Ken’s reading journey

Posted on August 16, 2017 by Val Hewson

By Mary Grover

Husband and wife Ken and Kath were interviewed together for Reading Sheffield. Their marriage includes a strong ‘reading partnership’, based on their shared political and local interests. We will post Kath’s reading journey after this.

Ken was born on 27 April 1924. For the first 20 years of his life he lived in Fir Vale, Sheffield, in a house where he was surrounded by ‘tons of books’. ‘Everybody in the family read.’ Ken got books as presents and his older sister handed down her favourites – some of them novels his mother and father would not have approved, ‘Istanbul Train and all those stories’.

And of course I read all the boys’ books that you would have. You know, tuppenny bloods and all that sort of thing, school stories and that, which were really funny. By today’s standards rather silly, I expect, but I used to think they were marvellous.

Though Ken didn’t think much of the radio programmes in the Thirties, he did enjoy the books read on Children’s Hour, like Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, and all are still with him. Down at Fir Vale shops was a tuppenny library, a rich source of popular books, Ken’s favourites being humorous books and The Saint books by Leslie Charteris.

And then, when he was about ten, a new municipal library opened in Firth Park. Ken’s main aim on his first visit was to get the thickest book possible because you were, in 1934, only able to borrow one book a week. So his first choice was The Great Aeroplane Mystery by Percy F Westerman[i]. ‘Absolute rubbish, of course,’ but thick.

The old Firth Park Library building today

It was when Ken gained a place at the Catholic grammar school, De La Salle, that his reading tastes expanded to include a whole range of authors that were new to him.

An English master who was a brilliant man put me onto all sorts of good books. And he was a very opinionated bloke. He used to think that all the best writers were people like Lytton Strachey and all that lot. You know – the Bloomsbury outfit and all those people.

We used to have an English room and there used to be favourite things pinned up on the wall. You know, things like The Land and all those famous poems. Things I’ve never forgotten. I mean all those dreadful poems you had to memorise like The Ancient Mariner and ‘Young Lochinvar has come out of the west / Through all the wide borders his steed was the best’. You know, that sort of stuff and all the classic things – Sohrab and Rustum and all those sorts of things. But it stamps what you’re going to do if you listen. And he was a very unusual person. I used to hang on his every word really, I expect. He never failed to be right in what he’d said. Well, I think so. I thought he was bang on the nail with everything.

During his school days Ken became a socialist, reading ‘loads and loads of pamphlets, political pamphlets. They were all the rage then’.

The outbreak of war led to the closure of Ken’s grammar school and the end to his formal schooling. At 15, he left school to go into ‘the works’, first as an apprentice and then as a draughtsman. But the war meant an increase in Ken’s reading.

During the war that was all you could do, read books, with very little other entertainment. Certainly nothing like the radio or TV as there is now so you were thrown onto books and written material, newspapers.

Towards the end of the war, just turned 20, Ken was lucky enough to marry Kath who shared his taste in books and politics. Kath introduced Ken to Sholokhov’s books, ‘Quiet Flows the Don and all those Russian novels’. ‘And Chinese books, famous Chinese novels,’ adds Kath. These books opened the couple’s eyes to the suffering in ‘Old Russia’ before the Revolution. Ken describes himself ‘ploughing his way through’ Das Kapital. He and Kath became communists and during the Cold War, they took their children to a children’s camp in East Germany. Their experience left them with a deep scepticism about the way East Germany was represented in Western spy stories.

A lot of them are a whole load of rubbish, you know. Weren’t they, Kath? Absolutely. We used to know this girl – East German girl who was a teacher there – and she used to go across the border every night to go and be entertained in West Berlin. They were supposed to be at daggers drawn and everything but it wasn’t like that a bit when we were there, was it? Not a bit. And it makes you wonder just how the news and everything has been manipulated in the past, you know? Shocking, shocking.

However, despite his firm political convictions, Ken describes his reading tastes as catholic: Quiller Couch, P G Wodehouse, Ernest Hemingway, Jane Austen, Just William, Ken has read and enjoyed them all. Indeed, when asked to pick out a favourite book, he chooses one written by the journalist and novelist, Philip Gibbs, who was no socialist.

It was called European Journey. It was set in the 1920s just after the First World War. He’s an artist and a crowd of about six of them toured through France and Germany by car – typical better-off officer-class people. You’ve got to forget all that part of it – because he was a brilliant writer and he writes about Paris and all – really great – just how France is. I love France. He writes about France with real feeling. But it was when he was a comparatively young man. That’s a book I got by sheer chance, just by picking it up. It was old, of course; I’ve still got it upstairs. It’s a lovely book to dip into and just, er, read all these bits and pieces now and again.

As Ken puts it, ‘We never were tied up to one set of things’.

You can find Ken’s full interview here.

