Jonathan Dodd‘s latest column. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
I’ve always been a reader. That’s what I’ve always said. I caught myself saying that very thing today, and I realised it just isn’t true. I realised that I’ve only been a reader since I learned to read. Before that, I think I was probably a fan of books with pictures in, and before that I was probably a fan of colourful things that waved in front of the eyes I was still learning to focus.
Someone once told me that you learn more in your first three months than you do in the rest of your life. I suspect it’s one of those things that try to compare chalk and cheese, but I suppose from a standing start just being able to recognise faces and differentiate sounds must be quite a major accomplishment.
How we treat our memories
That got me thinking about memory. Not just what we actually remember, but how we treat our memories. I’ve been acting as if I was born being able to read, because it feels like that, so I didn’t until today realise that’s what I was saying. Then I tried to remember when I did actually start to read, and got into even more trouble.
I remember two things, crisply and clearly. The first is on the balcony of our house in Hove. It wasn’t a posh house, but it did have several bedrooms so my mother could work. She took on foreign students. They would come to stay for anything from a couple of weeks to over a year, to learn English. They would go to a language school and then live as one of the family. We usually had a houseful, from everywhere in the world, it seemed, from France to what was then Sarawak, then part of Borneo, now part of Malaysia.
If only they had had Tripadviser
One of our students was Inger, who was Swedish. She liked living with us so much that she came back, even though her English was better than the version spoken by most Brits. Then her sister Eva came to stay. Their mother Ulla was so intrigued by their reports of life in England and specifically in my mother’s house that she decided to come and stay to see for herself. If only they had had Tripadviser at the time…
Thus the balcony, with Ulla sitting on a wicker chair in the setting sun, and me sitting on her lap with a Rupert Bear book. She had looked through my book collection and picked it because her English wasn’t brilliant and my reading wasn’t yet as good as it is now. We sat fingering the words in the gorgeous golden light, working out what the words meant, her helping me to work out the sound of the word, and me working out what the word meant in English. I think we both improved.
The Castle of Adventure
My second early reading moment was more prosaic. Once I became good enough not to need Swedish help I got reading seriously, and I believe I did nothing else for years. At least I can’t remember much else, apart from jigsaw puzzles and sandcastles. I remember lying on my stomach in the middle of the floor, my shins and feet up in the air and my chin resting on my hands, reading The Castle of Adventure, by Enid Blyton. I was completely absorbed. People told me they had to step over me as they passed from room to room.
I can see why these two memories, precious and perfect as they are, have coloured my memory of myself as a reader of books all the way back, because they are the memories I remember. I know there are more memories, but I’m having trouble actually remembering them. I’m hoping that thinking about it and writing this will soften up the hardened walls of memory and allow them to flow.
Building up our own legends
We each have so many memories banked in our memory that it’s no wonder we have trouble actually remembering everything, so it’s no surprise that we become selective, building up our own legends about ourselves in our minds. I firmly believe that everything we ever experienced is locked up somewhere in there, but that most of it is frankly rather boring and mundane.
Who wants to remember vividly being bored rigid during Second Year Biology second lesson third Tuesday afternoon after Easter? Who wants to remember vividly every journey to and from Tesco to do the food shopping? And who wants to remember the embarrassing stuff, or the painful things, or those things about which we’ll always feel guilty, even if it wasn’t our fault? Of course we’re going to push those memories as far back as we can.
My legend of myself
There must have been a moment when the whole reading thing came into focus in my mind, when I realised that I was, and always would be, a reader. My legend of myself, and my lifelong love of books, almost demands that I should have had an Eureka! moment.
I shall have to start digging in my own personal memory mine to see what I can come up with.
If you have been, thank you for reading this.
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