Cathy Rentzenbrink - Dear Reader

For Matthew Jan Rentzenbrink
A book of your own

Weve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterleys Lover

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humour, and some style.

Maya Angelou

I m lying on the floor of my new house in Cornwall surrounded by boxes. Im supposed to be unpacking, but my back hurts and Ive remembered some advice I was once given: to lie flat on the floor with my knees bent and to put a book under my head. The book is a big blue hardback that contains all four of Daphne du Mauriers Cornish novels. Rebecca is my favourite. I think about the story; the timid girl whose name we never get to know, who is working as a companion to a demanding woman in the South of France when she meets and marries newly widowed Max de Winter. He is twice her age and breathes experience and wealth. She goes back with him to Manderley, his beautiful house by the sea, where she walks among the azaleas in her garden and frets about how inadequate she is compared to Maxs dead wife Rebecca. Like me, the girl is a bit of a scruff. She worries about not having the right clothes and that her hair is a mess. We also have nail-biting in common. I hold my hands up and look at them. The skin around both my thumbs is red raw.

How many times have I read Rebecca? Ten, twenty? I dont remember the first time but I will have been younger than the girl then, and now I am older than Max de Winter himself. I am feeling my years today; tired and worn out from the stress of moving. It is the right thing, to come back to Cornwall, to be close to my parents. I feel the lure of nature, the desire to exchange sitting in traffic for walking by the sea. I want to have a garden and spend time cultivating it.

But so far all Ive done in between emptying boxes is stare at my phone, watching the ongoing soap opera of politics. If I were reading a novel, I might find it enjoyable, though unrealistic. It would be funny, if it were a satire. It does me no good, I know, to be too close to this absurdity, to be continually confronted with evidence of the folly and vanity of my fellow humans. I need to find a way through, to stop spinning myself out over things I cant control.

And as I lie there, surrounded by boxes, looking up at the half-filled shelves, at the books that have followed me from place to place, I find my answer. I will be my own doctor and prescribe the best medicine: a course of rereading. I will make piles of my most treasured books and read through them, taking comfort not only in each book itself but also in the reassuring knowledge that there are many more to come. Something shifts in my body. I feel better already, just at the thought of turning off my phone and spending my evenings curled up with a good book. This is what I have always done. When the bite of real life is too brutal, I retreat into made-up worlds and tread well-worn paths. I dont crave the new when I feel like this, but look for solace in the familiar. It is as though in re-encountering my most-loved fictional characters, I can also reconnect with my previous selves and come out feeling less fragmented. Reading built me and always has the power to put me back together again.

I roll over to one side and pull myself up. Where shall I begin? I pick up the big blue hardback as I mull over my options. I feel Rebecca call to me with the promise of glamour and mystery, but then a slim volume on the top shelf catches my eye.

My initial attempts at shelving have been chronological; Ive been organizing my books according to the age I was when I first read them. Ill do that. Ill start at the very beginning. I reach up and my journey begins.

L ast night I dreamt I went to Narnia again. I stood under the lamppost, felt the snow crunch under my feet, and shivered despite the warmth of my fur coat. I didnt know if I had arrived in happy or dark times. Was this an ordinary winter or the endless reign of the White Witch? Would I be brave enough for the challenges ahead? Or would I succumb to the lure of enchanted Turkish delight? I dont know what age I was in the dream, if I was the woman I am now or the girl who stepped into the wardrobe when she was a child. Ive been dreaming of Narnia almost all my life.

Where did it begin? Reading has always been a great source of comfort, knowledge, pleasure and joy. It is the most central aspect of my identity; the truest thing I could say about myself is, I am a reader. Growing up, I often preferred reading to engaging with real life. Lost and sad in my late twenties, I found consolation when I got a job in a bookshop. When I briefly dallied with internet dating I described myself as Amiable Bookworm. Pregnant with my son, Matt, I patted my bump and dreamed of the books we would read together. The first thing I do in any new place is look for the bookshop and the library. When I make a friend, I wonder what sits on their shelves.

My granny gave me my first book when I was a few months old. The pages were made of cloth and it was about the seaside. My mother tells me I used to gum on it for hours, staring at the letters as though I knew that words were going to be important to me. I was alert around books; Mum couldnt read me to sleep, because I would get increasingly excited as the story went on. Reading woke me up rather than calmed me down.

I dont remember learning to read. It feels like something that happened by magic rather than a skill that I had to acquire. What shall I do with this little girl? asked my fairy godmother as she leaned over my carrycot. I know! I will make her a reader. And so she waved her wand and sealed my fate, and gave me a gift that has brightened my days, expanded my horizons, and kept me company through the darkest hours.

The first stories I remember were not in books but sung to me by my dad. He was an orphan who had run away to sea from Ireland when he was fifteen. He met my mother when his ship docked into Falmouth three years later. They looked at each other across Custom House Quay and that was that. Four years later I arrived, and then my brother, Matty. Dad took work on dry land so we could be together, and we lived in a caravan so we could follow him around the country as he did various dirty jobs that involved construction and drilling. It was a time before seatbelts and radios in cars, so Matty and I roamed free and unbuckled on the back seat of the Land Rover as Dad sang about brave Irish rebels and wanderers. The men in the songs were always on the move, often working hard and being betrayed by women. Sometimes they were fighting for Ireland and being badly treated by the British. I used to beg for more and loved to sing along.

When we were nearing school age, Dad became a tin miner so we could stay in the same place. We went back to Cornwall and lived in a bungalow in Lanner at the top of a hill. Mum was doing an Open University degree. Shed tell Matty and I that if we let her study for an hour she would read us a chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The time passed so slowly as we waited to be transported to Narnia.

Once there were four children called Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy who are evacuated from London during the Blitz, to live with an old professor in a mysterious house that has secrets even he knows nothing about. One rainy day, exploring, Lucy peers into a big wardrobe full of fur coats. She walks in. Theres another rail of coats. This wardrobe is enormous, she thinks, as something crunches under her feet. Mothballs? No, its snow! There are trees and a lamppost. Lucy meets a faun called Mr Tumnus who has the legs of a goat but is shaped like a man from the waist up. When Lucy explains how she got there, Mr Tumnus thinks she has come from the bright city of War Drobe in the far land of Spare Oom, and says that if he had only worked harder at geography when he was a little faun he would know about those strange countries. Lucy has found her way to Narnia, and so begin the adventures that will see her, Peter, Susan and Edmund join Aslan the lion to triumph over the White Witch and bring spring and happiness back to these frozen lands.