The Essential Collection for Young Readers Read online

  I have a small collection of these little books, treasured over the years. Foremost is my father’s prayer book and psalter, with his name, ‘Aubrey Bond, Lovedale, 1917’, inscribed on the inside back cover. Lovedale is a school in the Nilgiri Hills in South India, where, as a young man, he did his teacher’s training. He gave it to me soon after I went to a boarding school in Shimla in 1944, and my own name is inscribed on it in his beautiful handwriting.

  Another beautiful little prayer book in my collection is called The Finger Prayer Book. Bound in soft leather, it is about the same length and breadth as the average middle finger. Replete with psalms, it is the complete book of common prayer and not an abridgement; a marvel of miniature book production.

  Not much larger is a delicate item in calf leather, The Humour of Charles Lamb. It fits into my wallet and often stays there. It has a tiny portrait of the great essayist, followed by some thirty to forty extracts from his essays, such as this favourite of mine: ‘Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that “Such as he is now, I must shortly be”. Not so shortly friend, perhaps as thou imaginest. In the meantime, I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters!’

  No fatalist, Lamb. He made no compromise with Father Time. He affirmed that in age we must be as glowing and tempestuous as in youth! And yet Lamb is thought to be an old-fashioned writer.

  Another favourite among my ‘little’ books is The Pocket Trivet, An Anthology for Optimists, published by The Morning Post newspaper in 1932. But what is a trivet, the unenlightened may well ask. Well, it’s a stand for a small pot or kettle, fixed securely over a grate. To be right as a trivet is to be perfectly right. Just right, like the short sayings in this book, which is further enlivened by a number of charming woodcuts based on the seventeenth century originals; such as the illustration of a moth hovering over a candle flame and below it the legend—‘I seeke mine owne hurt.’

  But the sayings are mostly of a cheering nature, such as Emerson’s ‘Hitch your wagon to a star!’ or the West Indian proverb: ‘Every day no Christmas, an’ every day no rainy day.’

  My book of trivets is a happy example of much concentrated wisdom being collected in a small space—the beauty separated from the dross. It helps me to forget the dilapidated building in which I live and to look instead at the ever-changing cloud patterns as seen from my bedroom windows. There is no end to the shapes made by the clouds, or to the stories they set off in my head. We don’t have to circle the world in order to find beauty and fulfilment. After all, most of living has to happen in the mind. And, to quote one anonymous sage from my trivet, ‘The world is only the size of each man’s head.’

  2

  Amongst the current fraternity of writers, I must be that very rare person—an author who actually writes by hand!

  Soon after the invention of the typewriter, most editors and publishers understandably refused to look at any mansucript that was handwritten. A decade or two earlier, when Dickens and Balzac had submitted their hefty manuscrips in longhand, no one had raised any objection. Had their handwriting been awful, their manuscripts would still have been read. Fortunately for all concerned, most writers, famous or obscure, took pains over their handwriting. For some, it was an art in itself, and many of those early manuscripts are a pleasure to look at and read.

  And it wasn’t only authors who wrote with an elegant hand. Parents and grandparents of most of us had distinctive styles of their own. I still have my father’s last letter, written to me when I was at boarding school in Shimla some fifty years ago. He used large, beautifully formed letters, and his thoughts seemed to have the same flow and clarity as his handwriting.

  In his letter he advises me (then a nine-year-old) about my own handwriting: ‘I wanted to write before about your writing, Ruskin... Sometimes I get letters from you in very small writing, as if you wanted to squeeze everything into one sheet of letter paper. It is not good for you or for your eyes, to get into the habit of writing too small... Try and form a larger style of handwriting—use more paper if necessary!’

  I did my best to follow his advice, and I’m glad to report that after nearly forty years of the writing life, most people can still read my handwriting!

