Washing dishes has never thrilled me and as a child I regularly hid books in toilets to avoid being roped in for lengthy stints in the kitchen, particularly when our relatives were staying.
The range of books I hid under mats, towels and even in the cistern depended on where I was and my current mood at the time. Enid Blyton lost her power to Biggles and then Biggles yielded to Alistair MacClean. My father would discard books in my direction and I would follow his reading habits as fast as I could though never with quite the speed of my father whose ability to concentrate absolutely and devour a book whilst the world collapsed around him has been passed onto my son.
But my mother was the genie of books bought from the magical city of Manchester when she ran C &A’s ground floor on a Saturday each and every week. Such a job seems eccentric now and the once dominant fashion house no longer trades in this country. Yet once upon a time C&A ruled the fashion world for us all and no Christmas could take place without the help of this Dutch Retailer. And near to where mother worked was another lost shopping empire of bargains: Pauldens. This shop sold books at bargain prices and when my father would drive up the lonely road to Chapel- en -le -Frith station after looking after my brother and I for a day ( think Grandstand, lots of rally-cross and Vesta curries) I would go and ‘help’ mum in the dark( winters in Derby shire were very dark and very cold and even decorated with deep, drifting snow) and lift her bags of gifts for my brother and me into our pale blue Cortina car.
At that time children could be tempted to read by abridged versions of the classics. There were two rival companies vying with parents to gift their keen readers with Deane Classics or this other company whose name I will have to look up. Suffice to say the print was small, the paper cheap and they were hard backed to convince readers and their parents that these books were serious.
I devoured Little Women and then Good Wives and finally Jo’s Boys. Alcott was an enchantress. I also adored Swiss Family Robinson and Coral Island but with a more muted passion. ( No Jo!)
But it was Dickens who reached into my mind and haunted me. Sydney Carton, the louche antihero with the scaffold speech that made me cry for days. Or so it seemed. Oliver Twist being pushed through a window by Bill Sikes’ whose ferocious dog( Bull’s Eye) gets hung.
I was aided and abetted in my terrified love for Dickens by our black and white Television. I don’t know if it was a Saturday. It feels like a Saturday somehow. And it was on one of those Saturday morning film treats along with Jason and the Argonauts and The Vikings when I started watched David Lean’s Great Expectations. Like so many children I might have started nonchalantly on the sofa or even on the floor with our two poodles, Bella and Cindy, but I certainly ended up behind the sofa with its sixties’ tiger stripes before the opening scene had even ended. For how could anyone with a capacity to feel fear deny the utter terror of young Pup’s first encounter with the convict Magwitch in the churchyard? The mist, the wind, the whole black and white experience made me intensely aware that the world of Great Expectations was dangerously wonderful for anyone with a beating heart and an imagination.
And maybe it was the whole combination of chilly Derbyshire, mum working way in magical Manchester, and the slightly musty and therefore serious scent of the abridged classics that made me read Great Expectations for the first time. I no longer own the cardboard book and I suspect that many of the more extraneous scenes had been chopped, but Magwitch, Miss Havisham and Jaggers still reigned over the musty pages and have remained in my mind ever since.
