever since is Thomas Hardy’s ‘Friends Beyond’. The mood - and, unconsciously, the effect of the metre — seemed to me, at that age, kindly and reassuring. These nice, dead people were still around, talking to Thomas Hardy and not in the least frightening. The characteristic Hardyesque irony completely passed me by. But no doubt it would pass by any young child.
Reading was highly reassuring. It was the perfect escape - into other worlds which often seemed more valid and valuable than the real one. And no one found fault with you or blamed you for it: no, they were pleased to see you reading. And the thing that happened in books didn’t evanesce, like last Christmas or yesterday’s picnic. They stayed put, to become familiar, to be re-experienced as often as you wanted; and as they were dwelt on they grew in grace and power. Jim Hawkins was for ever and ever poised on the cross-trees. ‘One more step, Mr Hands, and I’ll blow your brains out!’ That stuck all right. Or the Artful Dodger sidled across the road to the exhausted Oliver. ‘Hullo! my covey, what’s the row?’ (The Dodger’s dialogue throughout, culminating in his glorious appearance before the magistrates, has been a resource and solace to me for years. But again, the pathos of the Dodger’s braggadocio escapes a child.) The permanence of books and the memorability of dialogue are well up among the most supportive things I have ever found. Becoming literate put me in possession of a new expanse, constituting a better bolt-hole than I could have dreamt of; far better than being behind the bedroom door at the Punch and Judy party. Words, and my own imagination, could open wider prospects and make the world more lucid and vivid - yes, and enjoyable - than I had known to be possible. Years later, when I was grown-up and living in Islington, I was privileged to pass this lot on to a friend, an East End boy. ‘I never knew there were such books,’ he said to me.
But there was a reverse side. I came upon it, of course, unaware: I couldn’t have foreseen it. Stories and poems reflect all aspects of human experience, not just the pleasant ones. They include grief and fear. It didn’t take long to discover that books could upset you a great deal. What was the first to do so? I don’t know - I can’t remember. Perhaps it may have been the heroic, self-sacrificing death of Elzevir Block (after years of undeserved imprisonment) at the end of Moonfleet. Ernest Thompson Seton was liable to upset you passim, without any warning at all. Scotty the hunter killed Krag, the Kootenay Ram. Raggylug’s mother was pursued onto the ice, fell through it and drowned. The nest-building sparrow hanged itself in a loop of horsehair. Uncle Remus’s stories of Brer Rabbit were usually delightful (I loved the dialect - reading it so as to hear it in my head), but did Brer Rabbit really murder Brer Wolf by pouring boiling water on him through holes bored in the lid of a chest?
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the book which upset me to the point of something approaching a small nervous breakdown. I can’t recall now how the book came into my hands, but certainly no one in the family foresaw that it was going to have such a devastating effect on me. A child takes everything at face value and has no discrimination or standards of comparison. For what it was worth, I knew that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a book that had been read and taken seriously by enormous numbers of grown-up people, and that it had been influential in bringing black slavery to an end. I wanted to know what it could all be about. Obviously, this was a great book and something I was going to enjoy reading. It turned out a quite unexpected disclosure, a journey to levels of grief which I had never imagined. People laugh at little Eva now: she has become a symbol representing the worst kind of Victorian sentimental mush. A child, absorbed in the story, cannot see her in this way and has no mental equipment with which to criticize Mrs Beecher Stowe’s outlook and narrative style. I found Eva’s relationship with Topsy entirely convincing and unlike anything I had ever come across elsewhere. Eva’s death came as a bad shock. It had never occurred to me that children died, and in trying to talk about it I didn’t get much reciprocity from the parents of poor Robert. I had to weep and wonder almost by myself; although the housemaid, kind girl, was comforting.
There was worse to come. Simon Legree, his dreadful plantation and his two black torturers Sambo and Quimbo have never really left me. In an odd way it was all worse because I couldn’t understand about Cassie. Why was she there? If I couldn’t understand about Cassie, perhaps there were other, more upsetting things that I couldn’t understand. But I understood all right about Uncle Tom, and I believed every word of it. I’m afraid I must have been a bit of a trial to the family for a day or two at least. To someone who tried to comfort me by saying ‘It didn’t really happen’, I answered ‘No, but I bet something like it did.’ I had, after all, in effect been told that that was so.
