The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (19 page)

My parents' books were kept in two places. The first was a massive multi-purpose shelving unit Dad had hammered together in the garage and installed in the dining room, incorporating a drinks cabinet, on which stood a blue metallic soda siphon, Poole pottery, smoked glass ornaments, my plaster-cast models of characters from Beatrix Potter books and
The Muppet Show
, and all the atlases and instruction manuals. The second was a wooden cabinet with a sliding glass front. This cabinet stored a set of uniform editions of novels by the likes of Ngaio Marsh and Alistair MacLean:
Ice Station Zebra
,
Final Curtain
and so on – the results of a subscription to the Companion Book Club some years before I was born. These were certainly never read in my lifetime. All the dust jackets had been thrown away.

Nonetheless, my parents were always reading, whatever had been borrowed from the library, or paperbacks on holiday. My mother enjoyed, and still enjoys, historical romances set in Cornwall or at a royal court. When I was a boy, her favourite authors were Jean Plaidy (
The Captive of Kensington Palace
,
The Thistle and the Rose
) and Victoria Holt (
Bride of Pendorric
,
My Enemy, the Queen
). She slightly favoured Holt over Plaidy, but there was little to choose between them, not least because Jean Plaidy and Victoria Holt were the same person writing under different pen names.
⁶
These days, she reads Philippa Gregory, Dick Francis and Alan Titchmarsh, again all the same person, probably Victoria Holt.

To make use of a cliché, my mother does not know much about art but she knows what she likes. Actually, no, that is not quite correct. My mother knows enough about art but she prefers what she likes. Thus, in her late seventies, inspired by a trip to Castle Howard in Yorkshire, she read
Brideshead Revisited
and found it underwhelming. It was, she informed me, markedly inferior to Alan Titchmarsh's most recent novel. When I begged to differ, she pointed out that I had not read it and suggested I was simply being a snob. ‘He has written some really super books, Andrew,' she said. She thinks I could learn a thing or two about being a successful writer from Alan Titchmarsh; undeniably true.

My father, for his part, liked to read about the First World War, the Second World War and/or the Cold War, either as fiction or fact, and so read the novelists everybody's dad read in the 1970s: Frederick Forsyth, Len Deighton, John le Carré. He had been sent out to work at fifteen, up to the City every day while German bombs fell on London. In his early twenties, he developed severe diabetes and the pattern of his adult life was fixed. If Dad was bitter about these events, he never showed it to me, nor did he harbour thwarted academic ambitions, although he was well aware of the advantages and confidence such an education bestowed. ‘You always know when a person has been to Oxford or Cambridge,' he used to say, ‘because they always tell you.' This too has proven to be undeniably true.

Is it redundant to say I loved my parents? My father was wonderful company, intelligent, articulate, argumentative, and my mother was patient and talkative and loving. They were older parents with one cherished child, and we were undoubtedly an old-fashioned family, Dad taking the train to town every day while Mum stayed behind and made a home for us. My father's ill-health meant he needed stability and routine; my mother worked hard to provide him with these things. The upheavals of the 1960s passed them by or they chose to ignore them – we knew no war, and my father continued to wear a bowler hat to work well into the next decade. There may not have been any Tolstoy in our house but what I want to say is that I did not care then and I do not care now. We were happy, and we were happy in our own way.

But then I had to go to school, the catastrophe of my childhood. I stood in the playground on the very first morning, while all around children ran and shrieked and laughed, and though I did not yet know the word, I thought to myself: oh shit oh shit oh shit. And these first impressions proved to be correct. There was not a single school day for the next thirteen years when I did not think: oh shit. From the moment I arrived, I was waiting to leave.

Books became more important to me then. For the first few weeks of school, I spent as much time as I could sitting inside, reading, until my teacher, Miss Twitchit, told me gently that I was banned from the classroom during break times and I had to go outside and play with what she called ‘your friends'. And though I did make friends eventually, I always preferred indoors to outdoors because indoors was where the books were kept.

