Frydmania

When I was little, my parents joined a bookclub which specialised in doing lovely books for kids. Not just good reads, great pics – this was really special editions of classic books. It was a decision that still feels like a gift now – and I still have many of them.

This is a point at which I really need to break out the pictures to show you what they look like – and I will, I promise. I’m looking to get an upgrade for the site soon, where I can actually link to things without the system looking blankly at me in surprise.

Still, back to the books. What did they choose? A very special copy of Peter Pan, with those great illustrations that have a cobwebby page opposite them to protect the prints. This one definitely evoked magic – as well as having a striking illustration for that doom-laden opening sentence ‘Two is the beginning of the end.’

A heavily illustrated copy of The Wizard of Oz. I read this one out loud, over the Christmas holidays last year, and it is still such a beauty, really going to town on how the Emerald City looks through those special glasses.

A Maurice Sendak illustrated version of The Nutcracker. Ideal for the Gothic aspects of Nutcracker toys. The Rat King is properly scary – but with the slightly stylised Sendak touch that doesn’t mean you are actually terrified.

Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, with print in different colours. I think that was one of the last. I don’t remember how old I was when it stopped – perhaps my book habit was being fed more at the library as a way of keeping up.

These ones I definitely know were bookclub purchases. There may have been others. There is a wonderful version of the Sleeping Beauty where the pictures are dreamy, like light falling through dappled trees, foreshadowing the forest that will grow up around the castle, even before she finds the fateful spindle.

There is also a lovely version of The Selfish Giant. In fact, I mis-attributed this in a post in the last little while – I thought it was The Happy Prince that I couldn’t finish reading without crying, but it’s actually this one.

The giant’s emotions, his transition, are writ so large, you live out his grumping, his anger, later his indignation for the little child, as you read it.

The final pages, with pictures of fruit blossoms in the garden, now make me think of the point in Kung Fu Panda where the old tortoise disappears in a whirling cloud of peach petals. I can imagine the giant ebbing away with the blossoms swirling around him.

What does it do for us, having beautiful books? Again, it teaches us that these things are possible – that great stories are worth exquisite illustrations, fine binding, and the weight of hard back covers.

We learn about art, about the noble tradition of children’s book illustration, about how the best books are often the perfect match of picture and words, twined around each other.

It offers something of a child’s worth – that they are entrusted with such treasures. It encourages you to look after them, to open them carefully and pass on the spell to others in time.

I love charity shop book acquisition. And I like a bargain too. Most of our books come in this way, and there is nothing like the thrill of the chase in finding a copy of a book you have been hunting for.

But there is also something of quality, of appreciating something that has been made with care. It says something of the art of making books in the past – the attention lavished on creating illustrated manuscripts.

For now, I am grateful – that this gift was given, and that I still have the enjoyment of it, decades later. So thanks, Mum and Dad, and thanks also for the publishers who made them.

Rather a while back, I lived in a town with hills. Doesn’t sound that exciting – lots of towns have hills. But this town was flat plain on one side, and suddenly: Hills. They dominated the town. And the imagination.

I was able to sit on my bed, look out of the window, and see a certain tree towards one end of them. It was a spot to focus on, to look up at from doing my homework. But I didn’t realise the impact until I realised that there were others with Hills in their lives.

At secondary school, I started to read Ted Hughes, and discovered the extent to which the local landscape had featured in his work. And I came to learn more about other hills, as featured by Alan Garner, whose books one of my primary school teachers had read to us.

When you live near hills, particularly stand out ones, they are part of your daily orientation. Partly, you look up to check they’re there – of course they are! It can be both dominating and comforting, depending on the the weather and the character of the particular hills.

So here I was, devouring Ted Hughes’ poems in a school anthology – and then discovering a personal link, so to speak. It seemed like a further connection, a proof that there were extra factors that could help inspire your work.

Quite a lot later, I came to see Alderley Edge, the area that inspired Alan Garner.
In his case, the hill already had its own legends, and he drew on these to write
The Weirdstone of Brisenghamen.

It is one thing to be inspired by the landscape. It is another thing to see how that inspiration affects others. As much as Garner’s book had an impact on me, an equal impact came from seeing how the story gripped the teacher reading it – how she was reading it for herself as much as for the class.

