Pat Cymbal’s Reading Journey

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By Thecla Wilkinson

Pat was born in Sheffield in 1926. Her father was Russian and originally a master furrier. She went to Abbeydale Grammar School, leaving at sixteen to go to art college. She worked in fashion, becoming a buyer for J.Walsh and then Debenhams. In her forties she left Debenhams to train as a teacher and taught in London and at the High School in Sheffield.

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Pat’s parents were both great readers. Her mother read her fairy stories such as those by the brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson and also Alice in Wonderland. Her father didn’t read her children’s stories but told her tales from the Greek myths and read Tennyson’s Idylls of the King over and over to her so that, as Pat says

When I went to grammar school, we started to do Tennyson and I could recite whole wads of it off by heart, you know, before we started. I still can to this very day.

Pat doesn’t remember reading any children’s books as such apart from a small set of hardbacks called Swiss Stories, one of which was Heidi. She says that she was encouraged to read by example rather than directly,

To me it was just normal to read.

Books came from the library mainly. Not many were bought, although her father would sometimes buy books which the library was selling off. In her teens Pat read the books her father got from the library; from this time she remembers Rider Haggard, P.G.Wodehouse, Damon Runyon, Jerome K. Jerome and Sanders of the River by Edgar Wallace.

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Then she began to get books from the library herself and mentions The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. She borrowed this after seeing the film of The Picture of Dorian Gray which had a quotation from it at the beginning.

From this time she remembers working her way through Agatha Christie and then Ngaio Marsh, Erle Stanley Gardener and Raymond Chandler. She also read and still reads a lot of history and biography, from the Roman emperors to the autobiographies of Peter Mandelson and Alistair Darling.

She also enjoyed books which made her laugh such as How to be an Alien by George Mikes, The Education of Hyman Kaplan by Leo Rosten and 1066 and all That by Sellars and Yeatman which she still goes back to sometimes.

If ever I feel downhearted, I go and get that off the shelf. I mean, in no time I’m laughing.

Pat doesn’t think that the war affected her reading. Because her father had a Russian passport, none of the family was allowed to join up. Pat moved from school to art college and continued to read. There was no television, of course, but even later television didn’t stop Pat reading.

It sometimes made me read. For instance, I was watching Wallender, which I think is marvellous, so I have now ordered from the library some of the books.

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When Pat was working as a buyer and travelling a lot for work, she used to buy paperbacks to read on the train. The Day of the Triffids is one she recalls vividly,

I sat down to read and all of a sudden we were in London….It really gripped me from the beginning.

pat-cymbal-modelling-age-40's-5Pat had read some of the classics, for example, Jane Austen, when younger but it was when she started teacher training that she read George Eliot and the Brontes.

wuthering-heights-wordsShe also became interested in Greek plays, particularly those of Euripides because he writes about strong women.

Pat likes to re-read favourite books especially if there has been a new film or television version,

I re-read it to make sure I’m not daft and they are.

But there are books which she has gone back to only to find them unreadable, such as Rider Haggard and Agatha Christie, saying of the latter, ‘Poirot, for instance, what an abominable little man he was in her books’.

Pat has been a great reader from childhood and still reads widely.

I read in bed. I wake very early and I read for a couple of hours every morning before I get up.

Does Pat think that reading changed her life?

For one thing it’s changed it for the better because I’ve always enjoyed reading and anything you enjoy and is educational can’t be bad, can it?

 

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Clansmen (1936) – ‘A long new novel by Ethel Boileau’

By Mary Grover

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You will struggle to find out anything much about the author, Ethel Boileau, although the indefatigable Furrowed Middlebrow offers some information about her books.  However, you can now find a signed copy of Boileau’s 1936 tome, Clansmen – the story of a Scottish family struggling to maintain their ancestral estate, from just after the Jacobite rising of 1745 to 1936 – on the shelves of Sheffield Hallam University’s special collection of popular fiction 1900-1950.

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This copy was donated by Norman Adsetts, after whom the Learning Centre at Hallam is named. As Reading Sheffield’s interview with Norman Adsetts revealed, Boileau was an extremely popular novelist in the 1930s.  Norman should know; he grew up in between the shelves of his father’s tuppenny library where his mother would have found her favourite author, whose foreign name the little boy struggled to pronounce.