Many years later, when I came to write Shardik, I found that the inexorable course of the story compelled me to create the character of Genshed. He had to be the most wicked, cruel man I could devise. Meditating, I concluded that in fiction there were really two kinds of wicked man: a rich wicked man, like Grandison in Daniel Deronda; that is to say, a man rich enough to be wicked without being physically violent. And a poor wicked man, like Mr Squeers. Genshed was deliberately modelled on Simon Legree, except, of course, that his victims were not blacks but children. The critic Edward Blishen, writing about Shardik, showed himself under the curious misapprehension that it was meant to be read by children, and accordingly warned all his readers not to let any child come near it. Well, I underwent Simon Legree as a child and, whatever the sentimentality of Harriet Beecher Stowe, he has remained with me these sixty years. Yet as a child it was less horror of Simon Legree which obsessed me than grief for Uncle Tom.
If you come to think about it, the relative naivete and narrative simplicity of Mrs Beecher Stowe’s approach to the reader were essential to my absorption and my passionate feelings of grief. I was eight years old: if it had been King Lear or Jude the Obscure I wouldn’t have been able to take it in.
Worse than the grief emanating from stories and poetry was fear. Grief at least let you remain yourself, but fear could drive you distraught. I remember in particular one summer evening. I had gone to bed as usual, but was nowadays allowed to read until I was ready to lie down and go to sleep. I was reading the ghost stories of Algernon Blackwood (the books mostly came from my sister, who was generous in lending them and often left me simply to help myself from her shelves) and began upon ‘Ancient Sorceries’. I don’t know how long I took to finish it; an hour perhaps. In the twilight the sinister, mysterious silence of the isolated little French town intensified round me and the people – the landlady, her daughter and the others - the people who turned into cats at night, came slinking into the tail of the eye and vanished, sometimes posturing, sometimes gliding round corners, never disclosing exactly what their menace was. That I did not really understand what I was reading about - witchcraft - if anything made the fear worse. It was something bad, something malign. Somewhere at the bottom of it was the Devil. At the top of it were the trance-like silence - à cause du sommeil et à cause des chats (I could work out what that meant, near enough) – and the half-seen, sidling cats. Conscientiously trying to go to sleep, I lay sweating, every now and then starting up with terror in my own familiar bedroom. I don’t know why I didn’t go downstairs to seek comfort. No one would have been cross: I would have been met with kindness. Yet somehow I remained there, helpless in the fantasy of the still town and the gathering cats.
A curious feature of all this is that in the story the witches – the cats – are not actually seeking to harm or physically to hurt the English visitor to their town. Their aim is to seduce him, to make him one of themselves; to effect, in some strange way, his transit into their world of the fifteenth century. It is rather the atmosphere of seclusion and mounting peril – the feeling of being helpless in a whirlpool - which is so terrifying. When my mother came up to bed, I suppose about quarter past ten, I was in a sorry state. She, however, was completely reassuring; she always was. Simply by her presence and her own natural separation from and sensible immunity to all such things, she could disperse the spectres and restore the senses to their proper command. The fear simply went away and, although it sometimes troubled me later, when I was alone, it gradually diminished and became diluted until I could cope with it.
Cruelty was upsetting in a different way. I have since learned that, setting aside all question of morals, conscience and what we would like to believe we think, we are all by disposition either sadistic or masochistic. That is, we identify naturally either with the tormentor or the victim. I identified with the victim, and how. In those days, the late nineteen-twenties and early ‘thirties, only a handful of scoffed-at innovators knew anything about Freud and his world-changing discoveries. Nobody connected cruelty with sexual excitement. On reflection, this is surely an extraordinary state of affairs. What I am trying to explain is that in those days, incredible as it may seem to younger people today, sexual fantasies and imaginings were regarded as morally worse and much more unmentionable than cruelty. Sexual things simply ‘didn’t exist’. People pretended they hadn’t heard you. You might acquire a bad reputation and people would drop you: I have known boys to whom it happened. Yet you could talk without causing embarrassment about cruelty - for instance, the well at Cawnpore in the Indian Mutiny. You couldn’t talk about sex. The safety curtain fell immediately, like a portcullis.
What I am calling an extraordinary state of affairs is that this condition of the collective mind had brought about a strange moral inversion. I assume that most people today would agree that it is natural and harmless for people to entertain sexual thoughts - we all do, anyway - but that the idea of dwelling on cruelty is disagreeable; we wouldn’t like to think that anyone we loved was prone to this. If it had been suggested to people in the nineteen-twenties that writing or talking about cruelty was at all connected with sex, they would have denied it vigorously and the person who suggested it would have been ‘cut’. If they had actually come to believe it, they would have been overcome with mortification, because to them the idea of sex was far more embarrassing than the idea of cruelty. This seems strange now, but it was so: and consequently the whole nature of society was different.
