You can take a horse to the river …
Today I’m announcing something of a departure from a lifetime of personal philistinism.
Yesterday, I happened to be out and about enjoying a stroll in the afternoon sunshine with the ‘Ball and Chain’. Just as the local high street shops were on the point of closing we came to a Waterstone’s store and – as she disappeared towards the Stationery and Card section on the ground floor to search for an Easter card to send to her brother (a task that, from bitter experience, I knew would involve looking at every card in the neighbourhood at least twice) – I gravitated towards the ‘New Books’ section by the front door.
I’ve never been quite sure whether the root cause was genes, personality disorder, the restlessness of my personality, nurture, or even just plain old basic lack of intelligence, but I’ve never been a particular fan of reading and books.
As a small child I suppose the fictional character I most resembled was Just William from the Richmal Crompton series.
Boisterous, full of boundless energy and mischief, always on the borderline of getting into trouble, exploring preferably the most mucky and unlikely things on hand and playing innumerable imaginary games of either military derring-do or sporting matches of significant national importance.
At the task of climbing trees, and indeed falling out of them, I became something of a self-taught expert and regarded the scratches, scrapes and bumps attendant upon doing so as little more than occupational hazards later perhaps to be regarded as badges of honour.
A decade or more ago now one of my nephews (then aged about eight) fell off one of the lower branches of an oak tree in my parents’ garden, of which in days of yore at a similar age I habitually ascended the summit on a daily basis, and sustained a slight graze to his knee.
I then stood by watching in puzzled disbelief as his hyper-anxious mother, having with some difficulty been restrained from calling 999 and summoning all three emergency services, insisted that my brother drive him immediately to the casualty department of the nearest hospital.
In my time both fall and injury would have been regarded as entirely incidental and I would have simply begun climbing the tree again – and probably suffered similar several times – during the course of half a day or so spent somewhere between ten and thirty feet above the ground clambering about within the tree’s branches doing my impression of either (or probably both) Mogli and Tarzan.
My subsequent introduction to physical contact sports opened new vistas and limitless opportunities for ‘rough and tumble’, minor injuries and my growing devotion to the camaraderie of teamwork.
Somewhere around this time (the mid-1960s?) the England cricket team gave a Test debut to a lanky Northamptonshire fast bowler of about six feet five named David Larter whom, I remember, gave an interview to The Cricketer magazine in which he said that at school he had regarded lessons as an unnatural interruption between games, a sentiment with which I felt great communion.
At my prep school, starting from a position where by choice books were objects opened only under duress and/or in class, I was gradually schooled by my ‘section’ [similar to a ‘house’ in a public school] in the direction of the written word. One time, when against all odds and expectation our lot became embroiled in the business end of the occasional unit contest to gain a prize via amassing the most ‘plus marks’ during a specific term, the prefects decided to mount a campaign of doubtful moral quality in a final push for glory.
Hordes of we ‘illiterate classes’ at the bottom of the food chain were therefore summarily coached, Book Comprehension For Dummies-style, in the stories contained in some of the most popular volumes in the school library, for the sole reason that on Wednesday afternoons – after the entire body of the school’s pupils had completed their statutory daily half an hour resting on their beds – a master was given the task of interviewing boys about such books that they had claimed to have read, further to awarding ‘half a plus’ if he became satisfied that the boy standing immediately in front of him (heading a queue of similar waiting for the opportunity to be quizzed) had actually read the book he was holding in his hand.
By this route, if one could master the basics about the content of – say – three books, one might deliver one’s section a very-valuable one-and-a-half plusses towards the Holy Grail (or rather, the cheap-looking tin cup in question) by recounting them, one after the other, to the invigilator.
My experience of going the extra mile for my section that term was something of an ordeal.
Either by choice – or just as often, simple lack of time given everything else I was up to – my book-reading exploits were as rare as hen’s teeth.
In such circumstances to present myself in front of a master, who through school legend was bound to know of my reputation in the matter, and try to give a convincing account (learned by rote from a fellow pupil nerd probably wearing glasses and sticky-out ears) of yet another book telling of stirring, against-the-odds, British Empire-building – or was it defending? – adventures by the likes of H. Rider Haggard or G.A. Henty, was (for an eleven year old) a performance in prospect akin to appearing solo on the stage of a packed Royal Albert Hall backed by a 100-piece orchestra at the climax of Last Night Of The Proms.
Having to learn and then recount a summary of the contents of a book one had never read was a big enough ask in itself. Having to learn and recount two of them was on the outer edge of the Solar System, and three … well, frankly, three was quite beyond your author.
One of the nightmare scenarios that haunts me to this day ( I can still curl up in a cringing ball when the memory flashes into my mind, over fifty years later) occurred when our section was neck-and-neck with its main rival for the trophy in the final week of term, the day before the final reckoning of the score was to be done. As the time I was next in line to be interviewed, waiting nervously – a single book in hand – for my turn in front of the examining master.
Suddenly I received a tap on the shoulder.
“Hey, Byford, …” whispered the tapper, a fellow member of my section, “… Svensson [an older boy and prefect also in our section] says we need just two more plusses to win the competition. He says you’re to take this and do your best to fudge it with Mr Martin [the invigilating master on this occasion] and try and win us another ‘half’ [plus mark] if you can …”
And with that he thrust surreptitiously into my mitt a volume upon which I had never set eyes before, written by an author I had never heard of and – worst of all – in whose contents I had certainly never been coached.
To put no gloss at all upon it, a few minutes later, after just about doing enough to convince Mr Martin that I deserved a ‘half’ for my first book (mind you, he could have been feeling generous because it was so near the end of term), I brought out my second … and … just ‘folded’ like a pack of cards.
Fasting-forward again to the present day, I suspect the above goes some way towards explaining my life-long aversion to fiction.
Instead, almost exclusively all my adult life I have concentrated upon reading non-fiction – biographies, histories, diaries etc. – and, when asked about this preference, I usually trot out the line that I prefer reading of ‘real lives’ and experiences from which I might learn something.
In contrast, I continue, whenever I begin to attempt to read a novel or fictional volume, it’s not long before I am overwhelmed with the thought “Why am I reading something that someone else has invented? Reading some of this stuff, I feel I could have done better …” (this, I have to admit here, being a proposition highly unlikely to come to pass in the actuality).
Thus – despite a passing devotion to the first two novels of Joseph Heller (Catch-22 and Something Happened) – myself and fiction broadly remain ships passing in the night.
Habitually I am an avid reader of arts reviews and indeed the Literary Review. After all, why bother to read books, or buy CDs, or see movies, when you can consume reviews written by people who know what they’re talking about, can fillet the piece, tell you all about it and if you’re lucky also write about the issues arising from it from a wide and knowledgeable perspective?
None of which quite explains why in Waterstone’s yesterday I found myself purchasing a copy of Lincoln In The Bardo, the new novel by American author George Saunders, which had received good reviews in the Sunday paper arts supplements a few weeks back.
My intention is to read it over the Easter weekend but you know how it is – you don’t tend to read things when and if any more interesting a distraction should come along.
Anyway – I’ll let you, dear reader, know how I get on with it in due course.
