Paperboy (7 page)

Gradually, I came to understand the genesis of reading books:

As a child you started with Janet and John
⁵
rag-books
(which
my ‘Aunt’ Mary, who had invented the concept of ‘re-gifting’, continued to send on birthdays until I was twelve, along with old jigsaws that had pieces missing and boxes of chocolates that had turned white with heat and time).

Then you progressed to punishment-filled fairy tales, and Babar the Elephant, Gallic tales perversely translated and printed in joined-up handwriting by publishers who clearly wanted you to become annoyed with the French at an early age.

Then you moved on to Winnie the Pooh, Finn Family Moomintroll and Toby Twirl, weirdly asexual creatures who had adventures in places that were alien to a suburban child, like woods and meadows.

Then you made your first critical decision by ditching Rupert the Bear because he was boring and wet and presumably only appealed to posh, cosseted children who looked like extras from
Brideshead Revisited
.

After that it was anything the library could provide, including Edward Lear, Professor Branestawm, Dr Dolittle and Biggles. This last one was a big jump into Boys’ Adventure, and opened the world to Robert Louis Stevenson, R. M. Ballantyne, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and anything with pirates, tigers, caves, airships or secret Chinese societies in.

Finally, I started making mental lists of words I didn’t quite understand:

Incognito

Copse

Ingot

Pipette

Zeppelin

Contraband

Hottentot

Capstan

Runcible

Quartermaster

Chocks

Infidel

There seemed to be little place for the fantastic in a commuter-belt white-collar household, which was a shame because the grandfather of such tales, H. G. Wells, came from just such a cosy background. On an inaccessibly high shelf, my father kept a full set of Dennis Wheatley paperbacks, which were out of date long before I could reach to read them. These eventually faded from fashion due to their peculiar mix of Nazism, racial stereotyping and the luridly supernatural. Bill’s volumes of bizarre Fu Manchu tales by Sax Rohmer were peppered with wily, snickering Orientals who planned to take over the world via Limehouse opium dens, which was surely not a very sensible idea.

I plumped for the Dennis Wheatleys. The once-ubiquitous witchcraft novels reflected the period’s obsession with the idea that England might become enslaved by sinister foreigner powers. Even when they were first published, the books must have appeared archaic and stilted, rather like charming, ridiculous fairy tales, although
The Haunting of Toby Jugg
, with its monstrous fascist-empowered spider tapping the bedroom windows at night, could still keep any child awake and quaking beneath the candlewick. Wheatley’s absurd frontispieces featured dire warnings of the real threats posed by witchcraft, but Bill took them as seriously as his own mother had probably taken the threat of white slave-traders. ‘This is a very dangerous book in the wrong hands,’ he would say, tapping the spine against his calloused palm as if discussing a bomb-making manual.

Actually, he had one of those, too. It was called
How to Make Explosives
and featured photographs of beaming housewives in Marcel waves mixing volatile cocktails from ordinary household items in Pyrex bowls, as though they were baking cakes. Bill owned this book because he had been a scientist. Once, he had worked on an explosive paint that became unstable when it dried. His colleagues painted all the Os and Ps and Qs in his newspaper with it for a joke, so that when he came home and wearily threw down the paper, the dining table blew up. Somewhere I have a photograph of Bill and his colleagues in the doorway of their science shed, wearing white lab coats and nervous smiles that suggested they had just made a discovery that would have to remain hidden for the public good.

My parents’ books had their place in the dining room and never strayed from it, just as ornaments belonged in the front room, cutlery belonged in the scullery and the motorbikes belonged in the back parlour.

Many years later, I went back to Westerdale Road, Greenwich SE10, London, England, Earth, The Universe, to see the half of the street that remained. It was still very quiet, but now it was because the men were off at day-schools and the women were shuttling between Primark and Sainsbury’s.

This part of Greenwich had always been the shabby end, the mucked-about-with part that was grey from lorry dust, far from the stately grandeur of the Naval College, the Observatory and the
Cutty Sark
. I turned into the street and studied the raggedy front gardens, the ashen net curtains, the dripping box hedges, the walls studded with sea shells at the front and broken bottles at the back, the terrace broken halfway along by an incongruously modern builders’ yard (on the site where a single bomb had fallen on the street). The old Sunday school now sold
pine
furniture, but the houses looked much as they had when I was a child. The only difference was that they had mostly been bought by Indian families, who tended perfumed rose bushes and painted numbers on their dustbin lids just as generations before them had done.

