The first book I ever loved

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favourite book – Marcel Proust

I read an article a while back in The Huffington Post entitled ‘8 Famous Authors on the First Book They Ever Loved’ and I hadn’t read any of them. Of course I feel like I’ve read Alice in Wonderland but somehow I never got round to it. I’ve written before about how my parents weren’t great readers—and by ‘not great’ I mean ‘didn’t read’—and it’s always puzzled me—I know it puzzled the hell out of them—how I ended up such a lover of books. My dad had books—and by ‘books’ I mean ‘reference books’—but that was about it. Even the Bible he regarded as a reference book, a thing to be studied as opposed to read for pleasure.

I wonder what would’ve happened if Yehudi Menuhin had been handed a banjo when he was a kid rather than a violin and Julian Bream had been sent for trombone lessons. I suppose there’s a universe out there where that happened. I mean is there such a thing as the violin gene? I’m being facetious, well half-facetious. My brother doesn’t read. He used to be quite proud of the fact too. Never got that. I mean I really never got that. I read somewhere—here actually—that x number of Americans had read a book last year. A book. Singular. As if that was a good thing. Seriously. Okay it’s better that no books but seriously. ONE BOOK! And, of course, some—between 8 and 23 percent depending on whose poll you believe—hadn’t even read one book. (At the time of writing this I was halfway through my one hundred-and-second book of 2014.) I wouldn’t call myself a natural though. I couldn’t sit and read all day long. I’d say an hour—two, tops—is my limit and even then I rarely sit still. I’ll get up and fix something to drink, go to the loo, check my computer, find something to nibble on, clean my glasses. I have to work at reading.

When I think about specific books oddly enough there aren’t actually that many I can say, hand on heart, that I love; that I’d rush to save if the flat was on fire. Now music’s another thing completely. When my wife and I were getting to know each other we tried listing our various Top Tens and when it came to my Top Ten Albums I gave up at around fifty. Couldn’t do it. Still can’t do it. But books… There aren’t a huge number of books I’ve read more than once, that I’d want to read more than once. It’s actually a measure I use in my head: Is this a book that you’d a) want to read a second time and b) might get something more out of a second time? But can you imagine only been permitted to listen to Dark Side of the Moon once?

(If you need to take a 43 minute Pink Floyd break just now I fully understand.)

Here’s one book I’ve read many times: Enid Blyton’s Brer Rabbit Book. Christ knows how many times I’ve read that book and it wasn’t just because I only had the one book before some smart aleck (yes, that’s the correct spelling) suggests that. I know Blyton comes in for a fair amount of stick these days—especially following the BBC film Enid which did not portray her in the most favourable of lights (although Gyles Brandreth’s interview with her daughters is illuminating)—but I knew nothing of that and even now I don’t consider it a big issue; there’re plenty of unlikeable writers out there—V.S. Naipaul, Philip Larkin, T.S. Eliot, JL’s uncle—but the work stands on its own. And, of course, she was simply retelling these tales. My two favourites—can’t really say which was my mostest favouritest—were ‘The Wonderful Tar-Baby’ and ‘Mister Lion’s Soup’ which is one of the few stories not to feature Brer Rabbit at all. The latter, very briefly, goes as follows:

Mister Lion says, "I cannot eat my soup." Brer Coon tries to convince him to eat his soup. Brer Hedgehog, Possum and Hare also try to persuade him. However Mister Lion still insists he cannot eat his soup. They try again to convince him but he keeps on saying he cannot eat his soup. Finally he admits, "I want to eat my soup but I can't. I HAVEN'T GOT A SPOON!" Everyone rushes off to get him a spoon but by this time his soup’s gone cold and it’s all his own fault.

In a recent article in The Guardian author Judi Curtin talks about how much Enid Blyton inspired her. She ends with:

We sometimes become carried away with notions of worthiness in children's books, and get all snobby about literary merit. We shouldn't let ourselves forget, however, that anyone who writes books that children love to read, is doing something very right. Reading continues to be one of my greatest pleasures, and it all started with Enid.

Is Enid Blyton the best writer in the world? Absolutely not. Has she been an inspiration to me? She jolly well has.

Here I guess I’m supposed to say that it was reading Enid Blyton that inspired me to be a writer but that’s simply not the case; I had no aspirations to be a writer as a kid. I read Blyton’s three Brer Rabbit books—several times—enjoyed the hell out of ’em every time and that was it, moved onto The Secret Seven; never read The Famous Five.

When my daughter was born I made sure she had a set of all of the Brer Rabbit books printed by Dean & Son. And very grateful she was for them too.