In those days cruel but never explicitly sexual fantasies, bad enough to trouble any reasonably sensitive person, were a common feature of popular fiction. (As a matter of fact, there are some nasty and quite unnecessary things in Humphry Clinker, come to that; but in those days I hadn’t read Humphry Clinker.) I was upset by things in R. M. Ballantyne, in H. G. Wells and in Conan Doyle, the last of whom, I still think, possessed a foully sadistic imagination. ‘Sapper’, too - a very popular writer of those days - can’t be exonerated. And these writers were imitated in that regard by the lesser people who wrote for boys’ magazines. Indeed, a certain amount of cruelty seemed almost obligatory in boys’ magazine fiction, and often there was no mistaking the note of relish. People in those days not only knew nothing of sadism: they were also ignorant of the relevance and validity of fantasy to the psyche and to real life. Dreams were all rubbish, and fantasy was what Jung sardonically called ‘nothing but’: that is, a thing on its own, unconnected with the personality of the fantasist.
A lot of the nastiness just ran off the reader harmlessly. Most little boys aren’t easily upset, and rubbish, being rubbish, soon evaporates. But when an author writes memorably and is himself as good as mad, like Edgar Allan Poe, it is another matter. Of course, I had no business to be reading Edgar Allan Poe at my age. It should have been kept from me. But my father was by temperament disinclined to interfere or put his foot down - what he lacked, as Mr Gibson had as good as said, was self-assertion - while my mother, though kind and understanding when you were troubled, didn’t read books much and was not really conscious of them as influential and in certain ways larger than life. Little by little, I was becoming a compulsive reader, perhaps a trifle escapist, my rudimentary notions of self-respect to a certain extent tied up with reading. If a book enjoyed a high reputation, that was enough to make me feel that I at any rate hoped to read it. Sometimes I had to admit myself baffled. I could read Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop, but I was defeated by Dombey and Son and A Tale of Two Cities.
Edgar Allan Poe gave me, as they say, the screaming hab-dabs. Were there really people like the man in ‘The Black Cat’? I knew there were not - nor any like Montresor in ‘The Cask of Amontillado’. These were creatures of a horrible fancy. But the force and credibility of Poe’s narrative style reft you out of your world into his and held you gripped there. You had to read on. There is a deliberation and an absence of haste about Poe – some people might even say he is long-winded – which, if you are a submissive and conscientious reader, slowly enmeshes you and leads you step by step to the catastrophe. The trouble was that he wasn’t pretending, like M. R. James. I felt that he himself believed every word of what he wrote. And even when the ‘goodies’ won, as in ‘Hopfrog’, the denouement was so terrible as to leave me unnerved.
However, not all my reading (I’m glad to say) was as unsuitably advanced for my age as this; for a lot of the time I read undemanding stuff - honest tripe. The most enjoyable and memorable of these lighter books had been published during the first two decades of the century - before I was born: once again, they came from my sister. I wonder whether anyone reads them now. I fear not, for they are long out of print (in their beautiful, hardback, illustrated editions) and today children’s books have become an industry: no one reads yesterday’s much. But surely W. M. Letts’s The Story Spinner would be worth reprinting? I still have my sister’s copy of Why-Why and Tom-Cat, written under the nom-de-plume of ‘Brown Linnet’, and I hope my grandchildren are going to enjoy it as much as I did. Madeleine Nightingale’s Tony O’Dreams has charm and humour, although as you get older you can’t help but perceive its sugary sentimentality. Still, Little Lord Fauntleroy has plenty of that, and children still read it. They read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, too.
Our edition of Edward Lear was the one illustrated by Leslie Brooke, and I don’t think there could be a better. I still love the pictures. My mother used to read it to me (the actual title is Nonsense Songs and the publisher was Warne), and naturally it wasn’t long before most of it had soaked in and I had it by heart. I can still run through ‘The Jumblies’, ‘The Dong’ or ‘Uncle Arly’ if I can’t go to sleep. It’s extraordinary how moving and memorable they are.
I have already mentioned my father reading Dr Dolittle to me. I understand that the Dolittle books are currently out of favour, on account, apparently, of the character of Prince Bumpo. It seems a pity to set aside a canon of some nine or ten books — though of varying quality, the last four being of little account, I reckon — which have a lot of merit and remain very readable to and by children. Their strongest characteristic, I think, is their buoyant optimism, even though this is often sentimental. For example, when the Doctor, Bumpo and Long Arrow defend Popsipetal against the Bagjagderags, apparently no one gets killed. Nevertheless, the books have consistency and integrity: they are nowhere false Sentimental they may be, but they possess a decency and rectitude of their own, despite the lack of any spiritual dimension. And there is nothing amiss with the Doctor’s passionate concern about the abuse of animals. He turned me against circuses, fur coats and other such evil things - for life.
