I did this the easy way, although the easy way is often not at all easy. I read for pleasure every bound copy of the magazine Punch between 1840 and the mid 1960s. Why? Well, not to get a master class in humorous writing, but for fun. However a master class was what I got because I read the best satirists and comic writers of a whole century, including Mark Twain and Jerome K. Jerome, whose laconic styles, it seemed to me, bore a similarity even though they were an ocean apart. Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle delighted me by producing the Molesworth series. Surely you know? The very best schoolboy humour in the books Down with Skool!, Whizz for Atomms, How to be Topp, and Back in the Jug Agane. Then I began to absorb the columnists like Beachcomber, Patrick Campbell, Robert Robinson, and not least, certainly not least, Alan Coren—possibly, as far as observational humour is concerned, the king of them all.
I read all of these when I was, by the standards of the late fifties, still a child, but in doing so for sheer pleasure, I was pressing my foot hard down on the growing up button; I found humour has to be topical and so while reading those musty tomes of Punch I picked up, by osmosis, the topics, concerns, and even the speech patterns of the millennia, which is money in the bank for a writer. I wasn’t looking for ideas, techniques, or, that terrible word, tips, I simply absorbed. Writers probably all do this in their separate ways, because it is hard to imagine an author who was not a reader first. I was astonished at the wealth laid out for me. I was learning from the masters and I thought about what I learned. In fact, I did not know it at the time, but a Satanic mill had started turning in my head and eventually it would turn out a writer, but like every mill, it needed grist. (And if you don’t know what grist is, look it up! You’re supposed to be academics!)
I was particularly impressed by Alan Coren’s grasp of the vocabulary of the average bewildered Englishman, but especially of what we used to call the working class. I know this because my London granny used to take me around the street markets and every single barker, shill, trader, hard bargainer, bus conductor, and even my grandmother had a dialogue by Coren. A wonderful man.
I remember having a cheerful argument with my mum after my London granny told me that you could tell where a bus was going to because its name was on the front. My mother had taught me about the Greek myths and had mentioned the first marathon, run by Pheidippides—he ran from Marathon to Athens, as every schoolboy knows, well, used to—and I remember discussing with Mum the valid point that since he was running to Athens he was really running an Athens rather than a Marathon because, quite certainly, this would have been the case had he been employed by London Transport. A point which my mother graciously took without giving me a clip around the ear.
In accordance with the Satanic mills, to make certain that I was constantly being surprised, the calendar that my mother and father, both working people, had to follow for their summer holidays meant that I also arrived at my secondary school, yes, one day late. And that’s the day, if you remember and have been paying attention, they tell you everything important. It’s no good coming in on the second day, because the second day is not the first day, and of course that’s the day you learn the things you learn on the second day and once again the feeling I had that “everybody knows something that I don’t” reinforced my air, if air can be reinforced, of astonishment.
Obviously on that first day the secret of algebra had been disseminated. Later on I would dream that I might understand algebra and have mastery of the world, but ten years ago my friend Ian Stewart, professor of mathematics at Warwick, sat down with me after a university dinner and scrawled all over the napkins the sheer and obvious understandability of the basics of the quadratic equation, with sweat beading on his brow, to which I sadly reacted with the philosophical equivalent of the word duur. (I had to teach my speech engine to understand the word duur, you know, yes, I had to teach a computer to be dumb. A project for a rainy afternoon.)
And so, once again I settled down to being halfway down the class, doing enough schoolwork to survive, and no more. My true education was still coming via the library, and amazingly from the science fiction books I was consuming like sweets. Bliss it was in that space-age dawn to be alive, but unfortunately my only reliable source of first-class secondhand American science fiction magazines was called the Little Library, and it was in a shack in Frogmoor, a tiny part of High Wycombe, in which a very nice elderly lady dispensed cheer, the occasional cup of tea, and pornography. However, in order to justify the name and presumably to have some wares that she could put in the window, she also sold decent SF and fantasy from secondhand cardboard boxes, below, how shall I put it, the pinker shelves, which were not at that time of particular attraction to me. How could you turn your eyes upwards when there was a Brian Aldiss that you hadn’t read yet, and something by Harry Harrison, and the third book in James Blish’s Cities in Flight trilogy? I consumed, and became such a habitué that I was guaranteed a cup of tea twice every week, after which I would leave with my satchel bulging, possibly to the bewilderment of any regular bystander, who might have been unaware of the SF booty I called my own.
I recall scrabbling around happily one day after school when the door was abruptly pushed open and in came a man who by the look of his efforts not to look like one was clearly, even to me, a plain-clothes policeman. He pointed angrily at me and demanded of my hostess, who was a dear old soul, “What is he doing in here?”
Gleefully, she brandished a mint copy of Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, which I certainly was, and said, “Honni swarky marley ponce, Geoffrey,” which, astonishingly, he didn’t understand but seemingly accepted. And for those of you with little French, it broadly translates as “He who sees any evil in this is a ponce.” Game, set, and match to her, I fancy, and she was a decent soul, a nice friend to this kid that she considered was her only legitimate customer. She never encouraged me to become a patron of the pinker shelves, and nor did she offer me any of the slim envelopes which, when she thought I wasn’t looking, she handed to the serious and somewhat furtive connoisseurs of the dirty raincoat persuasion, who were always embarrassed by my presence. I think at the time I thought they probably contained mint-condition, and therefore expensive, science fiction. (The penny dropped about a year later, when so did other things.…)