Of course the Brer Rabbit stories go back donkeys' years. He can be traced right back to trickster figures of African folklore. They weren’t written down, however, until the 19th century. According to Wikipedia:

The stories of Br'er Rabbit were written down by Robert Roosevelt, an uncle of US President Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography about his aunt from the State of Georgia, that "She knew all the 'Br'er Rabbit' stories, and I was brought up on them. One of my uncles, Robert Roosevelt, was much struck with them, and took them down from her dictation, publishing them in Harper's, where they fell flat. This was a good many years before a genius arose who, in 'Uncle Remus', made the stories immortal."

(See Further Reading however.)

Incidentally, I’ve never seen Song of the South, Disney’s live-action/animated musical film. I’ve seen the same ol’ clip (the Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah song) many times over the years but Disney’s version of Br'er Rabbit just didn’t gel with the image of him I held in my head. Never much cared for Roger Rabbit either. Bugs was okay. And Thumper. Gotta love Thumper.

Let me leave you with the 1940 version of ‘The Wonderful Tar-Baby’. (The 1963 version is the one I know but the differences are minimal.)

THE WONDERFUL TAR-BABY

BRER FOX couldn't seem to catch Brer Rabbit and make a dinner of him, no matter how he tried. So one day he sat himself down and had a very hard think.

He scratched himself behind his left ear; and he couldn't think of anything. He scratched himself behind his right ear, and still he couldn't think of anything. But when he scratched both ears at once he thought of a mighty fine idea indeed. He chuckled very loudly, and went off to get some tar. He mixed it up with turpentine and stirred it into a sort of thick paste. Then he worked it about and worked it about until he had made a thing with arms, legs and head that he called a Tar-Baby.

He put some grass on its head for hair, and stuck an old hat on top. Then he sat back on his hind legs and laughed when he thought of what Brer Rabbit would do when he saw the Tar-Baby.

He took it and sat it down in the middle of the road. Then he went and lay in some bushes to wait for old Brer Rabbit to come along.

By and by along came Brer Rabbit, lippitty-clippitty, humming a little song as jolly as a jay-bird. Brer Fox didn't make a movement. He just lay low and grinned to himself.

When Brer Rabbit saw the Tar-Baby he was most surprised. He stopped: short and stared at him. The Tar-Baby sat still and stared back, and didn't make a sound.

"Good morning to you!" said Brer Rabbit. "Seems I haven't met you before."

The Tar-Baby didn't say a word.

"GOOD MORNING!" said Brer Rabbit in a louder tone. "Nice weather to-day, isn't it?"

The Tar-Baby said nothing, and Brer Fox lay low.

"Is anything the matter with you?" asked Brer Rabbit. "If you're a bit deaf I can shout in your ear."

Still the Tar-Baby said nothing, and Brer Fox chuckled inside himself.

"Look here," said Brer Rabbit fiercely, "if you don't answer, I'll call you stuck-up! I always box the ears of stuck-up people, so just you answer me!"

The Tar-Baby stared and said nothing. Brer Fox lay low.

"I'll soon teach you how to speak to polite folk like me!" shouted Brer Rabbit, dancing round the Tar-Baby. "If you don't take off that old hat of yours and say 'How do you do?' like a gentleman, I'll hit you."

The Tar-Baby didn't take his hat off and he didn't say a word.

Brer Rabbit didn't wait any longer; he raised his hand and hit the Tar-Baby on the head. Blip!

That's just where he made his mistake. His fist stuck in the tar, and he couldn't pull it out. The Tar-Baby still said nothing, and Brer Fox almost killed him-self with laughing.

"Let me go!" yelled Brer Rabbit in a terrible rage. "If you don't let go my hand, I'll hit you with the other, and that will teach you to be polite!"

He banged the Tar-Baby with his other hand as hard as ever he could, and that stuck too! Brer Rabbit couldn't pull it out anyhow.

The Tar-Baby said never a word, and Brer Fox lay as low as anything.

"Let me loose or I'll kick you all to bits!" shouted Brer Rabbit. But the Tar-Baby held on tight and kept as still as still.

So Brer Rabbit kicked as hard as he could with one leg, and then with the other, and got them both stuck in the Tar-Baby. He couldn't move an inch, not an inch.

"You let me go!" said Brer Rabbit. "If you don't I'll butt you in with my head, and a mighty hard head it is, I can tell you! Do you want to be butted into next week, because if you don't, you just let me go!"

The Tar-Baby held on and said nothing. Brer Fox still lay low.

Then Brer Rabbit butted with his head, and that got stuck too. So he couldn't move his head, or his arms or his legs. He was in a very pretty pickle, and didn't he hope old Brer Fox wouldn't come along at that moment!

Well, of course, that's just what Brer Fox did do! He wasn't going to lie low any more with a nice dinner waiting for him like that.

So out he sauntered from the bushes looking just as innocent as a day-old lamb.

"Good morning, Brer Rabbit," he said, pretending to be most surprised. "Have you been talking to that stuck-up Tar-Baby? He's made you sort of stuck-up too, hasn't he?"

