The Child that Books Built

by Francis Spufford

  I remember there was an intermediate stage when strange words did not yet quite have a definite meaning of their own, but possessed a kind of atmosphere of meaning, which was a compromise between the meanings of all the other words which seemed to come up in conjunction with the unknown one, and which I had decided had a bearing on it. The holes in the text grew over, like this. The empty spaces thickened, took on qualities which at first were not their own, then became known in their own right. But it was not a process like scabs growing over cuts. That’s too thick, too brown, too fibrous, too organic a metaphor. Writing might flow like thought, but it was still a constructed thing. That was part of its appeal to me, that it retained an intricate, made separateness from bodies, mumps and families. Imagine instead a vast dome built up from countless panels of stained glass. Some panels are missing. As you gaze at an empty segment of the dome, the space shimmers, and into it are infused, like vibrations in the air, both the fire-opal blue from the panel to the right, and the lemony gold from the panel to the left. They harden, and now there is glass there, of a colour somewhere between the two: a citric green perhaps.

  Now that I hardly ever spell out a word I do not know, and the things that puzzle me in books do not lie in individual words but in the author’s assumption of shared knowledge about the human heart (never my strong point), I still have, like everybody, words in my vocabulary that are relics of that time. The words we learned exclusively from having books infill their meaning for us, are the ones we pronounce differently from everyone else. Or, if we force ourselves to say them the public way, secretly we believe the proper pronunciation is our own, deduced from the page and not corrected by hearing the word aloud until it was too late to alter its sound. The classic is ‘misled’, said not as mis-led but as myzled – the past tense of a verb, ‘to misle’, which somehow never comes up in the present tense. In fact, misled never misled me. One of mine is ‘grimace’. You probably think it’s pronounced grimuss, but I know different. It’s grim-ace to rhyme with ‘face’. I’m sorry, but on this point, the entire English-speaking human race except me is wrong.

  For me, such words demonstrated the autonomy of stories. In stories, words you never heard spoken nonetheless existed. They had another kind of existence. They acted – upon objects likewise made of words. Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be. They commanded events to happen, each one generating its subtle, supple tone, and therefore they commanded feeling, which was not true of the ordinary world, where protestations did not abolish unease, however vehemently they were made, and where I always feared that however strongly I pledged my allegiance to the family, some terrible counter-truth of rage and rejection was pooled inside me, in the sump of my psyche. In stories, if an author said it, it was so. Maybe it is true, as I argued in the previous chapter, that all sentences tell a story of sorts; but the sentences in a story have a special power. In a world wholly composed of words, words hit no obstructions, have no limit on their effectiveness. They can take you elsewhere.

  *

  The home of the massed possibilities of story was the public library. Keele University ran a free bus service for the cleaners who came up from the towns of the Potteries to Keele Park to wax the floors of the university departments and clean the students’ rooms. Anyone could use it, and from when I was about seven or so, I regularly rode the bus down the hill on my own to visit the library in Newcastle-under-Lyme. The bus turned out of the park gates, and suddenly, instead of being inside the small horizon of the campus, cupped on the hilltop round its lakes and woods, the view opened onto a long valley full of housing estates and pit winding-gear and factories. In the fields sloping down to the town, bullocks nosed at blackberry bushes on rainy mornings. Rooks cawed in the trees. At night the valley twinkled with sodium lights. Beyond the new roundabout at the foot of Keele Bank, the weirdly centre-less conurbation of the Potteries began, as large as a city altogether, but never as concentrated. There were five small-town provincial High Streets, five sets of Victorian civic architecture. Newcastle’s core was red sandstone, scorched by nineteenth-century industrial soot.