Some of the most popular light reading for children during the ’twenties and early ’thirties were the William books of Richmal Crompton. The only thing wrong with William is that he went on too long; up to the Second World War, into it and beyond. He was overtaken by a changing world. He ceased to be what he had begun as — an amusing, topical, satirical and at times even damaging reflection of the ’twenties, the days of short skirts, motor-bikes and Oxford bags, bobbed hair and long cigarette holders. Ah, and the tramps, whom everyone feared and too few pitied; the disguised Bolshevik spies; the local amateur dramatic societies, and the Seaside, and spiritualism, and the earnest ladies and the Band of Hope! This is what gave the early William books their authenticity and their sting. William himself, of course, was a gratefully received anti-hero, in the spirit of the times. The great thing was that he was no prig. Of all things he detested a prig. I have, in the past, said in print that William - dirty, sceptical, cunning and ill-spoken - was a much-needed antithesis to Christopher Robin, but if this was so, it cannot have been deliberate, for the first William book came out in 1922 and When We Were Very Young did not appear until 1924. No, I think the irritation that created William and ensured his popular success goes back not only to Little Lord Fauntleroy, but also to the whole notion - late Victorian and persisting well into the twentieth century — of children as beautiful, innocent little creatures, whose charming world must not be touched with the rough hand of grown-up reality. Lewis Carroll had a gentle go at this in the Alice books: for example, Alice, called upon by the Caterpillar to recite ‘You are old, Father William’, comes up with a brilliant parody which has eclipsed the original. Yet Carroll himself, as he shows clearly, remained a member of the ‘fairy creatures’ school. Sylvie and Bruno is not easy to swallow nowadays. If Richmal Crompton was consciously reacting against anyone, it was probably Rose Fyleman (‘There are Fairies at the Bottom of our Garden’) and certain others like my Madeleine Nightingale, whose Tony O’Dreams is very starry-eyed and chivalrous.
After the First World War (though of course I knew nothing about this at the time) there was a general reaction against the accepted social values of pre-war days. It became fashionable for young people to be ‘rather fast’. There was much media attention to cocktails, divorces, female independence, Noel Coward, Chicago gangsters, fast sports cars, very long woolly scarves and so on. People called each other ‘Old Thing’. Along with these reactive features, society liked and bought William Brown. He was a logical part of the whole reaction, Jung’s archetypal Trickster in person. The memorable illustrations, by Thomas Henry, reflect this perfectly. They are idiosyncratic, exaggerated, cartoon-like, reminiscent of illustrations to Punch jokes. Above all, they are of the period, the time when the full-scale ‘respectability’ of Edwardian days and of the next decade were melting towards the ‘thirties; talking pictures, charabanc outings, hikers and the Slump. The whole point of William was that he outraged respectability - vicars, visiting lecturers, poets, rich war profiteers and so on. That is the joke, time after time, and I could enjoy reading it all right - up to a point. The characters were, perhaps, rather puppets. The stories tended to be repetitive, and similar situations used to recur. The dialogue lacked the bite of ‘Hullo! my covey, what’s the row?’ And the plots were often coincidental and contrived; you knew they were - like P. G. Wodehouse - but you went on reading, because it was easy. They indulged your laziness, really.
I think I would have to admit, if asked, that during my childhood I did become something of a book snob. I don’t mean that I boasted about it - it certainly wouldn’t have got me far with those about me if I had - but I did slip into the way of secretly giving myself credit for having read this book and that. (I thought I knew what was creditable and what wasn’t: the credit depended upon what I had heard grown-up people say about a book. Whence else could it come? I knew I was just a learner.) I’m not at all sure that this ‘snobbery’ was my fault; and come to that, I’m not at all sure it was a fault. My sister, now seventeen or eighteen, had grown into a true scholar: that is to say, she had set her sights on academic distinction. She was head girl at Miss Luker’s and soon going up to Girton. I admired my sister, and was very ready to accept her taste and guidance (though she never cared to read Dickens; Henry James was more her mark, and him, of course, I never even attempted). She would say things like ‘Even little beastly Richard could read this, I should think.’ (It might be Eden Philpotts, J. C. Squire or some such.) I would set about reading the book and determine to finish it one way or another. Usually I enjoyed it.
