Tag Archives: Tale of Two Cities

Josie Hall’s Reading Journey

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Born in 1942 Josie remembers her home as a place full of curiosity and knowledge about the world, but no books. ‘Because there couldn’t be. It was just after the war, and working class people, they just didn’t have books in the house. I don’t remember anybody, ever, reading to me.’

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After the war Josie’s father returned home from two years in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp and worked as a crane driver in the steel works. He had passed his 11+ and went to the grammar school ‘but he had to be fetched out because he was the eldest of six and he had to go to work … he was really cheated.’  A remarkably able man who never found a job to match his talents, he brought what reading matter he could into the house: Reader’s Digest magazines, and then, one day ‘a pile of second-hand comics, manna from heaven; I just used to fall on them. And it wasn’t particularly because it was the comics. It was the written word, I suppose.’

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The shelves of books surrounding Josie today are the legacy of her father’s encouragement of her reading and her own natural curiosity. She is open to every kind of book, fact and fiction.  The written word helped her get to know her husband because soon after she married at 18, he too was sent to the Far East, one of the last men to do their National Service. She remembers writing to him every day and receiving his letters as often as he could find an opportunity to post them.

The notebooks that record Josie’s reading show a great surge of reading in her early twenties, then in 1965, after her son was born, nothing. So when the twin girls came along in 1967 she said ‘they’re not doing that to me again’ and determined to keep reading which she did, as her notebook testifies.

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Diana Gabaldon books, Tess of the D’Urbeyvilles, biographies of Charles II and Martin Luther, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Doctor Zhivago, Tale of Two Cities, Forever Amber, Catherine Cookson, Howard’s End, Crime and Punishment, Dennis Wheatley’s science fiction, Gone with the Wind, George Orwell, Michael Bentine ‘oh and Utopia’s in there, Thomas More. I don’t know how I got my hands on all these.’

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She reflects that many were borrowed from Attercliffe library. A few were given as Christmas presents and Sunday School prizes.  Later Josie also bought paperbacks from second-hand stalls, newsagents and booksellers: they are all listed in her compendious notebooks. Only detective novels and horror fail to figure.

One book she particularly goes back to: Jane Eyre. ‘I can see Jane sat in the window seat hiding from her cousin, reading the book and I presume maybe I was a bit like that … hiding away, reading a book. Not wanting anybody to find you.’ This absorption in what she reads is sometimes overwhelming. She had to keep putting down Black Diamonds because she was so upset. ‘It took so much out of you.’ And  ‘Lady of Hey: that one spoilt a holiday for me.’ She left her companions playing Bingo downstairs in the hotel lounge and didn’t come down again till the next morning. Fortunately her husband shared her addiction so they could be anti-social together.

Josie has only recently realised that she doesn’t have to read all the books she is given. People just give her their books when they have finished with them, ‘piles and piles. So nowadays if anyone gives me a ton of Mills and Boon I just shove them to the Salvation Army. I don’t have to read them.’ This ability to leave a book unread has obviously been dearly bought. Josie’s instinct is to treasure every book. She was horrified to learn that someone she knew had burned her books when they moved house. ‘You do not burn books.’ So even ‘silly Mills and Boon’ would not be consigned to the flames.

When the children were older she did A levels and then a degree. For a while the scope of her reading narrowed so that she could focus on her studies. But now she has returned to her omnivorous habits and has a different book on the go in every room in the house.

‘Where other people have to have a cigarette, I have to have a book.’

Reading Journey by Mary Grover

Access Josie’s transcript and audio here.

 

Noel’s Reading Journey

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By Mary Grover

 

Born in that catastrophic year, 1939, Noel’s imagination was fired by the factual: Meccano magazines and stamp albums. Reading was a way of acquiring knowledge, especially historical knowledge.

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I’ve always said oh, to hell with the computer, my knowledge came from reading, listening to the radio and collecting stamps. The history of stamps has geography, history and everything else.

Noel remembers spending his pocket money on stamps or Aeroplane and Flight magazines stamps rather than comics. He can’t remember being read to but explored Biggles and Gimlet when he became an independent reader. Both by W E. Johns, the Gimlet commando books were perhaps even more full of derring-do than the chronicles of the famous aviator.

But his mother was the greatest influence on the young boy’s reading. She was a Sheffield town councillor, a Conservative. It was her engagement in politics that led him to read the newspapers, political periodicals and history books often found in Hillsborough Library. Though he did well in literature at grammar school it was history that Noel loved.

I met Jock Hamilton, a dour Scot, he was a qualified barrister by his own efforts, but he taught history, he made history live.  He didn’t just give you the facts, but what he did with it, he analysed the facts, and he made history come alive to me.

Noel’s school boy reading reflects that interest: Tale of Two Cities, Alexannder Dumas’ Marguerite de Valois and Kidnapped and unsurprisingly a history play, Richard II. More surprisingly perhaps, given the conservative commitments he shared with his mother, the history book that still grips his imagination is Eric Hobsbawn’s The Age of Revolution.

The Latin language made a great impression on Noel and upon the way he talked. Robert Bailey, the Latin master said to Noel, in his first year at High Storrs Grammar School,

‘The trouble with you, lad, is you’ve got to learn to speak English properly and also get your grammar correct, verb, subject, object.’

But there was the literature as well: ‘Sallust’s Cataline, which was marvellous – that made history live again. Oh, I read, yes, Livy going over the Alps’.  In the 1950s Noel’s time in the National Service led him to discover a book, D J Holland’s The Dead, the Dying and the Damned which contained a fictionalised portrait of one of the soldiers Noel worked with in Aden. This period provoked an interest in thrillers with connections to political events – some of Fleming’s novels, and Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal.

Also remembered, and in a way treasured, was a book that Noel could never bring himself to finish.

A lady who lived in one of the cottages in the block where my grandmother was living gave me a very old edition of Dombey and Son, I mean old.  I don’t think it was a first edition.  And I got through, I think, the first chapter.

Because it was so old Noel held on to it and it only recently left the house. It joins the ranks of books that our readers treasured but did not read, books that find a place in the bookcase for all sorts of reasons: its giver, an inscription, its antiquity or because there was a story attached to rather than contained within it.

Access Noel’s transcript and audio here