Seeing that passion for reading in an adult made a big impression. Yes, she was good at reading aloud; she wanted to encourage us that books were a great place for the imagination. But part of me also knows that it wasn’t just show, or didactics – she was caught up in the story as we were.

Words allow us a place to explore being under the spell of a particular location. They let us record the effects, big and small, of local landscape on our imaginations, but also on our daily toings and froings.

Can I do justice to my own surroundings now, when I write? I don’t know. What I write about has changed since those teenage days.

But to whatever extent the local landscape now influences me – when I read the work of Hughes, of Garner, I know what it’s meant to look like.

No, it’s not a typo. Nor is it a Moleskine. My mother introduced me fairly early on to the four Molesworth books, brought together in this compendium. It was the easiest way to reference it here – and an early example of kill yourself laughing funny.

Humour is obviously a personal business. So Molesworth may not be your thing, but I’ll explain anyway, because hopefully at least one of you might give it a try.

If I say that it’s based on 1950s prep schools, that may instantly turn you away. If I say it is about the familiar battles between kids and teachers, between kids themselves, between kids and their parents, that may help.

Add in that the pictures are by Ronald Searle, and that takes it up a level. ‘Creative’ spelling, Gothic-style illustration, and plenty of dry wit: we’re getting closer.

My parents each went to boarding school. I didn’t. But it didn’t stop me reading about boarding schools – whether the Enid Blyton worlds of Mallory Towers or St Clare’s, or the extensive Chalet School series by Elinor Brent-Dyer. (Harry Potter clearly came quite a bit later.)

From said reading, I knew that there was a world in which there were midnight feasts, adventures and even escape from the Nazis (the Chalet School series is set in the 1930s). A world of tuck boxes, and possibly dares involving swimming pools at night.

My mother informs me it was rather more mundane than this, but did include fishing hedgehogs out of cattle grids with lacrosse sticks. It is up to you which world sounds more adventurous from these descriptions.

But still: school stories are generally intended to excite, to offer adventure. Nigel Molesworth, main protagonist of the Molesworth books, looks on at a similar world, and offers biting, and incisive comments.

Molesworth spends much of his time looking to get out of algebra, school dinners, runs around the playing fields, and much else that is still familiar in a school setting. Like the best of teens (or tweens), he dismisses what is expected of him – but always with humour.

His letters home cover only the week’s rugby scores, and whatever contraption he wants to wangle from his parents. His parents’ letters gush back in return.

If nothing else, read the books to find out about Fotheringham-Thomas, the cherubic character who wanders around saying ‘Hello clouds! Hello sky!’ He could give Perfect Peter a run for his money – and, similarly to Peter, is trampled by the anti-hero at every opportunity.

Whatever your take on what makes you laugh, there is always room for a book (or several) that can be guaranteed to make you laugh. And I mean the kind that are almost impossible to read aloud without weeping with laughter, and becoming so incoherent that you can’t continue speaking.

That kind of book – seek it out at all costs. Whether it made you laugh when you were 8, or 38, go back to it. You knew that books could make you cry, swoon, flinch, cheer – but don’t forget the ones that make you explode with laughter.

When planning these posts, my aim was not to comment on writing techniques I’d learned from books, but things: ideas, ways of living, ways of being. So it’s really time to mention the book responsible for a major change in my teens: Whale Nation.

This was the late 80s. Environmentalism was popping up a bit more as a topic. We visited friends, who had a couple of big glossy coffee table books. Both were by Heathcote Williams, combining poetry with hardhitting photography.

One I can’t place now – I think it was to do with rubbish. The other: Whale Nation. The book responsible for me becoming a vegetarian overnight.

I was 14. I read, not just about the plight of whales being hunted (where Williams did a lot of good in raising awareness, and encouraging a ban on whaling), but on principles of land use.

I learned about how much energy goes into keeping a cow for meat production, vs. how much is used for cultivating a crop like soya.

I probably cried a bit – the pictures are pretty bleak in places. And I went downstairs and informed my mother than I was giving up eating meat and fish.

Parents are no doubt readied for their offspring taking up causes in their teens. As the saying goes, ‘Employ a teenager while they still know everything.’

