The Secret Joy of Reading Page 6

the Labour Party rather than the Conservatives. Coming as he did from a lowly background in the Labour stronghold of Leeds, it is not surprising that Waterhouse espoused left-wing views. These are on display in Billy Liar. Billy is contemptuous of the middle-class pretensions and capitalistic attitudes of Shadrack, his boss at the “funeral furnishers”. Because Shadrack, a former car salesman, inherited his share of the firm on the death of his father, his position is seen as undeserved. When Billy’s grandmother dies, he recommends that his mother enlist the Co-op (a socialist organization) rather than Shadrack. When Billy fantasizes about standing for Parliament, he unquestioningly casts himself in the role of Labour candidate. During Billy’s daydreams about Ambrosia, his arch-enemy is categorized as the “reactionary” Dr Grover; and so on.

  Yet, reading more closely, one detects something else at work. On almost every page we see that Billy is an individualist, a lone wolf who refuses to be bound by convention. His burning ambition is to be a scriptwriter: he has already submitted jokes to a famous comic in London, whose vague but encouraging response Billy tries to twist, in his own mind, into an offer of work. Billy and society are at odds. It is very hard to picture him living by the socialist creed.

  Besides the two girls to whom he is engaged there is a third, Liz, a free spirit whom Billy genuinely loves. Each of the other two is a parody of the mindless voter for Labour or Conservative, but the enigmatic Liz is different. We do not know her politics, even though, in Ambrosia, she is cast as Billy’s Home Secretary. She plays an increasingly important part in the story, becoming pivotal at the climax when Billy must decide between the adventure of London and staying at home in Stradhoughton.

  After Billy Liar, Waterhouse actually lived Billy’s dream and went on to great success as a journalist and writer for theatre, film and TV. In 1970 he joined the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror as a columnist and remained there until 1986, when that paper was bought by the fraudster and quondam Labour MP, the late Robert Maxwell. In what might be seen as a surprising move, Waterhouse went to another mass-circulation daily, the rabidly rightist Daily Mail, where he remained for 23 years. To quote from his obituary in the Times:

  By that time the tone and content of his columns had moved a long way from those of his early days on the Mirror. The socialist convictions nurtured by his upbringing in the industrial North had been sorely tried by the direction he felt the modern Labour Party was taking, and he came to see its years in Government from the famous electoral victory of 1997 as being rudderless and without conviction.

  I used to read his column whenever I got the chance, for his use of language, for his wit and inventiveness, and for his wry point of view. Even before Tony Blair’s victory of 1997, I was struck by what seemed a drift to the right. It is likely that Waterhouse and his many friends believed himself a socialist to the end, an adherent of old rather than New Labour, but I am not so sure.

  The seeds of my doubt are in Billy Liar. As an employee, a member of the team, one of the collective, Billy is hopeless. He is late for work, idle, and accomplishes the minimum. He steals from the petty cash and, when tasked with sending out promotional calendars, dumps them and trousers the postage money. He has no respect for his family or anyone else except himself and Liz. These are hardly socialist virtues: yet they make a sort of vague prototype, however repressed and transmogrified, of the author himself.

  I am not suggesting for a moment that Keith Waterhouse was ever like that in reality. It is the subconscious, contradictory portrait I find interesting: the portrait of someone who would be unlikely ever to vote at all; or, if he could be bothered to vote, it would certainly not be for Labour.

  But then … contradiction within contradiction: let me end with a quotation from the book itself.

  The strange, poppy-like flowers seen nowhere else in the world were in full bloom in Ambrosia, or what was left of it. We had won the elections, and I was pressing forward with my visionary plan to build an entire city over the dunes on a gigantic wooden platform. The reactionary Dr Grover had got a commission set up to investigate me, but I knew for a fact that he had been bribed to put forward a rival plan for another city to the west, over the marshes. In the inner layers of No. 1 thinking, Grover got his way and the houses began to sink, seventy-one dead and fourteen unaccounted for. “We will rebuild,” I announced in The Ambrosia Poppy. “We will build on the dunes.