Our family had moved from the street shortly after my tenth birthday. The remaining houses now looked miniature. Here, armed with broom, mop and duster, my mother had waged a lifelong battle against germs, incrementally losing as they got inside each of the neighbours in turn, killing them. Not that anyone made a fuss; front doors were quietly closed until flowers arrived, and after an appropriate period of mourning the surviving partner would reappear in the front garden, ready to prune the neglected roses.

I loved the house where I grew up, and was miserable when they demolished it. Standing at the stump of the road, it felt as though if I listened hard enough, it might once more be possible to hear my parents shouting at each other in the hallway. I had been a pretty resilient child; the sound of adults bickering on a Sunday was as much part of the background as bandleader Billy Cotton shouting ‘Wakey Wakey!’ on the kitchen transistor or distant choirs rehearsing for church services.

The high street comprised a densely packed corner store called Lynch’s, a butcher, a baker and a chemist with giant stoppered apothecary bottles full of coloured water in its windows. The local toy shop sported a model railway that could be activated by dropping a penny through the window into a tube. A dingy furniture store sold things like Pompadour Dralon boudoir stools and the Excalibur lounge suite, its hopeful owner hovering expectantly in the front doorway. The Co-operative Society gave out tin dividend coins and had an anachronistically ancient system of metal cylinders on cables that shot back and
forth
across the ceiling delivering bills to the cashier. The motorway that cut the street in half required all these stores to be demolished, and tore the heart from the one place where I had been happy.

Amazingly, the East Greenwich Public Library was still there, a lone surviving piece of sturdy orange and white Edwardian architecture, tucked beneath the dank shadow of the motorway. It had loose parquet floor blocks and smelled of mildew even in midsummer. A graceful flight of wooden stairs led down an oval hole to the basement, where a handful of forbidden reference books were kept. The librarian had agreed to lower the age limit for admittance to the grown-ups’ bookshelves in order that I could attend her Wednesday-night reading circle. For the whole of my childhood I had borrowed three books every two weeks, until I became more familiar with the shelves than almost anyone who worked there.

One of the first books I took out was
Down with Skool
by Geoffrey Willans. Willans’s collaboration with rococo artist Ronald Searle propelled him into the blazer pocket of every British schoolboy. His hero, Nigel Molesworth, the Curse of St Custard’s, rocketed to fame in four lunatic children’s books. With chapters on how to avoid lessons and how to torture parents, they caused outrage because of their deliberately awful spelling, and were regarded as bad examples to set before children. The second volume
How to Be Topp
, scaled the heights of the surreal. A new term begins; ‘No more dolies of William the bear to cuddle and hug, no more fairy stories at nannys knee it is all aboard the fairy bus for the dungeons.’ New boy Eustace is trussed to a chair and gagged with socks. His mother rings up and is reassured. ‘Eustace mater ring off very relieved cheers cheers and telephone all the other lades about it. An owl hoot and Eustace is insensible. St
Custards
hav begun another term.’ The roster of pupils included the ghastly Fotheringtom-Thomas, ‘skipping like a girlie’ and ‘uterly wet’, and Grabber, ‘skool captane and winer of the mrs joyful prize for rafia work’. The peculiar cadences of academic lassitude were perfectly nailed, so that a recital of ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna’ became a bored litany trotted out by an ADD-afflicted child: ‘Notadrumwasheardnotafuneralnote shut up peason larffing as his corse as his corse what is a corse sir? gosh is it to the rampart we carried.’ Willans’s catchphrases like ‘chiz’, ‘enuff said’ and ‘as any fule kno’ passed into the English language.

Around this time, I sensed that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was beckoning with sixty-four short stories and four novels involving the world’s first consulting detective. The fascinating thing about Sherlock Holmes was that the less you knew about his character the more intriguing he was, unlike Hercule Poirot, who had as much personality as a cardboard cutout.

