A few years on, when school days beckoned, the family was still on holiday and I missed my first day. And the First Day, as everybody knows, is the important day. That’s when you make your friends and enemies and, more importantly, get your peg on which your raincoat will hang for the next three or four years. I might have got the tank! I could have been a contender for the soldier! I wouldn’t have even minded the smiley sun and would have been happy with the purple dog but, no, not me, I was left with the two damn cherries. And so I lagged, but you couldn’t lag very much with my mum who taught me to read with love, care, and affection—and when that didn’t work, bribery, at a penny per page read perfectly, which subsequently turned out to be a very wise investment on her part, especially much later when they moved into their new house in quite a posh and sought-after location.…
However, she made the mistake of educating me above my age. I recall, because it is in fact tattooed on my psyche, the day in the third or fourth form when the teacher asked us where the rain came from. It so happened that my mum had told me about the water cycle and how the seas evaporate gently into the sky and form clouds which are then blown over the land, get cooled down, and fall as rain. Of course, all the smart kids, the ones with the pegs not marked by soft fruit, had their hands up and were making “me, miss, me, miss” noises, but the teacher’s eye lit upon the silly kid, who was the one raising his hand higher than any other child. And upon her surprised nod I triumphantly shouted out, “the sea, miss!”
The result? The jeering of the class, egged on by the teacher, who hadn’t even bothered to ask me why I said so. Even as a bewildered kid I was thinking in some kind of terrified puzzlement, “Well, surely she can’t believe that I don’t know that it falls out of the sky, but she asked where it came from and I told her the truth.” There is a circle of hell for teachers like that, and it’s right next to the one set aside for teachers who don’t like parents to teach their children to read before they go to school and one furnace away from people who believe that children should only be given books that are suitable for them, and I tell you what, it isn’t big enough or indeed low enough. I didn’t tell my mother, of course, because you never told your mother, just in case it got you into more trouble, but something began to seethe and grow, I’m sure of it. But still I pressed on. In my school, staff made the decision when you were six, based on your facility with reading, as to whether or not you would pass the old eleven-plus examination, the winners of which would go on to various grammar schools while the losers went to what were called the secondary moderns, where there was a wailing and gnashing of teeth, especially yours.
And because, despite my mother’s efforts to teach me to read at all, I didn’t pass that staff test, I was put among the goats rather than the sheep and that was the best thing that ever happened in my education, because I was a bright kid, even if a somewhat weird one, and with all the sheep pastured with the teacher who would get them through the examination I, the kid who was always halfway up the class, could suddenly become top with barely an effort. And as you know, when you’re on top you want to stay on top, oh my, indeed you do. And so, for the first time, I really worked hard.
Around that time, while I was up in London with my parents an uncle gave me a copy of The Wind in the Willows, and I exploded. I’d never heard of books like this. Books were things that the teachers read to you out of, but here was this mole, who had a friend who was a rat, who had a friend who was a badger, and they all had a friend who was a toad, and not just any toad because this toad could drive a car and be mistaken for a washerwoman! And even I was pretty certain that while a washerwoman probably was not a contender for the Miss World contest she was unlikely to be mistaken for a toad.
I couldn’t have expressed my feelings at that point, because I didn’t have the language for it but now I would say that I realized with huge delight that the author was doing a number on us, messing with our minds, twisting the world! Where the hell can I get some more? I thought.
Incidentally, I remembered while writing this, that at the time I was concerned about the horse. Remember? The horse that pulled the canary-coloured caravan in the book? I recalled thinking as a child that all these animals can speak and don’t have to go to work for a living, like my dad, whereas the carthorse does all the work, all the time, and doesn’t have a voice. The momentary feeling I had then was pure socialism. And that is how I became a Saturday boy at the local public library, feverishly writing out another library ticket to myself every time there was a book I really wanted to read. And I read everything.
There was a sort of chain reaction: one book sends you on to another, and I read it, and went on to the next, without order, method, or any plan, except possibly to read them all, and so I was reading Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor at the same time as I was reading Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll books and reading both these books in the same, as it were, mental tone of voice.
Some stuff I thought was rubbish, and probably was, but patterns emerged; taking down a book on the Silk Road, simply because it sounded interesting, channelled me on to the history that we didn’t learn at school, not because the teachers were bad but because nobody had really thought about what education should be. I remember learning in school about the Corn Laws, but only vaguely remember what they were; but I do remember that they were a government cock-up to the detriment of the poor. So, no change there then! But the real history—the history that everyone should know—the beginnings of the earth, the dance of the continents, the journeys of mankind, the developments of science—these took little space on the curriculum, but thankfully were in abundance in the library, God bless it.
For me, my education in the library was like putting together a great big jigsaw puzzle of science fiction, history, and palaeontology. I read up on them as if they were all part of the same thing which, in a holistic kind of way, they certainly were.
Another breakthrough came when I discovered secondhand bookshops round about the age of twelve; here were the books that no longer turned up on the library shelves, my local library in Beaconsfield being a spanking new library with spanking new books. But my dad told me there was a secondhand bookshop in the village of Penn, a short cycle ride away, although a difficult cycle ride when you’re coming back with two full, creaking carrier bags of books hanging off the handlebars. It was a wonderful bookshop, it was where I learned humour.