The cover and contents of Clansmen belie Boileau’s reputation as simply a writer of romance. For a start, it is unusual to find a novel explicitly promoted for its length.  The first words on the cover of Clansmen are ‘Ethel Boileau’s long new novel’. Length must have been a quality her fans sought. The length owes a great deal to the time-span: 1747-1936.

Family sagas were popular in the 1930s (as they still are).  John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga, published in the 1920s, was succeeded by Hugh Walpole’s Rogue Herries (1930-1932); Ethel Mannin’s Children of the Earth (1930 and 1937); and Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna series (1927-1958).  But the form was sneered at by modernists (as it is by today’s literary fiction proponents) who set value on the intense, the transitory and the subjective. The narrators of popular sagas of this period tend to assume an unfashionable omniscience.

However, in many ways Clansmen itself is about the value of the subjective, the transitory and intense and is very clear-sighted about the economic realities threatening the enjoyment of any emotional attachments. The only nineteenth century members of the Stewart clan who remain solvent are bankers. However their money is misspent by their relatives, either dissolute or dim. The focus of the main and later part of the book is Alan Stewart. His father having died in the Boer War, just before his birth, he is cared for by his uncle whose crazed and fraudulent stock market dealings wipe out what remains of the money. The generosity of a Jewish financier, Sir Isidore, and the utter loyalty of a retainer, Hector (who alone knows that he is Alan’s illegitimate half-brother), enable Alan to survive, first as an ungifted financier himself and then as a more committed laird. However, at the end of the book the success of this ancient calling is seen to be compromised by Alan’s new wife,  a beauty with ‘a past’ and hopelessly bored by the Highlands.  Though the dissolute cousin who attempts to seduce this desperate metropolitan beauty is pushed off a cliff by the loyal Hector, the novel ends on a decidedly equivocal note: Hector ‘with his silent stalker’s walk’ turning his back on the image of Alan’s wife in a way that reveals his own desire for her.

Perhaps it is the date when Clansmen came out, 1936, that accounts for its emphasis on the unforeseen and individual helplessness in the context of global war and pervasive economic collapse. The romance is really that of Hector, who loves both master and mistress with no hope of emotional fulfilment himself. The dedication of the novel ‘To All Scots in Exile’ and the prominence of the Stewart heraldic emblem on the cover suggest that this might be a nostalgic novel in which Scottish clans will represent threatened values of loyalty and land. In fact, it is the members of the clan with least connection with the land who make possible the precarious hold the Stewarts have on their shrinking areas of the Highlands. The benefactors of the romantic but rather obtuse Alan are the Jewish financier and a long-dead ancestor who redeemed the family fortunes by running a bank in India. The vast scope of the novel – the Highlands, Edinburgh, Calcutta, the trenches of the First World War, the battlefields of the Boer War, the fleshpots of New York and, very up-to-date, Nazi Germany – conspires to make the Scottish bogs where the action ends up very much on the edge of things, and certainly holding out no hope of stability or sanctuary.

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Returning to the reader who first brought Ethel Boileau’s popularity to our attention, Norman Adsetts’ own favourite was a book by Sir Phillip Gibbs, Cities of Refuge (1937). This novel is about the often harsh and tragic fate of White Russians fleeing the revolution.  This is a strange book for a six year old to read – yet what an appropriate preparation for the wartime apocalypse through which he was to grow up. The tuppenny library served the young Noman well.  Not only did it fire his imagination with romance, comedy and jungle adventures.   It also introduced him to the realities of the world into which he had to learn to be an adult through blockbusters (however much these might be derided by 1930s self-styled ‘realists’ or the heirs of Bloomsbury).  Clansmen together with Cities of Refuge would have given the seven year Norman more knowledge of the history of twentieth century Europe than a modern boy with greater access to fiction now regarded as more appropriate to his age.

The Reading Journey of Alan B

Alan was born in Kimberworth, between Rotherham and Sheffield.

He was born in 1944.

Though never discouraged from reading, Alan says ‘I kept my reading to myself’. His mother was a reader of Mills and Boon romances. She and Alan’s aunt read to him: Rupert Bear annuals and fairy stories with scary drawings. He explored comics on his own, the Beano, Dandy, Roy of the Rovers but was never an Eagle fan. The family also had a complete set of Arthur Mee’s Encyclopedia. Though initially Alan didn’t find reading easy, when he got to junior school he found a teacher ‘who bullied me, in a nice way, to read’.