Conan Doyle conveyed the creeping pallor of Victorian street life, the fume-filled taverns where a man might find himself propositioned by a burglarizing gargoyle, the alleyways where he could be struck on the skull by a beetling madman, the Thames-side staircases where gimlet-eyed doxies awaited the easily duped. Even his cheerful scenes felt vaguely gruesome: shopkeepers would drape a Christmas goose around a character’s neck like a boa constrictor, and the welcoming yellow light of a first-floor window could somehow suggest that its tenant was lying dead on the floor. Fog muffled murderers’ footsteps and London sunlight was always watery. The Holmes adventures were virtually horror stories. People went raving mad in locked rooms, or died of fright for no discernible reason. And even when you found out how it was done or who did it, what kind of lunatic would
choose
to kill someone by sending a rare Indian snake down a bell-pull, for God’s sake?

G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown tales offered crimes that were even more inventive, but the little Essex priest was too nice, and his adventures were simply too whimsical to stay in fashion. I found other mystery writers like Margery Allingham interesting, but virtually throttled by the frightfully English language of their times.

Moving to the Agatha Christie books, I found that the initial thrill of such plot ingenuity also created a curious sense of dissatisfaction. The characters were board-game pieces. How was I supposed to identify with any of them? Westerdale Road didn’t have too many colonels, housemaids, vicars, flighty debutantes, dowager duchesses or cigar-chomping tycoons. Certainly, none of our neighbours had ever attended a country-house party, let alone found a string of bodies in the library. Nobody owned a library, and country houses were places you were dragged around on Sunday afternoons.

At least Conan Doyle’s solutions possessed a kind of strange plausibility, whereas Christie’s murder victims apparently received dozens of visitors in the moments before they died, and were killed by doctored pots of jam, guns attached to bits of string, poisoned trifles and knives on springs. ‘It is a childishly simple affair,
mon ami
. Brigadier Hawthorne removed the letter-opener from the marmalade pot
before
Hortense the maid found the burned suicide note in the grate,
after
Doctor Caruthers hid the adder, easily mistaken for a stethoscope, under the aspidistra,
at exactly the same time
as Lady Pettigrew was emptying arsenic over the jugged hare.’ The only thing I ever learned from an Agatha Christie novel was the lengths to which county people would go to show how much they hated each other.

In the East Greenwich Public Library I caught glimpses of a world beyond my experience. I loved looking at the covers of books by Dickens, Huxley, Woolf, Forster, Waugh, Wodehouse, Firbank, Faulkner, H. H. Munroe and M. R. James, but I wasn’t old enough to take any of them out. It was a small library with a good librarian, Mrs Ethel Clarke, a woman of thrillingly diverse tastes who stocked her shelves with the widest possible array of books. The first time I met her she scared me with a laser stare intended to weed out time-wasters.

‘If you want to join the library, you’ll have to fill this out.’ She slid a purplish mimeographed sheet across her desk at me. ‘You’ll need a reference from a friend.’

‘I haven’t got any friends,’ I told her.

She peered over the half-moon glasses chained to her neck and pursed duck-lips at me. ‘Hmm.’ Looking around the library, she pointed out a pair of old ladies perusing the romantic novels. ‘Go over there and
make
a friend.’

Greenwich Council should have given her a gold medal. Instead, they plotted to have the place torn down and sold off behind her back. In my mind’s eye I could only ever see the library becoming emptier and emptier, as this gentle, thoughtful lady remained seated at her counter with a look of doomed hopefulness on her face. A custodian of treasures with the power to improve more young lives than any politician, I imagined her facing the forces of ill-informed darkness with a rallying cry like that of Boadicea, if Boadicea had been a suburban librarian rather than the Queen of the Iceni.
⁶

Amazingly, the axe did not fall on the library. Over forty years later it continued to stand in the same place,
its
doors open to anyone curious enough to explore the world through the printed page.

One week before Christmas, while I was still seven, I clambered on to the enamel flap of a freestanding kitchen cabinet, tipping the whole thing over and burying myself in a heap of smashed crockery. My mother came running in, thought I was dead, screamed and gave birth to my brother on the scullery floor. He had been due on Christmas Day, so I was able to blackmail him for years to come by reminding him that if this accident had not occurred he would only be getting one batch of presents.