  As I first remember it, it still had a cattle market, and one of those courtly antique grocery emporiums smelling of cheese and coffee beans, where the money my parents paid over for food in neat waxed-paper packages vanished into the ceiling up pneumatic tubes, and the change came jingling down other tubes into round brass dishes the size of an ashtray. But both those hold-outs from the past had vanished by the time I was taking myself to the library, and judged by the slow time of seven-year-olds, when several epochs will fit into one year, they were already a long time ago. Now was now, the modern, the proper, the natural year 1972. 1969 was ancient history, 1975 was science fiction. (I saw ‘1975’ printed in my guide to the Ffestiniog Railway – it was the year they were going to finish a station – and I just stared at it, amazed that this moment which did not exist yet could be fitted into an ordinary sentence as if it were something solid and dependable.) The shops along the Ironmarket had posters of Slade, 10cc and the Osmonds for sale. When I bought a packet of Sweet Cigarettes for 4p in decimal currency there was a cigarette card of the space race inside. Down Bridge Street there was an Indian restaurant where I had been with my dad and adventurously eaten a biriani. When my Coke came, there’d been a slice of lemon floating in it. Amazing sophistication!

  The town seemed just as glamorous to me as the parkland up the hill, only with a different orientation, a different job to do in my imagination. For a long time, just as I set any wild scene in Keele woods, whenever I read a story set somewhere urban, I borrowed Newcastle in my mind’s eye as the setting. Newcastle figured as London, as Paris; tweaked with columns, it was Rome, with a few pointy bits on the roofs it was Chinese. Later, when I read To Kill a Mockingbird, I made it into the Deep South. ‘Maycomb was an old town,’ wrote Harper Lee, ‘but it was a tired old town when I knew it.’ I upped the temperature, and let the rooflines sag. I put Maycomb town jail in the arcade by the town hall where they sold the éclairs. Scout and Jem Finch lived where Woolworth’s stood, and Boo Radley’s house was the hairdresser’s a few doors along, with a verandah slapped on the front and yellow grass set growing between the paving stones.

  The library was a brand-new concrete and glass block at the end of the Ironmarket, just before the civic gardens by the roundabout where the rose trees were trimmed into skinny public bouquets. In the window, leaflets about passing your driving test were stapled to a corkboard, and there was a poster, put up well in advance, encouraging you to Plant a Tree in Seventy-Three. To get to the children’s section, you turned sharp left inside and down the stairs into a long basement room lit by the blue-white of fluorescent tubes. The issue desk was at the far end, next to the floor-level picture books and coloured stools for the tinies; two or three wire twirlers of paperbacks tried to tempt you on your way out, like the chocolates for impulse purchasers at supermarket checkouts, but at that time library budgets ran to hardbacks as a matter of course, and, anyway, paperbacks were for owning yourself. The library’s true treasure was the A–Z Children’s Hardback Fiction, running the whole length of the right-hand wall on metal shelves arranged in big U-shaped bays. Every book had its dust-wrapper sealed onto the cover in heavy-duty plastic, soup-proof, thumb-proof, spaghetti-hoop-proof. Every book bore a yellow Dewey Decimal code number on a sticker on the spine. I approached them slowly, not with reverence exactly, but with the feeling that the riches in the room needed to be handled with some kind of grateful attention to their ordered abundance. Also, I knew that once I’d chosen my four books, the multiple possibilities of the library would shrink down to that finite handful. I hated to be hurried out of the great, free bazaar.

  Library visits have been a ritual in well-regulated childhoods in Britain and America for seventy years now. I recognise my own history in
Randall Jarrell’s 1944 vision of worlds smouldering under the stone roof of the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, and the books opening out upon a

  … country the child thought life

  And wished for and crept to out of his own life.

  Or in Ray Bradbury’s raptured evocation of the contrast between the tame apparatus of the library on the one hand – with its benevolent ladies presiding and the quintessence of order in the metallic ker-chunk of the date stamper – and the wilds it contained. This is Something Wicked This Way Comes:

  The library deeps lay waiting for them.

