After the rationing of books time passed more slowly. I think time passed slowly in the 1950s anyway, for everyone, not just for me. Still, I had The Tale of Two Bad Mice safely memorised, and odd stretches of Pigling Bland.
Beatrix Potter revealed new aspects of herself when I considered her with my new style of attention, without the book in front of me. I was less involved, and saw things from a greater distance. Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca, the anti-heroes of The Tale of Two Bad Mice, are confronted in their own way with the illusions of the world. Exploring a dolls’ house, they find food aplenty in its kitchen. Hungry, they settle down to eat, but the ham, the lobster and the bread are all made of plaster and stuck to their plates, a discovery that the mice greet not with religious resignation but with vandalistic fury.
Pigling Bland’s name was delicious in itself. Those clustered consonants — gl — bl — had a globulous poetry to them. My favourite sentence went ‘Pigling Bland listened gravely, but Alexander was hopelessly volatile.’ I didn’t know what all these words meant, but still I felt I was being nudged towards something. I wanted to be one of those who listened gravely. When I was allowed my daily ration of reading, of course, I preferred to tackle books that I didn’t already know. If ever I’d been dilatory in my reading, idly browsing from story to story, then that time was in the past.
Even when reading time was up I liked to have books near me. They became symbols of themselves. After the Collie Boy my love of books was deeply ingrained, and I would never again take them for granted.
There was a pattern set by her edict. There have been times in life when people have pointed the way for me, but more often I’ve only been able to find my path by spotting the pile of rubble in front of it. The roadblock was actually a signpost. Every time I’ve been told that some activity was unnatural, I was actually been being shown that this was where my nature lay.
Latent pigment
In the meantime, there was printed matter which didn’t need to be read. I loved the paintbooks which were printed with tiny dots of latent pigment, waiting for the stroke of a wet brush to make their colours appear, like cactus flowers. In fact Magic Painting of this kind was the only painting I was competent to do. My elbow had more or less seized up, and my wrist felt the loss of that movement. The wrist joint itself was no great shakes in terms of flexibility.
I loved the ‘Spot the Difference’ puzzles in comics. They were like a more sophisticated continuation of the beloved old games of ‘I Spy’. The puzzle page was always the first one I turned to, the moment the comic was in my hands. I never had the patience to save it up, to ration it so that it would last for the whole of the week. Sometimes as a special treat Mum would draw me a home-made one, to tide me over between publication days. I didn’t mind the fact that in a puzzle drawn freehand, there were always more differences detectable than Mum had meant to put in.
There was a picture in a comic that made a deep impression on me at this time. It was the simplest possible image, of a boy sitting on a roundabout in a playground. There was nothing special about him, but in my mind he was the Sit-Upon Boy. He could sit on anything, whenever he liked, while I could only lie. It was a sort of crush of envy. I felt such pangs of yearning, to be him, to do what he did.
In my daily half-hour I wanted to read proper grown-up books. Far from protracting my childhood by putting the brakes on my reading age, book-rationing drove me further forward into precocity. I didn’t always want stories. My favourite books were ones which explained the world, preferably all of it. Over several months I absorbed great swathes of The World We Live In by Arthur Mee. I would often lavish my whole half-hour on that book, as long as Mum sat by me to help me with the harder spellings and tell me what words meant. We had a little routine about the book before we started. I’d say, ‘Who wrote this book, Mum?’ And she’d say, ‘It’s by Mee,’ and I’d say ‘Clever Mummy!’ We never tired of that — at least I never tired of that.
When the half-hour was up (and I could hardly pretend that I didn’t know the time, with Jim’s outsized radioactive watch permanently on my wrist) Mum would read to me from the book I loved so much. I listened gravely. She held up the book for me to see the pictures. It was absolutely thrilling. I loved the pictures of trilobites and wanted to keep one as a pet. There was a section called ‘The Pageant of Life’, which was a phrase I loved, even before Mum explained that a pageant was a sort of procession with everyone dressed up. The best chapter of all was the one on the sun. It had a lovely pull-out bit that showed just a wedge of the sun and how big (how small!) the earth was in comparison. I loved the pull-out pages in The World We Live In and dreamed of a book whose pages would fold out again and again, till the pages were bigger than elephants’ ears, and then fold back neatly to be put away. A book that was huge and tiny at the same time.
I felt my mind stretching, as my body was forbidden to do, when I imagined how big the picture of the sun would have been if they had shown more than a wedge. The book would hardly have fitted in the room!
My body was subject to pinpricks and broadsides of agony, but from time to time my mind had pains of its own. Growing pains, perhaps. One night I woke up terrified that the sun was going to run out of fuel. I screamed for Mum who said of course it wasn’t. There was nothing to worry about — but I remembered the open fire at Granny’s house in Tangmere, and how she had to add coals to it every few minutes, using a wonderful tool like a giant pair of sugar tongs. I remembered that at Granny’s house I wasn’t allowed to touch the coal tongs because they were dirty, nor the sugar tongs because they were clean.
If Granny’s fire couldn’t burn for more than a few hours without going out, how was the sun any different? Nothing could burn like that and not get smaller. But Mum said our gas fire was different from Granny’s open fire, which was old-fashioned. She asked me if I had ever seen her having to add gas to the fires in our house? I had to admit that I hadn’t, but I stuck to my guns. Arthur Mee specifically compared the workings of the sun to a domestic coal fire, so it would have to run out sooner or later, wouldn’t it? Mum picked up the book and showed me a wonderfully reassuring sentence: ‘The Sun has enough fuel to go on burning indefinitely.’ Of course I was only reassured because I thought ‘indefinitely’ meant ‘for ever’. It’s a good job I didn’t know I was being kept in bed ‘indefinitely’ myself. Neither state was strictly speaking everlasting. One day I would leave that room and one day the sun would run out of fuel, too. Bed rest wasn’t going to be for ever, but it came close enough. It gave me a good working model of eternity.
When the half-hour of my ration was used up, and Mum had things to do so she couldn’t read to me, I would ask her to twiddle the knob of our big valve radio until it picked up words in a foreign language. Then I could find my own stories in the unfamiliar syllables. I loved it if there was a foreign radio play on, with unfamiliar speech-rhythms, dramatic music and mysterious sound-effects. I would come out with my own brand of rapidly-spoken gibberish, gabbling away and chortling all the time. I asked if I could learn to speak foreign, and Mum said, ‘No you can’t!’ which didn’t disappoint me as much as I made out. I wasn’t searching for sense but for magic. I didn’t want to understand so much as surrender, to something beyond knowledge with which I felt affinity.