  Word processors are all the rage now, and I have no objection to these mechanical aids any more than I have to my old Olympia typewriter, made in 1956 and still going strong. Although I do all my writing in longhand, I follow the conventions by typing a second draft. But I would not enjoy my writing if I had to do it straight on to a machine. It isn’t just the pleasure of writing longhand. I like taking my notebooks and writing pads to odd places. This particular essay is being written on the steps of my small cottage facing Pari Tibba (Fairy Hill). Part of the reason for sitting here is that there is a new postman on this route, and I don’t want him to miss me.

  For a freelance writer, the postman is almost as important as a publisher. I could, of course, sit here doing nothing, but as I have pencil and paper with me, and feel like using them, I shall write until the postman comes and maybe after he has gone, too! There is really no way in which I could set up a word processor on these steps.

  There are a number of favourite places where I do my writing. One is under the chestnut tree on the slope above the cottage. Word processors were not designed keeping mountain slopes in mind. But armed with a pen (or pencil) and paper, I can lie on the grass and write for hours. On one occasion, last month, I did take my typewriter into the garden, and I am still trying to extricate an acorn from under the keys, while the roller seems permanently stained yellow with some fine pollen dust from the deodar trees.

  My friends keep telling me about all the wonderful things I can do with a word processor, but they haven’t got around to finding me one that I can take to bed, for that is another place where I do much of my writing—especially on cold winter nights, when it is impossible to keep the cottage warm.

  While the wind howls outside, and snow piles up on the windowsill, I am warm under my quilt, writing pad on my knees, ballpoint pen at the ready. And if, next day, the weather is warm and sunny, these simple aids will accompany me on a long walk, ready for instant use should I wish to record an incident, a prospect, a conversation or simply a train of thought.

  When I think of the great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, scratching away with their quill pens, filling hundreds of pages every month, I am amazed to find that their handwriting did not deteriorate into the sort of hieroglyphics that often make up the average doctor’s prescription today. They knew they had to write legibly, if only for the sake of the typesetters.

  Both Dickens and Thackeray had good, clear, flourishing styles. (Thackeray was a clever illustrator, too.) Somerset Maugham had an upright, legible hand. Churchill’s neat handwriting never wavered, even when he was under stress. I like the bold, clear, straighforward hand of Abraham Lincoln; it mirrors the man. Mahatma Gandhi, another great soul who fell to the assassin’s bullet, had many similarities of both handwriting and outlook.

  Not everyone had a beautiful hand. King Henry VIII had an untidy scrawl, but then, he was not a man of much refinement. Guy Fawkes, who tried to blow up the British Parliament, had a very shaky hand. With such a quiver, no wonder he failed in his attempt! Hitler’s signature is ugly, as you would expect. And Napoleon’s doesn’t seem to know where to stop; how much like the man!

  I think my father was right when he said handwriting was often the key to a man’s character, and that large, well-formed letters went with an uncluttered mind. Florence Nightingale had a lovely handwriting, the hand of a caring person. And there were many like her amongst our forebears.

  3

  When I was a small boy, no Christmas was really complete unless my Christmas stocking contained several recent issues of my favourite comic paper. If today my friends complain that I am too voracious a reader of books, they have only these comics to blame; for they were the origin, if not of my tastes in readi
ng, then certainly of the reading habit itself.

  I like to think that my conversion to comics began at the age of five, with a comic strip on the children’s page of The Statesman. In the late 1930s, Benji, whose head later appeared only on the Benji League badge, had a strip to himself; I don’t remember his adventures very clearly, but every day (or was it once a week?) I would cut out the Benji strip and paste it into a scrapbook. Two years later, this scrapbook, bursting with the adventures of Benji, accompanied me to boarding school, where, of course, it passed through several hands before finally passing into limbo.

  Of course, comics did not form the only reading matter that found its way into my Christmas stocking. Before I was eight, I had read Peter Pan, Alice, and most of Mr Midshipman Easy; but I had also consumed thousands of comic papers which were, after all, slim affairs and mostly pictorial, ‘certain little penny books radiant with gold and rich with bad pictures’, as Leigh Hunt described the children’s papers of his own time.