  The Super Panther

  My daily desk-time must soon be reduced, as I have noticed many chores that need doing outside. I made a start today by cutting the grass.

  I have a motor mower with a rotary blade, which is handy for long grass and hoovering up debris, but rotary mowers just tear the grass-blades rather than cut them. I much prefer my Qualcast Super Panther, vintage 1962 or thereabouts, and use it for most of the summer.

  First, I like the absurdity of the name. Anything less like a panther would be hard to conceive. A panther is lithe, graceful, untamed, a miracle of cybernetics in flesh and bone. My mower is rigid, utilitarian, domesticated, and not very advanced, as machinery goes. The steel rear roller turns a chain which turns the cutters and er … that’s it.

  Secondly, I like the fact that it makes no more than a modicum of noise: an old-fashioned, Wimbledon Fortnight, Pimms type of noise. There is no engine. I propel it myself. The six blades of the cutting cylinder turn against the fixed bottom blade, producing a sort of purr: perhaps that’s where the idea of panthers came from. As they turn, a shower of cuttings rises from the delivery plate and falls into the grassbox. Certain squeaks and other mechanical noises arise from the chain-drive, the rear and front rollers; and now and then the lugs on the grassbox, which necessarily cannot fit tightly, rattle in their sockets. When I stop pushing, the noise stops altogether. The ears are not assaulted. Neighbours are not driven indoors.

  Thirdly, I like its quality. Each autumn I remove the cover protecting the chain, which has a disconnecter like that on an old bike. While cleaning the chain in a paraffin bath, I am taken with the fact that the words MADE IN ENGLAND are stamped on every link. The fellows who made that chain were proud of it, and well they might be, for it has worn and loosened hardly at all. The rubber handgrips are original. It is all original, even the paint job, which I am reluctant to renew, because then I would obscure the gilt transfer, depicting a panther, on the casing. Here and there rust has appeared, it is true, but that is my fault, for not being sufficiently conscientious, in some years, in preparing the machine for winter storage.

  Fourthly, I like its simplicity. There is no trailing cable, no carburettor, no spark plug, nothing much that can’t be fixed with a spanner, a screwdriver, and a carborundum stone. I once read of a man in America who shot his mower. It was one of those with a pull-rope for the starter, which had refused to respond throughout the whole of one day. Meanwhile the grass, already long, had continued to grow. The first cut of the spring was overdue. No doubt the man’s wife had been nagging him. Maybe he had trouble at work as well. In any case it all became too much. Like Basil Fawlty, he gave it one last warning, then went nuclear. The police arrived pretty quickly, as I recall.

  Fifthly, I like its contrariness. It is far removed from today’s plastic, streamlined junk. Like me, it is a relic from another age, when things were still made in Britain, things which were sold all over the world. We are both stranded. The tide has gone out and we have been left behind. Unlike me, the Super Panther has no idea that we are not still in 1962. But at least for a little while, as it contentedly munches the sward, making its twelve-inch stripes up-lawn and down, I too can fool myself that nothing whatever has changed.

  Fuzzy Computing

  I am intrigued by the way the brain works; by all the assumptions, allowances and compromises it must make in order to negotiate the maze of everyday life. My special interest is language, and nowhere do we employ so much fuzzy computing as in the interpretation of words – whether spoken or written.

  Fr xmpl, y r bl t mk sns, jst abt, f sntnc dprvd cmp
ltly f vwls. Your brain has filled in the gaps. It is helpful: it co-operates with an inexpert author in the business of communication. This is the way it has to be, or you would understand no more than a tiny proportion of the text you are presented with each day. If your mind operated like a silicon-based computer, it would baulk at the first misspelling or grammatical howler. An error message, or even a Blue Screen of Death, would be generated and that would be that.

  I have long been a private collector of literalisms. These are a species of lexical, rather than optical, illusion. Capable of more than one interpretation, they confuse the mind – or at least the mind of one who demands adherence to the rules.

  I found the following pleasing headline in a local newspaper: TRADERS EXPRESS SQUARE FEARS. The story, obviously, was about the redevelopment of a shopping square, but I prefer the literal sense. Or what about this beauty, collected by that connoisseur, Mr Vladimir Nabokov, from an American paper? TORSO KILLER BEATS CHAIR.