Then, at secondary school,

I seemed to have this sort of explosion, you know, I’d sort of discovered reading and I’d got a lot of time to make up and everything. I was probably, looking back, I probably didn’t understand them at all.

He thinks it may have been because he developed his reading confidence late that he felt that he had to make up for lost time, turning his back on what he regarded as childish:

Well I started reading classic books like Charles Dickens and I remember trying to read Paradise Lost and finding it absolutely totally beyond me … and I can remember going to Rotherham City Library and saying I’d like to join the library and them trying to direct me to the children’s library. I wouldn’t have that, no I wanted these other books.

Though Alan got huge pleasure from G A Henty’s boys’ adventure stories, he knew that there were other, ‘important’ books that he also wanted to explore. Identifying what were the important books took some doing and there were pitfalls in this voyage of discovery. When he was asked at secondary school to name a famous author, one of his mother’s favourites came to mind and he answered ‘Mazo de la Roche’ (who wrote the hugely popular and romantic Jalna series). ‘I was laughed at and … I perhaps realised that perhaps all our authors aren’t equal!’

Alan still remembers the books he read in class, one of the earliest being John Ruskin’s fable cum fairytale, The King of the Golden River or The Black Brothers: A Legend of Stiria.

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I went to secondary modern school and there were very few books actually in school in those days. And the ones that were, I think they were trying to make us realise how good books were but they were so sort of reverential about books that, you know, I wouldn’t have dared go to the library and borrow one.

The reverence for the book as object was shaken when the same teachers who instilled this attitude commanded their pupils to strike out the word ‘King’ in the National Anthem and insert the word ‘Queen’ in 1953. ‘I remember being quite shocked that teachers were telling us to deface our hymn books’.

At about this time he was introduced in English lessons to Jack London’s adventures of life in the Canadian forests: Call of the Wild and White Fang; and the great escape story, The Wooden Horse. This taste for adventure stories was satisfied by many different kinds of author: John Buchan, John Masters, C S Forester, John Wyndham, Nevil Shute and Graham Greene. Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin he enjoyed ‘in a sort of … disturbed way’. Alan bought many of these novels from the long-established Rotherham bookshop, Harpers, ‘a rabbit warren of shelves’. The municipal library was his chief source of books. Relatives and friends of the family also regularly gave him books as presents. A particular friend was the chair of the local education committee in Rotherham. ‘If I ever mentioned a book in his presence he would get it for me.’

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As a teenager Alan found Bright Day by J B Priestley ‘useful’,

useful in the sense that as an adolescent you had certain uncertainties and that is what he talked about. And knowing that other people had the same uncertainties, it’s not just you.

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So reading allied Alan to these unseen people who might ask the same questions. He never felt he was part of a group that were all readers though his family did have books in the home. He felt that in Rotherham ‘I was slightly unusual in that I was keen on reading and I did collect books.’ He built his own bookshelves to house his collection.

Alan left school to go to technical college and then, like his father, worked in the metal industry. His father had worked in the rolling mills and Alan joined a research laboratory. Alan was soon doing night classes, gaining a Higher National Certificate in physics and an Open University degree, all this balanced with family life.

Alan feels he is ‘fairly open to any genre as long as it is engaging, telling you something. So, I like a fast moving story and if you can get both together that’s wonderful’. He reflects on why books have been so important to him:

I think I am a person who uses reading rather than for its own sake, as it were. I like to see what it can do for me sort of thing.

 

Access Alan’s audio and transcript here.

 

The Reading Journey of John Y

By Mary Grover

There was just room for a boy, his bed and a bookcase. In the early thirties there were few boys in Sheffield who were able to go to sleep looking at a full set of naval encyclopaedias and a set of hymn books. But John’s family had rich connections. His father had been an engine room artificer on the HMS Achilles so ‘he must have got some books somewhere to study or do some studying’.  And then he returned to Hadfield’s works and spent his days grappling

with these huge castings and things like that, yet his hobby was repairing watches. So I’m thinking he had some, he must have had some reading knowledge about things like that.

And then there was the Wesleyan Reformed church on John’s mother’s side. Many of his mother’s relatives had been ministers. The book that John has read ‘more than anything’  is a book he came across, by accident, at a friend’s house: One Hundred Years of the Wesleyan Church, published in 1949, a book that contains an etching of  his great grandfather.

