Jean Compton’s Reading Journey

Here is a reading journey from local artist Jean Compton, who is one of the Reading Sheffield team.

Jean was born in London in 1948. She spent her childhood in Suffolk, where her family moved when she was a year old. Jean went to West Suffolk County Grammar School for Girls, studying for O levels and A levels. Moving to Sheffield in 1971, she studied at Scawsby College of Education, Doncaster, for her Teaching Certificate in Education, and then at Sheffield University for a B Ed in art and education. After teaching both in schools and adult education for eight years, Jean left Sheffield for a community arts job in Telford. She worked in community arts and traveller education until retirement when she returned to Sheffield in 2016 and joined Reading Sheffield.

I can’t really remember what I read when I was learning to read, but I had a lovely little peep-show book of the story of Ali-Baba and the Forty Thieves. There are no words and the illustrations are by Ionicus. I have the book today, more or less intact though a bit scrawled on.

I could read by the time I went to school. I was lucky that my parents were both readers and we had a house full of books. My father often made up stories, mainly tales of his childhood embroidered to add drama and excitement but basically true. Sometimes he took us to visit a friend of his, Edmund Cooper, a science fiction writer, who also made up stories for us. We crowded around him, asking for a story, in some shadowy corner of the room where he held us captivated and sometimes a little shivery from the eerie nature of the tale.

I read many folk-tales and fairy-tales including some with wonderful illustrations by Arthur Rackham. The Children’s Treasury of Great Stories, from Daily Express Publications, was given to me around 1958 when I was ten, and the previous owner had been given it in 1933. Another favourite was the Arabian Nights published in 1913 by A & C Black Ltd. It has the most beautiful illustrations by Charles Folkard, which I remember staring at over and over again.

As time went on I read Enid Blyton, much to my father’s disgust, and all Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series. I loved these as a child, but when I read them later to my own children and realised the incredible danger the children got into, I found it hard to read them aloud for a choking lump in my throat. I read Louisa M Alcott’s Little Women series, identifying strongly with Jo, and enjoyed C S Lewis’ Narnia books.

Detail from Coot Club cover in Swallows and Amazons book series (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Swallows_and_Amazons_01.png )

My younger sister Lizzie and I went through a phase of reading the Bible aloud when we were in bed and supposed to be going to sleep. We weren’t doing it for religious reasons or to be sacrilegious: we were fascinated by the sound and read out random texts and lists of names and ‘who begat whom’. We took it in turns and generally ended up laughing hysterically.

We also began pretending that we were George and Neville, two Suffolk farmers. It began as a sort of impromptu storytelling, which we later wrote down as individual scenes, such as reports on a day on the farm. Our father later recorded us. We made a good attempt at imitating the local Suffolk accent, which we didn’t really acquire ourselves, as the children of parents who kept their Scottish accents until the end of their lives, in spite of living in Suffolk for over 60 years.

I was fascinated by Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. As an adult I came across The Stone Room which, being quite claustrophobic, I found difficult. However, I persisted and it was worth it.

I loved to identify with the animals in Charles G D Roberts’ stories. I immersed myself in the wonderfully detailed descriptions of the landscapes in which these animals survived. Kings In Exile was one of my favourites, alongside Ernest Thompson Seton’s stories of wild animals in their natural habitat.

When I was about 11, I was given The Romany Rye by George Borrow about his encounters with the Romany people. It was published in 1857 and, reading it in 1959, the language seemed to me old-fashioned yet the lively style and fascinating content held me spellbound. I was thoroughly intrigued and went on to work as a traveller liaison teacher with gypsy traveller families for some years.

We took four comics at home, the Eagle, the Girl, the Swift and the Robin. We were three girls and one boy so I guess it was one each but in practice we all read them all.  Later on we had Look and Learn and the Elizabethan which I devoured, especially all the reproductions of famous paintings in Look and Learn. I do remember wet afternoons at the seaside with our friends, in a coastguard cottage they were renting for the summer. We would dive on a big pile of Beanos and lie around blissfully reading like crazy while the rain sheeted down.

My primary school was not well supplied with interesting books. A large box of books was delivered regularly, but I quickly grew out of most of them, as I was reading more advanced language at home. The archive section of the lending service also sent artefacts, which I loved especially when they were used for our art lessons. Once at the County Grammar School, a new world opened up, with a lot more choice in the school library. I was now based in the small market town of Bury St Edmunds, where I soon joined the public library and enjoyed the quiet atmosphere for studying, and the wider choice of books. I also came into contact with the mobile library which came once a fortnight to our village. They did not carry a huge stock, but for my grandfather who lived with us it was a lifeline. He went to choose his books initially, but then as he got older he would ask one of us to go for him. ‘But what do you like to read?’ I would ask. The answer was always ‘Oh just get me a good western!’

Illustration by Hablot Knight Browne from Nicholas Nickleby

As life went on, I usually had a book on the go. Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby made me weep and John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga gave me an insight into the Victorian and Edwardian upper middle-class.

I developed an interest in poetry early on, fostered by my father who had quite a collection of poetry and used to read Gerard Manley Hopkins to us, among others. I read any poetry I could find and moved from Andrew Marvell to Brian Patten to e e cummings to Lorca without any difficulty.  Succinct lines can offer such illumination. Now I am enjoying Alice Oswald, Pablo Neruda, Eleanor Brown, Shamshad Khan and Seni Seniveratne.

