The Secret Joy of Reading Page 5

my mother’s hand. The official reached in his pocket and brought out a comb, a woman’s comb, unused, in a paper wrapper. It was not easy to get such things in wartime. “Would you like this?” he said. “I came by it yesterday. I thought it might be of some use to you.”

  My mother looked at the comb, gave another smile, and accepted, thinking of her friend Mr Weiss. Thereupon she skilfully steered the official away from asking for a date, but left him with a faint impression that such a request, in the future, might not be declined.

  When she got back to the office she made a telephone call. During her time working for the head of legal affairs, she had had many dealings with London’s leading firm of planning consultants. She now engaged them on behalf of Mr Weiss and his application.

  A few days later the certification came through. The proposed factory would have A1 Priority, meaning it would have no trouble sourcing machine tools, brass, steel – everything it needed. The day after that, Mr Weiss received a call from the agent handling the sale. Was he still interested? Another buyer was in the frame.

  Instantly Weiss knew that the other buyer was offering less: why else should he have been called? He said he was engaged at the moment and asked whether he might call back in ten minutes. He needed time to think.

  The planning consultants had by no means arrived at a definitive answer, but would if necessary go over the heads of the town hall and appeal to Whitehall. My mother had naturally divulged this to Weiss, but not the full contents of her lunchtime chat.

  Weiss told her what the agent had said. What should he do?

  “Buy it.”

  He looked away, racked with indecision, and looked back again.

  “You did ask me, Franz. I say buy it.”

  He bought the factory, for the full asking price. My mother later learned, with quiet satisfaction, of the anger and discomfiture of Thompkins. The business was successful; she became a director and worked with Mr Weiss until 1954, when he died of a heart attack and his wife took over.

  His wife was a different sort of woman altogether, and my mother resigned in 1955 to start her own business, but that, as you are already half expecting me to say, is another story.

  Politics and Fiction

  Political fiction is not to my taste, unless, perhaps, it confirms my prejudices. The short story or novel is not at its best when used as a megaphone. Dickens’s agitation for reform was always subordinate to his vocation as a storyteller. Even that most political of novels, Orwell’s Animal Farm, succeeds primarily as fiction and is happily read by schoolchildren who know nothing of Stalin and the USSR. Whether he intended it or not, Orwell’s talent for engaging the reader’s humanity trumps the political message, powerful and memorable though that is.

  In the hands of lesser writers, the political novel is not only lumpen and dreary but soon dates. Characters whose sole function is to embody some political idea have no life outside themselves. We cannot identify with them. They have no organic interaction with the other characters or the plot. That is because they are a product of the conscious mind: the calculating mind of the author, who is trying to persuade the reader to his point of view.

  The best fiction is produced in the subconscious. Employing certain skills that he has acquired (for example, a knowledge of vocabulary and usage), the author uses his taste and sense of rhythm to order words on the page, but the ideas spring from a deeper source. He is often unaware of exactly what he is doing. He supposes that the story has taken on a life of its own, or that this character or that demands more attention than he intended, whereas all that is happening is that he is following the dictates of the mysterious vat where the story has been fermenting – his subconscious.

  The act of composition is of two kinds. First, there is the Monday-morning, blank-screen, must-do-500-words-today kind, which is not only unmitigated torment but usually produces little that is not pedestrian. But then there is the other kind. Somehow, the author’s brain slips into a different state. He puts self to one side: perhaps, as in meditation, there is some change in electrical activity. At any rate, he finds the words suggesting themselves. He imagines the scene and it is transmuted into prose. The more vividly he imagines it, the more vividly the reader will recreate it.

  This second state is fragile and precious. When it is shattered – for example, by some trivial interruption – the author knows at once what he has lost and is angry with the interrupter. His anger may seem exaggerated and irrational, but it could have taken him an hour, a morning, a whole day, or even a week, to reach that magic state.