[i] Although Percy F Westerman wrote over 150 books, none has the title The Great Aeroplane Mystery. He wrote The Secret Battleplane (1916) and Airship Golden Hind (1920). His son, John F C Westerman, also wrote adventure stories for boys, including A Mystery of the Air (1931). Another adventure writer, Captain Brereton, wrote The Great Aeroplane (1911) and The Great Airship (1914), John Westerman’s book seems the closest in title and date, but there is no way of knowing for certain which book Ken borrowed. The Westermans are discussed here.

Jocelyn’s Reading Journey

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Val Hewson

Jocelyn Wilson was born in Sheffield in 1926. She was educated, in wartime, at boarding school in Kent and was evacuated to Cornwall. In 1948 Jocelyn married and in time had children. In the 1970s and ‘80s she was a social worker.

‘Did your parents ever say, “Don’t waste your time reading a novel”?’ ‘Oh no, never. Nobody ever said that.’

How do we choose books? How do we decide what to read? And how do we judge our choices?

Looking at her interview, you feel that Jocelyn W, who read widely and had excellent recall, was confident in her opinions and happy to defend them. The quality of books, her own and others’ perceptions and the value of reading all lie just beneath the surface of her story.

Jocelyn was born into a comfortable, middle-class family in Sheffield in 1926. Her first books were typical for that background and period – Alice in Wonderland, The Enchanted Forest, Cecily M Barker’s Flower Fairies and other fairy stories. Predictably, they were chosen by her mother and a ‘very dear nanny who was into reading herself’. Later, Jocelyn’s older sister helped her find books too. Nanny and Jocelyn’s parents all read aloud to the children. Jocelyn didn’t say so directly, but her first books seemed to have all the impact any parent could have hoped for: Jocelyn described them as stories ‘that made your imagination race’ and remembered them clearly 80 years later. The Flower Fairies for example, she said, were ‘part of one’s history’.

After this promising start, things went less well. Books were in short supply in Jocelyn’s life. At first this was because her family lived ‘on the fringes’ of Sheffield and ‘it was quite a journey to go anywhere where there were books to be lent’. Then World War II intervened and Jocelyn, by now at boarding school, found herself being evacuated to remote Cornwall.

And I remember after a birthday having a book token and having great difficulty in going to a bookshop in Newquay, Cornwall, to find something to buy. And in the end The Heir of Redclyffe. I can’t remember who wrote it but it was a pretty frantic book, I remember. But there was so little choice. And I think that’s one of the things we forget now ‘cos there are so many books of every kind, good and bad. And then there were very, very few.

This early experience seems to have had a lasting effect. Jocelyn said:

But of course it’s difficult for people nowadays to realise how few books came out and they were rare beasts and you waited for your birthday to get a copy. Now there’s so much; you go to a bookshop and I’m overwhelmed. I can hardly ever choose anything ‘cos there’s too much to choose from and it’s difficult to find what you really want.

Another effect of this shortage was that Jocelyn ended up reading what was available – the books on the family bookshelves – just because they were there. She considered herself lucky. ‘I think people forget now that it was like that. You could be in a situation where you hadn’t anything new to read. It seems incredible now, doesn’t it?’

Jocelyn’s family continued to influence her choices and judgments. Her mother was ‘interested in books. And so there was a good wide variety of classics’. Jocelyn remembered reading, for example, Precious Bane and Mary Webb’s other novels. ‘My mother was very sensible; she never said, ‘Don’t’. She was very good; she was highly intelligent and we valued what she thought.’ (Jocelyn’s father tried too, but was rather less successful: suggestions like G A Henty were rejected as ‘boy’s own stuff’.)

School was the next big influence on Jocelyn, and it was there that her own judgment began to emerge.

… I did a project on keeping a notebook of all the things I’d read … I know that it was criticised by the person who taught English at school, saying, ‘I can’t think why you read all this rubbish when you’re capable of reading something so much better.’ You see, it had gone through the whole range. But that was important in order to learn what was rubbish and what wasn’t.

What was this ‘whole range’ that formed Jocelyn’s taste? Over the years, there were:

classics like Jane Austen (‘she writes with such a deft touch’)
literary fiction, as we might say today, with authors like Marghanita Laski (Little Boy Lost ‘tore everybody’s heart to pieces’) and Rumer Godden (‘very delicate in her writing, sensitive and she touched one’s heart’)
popular, middlebrow authors of the day: Nevil Shute (‘wonderfully good stories’); Daphne du Maurier (‘anything she wrote was grist to the mill’); Queens of Crime like Dorothy L Sayers and adventure writers like John Buchan; Mazo de la Roche (whose Jalna books were the ‘original soap opera’)
‘rubbish’ like ‘Oh Baroness Orczy and that sort of thing, The Scarlet Pimpernel. Oh good old rubbish, that’.