  But though they were mostly pictorial, comics in those days did have a fair amount of reading matter, too. The Hostspur, Wizard, Magnet (a victim of the Second World War) and Champion contained stories woven round certain popular characters. In Champion, which I read regularly right through my prep school years, there was Rockfist Rogan, Royal Air Force (RAF), a pugilist who managed to combine boxing with bombing, and Fireworks Flynn, a footballer who always scored the winning goal in the last two minutes of play.

  Billy Bunter has, of course, become one of the immortals—almost a subject for literary and social historians. Quite recently, The Times Literary Supplement devoted its first two pages to an analysis of the Bunter stories. Eminent lawyers and doctors still look back nostalgically to the arrival of the weekly Magnet; they are now the principal customers for the special souvenir edition of the first issue of the Magnet, recently reprinted in facsimile. Bunter, ‘forever young’, has become a folk hero. He is seen on stage, screen and television, and is even quoted in the House of Commons.

  From this, I take courage. My only regret is that I did not preserve my own early comics—not because of any bibliophilic value which they might possess today, but because of my sentimental regard for early influences in art and literature.

  The first venture in children’s publishing, in 1774, was a comic of sorts. In that year, John Newberry brought out:

  According to Act of Parliament (neatly bound and gilt): A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, intended for the Instruction and Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly, with an agreeable Letter to read from Jack the Giant-Killer...

  The book contained pictures, rhymes and games. Newberry’s characters and imaginary authors included Woglog the Giant, Tommy Trip, Giles Gingerbread, Nurse Truelove, Peregrine Puzzlebrains, Primrose Prettyface and many others with names similar to those found in the comic papers of our own century.

  Newberry was also the originator of the ‘Amazing Free Offer’, so much a part of American comics. At the beginning of 1755, he had this to offer:

  Nurse Truelove’s New Year Gift, or the Book of Books for children, adorned with Cuts and designed as a Present for every little boy who would become a great Man and ride upon a fine Horse; and to every little Girl who would become a great Woman and ride in a Lord Mayor’s gilt Coach. Printed for the Author, who has ordered these books to be given gratis to all little Boys in St. Paul’s churchyard, they paying for the Binding, which is only Two pence each Book.

  Many of today’s comics are crude and, like many television serials, violent in their appeal. But I did not know American comics until I was twelve, and by then I had become quite discriminating. Superman, Bulletman, Batman and Green Lantern, and other super heroes all left me cold. I had, by then, passed into the world of real books but the weakness for the comic strip remains. I no longer receive comics in my Christmas stocking, but I do place a few in the stockings of Gautam and Siddharth. And, needless to say, I read them right through beforehand.

  The Blue Umbrella

  1

  ‘NEELU! NEELU!’ cried Binya.

  She scrambled barefoot over the rocks, ran over the short summer grass, up and over the brow of the hill, all the time calling ‘Neelu, Neelu!’

  Neelu—Blue—was the name of the blue-grey cow. The other cow, which was white, was called Gori, meaning Fair One. They were fond of wandering off on their own, down to the stream or into the pine forest, and sometimes they came back by themselves and sometimes they stayed away—almost deliberately, it seemed to Binya.

  If the cows didn’t come home at the right time, Binya would be sent to fetch them. Sometimes her brother, Bijju, went with her, but these days he was busy preparing for his exams and didn’t have time to help with the cows.

  Binya liked being on her own, and sometimes she allowed the cows to lead her into some distant valley, and then they would all be late coming home. The cows preferred having Binya with them, because she let them wander. Bijju pulled them by their tails if they went too far.

  Binya belonged to the mountains, to this part of the Himalayas known as Garhwal. Dark forests and lonely hilltops held no terrors for her. It was only when she was in the market town, jostled by the crowds in the bazaar, that she felt rather nervous and lost. The town, five miles from the village, was also a pleasure resort for tourists from all over India.