Then Brer Fox rolled over on the ground and laughed and laughed till he hadn't got a laugh left in him. Brer Rabbit didn't say anything at all. He was just thinking very hard.

"Now, Brer Rabbit,”' said Brer Fox, when he had stopped rolling on the ground, "won't you come home to dinner with me? I've got some calamus root that you'll simply love, so don't make excuses not to come!"

Now if I can just interrupt her for a second. In Joel Chandler Harris’s version of the story—Harris being the “genius” Roosevelt was referring to earlier—he has the character of Uncle Remus take a long pause and the kid he’s telling the story to finally asks if the fox ate the rabbit. This is all he says, "Dat's all de fur de tale goes," replied the old man. "He mout, an den agin he moutent. Some say Judge B'ar come 'long en loosed 'im—some say he didn't. I hear Miss Sally callin'. You better run 'long."

Unusual for a kid’s story to be left open-ended like that. Quite brave actually.

Then Brer Fox rolled on the ground again and laughed some more. He felt mighty good about his dinner, for he'd had his eye on Brer Rabbit for a long time.

"Well, well," said 'Brer Fox at last, wiping His eyes. "I think you're caught this time, Brer Rabbit. Maybe you're not, but I somehow think you are! You've been playing tricks on me for a long time, but they've come to an end now. You've been rushing round thinking you're the most important person anywhere, and you're always going where you're not wanted!"

Brer Rabbit said nothing. He just stuck there and thought hard.

"Look at this Tar-Baby," said Brer Fox. "There he sat as peaceful as anybody, and you come up and worry him to death with your talking. And who stuck you up there where you are? Nobody in the world! You just went and jumped on that Tar-Baby for nothing! Well, well! There you are and there you can stay till I fix up a wood-pile and light it. Because I'm going to COOK you today—yes, COOK you, Brer Rabbit,” said Brer Fox.

Then Brer Rabbit talked back in a humble voice." Cook me if you like," he said. "Roast me as much as you please, Brer Fox—but don't—please don't, throw me into that prickly bramble-bush over there! I don't care what else you do with me, if only you won't do that!"

"Let me see," said Brer Fox; "there's not much dry wood about here. I think — yes, I really think, I'll drown you, Brer Rabbit."

"Do," said Brer Rabbit. "You just drown me as deep as ever you please, Brer Fox—but, oh! don't throw me into that prickly bramble-bush! "

"I think perhaps I won't drown you after all," said Brer Fox;" it would be too much bother to carry a scarecrow like you all the way to the pond. Maybe I'll hang you."

"Yes, you hang me," said Brer Rabbit. "I don't care a bit about hanging—but don't—don't throw me into that prickly bramble-patch!"

"I haven't got a rope," said Brer Fox, "so I don't think I'll hang you. I'll skin you all alive oh!"

"Yes, that's fine," said Brer Rabbit. "You just skin me alive, Brer Fox, and pull my ears and chop off my legs— but, whatever you do, don't—don't throw me into that prickly bramble-bush!"

"It's too much bother to skin you alive," said Brer Fox, "so I think I'll shoot you dead."

"Yes, do shoot me, Brer Fox," said Brer Rabbit. "I've always thought I'd like to be shot, if I had to die—but, oh don't, don't, DON'T throw me into that prickly bramble-bush!"

Well, Brer Fox wanted to hurt Brer Rabbit just as much as ever he could, so he decided he would throw him into the prickly bramble-bush, and see what dreadful thing would happen to Brer Rabbit. So he took hold of Brer Rabbit by his trousers and pulled him away from the Tar-Baby. Then he slung him quickly into the prickly bramble-bush.

Blip! blap! Brer Rabbit went rolling head over heels in the bush, making a tremendous flurry and flutter, while Brer Fox hung round to see what would happen to him.

When everything was still he ran up to see where Brer Rabbit was. But he wasn't there at all!

Then he heard someone calling out along way behind him, and when he looked round he saw Brer Rabbit sitting on a log up the hill, combing the tar out of his hair with a wood chip.

Brer Fox couldn't believe his eyes, then all of a sudden he saw he had been tricked. Brer Rabbit called out as cheeky as ever: "Hi, Brer Fox, hi! I was brought up in a bramble-bush, I was—yes, born and brought up in a bramble-bush!"

Then off he skipped as lively as a chicken on hot coals, while old Brer Fox went home with never a word.

If you really want to see what Disney did with this you can but I couldn’t stand to watch the whole clip so you’re on your own.

Oh and the whole drama Enid is up on YouTube in nine parts if you’re interested. Here’s the link to Part I
 
 

Further reading

From The Wonderful Adventures of Brer Rabbit:

Although Joel Chandler Harris collected materials for his famous series of books featuring the character Brer Rabbit in the 1870s, the Brer Rabbit cycle had been recorded earlier among the Cherokees; The "tar baby" story was printed in an 1845 edition of the Cherokee Advocate the same year Joel Chandler Harris was born.