  Once you start to look out for them, literalisms are everywhere. My favourite might just be this, seen on a canister of bleach:

  KEEP UPRIGHT IN A COOL SAFE PLACE WELL AWAY FROM CHILDREN

  Literalism is the very substance of life for someone suffering from autism. Such a one, deficient in useful fuzziness, has great trouble dealing with the imprecision of others.

  “The imprecision of others” includes the baggy language used by politicians, many of whom are lawyers, know exactly what they are saying, and rely on our innate decency and helpfulness to draw the wrong meaning from their words. Our fuzzy brains enable them to tell lies while apparently speaking the truth, to confess failure while apparently applauding their own success, and to promise nothing while assuring us that our expectations will be fulfilled.

  This form of deception is analysed in George Orwell’s essay, Politics and the English Language. Though published in 1946, it is even more relevant now. It also provides valuable advice for writers:

  (i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

  (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

  (iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

  (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

  (v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

  (vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.

  Much bad writing is the product of laziness – (i) and (iii); and of a wish to impress – (ii), (iv), (v). Both these traits are lethal to the development of an authentic voice. The former earns the impatience of the reader, the second his contempt. He may not understand exactly why he finds a piece of writing turgid or preposterous; he just rejects it.

  Orwell, with typical modesty, says that he himself frequently breaks his own rules. Any writer would have to be superhuman not to. Rather, he urges on us all, writers and readers, the need to analyse language, to develop the clarity of thought that only linguistic clarity can bestow. It is the most effective weapon against the lies of politicians.

  Orwell belonged to the British left. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he was an honourable man. He spoke out against Stalin, notably of course in Animal Farm, a book that the champagne socialist, Victor Gollancz, refused to publish.

  What Orwell would have made of the quagmire of deceit in which politics is conducted today is easy to imagine. His essay belongs in the survival kit of every modern citizen.

  The Secret Joy of Reading

  I was lucky enough to be taught to read in the era before television: well, it was being broadcast in the mid 1950s, but our set was like a wardrobe with a tiny, round-cornered rectangle of bluish screen that took at least two minutes to “warm up” and, as now, the programmes were hardly worth watching anyway. My school was called Cassiobury JMI, “Junior Mixed Infants”. For a long time I couldn’t understand the adjectives. Infants are junior by definition, and while we were certainly mixed I didn’t see any need to rub that in. Later I realized it was two schools in one, for Infants (5-7 years) and Juniors (8-11 years), and we were Mixed by virtue of having boys and girls together.

  We had staff of both genders. Ferocious (she was a sweetie underneath) Miss Buckley was contrasted with the indulgent Mr Hazell, who wore a tweed jacket and came to school by bicycle. We were afraid of Mrs Manders, another soft-hearted dragon with nobler goals than personal popularity. Gentle, pretty Miss Lucas reaped the benefit of that.

  By the time I reached her class I had already got the basics and, like my peers, could read pretty fluently. Her lessons included “comprehension”, which meant analysing a few paragraphs by one of our Better Authors. The chosen text was usually descriptive and contained nothing much to puzzle unduly, and nothing whatever to disturb, an innocent mind. We had to pick up hints (“how do we know the season is autumn?”) and note the correct use of number and tense. The aptness and necessity of any qualifiers would be discussed. If there were a semi-colon, say, Miss Lucas would explain why that had been used rather than some other stop. Most of all, we were exposed, silently and otherwise, to the rhythm and harmony of expert writing: language as music, as thought-flow, as sacred paint to illuminate the mind, as something that has the power to collapse history and make us see the world through the eyes of another.

  Then there was Mr Hazell. I recall him becoming lost in reciting Tennyson to us, mostly from memory, awaking, almost, with a start after the final line. Hazel also was his hair, as were his eyes, and what with the tweed jacket and his twill trousers and polished brown brogues, not to mention his moss-green bike, it was as if he belonged more to nature than the streets of man. By another teacher we were taken on occasional rambles through the adjacent countryside, so that ready images (a bosky riverbank, sunlight on the water, waving tresses of water-crowfoot, bronzing bracken) were available to create a notion of whither he might return each afternoon once he’d put his clips on. It all seemed to be one, poetry and nature, maybe because of his taste in verse, but then everything seemed to be one, that unknown territory beyond childhood.

