Mangan - Bookworm a memoir of childhood reading

When Lucy Mangan was little, she was whisked away to Narnia and Kirrin Island and Wonderland. She ventured down rabbit holes and womble burrows, into midnight gardens and chocolate factories. She wandered the countryside with Milly-Molly-Mandy, and played by the tracks with the Railway Children. With Charlottes Web she discovered Death, and with Judy Blume it was Boys. No wonder she only left the house for her weekly trip to the library or to spend her pocket money on amassing her own at home.

In Bookworm, Lucy revisits her childhood reading with wit, love and gratitude. She relives our best-beloved books, their extraordinary creators, and looks at the thousand subtle ways they shape our lives. She also disinters a few forgotten treasures to inspire the next generation of bookworms and set them on their way.

Lucy brings the favourite characters of our collective childhoods back to life prompting endless re-readings, rediscoveries, and, inevitably, fierce debate and brilliantly uses them to tell her own story, that of a born, and unrepentant, bookworm.

Lucy Mangan is a columnist for Stylist magazine and a features writer and reviewer for the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and many other publications. She broadcasts frequently on radio and occasionally on television, and is the author of My Family and Other Disasters, The Reluctant Bride, Hopscotch & Handbags and Inside Charlies Chocolate Factory.

Hopscotch & Handbags: The Truth about Being a Girl

My Family and Other Disasters

The Reluctant Bride: One Womans Journey
(Kicking and Screaming) Down the Aisle

For Alexander, whom I love more than books

People say that life is the thing but I prefer reading. (American essayist and entirely correct person Logan Pearsall Smith.)

I STILL HAVE all my childhood books. In fact, I have spent some of my happiest hours in recent months arranging them on the bespoke bookcases I had built under the sloping ceiling of my study for their ease and comfort. I may no longer imagine them, as I did thirty years ago, whispering companionably together at night when I have gone to bed, but I love them still. They made me who I am.

Pallid, says my sister, peering over my shoulder as I type this. Bespectacled. Friendless. Which is also true. And yet, who needed flesh-and-blood friends when I had Jo March, Charlotte, Wilbur and everyone at Malory Towers at my beck and call?

Remember hiding a book on your lap to get yourself through breakfast? Remember getting hit on the head by footballs in the playground because a game had sprung up around you while you were off in Cair Paravel? Remember taking yourself off to the furthest corner of the furthest sofa in the furthest room of the house with a stack of Enid Blytons and praying that everyone would forget about you till bedtime? Come bedtime, do you remember waiting four nanoseconds after the door closed before whipping out your torch and carrying on where parental stricture had required you leave off until tomorrow? Was your first crush on Dickon instead of Johnny Depp? Do you still get the urge to tap the back of a wardrobe if you find yourself alone in a strange bedroom, or keep half an ear out at midnight for the sound of Hatty in the garden?

If so, this is the book for you. But then, most books are. You are, like me, a bookworm. Little more needs to be said, apart from: I hope you enjoy this memoir of my own childhood reading and that it brings back happy memories of your own. It is a look back at the books I loved needed, depended on as a child. Ive tried to contextualise them, give their backgrounds (why, for example, was The Family from One End Street considered shocking by some when it first appeared? Who was the first author to use a first-person narrative in a childrens book?); potted biographies of their authors (which hugely successful female childrens writer whose name was not J. K. Rowling began writing only because she was desperate for money? What did E. B. Whites colleagues at the hallowed New Yorker think of him producing, of all things, a childrens book about a spider and a pig?); and a sense of where they come in the history of childrens literature. But this is a personal account of the classics and not-so-classics that shaped my world and thoughts, and so necessarily incomplete. I read omnivorously but not well and certainly without a thought for posterity. I read because I loved it. I read wherever I could, whenever I could, for as long as I could. At birthday parties not least my own I would stealthily retreat as soon as the games began, to the most hidden corner of whatever house I was in, gathering any available volumes on the way and reading furiously through them until a hateful adult found me and demanded my return or, if I was lucky, told me it was home time. In the summer holidays, I could read literally from dawn till dusk, unaware of anything until forcibly recalled to real life.

Those were the days, my friends. Those were the days. Do we ever manage again to commit ourselves as wholeheartedly and unselfconsciously as we do to the books we read when young? I doubt it. I have great hopes for retirement but for the moment, as an adult of working age and a mother of a five-year-old, life is unfortunately too much with me to allow such gorgeous, uninterrupted stretches of immersion in a book.

But let us relive, for the next few chapters at least, a little of those glorious days when reading was the thing and life was only a minor inconvenience.

I SPENT MOST of my early years aged one to three, say being trodden on.

It was your own fault, my mother explains. You were too quiet. You used to stand by my feet, not making a sound while I was washing up or doing the ironing, so Id forget you were there. What toddler does that? So Id step back and step on you. And you still, she adds accusingly, didnt make a sound.

The same tone of mingled confusion and denunciation attends her telling of another story, of the day she put me in the baby bouncer she had bought (a sort of nappy-shaped harness attached to elastic cords that you hang from a door frame) and you just hung there. You didnt even TRY to bounce. Just hung there! What kind of baby does THAT?

I think the explanation lies in the fact that I wasnt really a baby. I was a bookworm. For the true bookworm, life doesnt really begin until you get hold of your first book. Until then well, youre just waiting, really. You dont even know for what, at that stage if you did, you would be making more noise about it and be less covered in court-shoe-shaped bruises. But its books.

My parents, I should say now, are northern. And Catholic. They came down south in the late 1960s to look for work. My dad, to the bafflement of his upper-working-class family, had wanted to work in the theatre since he were knee-high to the family whippet. Or ferret. I forget. Once the most pressing of his parents many attendant anxieties upon this fact were relieved by his acquisition of a wife, they did all they could to help him realise his dream, eventually waving him, a bottle of dandelion and burdock and a bagful of clean underpants off at Preston station to start a new life as a stage manager at the newly formed National Theatre in That There London. Mum, a recently qualified doctor, went with him. Mainly to make sure he got off at the right stop.