  Out in the world, not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather, anything might happen, always did. Listen! and you heard ten thousand people screaming so high only dogs feathered their ears. A million folk ran toting cannons, sharpening guillotines; Chinese, four abreast, marched on forever. Invisible, silent, yes, but Jim and Will had the gift of ears and noses as well as the gift of tongues. This was a factory of spices from far countries. Here alien deserts slumbered. Up front was the desk where the nice old lady, Miss Watriss, purple-stamped your books, but down off away were Tibet and Antarctica, the Congo …

  But Bradbury writes as if the stories burst out of their library bindings on their own. I never found that. For me, they had to be stalked, sampled, weighed, measured, sniffed, tasted, often rejected. There were so many possibilities that the different invitations each book made would have blended together, if they had been audible, into a constant muttering hum. To hear the separate call of a book, you had to take it up and detach it from all the other possibilities by concentrating on it, and giving it a little silence in which to work. Then you learned what it was offering. Be a Roman soldier, said a book by Rosemary Sutcliffe. Be an urchin in Georgian London, said a Leon Garfield. Be Milo, ‘who was bored, not just some of the time but all of the time’ and drives past the purple tollbooth to the Lands Beyond. Be where you can hear cats talking by tasting the red liquid in the big bottle in a chemist’s shop window. Be where magic works easily. Be where magic works frighteningly. Be where you can work magic, but have to conceal being invisible or being able to fly from the eyes of the grown-ups. Be an Egyptian child beside the Nile, be a rabbit on Watership Down, be a foundling so lonely in a medieval castle that the physical ache of it reaches to you out of the book; be one of a gang of London kids playing on a bombsite amongst the willowherb and the loosestrife, only fifteen years or so before 1972 but already far, far into the past. Be a king. Be a slave. Be Biggles. All this was there in the library basement, if you picked up the books and coaxed them into activity, and uncountably much more besides. There can only have been five or six bays along the right-hand-wall, but they seemed inexhaustible.

  Books could vary more than virtually anything else that went around in the world under one name. They infused me with incompatible, incomparable emotions. Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series, for example, apart from giving me an enormous crush on Captain Nancy Blackett of the Amazons, always reminded me of my cousins, a large practical family in Cambridgeshire who messed about in canoes on fen rivers just (I thought) like the Ransome children did in sailing boats on Lake Windermere. Idylls of meticulous detail, instructive about semaphore and surveying and gold-refining, the ten Ransome books let me try out a counterlife for size: a wonderfully prosaic alternative to my own small, dreamy, medically unlucky family of four. Here, brothers and sisters were robust. They milled around. The parents waved the adventurers off at the dock on page one, and no intense spotlight of anxiety fell on anyone. The stories blended with the life I imagined my cousins had. Without having to feel disloyal, I could experiment, reading Arthur Ransome, with the idea of belonging to that other version of family life that existed over at my aunt and uncle’s house, with its dinghy in the garage, and its big Pyrex pots of stew and mounds of boiled potatoes at mealtime instead of our Elizabeth David-inspired experiments with risotto and pasta.

  On the other hand, Ian Seraillier’s The Silver Sword sent me recoiling back into family safety and family certainty. I wanted to believe that Jan the orphan in The Silver Sword, who leads a feral existence in the ruins of wartime Warsaw, was much older than me, so I couldn’t possibly be expected yet to face the dangerous world alone. I’d had a vision of life with nothing to depend on, when I was changing trains in London on my own, carefully equipped with a page of instructions in my father’s clearest handwriting. As I rode the escalator up from the Underground into the big, gusty dark of a rail terminus, gripping the sheet of paper, I thought suddenly: what if I had no instructions to get me home? What if I had no home to get to? What if my life, right now, got lost in these wild spaces full of strangers and never emerged again? And these were only two points on the spectrum of moods represented in Children’s Fiction A–Z. When I made my choice, and walked back up the Ironmarket from the library to the bus stop, I knew I might have melancholy tucked under my arm; or laughter; or fear; or enchantment.

