Patricia Craig on Bookworm: a Memoir of Childhood Reading

The first book I wrote was a collaborative effort. It was a study of girls’ fiction between 1839 and 1975, called You’re a Brick, Angela! (published by Victor Gollancz in 1976). My co-author was Mary Cadogan. We’d met, appropriately enough, at a gathering in north London of old boys’ papers enthusiasts – and once we had discovered a common interest in children’s books of all kinds, we decided to join forces to explore the subject, or an aspect of the subject, in a full-length, up-to-date survey.

A couple of years ago, it struck me that the time was right to approach the topic of children’s literature from a different angle – personal rather than critical, evocative rather than expository. The result was Bookworm: a Memoir of Childhood Reading (just published by the Somerville Press). Of course, as a literary critic, I couldn’t keep strong opinions out of this memoir; but basically I wanted to pay tribute to all the hours and hours of stupendous enjoyment and engrossment I had lived through from about the age of four on. Lost in a book.

“There are no days more full in childhood,” John McGahern wrote in his Memoir of 2005, “than those days that are not lived at all, the days lost in a book.” When I read that sentence, I knew I had found my epigraph; it only remained to take that assertion of McGahern’s, elaborate it through the five chapters which make up Bookworm, and impose my own perceptions and predilections on top of it.

My first requirement, as a child reader, was to be entertained. I suppose I didn’t mind being edified into the bargain as long as it happened subliminally and wasn’t a part of an author’s overt objective. No attraction whatever adhered to a tract. Victorian fiction for girls was anathema to me. (With boys’ fiction it was a slightly different matter.) Essentially, it was children’s books of the mid-twentieth century – I grew up in the 1950s – that kept me going, and all in all, I had an abundance of material to choose from. Alice, Rupert Bear, Kay and Gerda, William Brown, Jane Turpin, the Secret Seven, the Adventurous Four, the Turf-Cutter’s Donkey, the Famous Five of Greyfriars School, the Lone Pine Club, the Fossil sisters, Dimsie, Dimity Drew, the Silent Three ...and so on, and so on. The possibilities were inexhaustible, and this was due in large measure to the public lending libraries with which my home territory was well supplied.

As well as commenting on the books themselves, I wanted, with Bookworm, to honour the buildings in which the books could be found, in all their heady variety. I was six years old when I joined the Donegall Road Library in Belfast, and found myself in a kind of secular heaven. It wasn’t long before my book-addiction drove me to try out every library within reach of my childhood home (five or six of them, including the Falls, the Shankill, Ligoniel, the new library on the Ormeau Embankment and the venerable Central Library in Royal Avenue). So: when I embarked on this project, the books came first, then the libraries, and then the city in which the libraries were situated. Belfast. The place where I came to book-consciousness is an important element of Bookworm. The memoir of childhood reading casts some sidelights on Belfast history and topography. I didn’t just want to take an affectionate look at the stories and novels in question, but to evoke, as far as I was able, the decade and the place in which all this juvenile reading occurred.

Of course, Bookworm is quite a short book, and the titles mentioned amount to only a fraction of what I actually read. I had to be very selective while I was writing the book. Skimming through it the other day, though, I was rather surprised to find I had left out Jennings, Worrals, Gary Hogg’s Explorers, Kathleen Fidler’s Brydons, and a good many school stories, boys’ and girls’, including those published by Gerald G. Swan with thrilling titles like The Flodden Rubies. I could have included all of these, and others, for they are on my bookshelves – but in the end, the examples I chose were the ones that sprang to mind unbidden, and presented themselves most insistently.

My bookshelves. The fourth strand running through Bookworm, along with books, libraries and Belfast, is that of book-collecting, and – as with reading – I got started early along these lines, frequenting second-hand bookshops and market stalls before I was enrolled at grammar school. Of course, most childhood readers, however enraptured, don’t go on to become collectors; but for some of us, the habit of collecting seems a natural corollary of the primary activity. And, as PG Wodehouse said on the subject, those of us in the throes of a collecting impulse will find ourselves more and more gripped as the years go on. This is certainly true of me: from starting in a small way, I’ve now reached a point where books are climbing merrily up the walls and over the furniture.

One of my aims, with Bookworm, was to tie up the four narrative strands – or five, if you add the underlying element of autobiography – into a more or less lively, coherent and individual package. Forty-odd years, and 20 or so books after You’re a Brick, Angela!, Bookworm, it seems to me, makes an instance of a small personal wheel coming round full circle.