I believe that on balance the frame of mind I had is defensible. I wouldn’t mind a child of mine reading for inward prestige (one did, I rather fancy), provided she wasn’t just wasting her time and going cross-eyed with perplexity. I think that probably most people feel secretly proud of having read enduring books and a bit regretful about the ones they haven’t read. Faced with the literacy of Sir Angus Wilson or my friend John Wain, I feel I have to some extent wasted my reading life: I wish I had read more. As to privately felt ‘snob-value’ reading in childhood, my defence is first, that everyone knows that it takes a certain amount of determination and persistence to read a book that extends you, and if you don’t read books that extend you, you never learn or progress at all. Secondly, you have to get new ideas from somewhere, and open your horizon: also, you hope to develop a sense of style and to become able to distinguish between good writing and bad; between old writing and new, too, e.g., Defoe and, well - Alison Lurie. A child ought to feel himself in credit for having voluntarily tackled a book that stretches his mind and capacity. That’s one thing. I don’t approve of parents giving a child a book-list and pressing him or her to work through it. I know one man who has grown up a virtual non-reader on account of just that sort of thing.
I might add that for anyone considering an academic career, especially in the humanities, a developed ability in adolescence to read and grasp a book recommended by one’s schoolmaster or tutor is virtually essential.
I don’t know whether or not I was taking on too much when I accepted The Pilgrim’s Progress before I was nine. It came about in this way. I had, of course, heard a lot about The Pilgrim’s Progress: that was unavoidable. In those days most educated people would nave been ashamed to admit that they had not read this enormously influential book. They would often quote from it, consciously or unconsciously, in daily speech. ‘Now you mustn’t get into a Slough of Despond.’ ‘Honestly, it’s a real Vanity Fair down there.’ Paul Fussell, in one of his books about the Great War, includes a passage about the influence of The Pilgrim’s Progress on the war poets — Graves. Blunden, Sassoon, Owen, Rosenberg. After the Bible, it was the obligatory devotional work: I knew that. But I knew something else, too. It was a story; a story about a man and a journey. So if it was a story, you could read it. The way people talked, you ought to feel privileged to.
However, for some reason or other there wasn’t a copy in the house; I don’t know why. The Pilgrim’s Progress finally came into my hands through Thorn the gardener. Thorn was a nice fellow - what used, in those days, to be called ‘steady and reliable’ - a chapel man and a teetotaller. (As I grew older my father used to let him take me to football matches: to watch Reading, who were then in the third division south, I rather think, and frequently lost.) Thorn used to read a good deal, and I would often find myself chatting to him, as he dug up potatoes or planted out wallflowers, about Sir Nigel and the White Company, or the Time Machine. One day he offered to lend me ‘the most wonderful book in the world’. It turned out, of course, to be The Pilgrim’s Progress, in a little, green-cloth-bound edition measuring perhaps four and a quarter inches square. I took it gratefully, noticing amongst other things that it wasn’t very long.
It was full of pictures and conversations! The pictures were marginal, indenting the text. They were some sort of engraving, I suppose. Each was about half an inch square, and some were certainly frightening. I remember one of - is it Ignorance? - pitching over the sheer cliff in the thunderstorm. Apollyon was disturbing, too. But Christian always came out on top, ho! ho!
The doctrinal conversations, of course, were what effectively split the book in two, as far as I was concerned. The narrative I could follow easily enough and enjoy: it was highly imaginative and gripping. The conversations were rather wearisome, and I personally still think the book could do with fewer of them: they lack the invention, excitement and vividness of the narrative. All the same, I had determined that I was going to read the book, and through these dialogues I conscientiously ploughed. One day, my sister was kind enough to read some of it to me, and after reading a fair piece of one of Christian’s doctrinal set-tos with the unworthy, suggested that we should skip it. I said no.
‘But, Richard,’ she protested, ‘I could go on reading the same bit over and over again and you wouldn’t even notice!’ I still begged her not to leave anything out. I suppose it was a case of ‘Don’t treat me like an infant! Treat me like a grown-up!’ Since I was so much younger than anyone else in the family, this was a constant feature of my childhood: I hated thinking that allowances were being made for me.
Katharine went on reading, and after a bit I realized that she was reading a passage over again and said so. To spot it was no credit to me: it was an obvious line: ‘Do you think I am such a fool?’ All the same, I decided there was a lot of sense in what she said, and for the rest of the book I went rather lightly through the dialogues.
I’m not sure whether The Pilgrim’s Progress is worth reading when you’re eight (though when I came to re-read it, some ten years later, I found I had retained the incidents of the narrative well), but I’m sure enough that it’s worth reading. The story is unique - as far as I know there’s nothing at all like it in English literature. It is memorably inventive and very well written; and it constitutes a kind of forerunner of the English novel. C. S. Lewis, Ronald Blythe and Sir Christopher Hill have said a great deal more in its praise. For a child, I think, its main quality is that it is about a hero who has thrilling adventures, and wins.