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Few of us have ancestors who made it into history books. Stories of his grandparents and meetings with Methodists from all over the country, gave John a fascination with the way events could be mapped and our personal journeys directed. The one book he would never be without is a ‘road map’.

But, having said … ‘a road map’, there are a lot of maps, or books that can act as maps if you want directions in life. And also which way not to go, you know.

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Hymn books also served this mapping function, with the added advantage that the words remain when precious information has slipped away.

Why I like the hymn books, is because things like that you remember better, because my memory’s very bad now, so I can’t remember things. I remember this one verse in particular: ‘I am not skilled to understand/What God had willed and God has planned/I only know at God’s right hand/Stands one who is my saviour.’ And things like that you remember, and it makes you remember them. This is what I try to do now, to sort of stoke up my memory.

Buildings too ‘stoke up the memory’. The Sheffield church that John attended is now a mosque but when John enters one of Derbyshire’s two remaining Wesleyan Reform churches ‘the memories flood up there’.

Because John has memorised so many hymns, hymn books are not the ones he has at hand.

My favourite book, if you like, is the Derbyshire street guide, because this is Derbyshire, and you can find your way all around Derbyshire by this street guide. It’s the most well-thumbed book I’ve ever had, you know; too soon does it fall to pieces and I have to purchase a new one.

During the war John’s mother worked at The Book Room, the Wesleyan Reform Bookshop in Sheffield. It was to his mother that John feels he owes much of his absorption in history. He feels that his mother would have been a fine minister herself.

John met Meg, his wife, at the Manor Library where Meg had been one of the first librarians. I interviewed them together and he looked guiltily at Meg, as he recalls the use he made of the book case that stood at the foot of his bed when he was a boy. He uses it not only to connect with his relatives but to create a hiding place were they could not enter.

The other thing about the bookcase was one I probably shouldn’t admit to, because I know how Meg is, that I used to create a secret cupboard in here, in amongst the books. And I made a door and pasted the ends of books, the title pages, just to hide it and confuse you. Desecration I suppose it was, of a book.

Access John Y’s transcript and audio here

Delia’s Reading Journey

Delia was born on 5 October 1942 in Stannington, near Sheffield, where she grew up.  She was educated at Stannington County Primary School and, after the 11-plus, at Ecclesfield Grammar. She married and moved to Rotherham, where she had her children.  Later she went to night school to study literature. 

I just used to live in the books, you know, I was always reading, well, as I am now.

Early on in her interview, Delia comments on the impact of books – of fiction – on a child’s imagination.   As she talks, book after book, author after author, come back to her, often not thought of in years but now vivid and clear, like set pieces.

‘About the first book [Delia] can remember’ was a Christmas present about a ‘pig called Toby Twirl, and his friend, I think, was a penguin’.  Delia is right.  In these 1940s and ‘50s picture books by Sheila Hodgetts, Toby was a pig who looked rather like Rupert the Bear and had a penguin friend called Pete.

After Toby Delia learned to read.  She particularly enjoyed books set in the countryside, all handed down from her elder sister:

The Twins at Hillside Farm …  It was lovely, that.  It was about two children, twins, living on a farm in some country place and it would tell things about milk separators and things like that.  And there was one called Ranch on the Plain, which was about cowboys.  And The Girl from Golden [sic].  Oh, and another one that I really liked they called it A Pair of Red Polls, and it was about two red-headed children who lived on a farm.  But I couldn’t tell you any of the authors.  But that was between … I’d say I read those between five and seven years old.

Delia says she ‘used to like these books about children who lived on farms for some reason’.  Perhaps this was because the countryside was all she herself knew and so a lasting connection was made:

No, it was really countrified around Stannington in those days. I mean, not like it is now. It was very much … It seemed miles away from Sheffield, miles.  You had to go on one bus to Malin Bridge, and then catch a tram into Sheffield town centre.  So I think I must have been about five before I even went into the town centre.

And the interest in the countryside stayed with her.  In her early 20s, Delia started reading Thomas Hardy, whom she still loves: ‘I read all his books because I liked the Dorset theme to them.’

