Books I Love: Melbourne Writers' Festival 2001

I'd like to start with a story about my mother. One of the things she would do was to send my older brother, Alex, to a shop where he'd buy a four-penny bottle of lemonade on credit (or on 'tick' as everyone called it). We kids would drink the lemonade then Alex would go to another shop and collect the two-pence deposit on the bottle. Then he'd buy a large bone from the butcher and a penny's worth of mixed vegetables from the greengrocer. With these, my mother would make soup which is what we mainly ate.

There were five kids in our family, together with my mother and father, and we lived in a Glasgow tenement (two rooms, one coal fireplace with a small oven, a two ring gas burner, a kitchen sink with one cold water tap). The place was lit with gas and the toilet was in the stair-well, shared by other families. Our tenement block, along with hundreds of others, had been built in the late 19th century to house workers and their families.

My mother had a small window box in which she grew flowers, but sometimes she'd buy penny sheets of coloured crepe paper then take spoonfuls of earth from the window box, wrap them in crepe paper to make a weight, attach ribbons of crepe paper and sell them to other kids for a ha'penny. The kids would toss them up in the air and watch the ribbon tails flutter as they came down again. This was in the days before Nintendo and Play Station.

My father had a job which paid about sixpence a week more than he could have got on the dole. So we were poor. No one mentioned the word poverty, but that's what it was. While we lived in poverty, my brothers and I had a very happy childhood. When you are young and don't move very far from where you live, you tend to think that everyone else lives the way you do, so the whole world was poor. No one ever locked their front doors because we had nothing to steal. Before coming here, I asked Alex, my older brother, if he could remember any books we had in the house and he thought for a bit then said, the Bible. Later, at school, he won a prize. It was a copy of Les Miserables and later still, he won David Copperfield.

Then the war came and we were evacuated out of our tenement, because Glasgow and Clydebank were targets for German bombs. We moved down the Scottish coast to a town called Ayr, as evacuees. And while daily life was full of restrictions and sadnesses, blackouts, shortages and the occasional air raid, it was an exciting time with our bombers and fighter aircraft in the sky, barrage balloons and sometimes at night, searchlights. There was constant military movement and at times we'd go and see a German bomber that had been shot down or they'd put on a display of tanks to help raise money for the war effort. The idea was you'd buy a special stamp from the post office and stick it on the tank. They were always having Navy Week, Army Week or Air Force week.

I remember once in the war, my brother and I were in the garden when a squad of soldiers in full battle kit came over the wall and began crawling through our cabbages. We told our mother and she came out and took on the might of the British Army. 'Don't you touch my rhubarb!' She shook her apron at them. 'It's all right, missus,' they said. 'We're learning to fight the Germans.' 'Well go and learn somewhere else.' The soldiers went over the other wall and we knew they were going anyway but we thought our Mum was great.

My first reading was by way of comics. My mother let us have The Dandy and Beano every week and later, we graduated to four magazines which were short stories and serials. These were The Rover, Hotspur, Wizard and Adventure. My brothers and I loved this weekly feast of reading. There were stories of daring adventure, crime stories, sports stories and humour but the ones we liked best were English school stories. Carew of The Fourth was our favourite. Carew was a decent sort of good living chap who attended an English boarding school where they had fags, that is junior boys who were sort of servant to the older boys. The fags toasted the older boys' muffins, fetched coal for the fire, made tea and occasionally got a beating for being rude or for being late or for burning a muffin. The older boys used to say things like: 'Now cut along, Simkins Minor or you'll be late for prep and you¹ll get a beating.' They'd also say things like, 'I say,' 'Rath-er' and 'Congrats, old chap.' Very English.

At times, Carew would have a run-in with some beastly village louts, lower class types, but Carew would always put them in their place. It wasn't until later that my brothers and I realised that we were the beastly village louts and Carew lived in a world we would never inhabit. Scottish newspapers also provided weekly comic serials. One newspaper in particular used to serialise the classics such as Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Catriona as well as Oliver Twist and a few others. These weren't done with dialogue bubbles but were simply depictions of particular scenes with passages of the original text underneath. At the end of each series, the publisher would bring the story out in book form.

At school, there were graded reading books of course but there was no school library. They had one period a week called Silent Reading, the only snag being you had to bring your own book and they didn¹t allow comics. If you didn't have a book you could share with someone else, but he might be up to chapter four or worse still, he might be a faster reader or slower reader than you, so it had its frustrations.

