Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink. The very deep did rot: O Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy sea. About, about, in reel and rout The death-fires danced at night; The water, like a witch’s oils, Burnt green, and blue, and white.

My friend Katy’s post the other day about what children read at school got me to thinking about what I had to read at grammar school.

Well, sort of.

It was more like what I didn’t read.

Because I have always been a slow reader (am I 10% dyslexic?) I never managed to keep up with what we were (supposed to be) reading. If we were given homework of “Read the next chapter of [insert book]” which was supposed to take half an hour, it invariably took me well over an hour — sometimes two — and I still didn’t get all the nuances I was supposed to. So I was always trying to finish reading chapter 3 while the class were discussing chapter 5 (which of course I’d not read).

Add to that a level of terminal boredom with just about everything we read — I just couldn’t see the point of this tedium — and it’s a wonder I managed to pass GCE English Literature at all! Nevertheless I was at the top of the second set for English. I wanted to go into the top set (they did more interesting stuff) but rightly (in retrospect) my teacher said I couldn’t and that I would struggle there.

So what did I have to read?

I know that for ‘O’ level I did:

• CS Forrester, The Gun (about which I remember less than nothing)
• Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
• And some collection of poetry including a load of crappy ballads (Sir Patrick Spens, et al.) which I still hate with a vengeance; Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which I loved; Keats’s The Eve of St Agnes, which I didn’t understand; Masefield’s Cargoes, which is delightful; and I remember not what else.

The top set for English did some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales instead of the CS Forrester. My teacher was right; I would have struggled with this however much I wanted to do it.

Lower down the school we did most of the classics, which I hated without exception. I recall having to read:

• Dickens: Great Expectations, Pickwick Papers and A Christmas Carol
• Hardy: I think Far from the Madding Crowd and probably The Mayor of Casterbridge
• Buchan: The Thirty-Nine Steps
• Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
• Shakespeare: Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice
• And a continual selection of poetry mostly from Palgrave’s godforsaken Golden Treasury which included delights like Hiawatha and Sorab and Rustum (yeuch!).

What else we read I have no clue. It has all been long forgotten, which is probably as well.

Looking back about the only bits I at all enjoyed were Pickwick Papers, the first half of Julius Caesar, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Cargoes.

To this day, with the exception of the above handful, I cannot read any of this stuff and haven’t returned to it. School successfully destroyed all the so-called classics for me permanently. In fact I can, even now, read very little fiction or poetry; what I have read and enjoyed I have found for myself since leaving, and despite, school. I find life-writing and non-fiction much more amenable.

I’m still a very slow reader and have never properly mastered speed-reading, which can be a major handicap.