As a teenager, Delia read a book called The Secret Shore, by Lillie Le Pla.  Why she remembers this so well she doesn’t say, but 60 years later she can describe it in detail.  The images or characters in some books simply take up permanent residence.

Oh, and I remember reading one by a lady called Lillie Le Pla and it was called The Secret Shore and I think it was probably about the Channel Islands, which is somewhere that I love now.  I remember reading that one, it just came to me, it had a blue cloth back.  And it was about some … It was about a girl who would … I’m not sure if her dad had died, but they lived in this house and she found this tunnel through the cliff and there was a gate in it.  And that led up to this man’s house, and she used to go straight on and it led down to the secret shore.  And I remember this man, I think he must’ve been some connection of her mother’s because he bought her a lovely watch for her birthday.  I just remembered.  And then I think in the end there was a happy ending where they got married, where he married her mother.  I can’t remember all the circumstances, but it was about this shore that she used to go down to and be on her own and find shells and things, you know.

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In her later teens, in the early 1960s, Delia was working her way through popular authors like Elizabeth Goudge, Anya Seton and Agatha Christie.

Anya Seton, it was Katherine, she wrote.  Yes.  I remember reading that and The Herb of Grace, Elizabeth Goudge.  And Agatha Christie of course, I used to read all the detective books.  I used to love detective books.

The mention of Anya Seton sparks something:

… Dragonwyck, that was another Anya Seton one.  Have you heard of that one?  It was a film as well, an old film.  Foxfire, that was another one.  And My Theodosia, that was another one.  Yes.

Now that she was older, Delia started getting her books from the Central Library in Sheffield, going there with a friend after work.  It was amazing, she agrees, to have that much choice after small school libraries and the like, and so she started with the familiar.

I made for the authors that I knew. I started with Elizabeth Goudge and Anya Seton in the school library and I sort of went for those books again when I went to the main library.  And then with Agatha Christie as well, they’d always got the latest one.  And I can remember one that I never read but was advertised in Sheffield Library.  It was Frank Yerby – The Old Gods Laugh.  And I used to see it advertised on the counter and, you know, I never borrowed that book and I still don’t know what it was about.

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Asked about Frank Yerby, Delia admits she knows nothing about him.  But the image of his book  – Sheffield Libraries always did lots of displays – has for some reason stayed with her, buried deep in her memory, and has been retrieved during the interview.  ‘Came back to me when I was talking to you, you know, about Sheffield Library. I just remember that one.’  For the record, Frank Yerby (1916-1991) was the first African-American writer to become a millionaire and the first to have a book, The Foxes of Harrow, made into a movie.  Here is a review of The Old Gods Laugh, which is not encouraging.  Perhaps it is best that Delia never read it.

A little later, reading came to mean respite, with Delia borrowing books from the library in Rotherham where she now lived:

No, I’ve never dropped off reading because in 1963 I got married and immediately became pregnant with my first child and books were a wonderful escape from housework and crying babies.

The urge to read became an urge to study.  When she had had all her children, Delia ‘went to night school for English Literature’ and has now read widely among classics and older novels.  ‘Yes, I’ve read most of those classic ones.’  She readily lists: Charles Dickens (‘I liked David Copperfield’), Mrs Henry Wood (‘Victorian melodrama-type thing’), Tolstoy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Scott Fitzgerald, Mrs Gaskell, Evelyn Waugh (‘Oh, Evelyn Waugh, I love those’), Iris Murdoch (‘I can’t get on with [her]’), Gustave Flaubert, Anthony Trollope, Arnold Bennett, the Brontës (‘I liked Jane Eyre’) and Jane Austen.

But – another impression – school almost destroyed Jane Austen for Delia (as it has other authors for other people).

Pride and Prejudice we had to do at school … We did it for O level.  And, uh, the way you do it at school, you’re bored to tears by it, absolutely bored to tears by it. … Yes, we had to go back and forth over it and I got fed up with it.  But I’ve read it since and enjoyed it.  I’ve read all the others as well.

Pride and Prejudice: Mr Collins proposes

Pride and Prejudice: Mr Collins proposes

At one point in the interview, Delia is asked:

‘Were you what they describe as a bookworm?  Did you immediately take to it?’

‘Oh yes, yes,’ she replies, ‘I was one of the first in the class to do what they called silent reading.  So once I’d mastered silent reading, I just never stopped.’