The Book that Made Me by Various

Author:Various [Ridge, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781925126891
Publisher: Walker Books Australia
Published: 2016-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

It Looks Like a Comic

Mal Peet

Well, it wasn’t a particular book. It wasn’t even books in general, much as I loved them. As soon as I could read, in fact, I went through my primary school’s little library like a bookworm dipped in Red Bull. In part, this was because books were, to me, exotic. I did not come from a bookish family. There were few, if any, books in our house. Certainly no fiction, unless you count the Bible. This was not unusual. I grew up in a working-class council estate in the 1950s where spending money on books would have been seen as eccentric, if not actually irresponsible. Hence my greed for the stories in the library.

My parents were puzzled, even startled, by my bookishness but, to be fair to them, they did not actively discourage it. When I was maybe eight or nine, my mum put away a few pence a week and subscribed to a mail-order book club called something like The Classics Library. Once a month or so, the postman would deliver a suspicious package and I, home from school, would rip it open to discover what new wonder it contained. I was frequently disappointed. I just couldn’t get on with Little Women. And has anyone out there read, or tried to read, The Children of the New Forest by Captain Frederick Marryat? Well, bless you if you have.

Books with the word “island” in the title were generally more reliable.

Despite the clunkers, the actual possession of these books was thrilling. I spent hours arranging them on my bedroom windowsill. They were cheap editions (obviously, but hardback with coloured jackets) and when you first opened them they gave off a distinctive smell, something like the whiff of a recently deceased fish combined with boiled turnip. The aroma of literature.

If loving and owning books was a secret perversion in my peer group, the love and ownership of comics was universally shared. Ah, comics. Now we come to it.

When I was a kid, there were lots of comics and most families could afford one a week. They got delivered with the newspaper, Tuesdays and Thursdays. There were boys’ comics and girls’ comics. Boys’ comics had manly names: The Victor, The Rover, The Hotspur, Tiger. The strips featured war heroes, sportsmen, detectives, pirates, spacemen, explorers: the adult heroes we would inevitably become. Girls’ comics (which I furtively read) were mostly about gypsy ballet dancers, gymkhanas and awkward girls in private schools. I found them intriguing and utterly baffling.

As soon as I was old enough (eleven, I think) I got a before-school job delivering newspapers on my bike. My motive was not financial. I just wanted to read all the comics before I poked them through letterboxes along with the papers. It’s a wonder I wasn’t killed, pedalling along with my eyes fixed on Roy of the Rovers soccer star of Melchester Rovers. (It was a kick in the guts when I learned there was no such team as Melchester Rovers.

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