It was about then that I discovered the Carnegie Library in Ayr. There was a Scotsman called Andrew Carnegie who went to America and made a fortune. With some of his money he endowed libraries all over Scotland. Each year, in Britain, writers still compete for the Carnegie Medal, just as we do in Australia for the CBC Book of the Year. I loved that Carnegie library, it was such a warm place and everybody had to be very quiet and wipe your shoes before you came in. I can remember borrowing a book there - it was called The Story of Heather - the first book I ever read right through. I can recall the feeling of absolute achievement when I closed the end cover. Heather was a pony who had all sorts of adventures, she was stolen, she was ill-treated, she was lost but eventually, Heather was reunited with her original owners who gave her a rub down and put her in her loose box and fed her a warm bran mash. The warm bran mash sounded great and I thought I'd like to have one myself.

Then I discovered a series of wild life books The one I can best remember was Wild Life in Ice and Snow, about a bear, a wolf and a beaver, but the writer gave them names and described a year in each animal's life.

One thing we did have in abundance was radio and at the time, it was particularly rich. The BBC used to put out at least 365 radio plays a year. They also broadcast serials, short stories and children's programs. One of these was Just William which we listened to as a family and later the radio show led us to the William books, written by a woman, Richmal Compton. William was a sort of accident-prone boy who had a series of comic misadventures and misunderstandings. His girlfriend was Elizabeth Bott who if she didn't get her own way threatened to scream and scream until she was sick. William used to say: 'Oh, lor' and give in to her.

Another weekly radio program was called Appointment with Fear - really scary stories that finished at half past nine at night, which was our bed-time. My two brothers and I would then invent excuses for not going upstairs because we only had gas light in our bedroom and whoever went first had to go in the dark, strike a match and light the gas. And even then there were still shadows. In our bedroom, we told each other stories and if you got him in a good frame of mind, my father would tell spooky tales.

I have to say that writers like Enid Blyton, and A.A. Milne passed me by. As a child, I never read Kenneth Graham's Wind in the Willows or any Beatrix Potter books or even Helen Bannerman's Little Black Sambo. I had to wait until my wife and I had children before becoming familiar with such childhood staples.

As boys, we enjoyed the Biggles books by Captain W.E. Johns. Biggles was an English airman, an RAF type, very stiff upper lip, who flew about in those old wire and canvas aeroplanes, shooting down the Hun or having other adventures. He had two mates, Algy and Ginger, but no women. From Biggles I learned that if you're going to take your enemy by surprise, then come out of the sun. I also knew how to do a manoeuvre called the Immelman turn, the only thing I lacked was an aeroplane, and flying lessons.

Then I made the discovery of the Arthur Ransome books, and these qualify as my favourite books. I'm talking here of Swallows and Amazons, Swallowdale, Winter Holiday, Picts and Martyrs, We Didn't Mean to go to Sea, Coot Club, The Big Six and Peter Duck plus a few more. My younger brother and I absolutely lapped these books up. They were so vividly written and they were such thick books they lasted a long time. And after you'd read one, there were more to read then you could start all over again.

Critics today say the Ransome books were too middle class, written about privileged children whose parents could take them on long holidays or give them boats to sail about in. I must say that as kids, my brothers and I never felt any of this. The William books were also middle class, so too were the English boarding school stories, the Biggles books and all the rest of them. Looking back I wonder would stories of abject poverty have sold? Would anyone want to read them? I know that when we read the Arthur Ransome books, they took us to another world that was full of interest, incident and character.

One of the girls from the stories was called Titty. I think it was short for Letitia. I don't think a writer would get away with that these days. In fact, I thought I'd call one of my characters Titty and see how long it took my editor to react.

I remember my younger brother and I being prompted to make plans for a cycling and camping holiday to the Lake District where some of the stories are set. We'd lie in bed on a Scottish winter's night making a list of the things we'd do, how we'd go to a farmhouse and buy eggs and milk. The fact that we only had one rattly old bike and no tent didn't seem to deter us, our imagination had been stirred and that's what mattered. We dreamed our dreams, and we never actually made that camping adventure.

But in 1994, I was in Britain, researching a book of my own and visited The Windermere Steamboat Museum where you can see the original Swallow dinghy from the stories and a steam launch which was the prototype for Captain Flint's houseboat. In another museum there's Arthur Ransome's desk, some of his books and other possessions. The Arthur Ransome books are still in print, published these days by Red Fox. They remain popular and there are Arthur Ransome Clubs and websites and a magazine.

So these are my favourite reading and favourite books, and they've lasted as favourites for some fifty-five years of my life.

David McRobbie. August, 2001