Following on from my post of earlier, talking at lunch with Noreen has helped recall a few more things I read at school.

As plays we read Pygmalion and I think Toad of Toad Hall .

The poetry selections also included Alfred Noyes’ The Highwayman, Browning’s How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, Kipling’s A Smuggler’s Song and William Cowper’s The Diverting History of John Gilpin. Doubtless Wordsworth (those bloody daffodils!), Tennyson and Christina Rossetti crept in too.

In I think the second year we had a single “reading lesson” each week with Bob Roberts who was the Deputy Head. In this we read a set book and there was some discussion of it. The books tended to be slightly lighter weight than in mainstream English lessons and I know this is where we read The Thirty-Nine Steps. This may also have included some Sherlock Holmes, but I’m not at all certain about that.

Somewhere along the way I think we must have read George Orwell’s Animal Farm because I can’t think I would have read it otherwise, although I do remember reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World at my father’s suggestion.

I also remember that in the third year (so age 13-14), we had a weekly reading lesson in the school library where (when we weren’t being taught to use a library; boring; I’d know this for several years!) we could read anything we liked from the shelves. I tried reading War and Peace. Needless to say I didn’t get very far.

There was, of course, other stuff one was exposed to via the school play, house plays and the choir. One of the pieces we regularly sang in the choir was Benjamin Britten’s setting of Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno which is something else I still love.

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
…
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
…
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.

In my final year the school play was The Insect Play by the Brothers Čapek. A very curious beast, but actually quite entertaining and single acts from this were also quite a favourite of the house plays. Maybe the house plays (each of the four houses put on a single act play for two nights each December; all four on the same evening) was where I came across Toad of Toad Hall.

There must have been more that is now far beyond recall. Sadly so much of it was, as Katy observed, so unutterably miserable. And she was doing school English 20-some years after me when one would have hoped things might have improved.

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.