[…]

In the Cherokee tale about the briar patch, "the fox and the wolf throw the trickster rabbit into a thicket from which the rabbit quickly escapes There was a "melding of the Cherokee rabbit-trickster ...into the culture of African slaves. "In fact, most of the Brer Rabbit stories originated in Cherokee myths."

Reading

The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours ― Alan Bennett, The History Boys: The Film

I don’t read in bed. I don’t read on the loo or in the bath. I don’t understand people who do. I think the reason is—now I’ve given the matter some thought, because before I began writing this a few seconds ago I’d hadn’t given the matter any thought—that I don’t particularly enjoy being in any of these places.

Beds are for sleeping in. If I’m not sleeping then I want to get up and do something. Sleep’s a waste of time. I resent how often my body wants to do it and when. For some reason I often get ideas last thing at night when I’ve no time—because I have to go to bed—to do anything with them. Some get scribbled down in the hope I can make something of them later—the best ideas don’t need you to strike when the iron’s hot but will wait for you—but most get lost out of pure laziness. There are few things old age has going for it but the one thing I long for is the ability to get by on three or four hours a night especially since by then the amount of years left to me will be considerably reduced by then and every minute will count.

Toilets are a necessary evil. If I ever got the chance to buttonhole God on the subject one of my top peeves will be how unpleasant the elimination of bodily waste can be. Especially solids. Surely he could’ve dreamed up something more agreeable. But either way it’s a job I want to get done quickly and efficiently so I can get back to doing more interesting stuff instead. I do like the idea of multitasking however. And so I tend to think while I’m on the loo. I frequently get good ideas too whilst cloistered away for those five or ten minutes, in fact quite often when I’m struggling with a problem and have to heed the call of Nature the break proves to be exactly what was needed to provide a solution or at least a new direction.

Baths I don’t take anymore. It’s been showers for years now. We never had a shower growing up and I can’t say I was overly impressed with the whole showering experience when I got introduced to it but now the utilitarian in me likes to get the whole bathing experience over with as swiftly and proficiently as possible. (Yes, I know that’s just another way of saying ‘quickly and efficiently’.) Bathing’s another one of those things I resent. Why when I don’t’ go out of my way to wallow in muck does my body insist on getting filthy? I spend most of my days sitting in a chair reading or writing. Where’s all this dirt and grime coming from? If I did still take baths I certainly wouldn’t read in them. The idea of holding a paperback with soggy hands just upsets me. I look after my books. I don’t turn down the corners of pages or break the spines or take them into rooms full of steam and soapy water.

I tend to read in two places in this flat: my leather armchair in my office or the Ikea Poäng armchair in the living room. I prefer the former if I’m reading a paperback because I have a lamp beside the chair. If it’s an e-book—I mostly read on a tablet—then I’m happy in either chair but if my wife’s up I’ll sit beside her and read. I’m not an especially fast reader. Nor can I fall into a book for hours and hours. I’m always very conscious that I am reading a book. If I’m reading a paperback I always count how many pages are in the chapter I’ve started so I know how long I have to go before I reach a natural stopping point. (I don’t like that you can’t do that easily with e-books.) Forty pages used to be my absolute max. Twenty was typical. Recently I’ve been getting better and I’ve even managed a hundred pages in one sitting but that’s rare. I read seventy-five yesterday and the same today but in two sittings; I was getting tired and had to leave the last fifteen pages until I’d had a nap.

I don’t read for pleasure. I don’t hate reading but if I want to relax I’ll watch TV. I read to educate myself. I’ve always wanted to be the kind of person who people regarded as ‘well read’. I don’t think I am. Well, that’s not true. I am well read in that the majority of books I’ve read have been good books—Auster, Beckett, Camus… that’s my kind of ABC—but I’m not widely read. The list of authors I’ve never read upsets me every time I think about it although one has to draw the line somewhere and mine comes in round about 1900. I’ve read virtually nothing prior to the twentieth century apart from the Bible and feel no great pressure to do so. I’ve never picked up a Dickens or an Austen and can live with myself. The TV and film adaptations have filled any gap there.

I do wish I retained more of what I read. I have a bad memory—I mention it often (it’s the bane of my life)—which is why I always write reviews of the books I read—if not on my blog then at least on Goodreads—as a way of reinforcing what I’ve read. What is the point in reading a book if you can’t remember a damn thing about it? I’ve books on my shelves that I read in my twenties and literally all I can tell you about them is that I once upon a time I turned all their pages, looked at all the words contained therein and retained sod all. Waste … of … time. When I was twenty I had time to waste. If I last as long as my parents that’s probably all the time I have left. That’s a sobering fact. Of course medical science is improving all the time and it really would be nice not to snuff it when I hit seventy-five but let’s say I do. That means I’ve got some 7300 days left. Or 1040 weeks. So if I only read a book a week I could reasonably read another thousand books before I die. I should make a list.

