What on earth did we read?

Looking back at the 1940s and Earnshill I seem to have a complete blank in my mind as to what we were taught. This is hardly flattering to the many teachers who toiled at desk and blackboard and suggests that either our places, like commissions in the First World War, were somehow ‘bought’ at the public schools we went on to or that a process of osmosis fed the information into our little brains to be spewed out on the exam paper at the right time. More probable is the answer that learning, indeed that better word ‘education’ is a continuous process and there are few itemised fixtures in that calendar. For instance I hated Maths in each and every direction from the multiplication tables to geometry to algebra. Long division took an age and spidery numbers trailed far away to the bottom right of the page without much significant information emerging along the top line. Oh! For a pocket calculator …

Algebra was a curious thing. Something must have gone in (osmosis?) because when in the 1980s I had my first PC I was able to teach myself to write ‘Basic’ computer programmes with no trouble at all. Algebra was dead easy!

We had Kennedy’s Latin Primer with its stilted sentences and totally useless information about Caesar’s antics in Gaul, we remembered “Elefas, Mas, Gigas, As” for some reason but, with giggles, pronounced the last vowel with a long stress throughout. Kennedy’s book was never new and all had had been passed down through generations of schoolboys. Hence each and every one had the word LATIN transformed with heavy black ink to (B)AT(T)IN(G). Poor Kennedy was probably alive in those days.

Jasper H Stembridge wrote simple Geography books which devoted a chapter to a country and an aspect of it that would appeal to young readers. These were really rather good and conjoined physical geography with industry, commerce and agriculture. But who on earth rejoiced in the name ‘Jasper H Stembridge’ ? We never knew and perhaps he was an American but the name lingers on.

History, French, English or other books of learning I haven’t the foggiest notion of what we read. I will have to leave that to others.

Private reading is another matter. The library had shelves of G F Henty, Percy F Westerman and other Empire promoting works all in hard covers with well thumbed pages and large creases where corners had been turned down to mark the place where reading paused. I never read Henty, to my shame, but lunged into Westerman and reveled in the brave young men of the North East Frontier, pistol in right hand, left outstretched to encourage their men, whistle in top pocket (for what?) and snappy jodpurs and high boots. It was easy to identify with these clean featured products of the Public School. Westerman did in fact write a book entitled Building The Empire. His prose still lingers. ‘The bolts of the Gurkhas’ rifles clicked in a businesslike manner as in response to an order they loaded their weapons’. ‘Halting in front of the Viceroy, the lieutenant saluted and stood to attention. A mist seemed to swim before his eyes, through which he could see nothing but the clearcut features of India’s ruler. Deftly the Viceroy pinned the bronze cross upon the breast of the lieutenant’s uniform’. One may laugh today but what will the ‘deathless prose’ of cyber-space adventures, already looking a bit thin, look in fifty years time? We’ll laugh again.

Equally appealing and of a more gentle nature were the books of Arthur Ransome. We read the lot. I had a small wooden sailing dinghy at home on the Thames, I loved campfires and outdoor life, holidays were spent in the open air. Ransome’s stories  perfectly appealed to a ten year old with their restrained adventure, sense of decency and lack of any interference by the ‘grown-ups’. The simple drawings gave a sort of magic to the Lakeland and Broads scenes. There was a strapping young girl called ‘Titty’ but we passed that name without a thought as, I am sure, Ramsome himself did. Inuendo is for a later age – alas.

AEW Mason had written a book called No Other Tiger. Spine towards me it sat on the shelves throughout my stay at Earnshill. For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to open it. Funny thing book titles… On the other hand a book called Thieves Nights intrigued me. A man, our hero, walks into a den of miscreants wearing a red glove and a green sock. He tells a tale so arresting that, upon finishing his story, when the curtains are drawn back from the windows dawn has already broken. What had been planned for the night had been aborted and the police swooped. Fifty years later I discovered this book in a secondhand shop. Rattling good yarn.

The Sherlock Holmes stories were a very staple diet and we knew them by heart. The titles were brilliant. The Speckled Band, The Engineer’s Thumb, The Lion’s Mane, The Dancing Man, The Seven Napoleons, The Five Orange Pips. Conan Doyle always seemed to reach out beyond our experience and imagination to an ending surprising but logical. The volumes that we read did not have illustrations and that was probably a good thing since it kept the stories from being anchored too far in a remote past.
Actually Basil Rathbone was my father’s first cousin and he has become, for everybody, the way that Sherlock Holmes actually looked.

