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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.
A judge said that all his experience, both as counsel and judge, had been spent sorting out the difficulties of people who, upon the recommendation of people they did not know, signed documents which they did not read, to buy goods they did not need, with money they had not got.
Multi-tools have a geek following. But despite what we might think they aren’t new and weren’t invented by the Swiss Army. The first documented ones were used by the Romans and they have developed ever since. 
Garibaldi. Yes, those “dead fly” biscuits. I loved them as a kid, especially the slight chewiness of the fruit. 
Information doesn’t really have a life. I guess it can be forgotten, but as long as it is copied it won’t be. 
Young Albert Edward was sent to live with his uncle Edward Israel Hicks and on the 1891 census is at the Royal Naval School at Greenwich. So much can be established from census records etc. (Albert Edward Hicks is quite common as names go, but Albert Edward T Hicks isn’t.) And hence Noreen’s discovery of Albert Edward T Hicks on HMS Victory at Portsmouth on the 1901 census.