When writers are asked to give advice to newbies one of the things they usually tell them to do is read: read, read, read and then read some more. It’s not bad advice but I think it can be overemphasised. Read, yes, do, but do be selective in what you read. You can learn quite a bit from reading rubbish—what not to do, what doesn’t work—but once the lesson’s learned move on. Don’t keep reading tripe. Same with good books. You don’t need to read every book by every author but do try and read something by every author, every major author and certainly every author who chimes with you. This is why I feel no desperate need to read Dickens or Austen. They may be great authors but they don’t speak to me. Stumbling across an author who does though is a wonderful thing. It happens rarely. (It’s happens to me rarely and I can’t imagine it happening to anyone else more often.) You can even benefit from reading authors whose views you’re diametrically opposed to. (See Why It’s Important to Keep Reading Books By People Even If They’re Monsters.)

On 14 October 2013 Neil Gaiman gave the second annual Reading Agency lecture at the Barbican Centre, London. You can read the whole thing here and there’s a lot good in it but I’d like to quote just one section:

[A]s Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, over twenty years before the kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them.

Not so sure about the ‘bath-resistant’ but other than that I agree with him.

I like books. I like being in a library in the same way I like being in a supermarket. I love looking at all the packaging. I don’t always like what’s inside the boxes or the packets or between the covers of a certain book but I do like to be surrounded by them. The idea of throwing a book away really bothers me and probably the only ones I have consigned to the recycling have been technical books that are now outdated. And even ridding myself of them bothered me a wee bit. I try not to romanticise my feelings for books—they’re only books after all—but I find it hard. I have never known a world without books and I struggle to conceive of one without them even if they do all end up being turned into endless streams of ones and zeroes on some übercomputer somewhere in the distant future. I can imagine a world without sharks before I could imagine one without books.

Of course the Internet is full of lists telling you why you reading is important, Top Threes, Top Fives, Sevens, Eights, Tens but I don’t need a list to tell me why I should eat; I just eat because I enjoy it. Of course there’re reasons why we need to eat but once you start breaking things down like this, for me anyway (who doesn’t have a scientific bone in my body), it takes all the fun out of the thing. I feel better when I eat. I feel better when I read. It’s not complicated. I know that not everything that makes you feel good is necessarily good for you and, yes, reading has its minuses—tired eyes, sore neck, missing your bus stop—but that’s where we need to be grownup about reading.

My mother had a saying (it’s not hers but she made it hers): “You are what you eat” and as I may have mentioned here before in later life she lived off microwave chips so I’m not sure what the moral here really is but if you are what you eat then I suppose it’s just as true to say: You are what you read. My mother had another saying (this one was hers): “I don’t buy rubbish.” And you can see where I’m going here: I don’t read rubbish. What’s the point?

I have a daughter. I mention her periodically and if she bothered to read my blogs more often she’d probably be pleased that I mention her; people do like to be thought of. Before she was born she had a library of over one hundred books. I remember scouring the bookshops in Edinburgh looking for a complete set of Enid Blyton’s retelling of the Brer Rabbit stories—the first books I remember having a real effect on me (especially ‘The Tar Baby’ and ‘Mister Lion’s Soup’)—because I had a single ambition for my daughter: I wanted her to be a reader. That was it. Some parents try to live vicariously through their kids—that was never my intention—but if I have one regret (actually I’ve a list) it’s that I was never a voracious reader. I was never discouraged from reading but neither was I encouraged. I did not want that for my daughter. I wasn’t desperate for her to become a writer although it pleased me that when started writing poems and I have one of hers framed by my bed (one of the few she ever let me read) but it was important that she became a reader. Which she did. Everything else was gravy.

Why read? Why indeed? There are so many quotes I could insert here, pages and pages of them. I chose Alan Bennett to lead off this article because it was the one I related to most strongly but it’s only one of many and there’s some truth in all of them. Do we really need one more? Let’s have a go: Reading is the doorpost we measure ourselves by. Even on tiptoe few of us reach the lintel.

I’ll leave you with that lecture I mentioned earlier:

Silent Noon

You can’t go back to a place that no longer exists. – Trilby Kent, Silent Noon

When I agreed to review this book I was labouring under the impression that it was a YA novel. The mistake was completely mine because nowhere in the press release does it say that it’s aimed at young adults despite focusing on the lives of three teenagers. Perhaps what got me thinking that way is the way the book was presented:

A new novel from the winner of the Canadian Children's Literature Award for her novel Stones for My Father which also won the Africana Children's Book of the Year award in 2012. Silent Noon has also 14-15 years old protagonists...