  *

  Or longing. My favourite books were the ones that took books’ implicit status as other worlds, and acted on it literally, making the window of writing a window onto imaginary countries. I didn’t just want to see in books what I saw anyway in the world around me, even if it was perceived and understood and articulated from angles I could never have achieved; I wanted to see things I never saw in life. More than I wanted books to do anything else, I wanted them to take me away. I wanted exodus. I was not alone. Tolkien believed that providing an alternative to reality was one of the primary properties of language. From the moment humans had invented the adjective, he wrote in On Fairy Tales, they had gained a creator-like power to build elsewheres.

  The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power – upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes.

  Anyone, he said, could use ‘the fantastic device of human language’ to mint a new coin for the imagination, such as the green sun. The green sun had no value, though, unless it was given a sky to rise in where it would have the same natural authority as the real yellow sun in the real sky. And after the sky, you had to invent the earth; and after the earth, the trees with their times of flowering and fruiting, and the inhabitants, and their habits of thought, and their manners of speech, their customs and clothing, down to the smallest details that labour and thought could contrive. To sustain a world inside which the green sun was credible required ‘a kind of elvish craft’, ‘story-making in its primary and most potent mode’. In fact Tolkien wanted to believe that fantasy was the highest form of art, more demanding than the mere reflection of men and women as they already were. He wanted to be able to look outwards to story, and have it contain all that you might look inward to find, then more besides.

  But I knew there was a fundamental division between stories set entirely in another world, and stories that travelled out to another world from the everyday reality of this one. Some books I loved were in the first category. Tolkien himself, of course: the year I was eight, I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time. I skipped through Pippin and Merry’s adventures in Gondor in the middle to get back to Sam and Frodo and the Ring. I identified their journey as the story. Mordor formed in my mind, the blasted land, the cratered land, roofed in rolling smoke from Mount Doom, and lit by gouts of flame like the North Sea oil-rig flares I’d seen on television. The orcs were leathery, mutant, nightmare squaddies, marching to and fro on the military roads. Frodo and Sam crept between, hobbit knight and hobbit squire, the drama of their desperation shrunk to a speck by the hellish grandeur of the surroundings, their only hope to be so small the all-powerful enemy did not notice them, and
all the while Gollum trailed inexorably after on squelching feet. For some reason, I pictured Gollum as a small upright green crocodile, with the pale lantern eyes Tolkien specified. I read the book in three transported, mesmerised days. On the paper jacket of my father’s old hardback edition, the Eye of Sauron was drawn in red. It seemed to stare at me. Whenever I was called for a reluctant meal break, I took care to leave the book face down.

  Later, I discovered and cherished Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea novels. They were utterly different in feeling, with their archipelago of bright islands like ideal Hebrides, and their guardian wizards balancing light and dark like yin and yang. All they shared with Tolkien was the deep consistency that allows an imagined world to unfold from its premises solidly, step by certain step, like something that might really exist. Consistency is to an imaginary world as the laws of physics are to ours. The spell-less magic of Earthsea gave power to those who knew the true names of things: a beautifully simple idea. Once I had seen from the first few pages of the first book, A Wizard of Earthsea, that Le Guin was always going to obey her own rules, I could trust the entire fabric of her world. Though I resisted its lessons. The student wizard Ged cracks open the surface of the night and releases a shadow version of himself into the world, a Jungian clot of personal darkness, that hunts him till he turns to face it and incorporates it back into himself where it belongs, by naming it with its true name: his own. I resolutely thought of the shadow as a bogey alien to Ged, and wondered why he wasn’t different at the end of the book when that dark thing was inside him. You cannot outrun yourself, the story said: a deeply unwelcome thought to me. I didn’t go to the worlds of story to be reminded that on a dark road your anger and your cruelty pace just behind you, daring you to turn your head, unless you let them travel safely within you.