Although I was predictably inept at PE, and average at most other subjects, it is correct to say I was exceptionally good
at reading. What rewards did this bring? The good opinion of Miss Twitchit, on the one hand, and, on the other, the bemusement and contempt of ‘my friends'. In the summer term, the advanced readers in the class were allowed to take their little chairs out onto the grass, form a circle, and talk about what they had been reading. I was the only boy in this group. Every week, the little girls would be furious that their book club had been infiltrated by a boy – and a girly boy at that. Every week, the clever girls would make me cry and run indoors, establishing the pattern of my relationships with women into my adult life, up to and including when I met my wife, the cleverest girl of all.

What was it I got from reading as a child? It fired my imagination and provided me with an escape – that much is corny but true. Everything in the world of stories was harmonious and fair and I often found it easier to spend time there than in the muddy, idiotic, confusing world of other people.
⁷
However, what I really got from reading was this: it was the one thing at which I truly excelled. It was my natural talent, my golden voice, my prodigious goalscoring gift; and although it did not carry the same institutional prestige or heroic status as football skills and virtuosity on the descant recorder, it was enough to be good at something – not just good, better than
you
. By my penultimate year, I had exhausted all the books in the school and my parents were asked to send me in with new books from home or from the library nearby. Did I really read every single book in the school? My mother maintains I did. Maybe I just told the teachers I had and they all believed me. Maybe this is where the lying about books really began. Where were the checks and balances? I blame the authorities.

So, my parents gave me a love of reading; Croydon Borough Council, via its libraries, gave me a love of books; and schooldays ensured I became emotionally dependent on both. But only one person taught me how to collect books, how to covet them and hoard them, how to buy them. That was all me, autodidact, infant bibliolater. From the age of seven, it was my dearest wish to build a library of my own, all donations greedily accepted; and every Asterix or Tintin book that came home, every Dahl or Blyton or Fisk taken out on loan, was never returned without regret and a mental note to acquire a copy for the collection when funds permitted. I wanted to possess all the books I had already read, as well as all those I had not – every book in the whole wide world, in other words. Where did this mania come from? It was the tiger who came to tea and never left.

I also wanted to be a palaeontologist.

I read a piece in a magazine recently which rated book tokens as one of the most disappointing Christmas presents of the 1970s, just below home-knits and any bicycle which wasn't a Chopper or a Tomahawk. This was not my experience. I liked receiving toys as much as the next tank-top-wearing kid but, in my eyes, book tokens were every bit as ‘skill' as, say, Evel Knievel or Ker-Plunk!. A book token was a golden ticket to a land of pure imagination, and also the big branch of WHSmith in Croydon's Whitgift Centre.
⁸

And what did I spend my book tokens on?
Asterix
and
Tintin
, Roald Dahl, Nicholas Fisk and
Littlenose
.
The How and Why Wonder Book of Dinosaurs
.
Mr Men
books (original set, pre-
Little Miss
). Beatrix Potter.
Winnie-the-Pooh
and
The House at Pooh Corner
.
Now We Are Six
and
When We Were Very Young. The Dinosaur Encyclopedia
. Selected adventures of
Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators
.
I-Spy
books. Pop-up books by Jan Pieńkowski.
The Guinness Book of Records. Fattypuffs and Thinifers, Fungus the Bogeyman, Masquerade
by Kit Williams. Spike Milligan, the Rev. W. Awdry,
How to be Topp
. The Secret Seven and the Famous Five (I did prefer the Secret Seven).
Emil and the Detectives. Stig of the Dump. Blue Peter
annuals,
Beano
annuals,
Rupert
annuals – jumble sales were good for old annuals.
Arabella's Raven. The Wind in the Willows. How to Be a Junior Palaeontologist
. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
The Lost World
.