On reading this I assumed the book was aimed at fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds but it’s really not although, that said, I guess it depends on your fourteen- or fifteen-year-old. My gut feeling is that the book would be a bit too … ‘subtle’ is the word I kept coming back to as I was reading this book, but I think perhaps ‘understated’ might be a better choice. On the surface we have a set up for an Enid Blyton-style adventure: an island, a creepy old school, a triumvirate of young amateur detectives and more secrets than I would know where to start listing; there’s even some ginger beer. Of course had it been written by Enid Blyton it would probably have been called The Mystery of Lindsey Island rather than Silent Noon which isn’t in my opinion a very memorable title. After the book’s climax there are silences everywhere but you have to cover a lot of ground before you get there. It seems, however, much thought went into the title. Trilby told me:

We struggled with the title for ages. At first it had been The Peppermill, then The Devil's Purse. Silent Noon was deemed more reflective of the tone and content, and I have to say I like the way it inverts what is known as a love poem – there's actually a lot more ambivalence and sadness in the Rossetti text, I think, than we often remember.

The poem she’s referring to is this one:

Silent Noon

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass, —
The finger-points look through like rosy blooms:
Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms
'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.
All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,
Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge
Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.
'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky: —
So this wing'd hour is dropt to us from above.
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of love.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Having read the book I can maybe see why she—and, presumably, her editor—went with this one. I think if I’d been in that room I might’ve argued for The Devil’s Purse though. It depends on what one regards as the novel’s pivotal moment and I really can’t say more without revealing too much. There’s an analysis of the poem here which is quite helpful. The key lines for me are explained here:

In line eight, he says, “’Tis visible silence”. This right here is an oxymoron because silence is not able to be seen. But, this silence is so profound that it is visible. He uses a simile to say that this silence is “still as the hour glass”. This is paradoxical because an hour glass is only still when time runs out. But time never runs out and “Noon” will just continue into another hour.

That does make sense once you’ve read the book but I’m not sure many will get the Rossetti connection. The novel does lead up to a climax—which I assume takes place at noon (I can’t remember and I haven’t checked)—and after that the book drifts a bit towards its end. That sounds like a criticism but it’s not. The film Titanic doesn’t end when the ship goes down—it could, of course, and there are plenty of films that don’t hang around for any length of time after the climax (we assume everyone gets saved and gets on with their lives)—but the aftermath is also worth exploring at least for a bit and that’s what happens here. Does Barney rise triumphant from the ashes? Is this a character-defining moment or does he get swallowed up by the system? Orwell could feasibly have ended Nineteen Eighty-Four with Winston facing the rat—it would’ve worked—but those extra few pages made all the difference. The comparison between the two books might seem like an odd one at first but it’s less so than you might imagine.

The cover, however, is misleading. The three children in the picture are nothing like the three kids in the book all of whom are frankly troubled teenagers and two of which are overweight. I asked Trilby about this and she responded very much as I expected:

I completely agree with you about the cover. It's a strong image, but to me the kids are far too Call the Midwife, if you know what I mean. But as you rightly say, I had no input and it was presented to me as a done deal – the opinions of the marketing team rule!

The point I want to make is that I started this book with certain expectations and the book didn’t meet them which is not the book’s fault. In fact they worked to its advantage because what I found myself reading was better than I expected. Why that should be the case I’m not sure because I’d read Trilby Kent before—I reviewed her novel Smoke Portrait (now that was a good title) and really enjoyed it—anyway when I was offered two books for July this was the one I picked.

Here’s how the book’s blurb sets you up:

A story of displacement, betrayal – and the lingering past.

September 1953. Fourteen-year-old Barney Holland is promised a fresh start when he is offered a place at a boarding school on the remote North Sea island of Lindsey. Instead, he is shunned by his peers both for his status as a charity pupil and for being the replacement of a recently deceased student, the popular Cray. The arrival of Belinda Flood, a housemaster’s daughter stigmatized by her expulsion from another school, provides Barney with an unexpected ally. Both outsiders soon fall under the influence of charismatic senior pupil Ivor Morrell, who reigns over the forbidden corners of the school.

A gruesome find and the friendship with a local woman rumoured to have been a wartime collaborator draw the three into an increasingly dangerous web of personal and social shame. Gripped by mounting horror at his discovery of secrets harboured by the isolated school community, Barney personifies the struggle of a young peacetime generation finding its way out of the shadow of war.

See what I mean about the three kids on the cover? They just don’t work.

The story covers one term and is told mainly from the perspective of Barney Holland or ‘Camden Town’ as he gets called by some of the other kids although the narrative is written in the third person. He’s the outsider; everybody knows more about the island than he does. The trope is a well-worn one from Tom Brown’s School Days (the genre-founder in many ways although certainly not the first) through to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (which breathed new life into the tired old boarding school novel) and although there’s plenty of scope for the novel to fall back on familiar and comfortable clichés (midnight feasts, pranks, bullying—there’s a scene in the book that reminded me of the infamous roasting episode from Tom Brown’s School Days) Trilby doesn’t do too bad a job of presenting a story that’s historically viable—she’s always been big on research—without it becoming caricatured; this is how people spoke and behaved back then so just sit back and enjoy it for what it is.

