Sub-Standard

When I was still living at home with my parents, in their semi-detached house on a sprawling 1930s estate, I was only a few minutes’ walk away, down the alleyway that ran along the side of the Co-op, from the local library.  Searching online today, I see that at some point in the intervening quarter-century it became a (dread word) Community Library but, that sin aside, I’m sorry to see that it’s listed as one of those under threat of possible closure because, you see, I feel indebted to that library for helping to set me off along the never ending yellow brick road of books. 

 

Why do some people become voracious readers and others don’t?  Is there a reading gene?  I began with Enid Blyton and Ladybird and have never looked back such that now, if I don’t have a book or a newspaper or a magazine to hand when I’m eating my breakfast, I sometimes catch myself reading from the cereal box.
 

From the age of about seven I was in and out of that library two or three times a week, usually borrowing up to my maximum limit, reading, reading, always reading.  Biggles was my earliest crush and they had books in that library that were long out of print, unavailable in the shops, which I borrowed over and over again.  Biggles was such a major part of my early reading life that he’s deserving of a piece all of his own so I’ll say no more for now.  I don’t remember, now, what else I was reading from the children’s section of the library but at some point I must have tentatively wandered across the way into the collection proper.  It was probably science fiction at first and then the dread Tolkien but from then on I was off the leash, grazing eclectically through the whole place, fiction and nonfiction alike, stumbling upon unfamiliar corners of classification, little realising that the fates would eventually set me to working as a librarian for a good few years.

Sometime in my teens I picked up a copy of Good Times, Bad Times by Harold Evans.  I had little idea at the time about what went on in broadsheet newspapers – we took the Mirror at home – and it was a window upon the hitherto unknown world of journalism: Thalidomide, Biafra, the dying days of the old Street of Shame, and the inexorable rise of the Dirty Digger.  I’ve never re-read it – perhaps I ought to – but something about it must have stuck in my mind as I often recall it whenever I’m reading anything else about newspapers.

There’s little doubt that, Scoop is the non plus ultra of novels about the profession  and I dare say that Michael Frayn must have had it much in mind when he wrote Towards the End of the Morning, a recent read of mine.  Christopher Hitchens’ piece on Fleet Street's Finest in the Guardian from a few years ago makes a great deal of Frayn.  More, I’m afraid, than I could.

 

Social history apart, the first few chapters of the book are a genuinely very funny representation of a vanished world of long liquid lunches and hot metal.  I caught myself laughing out loud on the train.
 

“…do you remember Pavey-Smith?  He got the canteen manageress with child, obtained a refrigerator by fraud, charged dinner for eight at the Savoy to the paper, and then – mercifully – absconded with three months’ salary in advance.”

There’s a good little novel about newspapers in there but it’s sunken beneath the stodgy weight of the tedious, querulous, never resolved, personal demons of protagonist John Dyson and his friends and family, that makes up the rest of the book, never rising much above the average of early-middle Amis (Snr).

 

I gave up on the Sunday Times years ago, after I realised that I was throwing three quarters of it away unread.  Was it Orwell who said something about shifting from one newspaper to another like a sick man trying to get comfortable in bed?  Unsatisfactory though it often is – and I could live for a thousand years and still not miss ever seeing another piece by Hillary Mantell – I’ve long settled upon the Guardian on Saturdays for its Review section and the Observer on Sundays.

As for the ‘Community’ library, I shall be keeping my beady eye upon developments. I dare say that it will do little good but I will be flinging a few missives in the direction of the council should the worst be announced.