Essentially, provided it had nothing to do with football, war or girls, I liked everything. I read the
Radio Times
and ‘The Robins' in my mother's
Woman's Weekly
. I read the four-panel cartoons in the
Daily Express
and flicked through the
Croydon Advertiser
in search of more. I was addicted to comics, the jokey comics like
Whizzer and Chips, Buster,
Cheeky Weekly
and
Whoopee!
, or the 12p American imports of Marvel and DC titles:
The Amazing Spider-Man, The Uncanny X-Men, The Mighty Thor
, with their action-packed advertisements for Sea Monkeys, Hostess Twinkies and
GRIT
, ‘
America's Greatest Family Newspaper Since 1882
'. To a British child growing up in the 1970s, these adverts were every bit as amazing and uncanny as the adventures of the adjectivally-endowed superheroes.
⁹
My parents indulged me in all of the above. My mother took an uncharacteristically liberal ‘as long as they're reading' approach, though there was one notable exception: I was not allowed to bring
Look-in
(aka
The Junior TV Times
) into the house.

At school, reading won me my first and only prize, for which I received a certificate and, fortuitously, a book token. In the cub Scouts, though the swimming and athletics badges were beyond me, I could earn the readers' badge by talking about a book I had enjoyed and explaining how a library works – dur. And, inevitably, I was a member of the Puffin Club, with a shiny enamel pin, my Puffineers' codebook and a pink plastic binder for back issues of
Puffin Post
.
¹⁰
In 1976, I pleaded with my mother to take me up to the ICA for that year's Puffin Exhibition, the Club's annual jamboree. We queued in the Mall for ages to get in but it was worth it; we saw Quentin Blake and Bernard Cribbins and Fat Puffin. I would not set foot in the ICA again for ten years, not until an
NME
-sponsored gig by The Wedding Present, The Servants and a pre-ecstasy Primal Scream. This seems fitting because, with its badges and its cryptic messages, the
NME
in that period operated like a Puffin Club for students. And I would not meet Fat Puffin again until 1991, when Penguin loaned one of their Fat Puffin costumes to the shop I was working in and I volunteered to wear it and some youths in the street told Fat Puffin to fuck off and punched him in the stomach. But I digress.

A few books and authors stand out as my absolute favourites from childhood. Both
Winnie-the-Pooh
books, of course. Tove Jansson's Moomin stories, which have undergone a kind of merchandised revival over the last few years, were fabulous (as in fable) and reassuringly unsentimental; I liked the dark, windswept
Moominpappa at Sea
the best.
The Eighteenth Emergency
by Betsy Byars, with its Quentin Blake cover, whose hero Benjie ‘Mouse' Fawley must learn to take a beating from the school bully, Marv Hammerman. And thirty or so thin Coronet paperbacks of
Peanuts
strip cartoons by Schulz called things like
You Can't Win Them All, Charlie Brown
and
You're On Your Own, Snoopy
, which I read, and read again, and still read today, whose sheer brilliance is all the more apparent now I have a child of my own.
¹¹

The above does not represent an editorial sampling, these really were my favourites. Or perhaps these are the books that have stayed with me most vividly from that time, both in imagination and in reality. I carry the impression of them in my head – but I also still have physical copies of most of them somewhere in the house.

Fig. 11: ‘From the library of Andrew Miller': Puffin Club bookplate, circa 1977.

(birthday card from Julian Cope)

I loved the humour in these books, of course, but they are a melancholy bunch. Eeyore spoke louder to me than Tigger; I think I instinctively felt this was
realistic
. Life could be fun but mostly it wasn't, and between times there was an awful lot of hanging about in gloomy places, ‘
rather boggy and sad
'. In these books, children like Linus and Lucy, Mouse and Hammerman, Little My and Moomintroll, all seemed to behave like children really behaved, even the ones who were Moomins, beagles or piglets: playing, bickering, watching TV, feeling sorry for themselves and ‘slugging' one another. These characters got bored and frustrated and scared; sometimes they laughed so hard they fell off their doghouse. And they had wild imaginative lives and alter egos. In their heads, Mouse and his friend Ezzie know precisely how to deal with Crocodile Attack (Emergency Four) or Seizure By Gorilla (Emergency Seven), but not the Eighteenth Emergency – how
to defeat the school bully. In
Peanuts
, Charlie Brown often appears depressed and withdrawn (‘
I can't stand it
. . .') but his dog is irrepressible, Snoopy the World War I Flying Ace; the World-Famous Astronaut, Attorney or Author; Joe Cool.