  Reading was a safe way to explore it. I derived a modicum of boyish pleasure in the classroom:

  The Eagle

  A fragment

  He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

  Close to the sun in lonely lands,

  Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

  The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

  He watches from his mountain walls,

  And like a thunderbolt he falls.

  — Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1851

  yet reading at school was different from the other, freestyle kind. None of us would have dreamt of trying a Better Author for pleasure. That was “work”. In our leisure time we boys read comics – the Beano, Beezer and Dandy. The Eagle, which featured a square-jawed space adventurer and his interstellar struggles with the Mekon, was for older brothers, the sort who played with Meccano and assembled plastic construction kits of Spitfires and Wellington bombers. The girls had their own, fluffy comics, Jackie, I think, was one: it probably had a sparkly bracelet taped to the cover one week, a flimsy alice-band the next, whereas the Beano never needed such inducements and relied on Dennis the Menace to keep us coming back for more.

  We ate them up, the comics, not realizing our enjoyment depended on the skills given us by Miss Lucas and her colleagues. An odd page or two was devoted to fictive prose. Such pages helped wean us off the flat and fixed and onto the three-dimensional and imaginative. We were slyly indoctrinated in the idea that words on their own could be fun.

  Like a liquorice curl or a pink sugary shrimp, an issue of the Beano was soon disposed of, and in the week before the next one appeared we had to make do with other material. In 1957 my family were not well off and had taken a lodger, a frail German lady, a nonagenarian invalid whom we called “Auntie”, erstwhile nanny of a family friend – herself elderly now, the daughter of a wealt
hy family who had lost everything in the 1930s and fled to England. Auntie sported a glass ear-trumpet and rimless spectacles, wore voluminous black chenille and a black choker, and seemed to have a limitless supply of lady-finger biscuits. Even today the taste of these has a Proustian effect on my memory, and an essential part of that is her copy of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book in a rust-coloured binding with Kipling’s swastika peace-device gilded on the front cover. Top-right on the flyleaf, with a fountain pen, she had inscribed her name and added the year: 1897. The book was published by Macmillan. Auntie’s copy may even have been a first edition. She gave it to my elder brother, and in turn I opened it myself.

  My favourite story was Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Immersed in its pages, I lived in the heat and danger of Sugauli; looking up, refocusing, I was returned to the dull, temperate familiarity of a residential road in England. Next, I seem to recall, and simply because it was in the house, I read my brother’s Moby-Dick, bowdlerized for children. One of our local cinemas showed second-run films, and there I saw John Huston’s 1956 version. My little eyes widened at the scene with St Elmo’s fire, and positively saucered as Ahab, harpoon-roped to the White Whale’s wounded back, was borne away from the wreckage of the Pequod. That hadn’t happened in the book: that had been Fedallah’s fate, and he’d been left on the cutting-room floor. Even as the credits rolled I felt the novel, the movie it had made in my head, was better – less simplistic, more detailed and enthralling.

  By now I was an addict. My parents were readers too: sometimes our early-evening meal would be designated a “read tea” and, flouting etiquette, we would all have a book open at the table. I joined the local library and was issued with four tickets, valid for the junior section only, most of which I disregarded, since it was crammed with picture-books. I was impatient to access the grown-ups’ shelves. Every paragraph I read educated me for more, but I was very far from being discerning.

  It was just the stories – the action – I liked. I would read, legitimately, in bed before lights-out (I had my own little room), and then under a tented sheet with a Woolworth torch. This criminality in a simulated cave, or priest-hole, or chalky tunnel, fitted well with the adventures of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, all of which I devoured, cursing my yellowing bulb and hoping it would last for just one more chapter. It was then that I first knew the sense of loss caused by a dwindling pile of pages. I proceeded more slowly as the end approached, regretting my earlier