Lindsey Island, where Carding House School is located, was occupied by the Germans during World War II. One of his dad’s friends tells Barney, when they’d found he’d been offered a last minute place:

We ditched them in the war … Two weeks later, in come the Jerries, and they don’t leave until ’45. Right bastards they were, too.

A while ago I reviewed The Book of Lies by Mary Horlock which was set on Guernsey. During World War II the only British territories to be occupied by the Germans were the Channel Islands and the only permanently inhabited islands are Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, Sark, Herm, Jethou, Brecqhou and Lihou so I’m not sure where Lindsey Island is but I can only assume it’s fictitious. Lindsey is a real place—it’s situated in north Lincolnshire—and its origins date back to Anglo-Saxon days. The name Lindsey means the 'island of Lincoln': it was surrounded by water and very wet land but it’s still very much a part of mainland Britain which, as we love reminding people, was never occupied during the war. St Just, the other island mentioned, also came up a blank; St Just is a town—two towns actually—in Cornwall. There are no islands off the coast of Grimsby that I can see.

The book is not short on characters and I personally struggled to keep them all in my head.

The staff are Mr Runcie, the housemaster; Mr Pleming, the Headmaster (‘Ratty’); Mr Flood (‘Dolly’), whose daughter Belinda is now being taught along with the boys following some trouble at her last school; Doc Dower, the Maths teacher, who, it was rumoured, was a Japanese POW and Mr Swift, the French master, a former pupil of the school who also coaches the cross-country team and is generally known as a slave driver. There’s a school matron who’s only ever referred to as Matron and the groundsman, the taciturn Pole, Krawiec.

The boys are Barney; Robin Littlejohn, who’s in his set and the boy Mr Runcie assigns to show him the ropes (Barney develops what I’m going to call ‘feelings’ for the boy and I’ll leave it at that); Cowper and Shields who always seem be together; Percy (a.k.a. ‘Weeps’) and Hiram Opie, who’s a little bit ‘simple’ but “too old for primary school and too clever to go in a home”. The bed Barney’s assigned to was Henry Cray’s, a former pupil who died, so he’s told, in a plane crash coming back from holidays. This is how Robin describes their classmates:

“Percy and Cowper are middle-class duffers, like me,” Robin said. “Too thick to pass the common entrance, so our people tell their bourgeois friends they prefer to send us somewhere progressive. “He spoke briskly, bored by the fact of knowing everything. “Shields and Opie are military. They get locked up here because their people are always shuttling between Blighty and Malaysia, or Singapore, or Hong Kong – not like in the old days, where you’d actually get to live somewhere hot if your old man was posted there. You’re scholarship, aren’t you?”

In a letter home Barney outlines the school’s pecking order:

Sagartians are Sixth formers. Below that are Medes and then us Lydians. [He’s in Second Year] Sagartians and Medes can wear any jacket or shoes they like. First formers don’t get called anything.

A number of other boys get mentioned in passing and it’s hard to know who to hang onto as important: the only two of note are Hughes, a boy from another dormitory “whose cheeks were blotched with rosacea”—all Robin has to say about him is that he’s “downright revolting”—and Ivor Morrell who’s two years above Barney; his older brother Jonty was something of a war hero and there’s a plaque in the school chapel in his memory. It is whilst out on his first run that Barney encounters Ivor for the first time; he’s learned that there’s a bunker in the woods that some of the runners use to hide in. Ivor is the second member of the group of misfits that Barney becomes a part of. The third is Belinda Flood who, as the only girl in the school, is naturally not fitting in.

There are mysteries and secrets aplenty: what exactly happened to Cray, where’s Robin’s watch, are there still secret tunnels leading to an old German bunker, why did Krawiec come back from the States, where precisely does Belinda Flood go at night, what exactly did she find wrapped in newspaper and preserved from the elements by a piece of oilcloth in the walled garden by the kitchen and what has any of this to do with Miss Duchâtel and her memoir? And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Hard to tell at first what the real mystery might be.

In many respects, as with any good detective novel, most of the things we don’t know we really don’t need to know and the important things get swept along with everything else. Time is an important theme in this book although you don’t realise that at first. Had we begun with Barney as an old man looking back that might’ve helped but we don’t and so our realisation of what’s really important creeps up on us. The first page that jumped out at me was page 82 in which we hear a bit about Spike, Barney’s stepdad:

Spike had often told him that things happened in their right order. Spike believed in cycles and spirals and figures of eight, the rhythms of the tides and time recorded in sea rings. According to him, there was very little about life that was linear. He hadn’t cried at his own mother’s funeral, he once told Barney, because human emotions don’t work like that: you feel things at all the wrong times and that’s all right. You remember things out of order, too, but that just means you’re finding a way to make sense of it all. So, when in August the letter had arrived confirming that the school would be delighted to welcome Barney into the Second Form—and would his guardian please see to it that the vaccination checklist was completed as soon as possible—his stepfather had tapped the paper with one finger and said, “You see, Barn? To everything there is a season.”