Rubbish was not, however, as clear-cut as it might seem. For one thing, Jocelyn was becoming confident enough to reject other people’s opinions:

Oh yes, but I don’t count [Georgette Heyer] as rubbish … Of course she was a great storyteller, wasn’t she? And of course historically very accurate. There were things to praise about her. Even though the stories were romantic fiction in the very highest level.

And sometimes rubbish could be the thing: ‘And if you’re not feeling very well, rubbish is what you want!’ If it was what you needed, could it be rubbish?

What Jocelyn would not accept was the badly or carelessly written.

I think that now I can only read things that aren’t badly written. Sloppiness is what really gets me; and I think a lot of writers nowadays are very sloppy; they don’t do their research properly.

So Jocelyn developed her approach: reading widely; making her own assessments but open to influence; seeking out high quality but understanding the worth and pleasure in lower quality. This seemed to stand Jocelyn in good stead throughout her life.

… I didn’t read George Eliot until much later on; I came to ‘Middlemarch’ as a grown-up person. It’s a wonderful book, isn’t it? They’re very raw, some of those books by George Eliot.

…I still can read Arthur Ransome books. When I was laid low with a back injury two years ago. the thing I chose to read was Winter Holiday and I loved it and it took me back. It’s well-written and that’s the key, isn’t it?

I [chose Dracula for book group] and the men sort of withdrew in horror. A lot of them wouldn’t read it. It was quite interesting. The women mostly did. But I think it’s a marvelous book. I keep turning the pages to find out what’s next. I can’t believe it … It’s not even particularly well-written; it’s a most ridiculous story. So why are we fascinated with Dracula? I’m jolly glad I read it. [But the men] weren’t going to waste their time reading ‘rubbish’ … I said, ‘I know it’s rubbish.’

by Val Hewson

Read or listen to Jocelyn’s interview in full here.

Shirley Ellins’ Reading Journey

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Mary Grover

One of Shirley’s first memories of books begins at floor level – with the small, wooden bookshelf in the dining room which contained her mother’s library books. There were just 4 or 5 novels, whose titles she spelled out when she had learned to read (before she was 6 in 1942), but whose contents she ignored. These library books ‘came and went’, and Shirley didn’t open them. Much more to her taste was The House at Pooh Corner which she remembers – again from the floor – where she fell, helpless with laughter, from her miniature chair as her mother read to her.

But there are many bookshelves in Shirley’s reading journey. The three shelves of the bookcase in the family living room contained books belonging to both her parents, ‘our personal books’, some of which she read – reference works like Arthur Mee’s Thousand Heroes, biography like Robert Southey’s Life of Nelson, Charles Kingsley’s Water-Babies, her mother’s complete Shakespeare, won from Crookesmoor School for ‘Progress’, and her parents’ tune books from the Methodist church. As she grew older, her own books – given to her by family and friends at birthdays and Christmas – were added to these shelves, for reading was a downstairs activity, not allowed in her bedroom, which was for sleeping – ‘lights off’.

‘Half a recollection of a bookshelf in a classroom’ in Shirley’s junior school reveals The Pigeons of Leyden, a historical novel about the siege of Leiden, a book which inspired her at a very young age to become a history teacher. Then there were trips every Saturday by the ‘ladies of the household’ – Shirley, her mother and grandmother – to Sheffield’s Central Library, where the children’s and adult libraries provided Shirley with shelves of Biggles, Arthur Ransome and John Buchan, and the historical novels of G. K. Henty, D. K. Broster, and the huge output of Baroness Orczy.

At the same time, a whole room of bookshelves gave her pleasure at her secondary school – High Storrs School – where she would go to the school library and ‘sit and read there, a bit for pleasure, before I had to go down to the classroom’. There she read the Greek myths, and pursued an interest in poetry, Kipling in particular. Her taste was shaped by exposure to the school’s set texts, some of which she ‘mercifully seem[s] to have forgotten’, while some, like Paradise Lost, offered her rewards she would have missed had they not been required reading. But also chance played its part in moulding her preferences – catching chicken pox, for example, meant she had the leisure to read ‘the whole of Jane Austen, one after the other, to take my mind off the itching’.

At Bedford College, where Shirley read History, she managed to keep borrowing novels from the library and buying poetry – Donne, Kipling and Betjeman were favourites. And as a teacher of history, she filled her bookshelves with history books, and also history and guidebooks related to the holidays abroad she started to take now she could afford it.

Later, Shirley’s marriage was ‘a marriage of two minds and the marriage of two libraries too when we got together’. So her bookshelves, like those of her parents, continued to tell the story of interests pursued, preferences arrived at, and choices made. And there will be many of her students, in Sheffield and elsewhere, whose own bookshelves now bear the imprint and influence of Shirley’s voracious reading and her generous life as a teacher.

by Loveday Herridge