While training as a teacher, I read various writers of the deschooling movement. I benefited from the ideas of Everett Reimer, Paul Goodman, Neil Postman, Charles Weingartner and Ivan Illich. I also found great rapport with the ideas of A S Neill, John Holt and especially Robert McKenzie in his A Question of Living. They all believed that a teacher should keep the idea of a child as an equal human being at the forefront of any teaching practice.

In between all the poetry and education books I travelled with Tolkien on his great allegorical journeys against evil. I read Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear series, which improved my sense of historical chronology enormously.

My eyes were opened by reading Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept – so powerfully expressed and emotional.

I delved into the writings of John Berger, which resonated with my politics and interest in art. Although other writers have since explored these ideas further, I learned to look at photography anew and saw it could only tell one part of any story.

In my childhood, our front garden had large currant bushes down the centre and a mat of grass under them. In the summer my favourite reading place was a blanket under the bushes, with the dappled light filtering through a ceiling of green, quiet, private and alone. My mother left me alone and free from boring tasks. I am still grateful for that and remember once telling her that one of my children did nothing but read. Her words come back frequently. ‘Let her read while she can. It will be harder to find the time later.’

Malcolm Mercer’s Reading Journey

Born in 1925, Malcolm Mercer has lived most of his life in and around the Manor estate in Sheffield, and left Pipworth Road School in 1939. After seven years in the retail trade, disrupted by three years in the Royal Naval Patrol Service – Minesweeping (1943-1946), he trained as a teacher at Sheffield Training College and taught in several Sheffield schools before being appointed Head of Parson Cross School (1968-1983). He gained a Diploma in education management at Sheffield Polytechnic in 1971 and an MA in education at Sheffield University in 1979. He contributed to two of the major histories of Sheffield city and is the author of The School at Parson Crosse 1630-1980 (1980), Schooling the Poorer Child (1996) and A Portrait of the Manor in the 1930s (2002).

Unlike his wife Jean, whom we also interviewed, Malcolm did not pass the 11+, He left school at 14 to become a shop assistant. However that never prevented him doing what he wanted to do and as a teacher and historian he has written himself into the history of Sheffield, its schools and the community to which he still belongs, the areas of Manor and Park.

Malcolm has always read and he came from a family where there were books about.

I never saw father read but I’ve still got a number of his books. He was a newspaper man and though I never saw him read he’d bought a lot of books when he was younger including Shakespeare and I’ve got them now, and Southey and poetry by Goldsmith. So yes, he must have read.  My mother read Blackmore’s Lorna Doone and I’ve still got her copy and I can remember her reading Lorna Doone. So I think they must have read when I’d been put to bed.

Malcolm’s life was rich. He was a Boy Scout, and he has always been an active member of the church community at St Swithun’s on the Manor. He read constantly, like Jean his main source of books being Park Library. There were two tuppenny libraries on the Manor in the ’30s but the thrilling tales provided by Park Library seemed to satisfy the fourteen year-old’s need for adventure when he returned from working in a shop during the early 1940s.

The one I think that struck me most was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. But, I mean, I read quite a great deal, The Scouts of the Baghdad Patrol by Lieutenant Brereton, Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan. The Last of the Mohicans by Fennimore Cooper, The Three Musketeers and then I read Dumas: Twenty Years After, The Man in the Iron Mask, Count of Monte Cristo, Vicomte de Bragelonne, Louise de la Vallière, The Queen’s Necklace, Chicot the Jester and The Forty-Five Guardsmen, all by Alexandre Dumas and of course Conan Doyle – The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Hound of the Baskervilles, Adventures of Gerard.

A lot of the stories that he loved were connected with nature: the Romany stories on children’s radio. ‘A Summer Road to Wales, I‘ve got a copy upstairs. I read that about three times.’

He also describes being ‘enthralled’ by a geography series on BBC radio for schools, which inspired an interest in ‘South America and the Amazon and the history of Aztecs and the Incas and I read books that were linked to that.’ The survival skills of Manga, a boy living in the Amazon, appealed to the Boy Scout as he prepared for his Camp Craft badge.

Malcolm’s boy scouting had practical consequences. His knowledge of signalling meant that in 1943 he was posted to serve on a minesweeper for the duration of the war. There were few books or readers on the minesweeper but Malcolm had taken Palgrave’s Golden Treasury to sea with him.

I had it throughout the war until … we were anchored, we were sweeping first in the Bristol Channel in order to make it safe for ships to cross from Cardiff and Swansea over to North Devon and we swept from there and we were anchored on one occasion and we drifted and the bottle of ink that I had went all over the pages of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, the copy that I had so that was the end. I’ve got another copy but it’s not the same. But that was the only book. I didn’t have a Bible although I was a churchman.

After the war, Malcolm returned to Park Library where he found his favourite authors, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens. Though Malcolm began by reading such novels as The Tale of Two Cities for their stirring qualities, he was soon, as he began to think about the education and care of children in Britain’s cities, reading novels as social history. ‘Oliver Twist for instance, workhouse children, and I compared it because I’ve researched a fair amount about the Sheffield Workhouse’.

Malcolm still has in his possession a little notebook in which he listed all the books he read during the war years 1941 and 1942. Each letter of the alphabet has two pages, and just a look at the page for B shows how widely Malcolm’s curiosity ranged.

Since Jean and Malcolm got married, the books they bought have been mostly for Malcolm’s work as a teacher and historian of Sheffield’s schools. Despite their regular book-borrowing habits, Jean observes that ‘in fact this house is weighed down with books, if I took you round to see them. In fact people ring up and ask Malcolm something and he says “I’ll ring you back” and then he disappears.’

You can read Malcolm’s and Jean’s interview here