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