  Binya was probably ten. She may have been nine or even eleven, she couldn’t be sure because no one in the village kept birthdays; but her mother told her she’d been born during a winter when the snow had come up to the windows, and that was just over ten years ago, wasn’t it? Two years later, her father had died, but his passing had made no difference to their way of life. They had three tiny terraced fields on the side of the mountain, and they grew potatoes, onions, ginger, beans, mustard and maize: not enough to sell in the town, but enough to live on.

  Like most mountain girls, Binya was quite sturdy, fair of skin, with pink cheeks and dark eyes and her black hair tied in a pigtail. She wore pretty glass bangles on her wrists, and a necklace of glass beads. From the necklace hung a leopard’s claw. It was a lucky charm, and Binya always wore it. Bijju had one, too, only his was attached to a string.

  Binya’s full name was Binyadevi, and Bijju’s real name was Vijay, but everyone called them Binya and Bijju. Binya was two years younger than her brother.

  She had stopped calling for Neelu; she had heard the cowbells tinkling, and knew the cows hadn’t gone far. Singing to herself, she walked over fallen pine needles into the forest glade on the spur of the hill. She heard voices, laughter, the clatter of plates and cups, and stepping through the trees, she came upon a party of picnickers.

  They were holiday-makers from the plains. The women were dressed in bright saris, the men wore light summer shirts, and the children had pretty new clothes. Binya, standing in the shadows between the trees, went unnoticed; for some time she watched the picnickers, admiring their clothes, listening to their unfamiliar accents, and gazing rather hungrily at the sight of all their food. And then her gaze came to rest on a bright blue umbrella, a frilly thing for women, which lay open on the grass beside its owner.

  Now Binya had seen umbrellas before, and her mother had a big black umbrella which nobody used any more because the field rats had eaten holes in it, but this was the first time Binya had seen such a small, dainty, colourful umbrella and she fell in love with it. The umbrella was like a flower, a great blue flower that had sprung up on the dry brown hillside.

  She moved forward a few paces so that she could see the umbrella better. As she came out of the shadows into the sunlight, the picnickers saw her.

  ‘Hello, look who’s here!’ exclaimed the older of the two women. ‘A little village girl!’

  ‘Isn’t she pretty?’ remarked the other. ‘But how torn and dirty her clothes are!’ It did not seem to bother them that Binya could hear and understand everything they said about her.

  ‘They’re very poor in the hills,’ said one of the men.
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  ‘Then let’s give her something to eat.’ And the older woman beckoned to Binya to come closer.

  Hesitantly, nervously, Binya approached the group. Normally she would have turned and fled, but the attraction was the pretty blue umbrella. It had cast a spell over her, drawing her forward almost against her will.

  ‘What’s that on her neck?’ asked the younger woman.

  ‘A necklace of sorts.’

  ‘It’s a pendant—see, there’s a claw hanging from it!’

  ‘It’s a tiger’s claw,’ said the man beside her. (He had never seen a tiger’s claw.) ‘A lucky charm. These people wear them to keep away evil spirits.’ He looked to Binya for confirmation, but Binya said nothing.

  ‘Oh, I want one too!’ said the woman, who was obviously his wife.

  ‘You can’t get them in shops.’

  ‘Buy hers, then. Give her two or three rupees, she’s sure to need the money.’

  The man, looking slightly embarrassed but anxious to please his young wife, produced a two-rupee note and offered it to Binya, indicating that he wanted the pendant in exchange. Binya put her hand to the necklace, half afraid that the excited woman would snatch it away from her. Solemnly she shook her head. The man then showed her a five-rupee note, but again Binya shook her head.

  ‘How silly she is!’ exclaimed the young woman.

  ‘It may not be hers to sell,’ said the man. ‘But I’ll try again. How much do you want—what can we give you?’ And he waved his hand towards the picnic things scattered about on the grass.

  Without any hesitation Binya pointed to the umbrella.