My mother coped well with the announcement – but had already made salami sandwiches for the next day’s packed lunch. Would I eat them?

My first test. I thought about it – and said no. I don’t know who ate the salami sandwiches, but I went off to school next day with cheese. And kept going.

I spent 4 years not eating meat or fish. It got a bit tough at points like Christmas Day, when others were having more interesting meals, and I was on rather dry Linda McCartney items. The products were fine – but I was forgoing gravy, because it was made with meat juices.

I wish I had known at that stage that you could get instant gravy that was vegetarian. Gravy was my main ‘miss’, rather than bacon, which I think is the main thing people generally miss if they give up meat. It would have helped on roast dinner days.

I stopped being a vegetarian when I went to Poland the first time. In a boarding school set up, in a culture which had little understanding of vegetarianism at that point (or at least, the boarding school where I was working), it would have been a case of living on bread and pickled cabbage – or going back to meat.

As it was, there was no meat on Fridays anyway – because it was a Catholic institution. And quite a lot of other meals didn’t include meat or fish, because the school tried to produce as much of its own food as it could.

Before I went to Poland, being a vegetarian happened at a time when I was learning to cook anyway. It probably accelerated the process. And it proved very helpful by the time I was a student, since there was no money to buy meat.

After we got married, and while it was just the two of us, we ate vegetarian every second day. We both cooked it – with Dan still specialising in the spicing side of things. We still love veggie – particularly Middle Eastern type combinations of flavours.

Where am I at now? In a mixed place. We now do eat more meat, and fish, for a variety of reasons to do with balancing the family’s diet.

But the early impact of Whale Nation is still with me. I still cook vegetarian meals, though they are now more treats for the grownups who like tastes like aubergine, kidney beans, and so on.

And, at the start of a new year, I am looking to find ways to shift the balance again – to find more plant-based proteins for the times when I can choose what I eat, for myself.

Books can change the world. And they can change an individual’s world. The reverberations may be different, some twenty years on, but the role of books as a place to call us to take action is still secure.

There’s a certain annual we own that has been doctored. One of the comic strip stories was deemed too scary to be found unexpectedly – I think it was one illustration in particular. Solution: trap the story so it can’t come out.

Now some people find Scooby Doo too much to begin with, and others love it. One of the latter is resident here, and regularly inbibes Scobby stuff, mostly cartoons from different eras. But finding one overly scary story among the others that were deemed fine meant an impasse – the book was not safe.

What to do? I had the answer. It had been done to one of my childhood books – a Japanese-illustrated fairytale collection. The illustrations for Red Riding Hood had been deemed too scary at some point.

And so the whole story was tamed by sellotaping up the pages. It meant you got one very thick page to thumb past, but it meant you could safely skim the rest of the book – which was reasonably sunny and cheery, all in all.

I proposed the same solution for the offending Scooby story, and so we did it. The whole story is ‘held in’ – a bit like putting plastic sheets up at a crime scene? – and remains that way. As, I think, does my fairytale collection.

In my teens, I would occasionally, and unwisely, read ghost story collections from the local library. I remember being so disturbed by one story that I put the whole book in the corner of the room, under my dresser, with the paper edges touching up against the corner on two sides.

I think it was again a way to trap a story – until it could be safely disposed of, back to the library. I could have left it in another room of the house, I realise now, but somehow this was the solution that helped me deal with a ‘dangerous’ story.

I’m trying to make sense of what is happening here. Reading is such a place of escape, generally of safety (though that depends on what we choose to read) – and sometimes, that place of safety is threatened by stories that disturb us in one way or another.

We cannot always take back the impression of the story – and often, the pictures, whether on the page or in our mind – but we can find ways not to let them disturb us any further.

Books do not always come with a rating, or a safety warning. There is much that is wonderful, uplifting, in books, and much that is dark, frightening at times. Both tell us about the world, about the human condition.

Just as we choose to take things in from books, to let them influence and shape us, we can also hold them at a distance where we need to.

Whether it’s taping things up, removing them from the house, or finding other ways to remind ourself which world is which, it’s good to be aware of the power of books – and to know our own limits.