Very much in the past was a wonderful collection of The Strand Magazine, bound volume after bound volume, along some shelves in a corner of a classroom above the stables. They belonged to the Coombe family. Like the Readers Digest in later years, though infinitely better written, the Strand Magazine appealed to our young minds. There were stories, situations, facts and, intriguingly, inventions. Greatest of these latter was a diagram of a Perpetual Motion Machine. This fascinated me. A wheel with a series of hollow spokes containing steel balls. The spokes were so cunningly curved that the balls rolled to the centre of the wheel on the ‘up’ side and the perimeter on the ‘down’ side. Hence the wheel would turn. For years after I tussled with this idea drawing endless sketches but never seeming to capture the magic of the original. Two months ago that very illustration came up in a popular magazine and suddenly I was back in that small room over the stables, musty smell in my nose, dimly lit by a skylight and fearful of being called away by the bell for supper.

One day, for no particular reason, save that I admired it, Hancock gave me a copy of Janes Sailing Ships of the World. The book was small but quite thick and gave drawings of all the classes of sailing ship from Barque to Barquentine and Brig and Brigentine and so to Schooner and fully rigged Ship. They were named – Lock Ettrick and others I have forgotten – and all showed in perfect detail every sail and rope on the boat. Soon I could name all the sails from Royals to Topgallants to Studding sails and, what fun when the wind was light, ‘Sky Sails’ right at the topmost pinacle of the mast. The ropes, hundreds of them, were fixed in my memory, too. I drew pictures of sailing ships endlessly on any scrap of paper I could find. My pockets were filled with pieces of string so I could practice knots; sheetbends, reef knots, bowline and sheepshank and, a little later Turk’s Heads. Probably that was the book I liked best.

Again of a practical nature was the series entitled Aircraft of the Fighting Powers. Published each year on superior ‘shiny’ paper and bound in blue the books showed accurate drawings of all the aircraft likely to be see around the world at that time. The planes came both from the Allies and from our enemies, the Germans, Italian and Japanese. How the plans of hostile countries came to be pictured we never bothered to contemplate. The main thing was that, from these excellent and detailed drawings, we could model our own replicas. Construction Kits did not exist and we had to make do with bits of wood picked up from the floor of the carpentry shop and to saw, cut and sandpaper away till the final shape came out. Quietly, during a lesson, one would take a roughly formed wing or fusilage from the pocket and gently sand it to more perfect shape. Thereafter acetone smelling glue, clear and quick drying, a covering of ‘aeroplane lacquer’ and red, white and blue identification roundels in transfer would bring the model into being. I still have some of these planes and they are really rather good.

One extraordinary book we read was a sort of compendium, the ring binder of today, containing pages of closely typed text and photographs with cellophane pockets with all sorts of trivia; bus tickets, cigarette stubs with lipstick on them, book matches, scraps of paper torn from a diary and a piece of cotton stained, it seems, with human blood. Very mysterious but of course these were the famous Denis Wheatley detective stories where the ‘clues’ were thus tangible and we were invited to solve the murder ourselves. Never seen them again.

Lushington, the younger one, was tremendously keen on the Biggles books and, almost vicariously, we all got to know the stories. “Then the Mechanics pulled away the chocks and Biggles and Ginger roared across the tarmac”. That sounded fine to us. No question then of Biggles’ orientation though nowadays it is fashionable to question exactly what these manly heroes, with not a pretty girl in sight, were actually up to …

Oblique to all this derring-do was that great schoolboy William. Richmal Crompton’s  Just William was not to everyone’s taste; we’d probably call him ‘down market’, but the sheer silliness of it all made us turn the pages. Curiously, during the War Crompton spent time in Iceland in the RAF where a fellow officer, Air Commander Cecil George Wigglesworth was also posted. I say curiously because Wigglesworth had known W E Johns in the First World War and the man Biggles had been modeled on him. Thus, if the War Office had only realised it, were two heroes, Biggles and William, ready and together to do their bit for the conflict. What a fine pair they would have made, clearly shortening the war thereby.

Did we read comics? Well actually I don’t know. Certainly I didn’t much though I did manage to see two from time to time at home. Film Fun and Radio Fun were magazines with cartoons of the actors and comics of the week. In my case this didn’t work all that well because we went to the cinema once a holidays and the radio was turned on in the household at 9pm for the news and then switched off at 9.10pm. The characters were endearing and often very funny but were not akin to reality. The Beano, now in its early prime, was available to us and so Desperate Dan, Lord Snooty and his Pals, Ping the Elastic Man and Pansy Potter the Strongman’s daughter were nicely familiar. Today we have to go to Viz to see anything like it though the Two Fat Slags and other disgraceful persons would have deeply shocked not only the grown ups but also the children of that time.

So that’s what we read at Durlston in the early forties. Not a very firm foundation for our future lives and requiring an awful lot of catching up in later years. I must leave it to my fellow schoolboys to improve on this meagre catalogue. For my part I am content that we were not force-fed with high literature and could, in our own time, absorb freely what is probably the finest literary output of any country in this world.

Rowland Whitehead
3.10.03