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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! About, about, in reel and rout |
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.
Something I Like: Fresh Snow
So long as a judge keeps silent his reputation for wisdom and impartiality remains unassailable: but every utterance which he makes in public except in the course of the actual performance of his judicial duties, must necessarily bring him within the focus of criticism. [It would] be inappropriate for the judiciary to be associated with any series of talks or anything which can be fairly interpreted as entertainment.
This week I’ve been reading Richard Wiseman’s 
The moon lives twenty-eight days and this is our month. Each of these days represents something sacred to us: two of the days represent the Great Spirit; two are for Mother Earth; four are for the four winds; one is for the Spotted Eagle; one for the sun; and one for the moon; one is for the Morning Star; and four are for the four ages; seven for our seven great rites; one is for the buffalo; one for the fire; one for the water; one for the rock; and finally, one is for the two-legged people. If you add all these days up you will see that they come to twenty-eight. You should know also that the buffalo has twenty-eight ribs, and that in our war bonnets we usually wear twenty-eight feathers. You see, there is a significance for everything, and these are things that are good for men to know and to remember.
Campbell: That’s exactly it. That’s the significance of the puberty rites. In primal societies, there are teeth knocked out, there are scarifications, there are circumcisions, there are all kinds of things done. So you don’t have your little baby body any more, you’re something else entirely.
We now return to the spring of 1593 and the events leading up to the killing of Christopher Marlowe … with a new understanding of the continuity of secret politics as a factor in his life. He is remembered as a poet … and as a wild young blasphemer in an age of enforced devotion, but he was also a spy … one of hundreds of such men, part of a maverick army of intelligencers and projectors on which the government of the day depended, sometimes out of a genuine need for information, but often in ways that relate more to political expediency, to courtly in-fighting, to police-state repression.
Even the cats were different, and Aubrey could recall when ‘the common English Catt was white with some blewish piednesse sc gallipot-blew, the race or breed of them are now almost lost’ … Aubrey says that Archbishop Laud had been ‘a great lover of Catts. He was presented with some Cypruss-catts, our Tabby-catts, which were sold at first for 5li a piece. This was about 1637 or 1638’. Tabbies are still called ‘cyprus cats’ in Norfolk.