In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.
Being a shy and often bronchitic child I had lots of fantasy friends. These were not however ‘made up’ creatures who peopled the stairs and corridors of my young imagination. No, they were the ‘real stuff’ and legend of the books I used to devour in bed, full of Robert Louis Stevenson’s rapture at ‘kaleidoscipic ‘images. There, I could be freed from the confines of sickliness and my marked antisociality into heady worlds of adventures where I could run away to sea and hang out with pirates; fight desperate Knights Templars and even live on a raft on the Mississipi.
My mother bravely liberated herself from the incarceration of my father’s sense of educational superiority through a Saturday Manager’s job at C&A which she loved and which changed her life forever. Every Saturday night I would wait eagerly for the return of my mother from Manchester on the 6pm train to Chapel-en-le-frith station which was at the top of a long hill, shrouded in trees and manned by a thin figure more ghoul than Bernard Cribbin. Mum would spend her hard earned cash on fresh fruit from the city centre stalls and books. Books I remember from Pauldens, one of those vast , sprawling department stores that we rarely see anymore, where kids could ride the escalators from floor to floor, hypnotised by the array of fixtures crammed full of things never, ever seen back in the villages we came from. I still associate that time of my life with the darkness of the railway station as I would meet my mother off the train, and can still imagine the slightly musty smell of the wooden carriages as the doors opened and let her off to the guard’s whistle. I can still feel the promise of the huge yellow coloured plastic bags as she stepped towards us and the elation of the new book, often hardback, which I was lucky enough to find gifted each week. So much of recalled life then; the eager movement up a darkened wintry lane to meet a train and a book to clean me out of myself!
So I was Ivanhoe for a time, though I could never prefer Rowena to Rebecca who always seemed far more plucky and individual. I am sure I rewrote the ending of that novel many times! There was something uneasily compromising I felt about Ivanhoe’s conventional choice of romantic attachment and this I longed to change despite the resolution of the original ending.
I played at Huck Finn with my brother when we moved to a bungalow with a pylon in the garden( the previous owner had gone mad with it rumours suggested) and a hot flat tarmac garage roof which proved a perfect raft for the Mississippi. I also met Long John Silver and Blind Pugh, the latter who terrified me obviously with his infamous black spot and who even now seems to encapsulate some primal fear about impending mortality. He still gives me the creeps with his hidden, blind eyes and evil talismanic touch which caresses the fearful mind into self -destruct. Who would dare stay long enough to hear his tapping along the bridge as he comes towards us?