IN those far-distant pre-war years of hope, despair and resignation, my parents chose hope and sent me to a private primary school just down the road. Hitler’s not coming here, my father said, so let’s give the lad a good start. It proved to be a much better choice than even he realised at the time.
It was run by two sisters, the Misses Neale, one the head teacher, the other mostly seen hovering in the background. There were about one hundred of us split into Classes One, Two and Three, then Middle and Upper School. After Class One you worked seriously hard. By Class Three you had to have your own Pocket Oxford Dictionary along with an even thicker Pears’ Cyclopaedia, a very useful volume. We were encouraged (told) to look up any word or topic we didn’t understand. Middle and Upper Schools held regular spelling bees and were taught basic French and news of the Empire using Arthur Mee’s Children’s Newspaper.
By the time I left I had read both Alice books three or four times, discovered Arthur Ransome and devoured as many of Percy F Westerman’s books as I could find in the library. You may never have heard of him, but there is an article from 1982 in The Guardian headed: The Wizard Tosh of Percy F Westerman. He wrote dozens of adventure stories for boys which gripped you from cover to cover and I wasn’t old enough to be critical of his style. The Ransome Swallows & Amazons series was published over 17 years, the last of which, Great Northern in 1947, I was reading along with Peter Cheyney (crime fiction) and Leslie Charteris (The Saint series).
Mixed in with those and read over and over again were the Dr Dolittle books by Hugh Lofting and any book with Biggles in its title. Science fiction came by way of Jules Verne, not only with his well-known 20,000 Leagues under the Seas but some really strange, like Floating Island, a kind of 19th-century rich people’s permanent cruise liner sanctuary. The passengers lived a good life and had string quartet recitals, the exact programmes of which were given in detail. Another curious one was Hector Servadac, about a group of people carried away by a comet which grazed the earth, went off round the solar system then brought them back. Unlikely? Of course, but it’s full of interesting scientific details.
I continued to race through all that wizard tosh while at my next school where a whole lot more books arrived as we were given a stack of ten or 12 which we were ordered to take care of and put brown-paper covers on any new ones. At the end of the school year they would be handed in ready for those moving up in the autumn. Some of them were grubby but we all had text books for every subject.
When a grandson came to stay recently, we discovered that he does not have text books as everything is available on his laptop. Schools have been moving away from anything printed for some time, apparently. Cost is one of the reasons given for this what must surely be a retrograde move. Said grandson was taking Further Maths at A-level so Dad bought the course book, 190 pages of the densest mathematics you can imagine. I understood only the bit about using a Critical Path diagram when planning projects as I had used it in one of my various careers. The book seemed to be so full of complex detail that he almost certainly needed to flip back and forth to jog his memory about what he had read last week. Not so easy on a laptop.
Some, perhaps most, of those adventure books I used to read and enjoy would be considered unfit for modern children. They tell about the people of their time, the way they spoke, how they saw their world. A small army of concerned meddlers have labelled themselves ‘sensitivity readers’, and have been at work on authors such as Agatha Christie and even Enid Blyton to weed out references which they consider might upset a younger reader. If Percy F Westerman’s books were still being published they would suffer the same way. These readers are the officious and mean-minded lot who quite soon will be advising that certain books should be destroyed before they transmit their dangerous thoughts.
If my feeble mind is still able to conduct a web search, and if I can find ancient copies of Percy F Westerman’s and Enid Blyton’s epic volumes, I will order half a dozen of both for delivery to any great-grandchildren I may have in the future. So there.
That is my answer to the over-sensitive sensitivity readers. Why don’t you all get a proper job?
