I’ve written a good deal about the books I read as a child, and this got me thinking about those I didn’t, and the reasons why. Partly it was because in those days, parents didn’t cram culture down their children’s throats as they seem to do now, possibly believing that children were better left to find things out for themselves. Apart from one inspirational teacher when I was nine or ten, teachers didn’t bother either. Weekly visits to the wonderful local libraries were the usual way of satisfying my addiction then, though before the days of plastic wrappers, books were stripped of blurbs and jackets and bound in drab library bindings so you could find out little about them before you took them home. I don’t recall librarians as being particularly friendly or supportive, either. Once, I crept, very scared and timid, into the adult library, where I asked an unsmiling woman if I could reserve a copy of T.S. Eliot’s Book of Practical Cats. She glowered at me, and told me there was no such book. Eventually though she spoke to a few more unsmiling giants, and in the end one said scornfully, Oh what she means is Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Silly me. Luckily this didn’t put me off libraries for life.
I suppose the main series that I didn’t read was the C.S.Lewis lot. Something about that title, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, put me off, I think;it sounded a bit patronising to me. Anyway, I never made my way through those fur coats into the snowy forest. I read the series as an adult, though, not long ago, and wonder whether I would have enjoyed it as a child. I find Lewis’s voice too insistently authorial, and I don’t like Aslan and his mawkish sacrifice. As a child, I was an enthusiastic Catholic who could believe in angels and miracles while distinguishing them from fairy tales and fantasy, but I think I would have resented even then the mixture of fairy-tale stuff and Christian polemic that Lewis sneaks into his story.
Another book I thought I had never read, though I must have done at some later stage, was The Wind In The Willows. I recall that I wasn’t charmed by Ratty and Moley and all that blokeish boaty stuff. But my chief problem was Toad. My child’s logic was upset that he could change size in the course of the book – one moment a toad-sized toad, the next human-sized and dressed as a washerwomen. Sorry, Mr Grahame – it doesn’t work. But I do remember reading some pages of Dream Days, and thinking, this man has no idea how real children talk and behave! So thumbs down to Kenneth Grahame.
I loved Rudyard Kipling, though, and never minded the authorial tone in the Just-so stories. He was on my side, I felt. The best writers were those that didn’t talk down to you, but somehow swept you along in their own enthusiasm for their stories and characters – Lousia M Alcott, Noel Streatfield, Geoffrey Trease, Rosemary Sutcliff. They were writing for you and with you.
Of course there were books I didn’t read because the subject didn’t appeal – I never liked horses, so no pony tales. Biggles and his ilk were boys’ books – the divisions between girls’ books and boys’ weren’t so marked then, but there were still differences. I never read Just William, though I loved Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings stories. Arthur Ransome’s stories seemed dated, and hadn’t acquired the charm of nostalgia.
I never read The Lord Of the Rings trilogy as a teenager, though I know I would have loved it. Partly because for some reason, I though it was one of those big desert adventure sagas, and partly because when a geekish friend tried to persuade me to read The Hobbit as a starter, I could never get beyond the first few lines. Bilbo Baggins is a bit blokey too, but you somehow forgive him. I think that’s the book I most regret not having read at the right time.
There’s a whole other subject here, and one that I’m not going to tackle at the moment – that’s the subject of the books you’ve got on your shelves as an adult, and just haven’t read: Toni Morrison’s Beloved is one and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead another. They stare reproachfully at me; it’s just a stupid mental block, and one day I’ll overcome it.
There were plenty of books I did read as a child, of course. But sometimes I think about those waiting in the wings that never managed to come my way. What did I miss? I’ll never know.