(Margaret von Klemperer)
Article by Margaret
von Klemperer, courtesy of The Witness
Enduring another
day of lonely lockdown, I begin to wonder what on earth non-readers are doing
with themselves. Watching Netflix or staring at the wall – which sometimes
seems to me exactly the same thing? Or marching solemnly round and round their
house to try to keep their steps up? (I admit I’ve been reduced to that but it
sure isn’t fun.)
But for readers,
there’s a whole world out there, or, rather, in here. How did we get here? What
makes some people addicted to books and others not? Make no mistake, it is an addiction – you buy them,
stockpile them and watch them encroaching all over your house. Thinking about
it, I guess it begins when, as a child, something you read catches your
imagination and whirls you away. And you realise there are a million lives you
never dreamed of, waiting to be claimed as your own. The people you meet in the
pages live in your imagination, which is why films of favourite books are such
a let-down. These are not the people I saw when I lived their lives.
I have an early
memory of being given Mary O’Hara’s glorious My Friend Flicka – and being deeply incensed and slightly
frightened by the blurb which said something about: “for horse lovers from nine
to ninety”. I was only eight. So wasn’t I supposed to love it? I still have my
battered old copy, but the red and yellow dust jacket with the offending quote
has long gone. One of its main strengths for me was that, as a book for children,
it gave the adults real thoughts and feelings. They were proper people, not the
slightly absurd authority figures that writers like Enid Blyton created. Around
the same time, I got into Arthur Ransome’s Swallows
and Amazons series. I no longer have those: my copies are now in my son’s
house. Another favourite was The Eagle of
the Ninth, Rosemary Sutcliff’s evocation of Roman Britain. For a long time
I was part of that world, until I was whipped away to the Prince Edward Island
of Anne of Green Gables. How I longed
for red hair.
I’ve often wondered
whether, if I re-read those wonderful books of childhood, they would still
resonate. Or would I be embarrassed at the naivety of my small self. Certainly,
The Eagle of the Ninth is as good as
it ever was, and lives on my shelf of “comfort reading”, to be returned to when
the going gets tough – it might be coming out soon. And reading Swallows to my two small grandsons,
still too young to read it to themselves, I was fascinated by how much they
understood and how much they loved it, though it’s as well they are still too
young to raise an eyebrow at one of the characters being called Titty. Of
course now, the children’s father would be locked up and his kids taken away
for the infamous telegram he sent, giving them permission to sail on their own
in the Lake District: “Better drowned than duffers. If not duffers won’t
drown.” It ties in with Alison Lurie’s view in her excellent book on children’s
literature, Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups.
The best books are the ones where the kids take control.
When I was around
eleven or twelve, my best friend’s aunt gave her a pile of battered, green
cloth-bound novels by D K Broster. She read them first, and then handed them
over to me, and for a whole summer we read together, often lying on beds or the
floor, immersed in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, until we were chased out of
doors by our mothers, to play games where we were skulking in the heather. Many
years later, well into adulthood, I found copies of The Flight of the Heron, The Gleam in the North and The Dark Mile in a second-hand bookshop.
Would they have dated and would I cringe at the sentimentality? No. The best
writing can stand the test of time. In fact, Broster’s historical research was
exemplary and though now my favourite would be The Dark Mile which it wasn’t then, they are still a great read.
Later, in my high
school years, I would move on to T H White’s The Once and Future King (and here the adaptation that turned into
the musical Camelot is an exception
to the rule about adaptations); Gone With
the Wind, where I had the obligatory teenage sob over Rhett and Scarlett;
Annemarie Selinko’s Desiree and Anya
Seton’s Katherine. With hindsight, I
was obviously into historical fiction.
And setworks began
to join the growing pile of books I couldn’t do without. Pride and Prejudice, of course, and Albert Camus’s La Peste, set for A Level French and a
huge relief after my inept struggles with Racine and Moliere. I still have both
French and English editions – the English one probably to help my inadequate
French with the nuance of that brilliant book. It is, of course, one which
resonates strongly right now.
Over the years, my
tastes have changed, but those are some of the books that launched a lifetime
of reading, and made me the person I am today. I nearly always have a book with
me, to stave off boredom and ease the pain of a queue. Most of the ones I have
mentioned are still in my house, treasured and battered old friends. In fact,
to while away another locked-down day, I think I’ll go and organise them, and
some others, onto a special shelf all of their own. - Margaret von Klemperer
Posts