  There is a widespread misconception, then, about the cleverness of authors who seem to have a God-like overview, who are aware of every nuance of symbolism that goes to reinforce the thrust of their work. If credit is due, give it to the subconscious, that receiver of all experiences and impressions, that vessel shaped by upbringing, class and personality. The conscious author is merely its clerk.

  That is what makes good literature so engaging. As readers, we connect with it also at a subconscious level. Mind speaks to mind. Our subconscious can quickly spot a fake, which is why overtly political fiction is so dull.

  The unwitting content (political and otherwise) of good fiction is fascinating. In telling his tale, the author inadvertently reveals much about himself and his beliefs.

  These thoughts were prompted by a re-reading of Billy Liar by the late Keith Waterhouse. It is one of my favourite books, not least because it is, especially in the early chapters, very funny. Billy Fisher is nineteen and living in 1950s Yorkshire. He rails against the small-mindedness of his surroundings: his dead-end job at an undertaker’s, his lower-middle-class parents and grandma; and he rails even more against the philistinism that assails him on every side. His solace is fantasy. To relieve his boredom he tells lies, many of them pointless. Of course, these land him in trouble, not least from the two girls to whom he is engaged simultaneously and who share a single ring. And he regularly escapes into his imaginary country of Ambrosia, where he sees himself as progressive leader and hero.

  Keith Waterhouse was born in 1929, into a working-class household in Leeds, Yorkshire. His father sold fruit and vegetables from a barrow and his mother was a cleaner; she encouraged young Keith to apply himself to his books in the hope of getting a place at the local grammar school.

  Grammar schools then were a stepladder to the professions for children of all backgrounds: the tuition was freely provided by the state. I went to one myself. I had to pass the 11+ (an exam taken at the end of one’s time in primary school, ages 5-11), then sit an IQ Test. Finally I was interviewed.

  Once inside the school we were streamed. Half of us were earmarked for an academic education. The curriculum for the others was weighted towards vocational subjects like technical drawing and metalwork. Boys (it was a single-sex school) who failed to pull their weight were chucked out. They landed at the “secondary modern”, the school for the also-rans. Here the teaching was as unashamedly vocational as ours was unashamedly elitist: such subjects as plumbing and typing were taught in addition to the core curriculum. Just as underperforming children could be demoted from the grammar schools, so pupils in the secondary moderns could be promoted.

  Perhaps the worst defect of this system was its reliance on the 11+, for which some comparatively gifted children were not, at that age, ready, and which (if exacerbated by ambitious parents) put intolerable pressure on the candidates. If you failed, you were perceived to be doomed to a lifetime of servitude – a palpable untruth, by the way, since many graduates of the secondary modern schools went on to become successful business-people earning far more than their grammar-school peers in the Civil Service, say.

  The system’s blatant meritocracy also offended on ideological grounds. In 1965, under a newly elected Labour government, its abolition began in earnest. Anthony Crosland, Harold Wilson’s Secretary of State for Education and Science, is quoted by his wife as saying: “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f
ucking grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland”. By 1970 my former school had been turned into a “comprehensive”, admitting children of all abilities.

  A debate has raged ever since about the destruction of the grammar schools. Some say that the socialists (many of whom themselves attended such schools) spitefully kicked the ladder away; that the abolition was part of a larger, Gramscian, and entirely successful, plan to dumb down the voters and make them more susceptible to propaganda and, by impoverishing their life chances as well, to make them ever more reliant on the state. Others say that the comprehensive system allows all children to flourish, not just the privileged few who happen to be able to pass an exam; that such inequality so early in life can lead only to a perpetuation of the class structure which is such a curse on Britain. The issue, as neatly as any other, divides left from right.

  Waterhouse failed his 11+ and the experience scarred him for ever. Thanks to an inspirational teacher at his secondary modern, he did not give up his ambition to write, but the going was very hard, and it was not until the success of Billy Liar, published when he was thirty, that he was freed from poverty.

  Yorkshire, the north of England generally, has a tradition of supporting