I said this book is a boarding school novel and, of course, it is at its heart but it’s also not. I mentioned there’s a scene in the book reminiscent of the one in Tom Brown’s School Days and I asked Trilby about this:

The roasting scene was entirely intentional – I was thinking of it not as a cliché so much as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the longer tradition of school stories you mention. In some respects I wanted this to be an anti-school story (Barney's ultimate buying-in to the system being not so much a triumph as a weird defeat), but it seemed to me that this could only work if I acknowledged the conventions of the parent genre.

So that’s another thing about this book. You think you’re reading one thing when you’re actually reading something else entirely. This is a book about systems: social, national and political—is the Nineteen Eighty-Four connection starting to make sense? The school and the island are both microcosms of society. Just as the boarding school is a common trope so is the new transfer student. He provides the perfect proxy for us readers: he knows nothing; we know nothing; we learn together. The school, however, is only one group Barney finds himself having to fit in with and that’s what life’s like. That along the way he should lose some friends and have his ideals sullied is just life. And life sucks.

***

Trilby Kent's first novel for children, Medina Hill, was published by Tundra Books in Canada and the U.S. in October 2009. A second, Stones for My Father, appeared in 2012. Smoke Portrait, her first adult novel, came out in 2011.

As an undergraduate at Oxford University (History BA), she chose Special and Further Subjects in the Indian Nationalist Movement and The Middle East in the Age of Justinian. After graduating in 2004, she moved on to the London School of Economics, where she completed an MSc in Social Anthropology. She’s currently working on her PhD.

She has worked as a rare books specialist at a leading auction house and as a freelance journalist contributing investigative, arts and feature writing to the British and Canadian national press and to literary and news publications in America and Europe. In 2010 she was shortlisted for the Guardian's International Development Journalism Competition. Her short fiction has appeared in African American Review and Mslexia, among others.

The perfect fork

My parents used to get annoyed with me as a child for leaving food on my plate. I was reminded – and not infrequently – of those starving children in Africa. It didn't stop me not liking Brussels sprouts though. Or cabbage. Or spinach.

I've just read through Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize acceptance speech in which she recalls her childhood in Africa and laments that children in Zimbabwe are starving for knowledge. I could understand hungering for food when I was a kid, not that I ever did, but hungering for knowledge? If I wanted to know something I just asked my dad.

There were books in the house where I grew up, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, self-help books, but no fiction apart from children's storybooks, mainly by Enid Blyton who probably deserves a whole blog to herself one day. It was not my parents' fault. My mother always told us how her sister was the dux of the school whereas she was the dunce; my father had been the school bully and fared no better. After though he set out to educate himself and bought books appropriate to his line of business; he got his City & Guilds and then looked for other things to learn. Books were tools as far as he was concerned, designed to do a job, like a fork, a means to an end; he couldn't see the point in reading things other people had just made up. I wasn't exactly forbidden to read fiction, you must understand, but I was never encouraged.

I've tried to put myself in the shoes (perhaps an inappropriate choice of metaphor there) of these Zimbabweans. It's hard. But I do get the desire to make the world a little better for our children. Before my daughter was born she already had 100 books ready and waiting for her, including all of the Enid Blyton retellings of the Brer Rabbit stories. I'm glad to report she has grown up into a voracious reader and I never tire buying her new books despite their almost prohibitive cost.

This is perhaps where technology can come to the rescue. If someone can invent a clockwork radio they can invent a clockwork e-book reader. I know there are organisations like Computer Aid International that find homes for all the perfectly good PCs we in the West dispose of because they're out of date. There is also something called the Simputer specifically designed for the third world.

A single PC can hold hundreds of books; with an internet connection that becomes thousands. We in the developed countries may be a bit sniffy about devices like Amazon's Kindle but I doubt the Africans would have the same attitude. I can't see them keeping it in the box in case it gets dirty. None of the above are perfect solutions but, as I've heard so often, we don't live in a perfect world as if that's reason enough not to try and improve things.

There is absolute perfection (e.g. a man who never sins) and relative perfection (e.g. a fork). A fork is perfect for the job for which it is intended. It's not very good for hammering in nails. I wonder how perfect Lessing's speech was. She tells a sad tale very well – she should be able to, they've just awarded her the ruddy Nobel Prize for Literature – but will it change anything? Will this blog? Maybe words don't quite have the power the Zimbabweans think they do.