The Long Weekend

My pal Scott likes to come up with a meme every New Year that he casts out onto the Internet in hopes of starting a fad. Last year it was make up an Amazon Basket of great books for under £50 or something, this year it's make a Spotify Playlist with a song which reminds you of every year of your life. I was actually tempted to do the latter - and I may yet - but I can barely remember last week half the time so it seemed more trouble than it was worth.

What did pop into my head though was the idea of books that bring certain periods to mind. Like I mentioned the other day, the mobile library reminds me so much of being a kid, looking through the net curtains in the kitchen, waiting for the library to pull up in our square, then the dash downstairs and back up with the permitted three books in my hands.

But certain books remind me of far more specific times.

Just before I left University, I was involved in the death throes of a relationship that had lasted me since the first week of second year. We'd drifted apart, as you do when you're twenty, and though we were still going out officially, we were really just friends. She'd got a room in a flat in town though, right above the old James Thins Bookshop and I'd gone round one Friday night after the pub. Next day we lay in bed all day, hungover, reading Laura Ingalls Wilder books, one after the other, in order. When I finished one I'd give it to her and then quickly get dressed, nip downstairs to buy the next one, then head back for bed.

All weekend we did that, following Laura from the Big Woods of Wisconsin, to Plum Creek and Silver Lake, then into town at Walnut Grove. It felt like watching a great long rambling movie, or a soapy mini-series - but one filled with right-wing Christian Americans, hating the Injuns and Big Government and loving the flag and self-sufficiency.

Laura lost in a blizzard and Pa on the march for work, the Long Winter and Mary going blind, Laura marrying Almanzo and then watching him cripple himself in a storm - over that long weekend we saw all of this unfold, buoyed up with innumerable cups of tea and hundreds of Malboro cigarettes.

And then, suddenly, almost unexpectedly, the books were finished and so were we...

Biggles:Charter Pilot (1943)

"British political officers don't tell lies", apparently.

As much as 'a veray, parfit, gentil knight' or 'It is a truth universally acknowledged...', that one line from Biggles: Charter Pilot dates the book to sometime slightly before Noah launched the ark.

Well, to 1943 to be exact, slap bang in the middle of World War II, when one would expect the heroic Biggles, doughty Ginger and less easily defined Algy to be fighting Jerry along with the rest of his chums from the curiously numbered 666 Squadron.

And so they are, but in downtime between sorties to rescue downed Allied airmen and while Ginger isn't off on an extended stroll (which occurs about every second story in this collection), the chaps regale the other chaps with tall tales of giant crabs, abominable snowmen, mammoths and dodos.

The dashed bally bounders. It's just not cricket.

But enough of the mockery. It's very easy to poke fun at Biggles and his ilk, lamenting the casual racism, the paternalistic and jingoistic attitudes, and to write them off as antiquated, poorly written pap for non-discriminating schoolboys.

Very easy, and - in the last case at least - utterly wrong.

Because you'd have not to have read them to think they're badly written. These books, like the best of the earlier Target novelisations of Doctor Who, say, are functionally and effectively written, with plain but readable prose. they do what they're supposed to - entertain and divert. The stories in Charter Pilot are each around half a dozen frantic action-packed pages long, with no diversions for extended metaphor or long, luxurious descriptions of the scenery. A quick introductory scene in which Ginger mentions some implausible adventure ('ah yes, that's a memento of the time I was gored by a mammoth, don't you know'), then we're off, straight into the story itself.

There is racism of the sort commonplace in the first half of the 20th century, and women are pretty much ignored. Foreigners are portrayed as superstitious savages (cannibals if black, and cowardly ne-er-do-wells if white), and everyone not British is treated with a degree of condescension and patronisation which wouldn't wash today. BUt as this wasn't written today, that hardly matters and as I rattled through the dozen stories in an hour and a half, I can't say I cared. Like a Jules Verne seventy years on, this is almost science fiction, and like Alan Moore fifty years early, it's also a mash-up of all sorts of genres and types.

It's not played for laughs, ironic and knowing or otherwise though. I loved the way in which Ginger never seems to be lying or exaggerating - he has to be cajoled to tell every story and even then makes a point every time of re-assuring his listeners that Biggles could back up every word. The stories even manage to have a realism lacking in many similar Boys Own Tales, with half the stories being resolved by Biggles et al running away.

Ginger even claims that every story has a logical, scientific explanation behind it (except when it doesn't). Which makes it a bit disappointing when everything falls apart in the face of the wildly inaccurate science used to shore that claim up.

Is it really plausible that filling a pit with dead crocodiles would lead both to a new type of mushroom orchid and a new kind of co-operative killer worm being spontaneously generated from the pit in the space of a few years? Or that five foot wide underwater crabs could rise to the surface on a giant island made of pumice stone, worked loose from the ocean floor? Or that giant Patagonians could be descended from ship-wrecked 14th century mariners, made gigantic by a mixture of moss and mussel soup? Not really, but again it doesn't matter - the stories are so short that they're finished before you start thinking 'that's just stupid' and you're off onto the next one, stopping on your way only to nod approvingly at the accuracy of the description of Plato as a 'lecturer'. At least they got their liberal arts information right...

I wouldn't recommend reading a lot of Biggles book in a row, but if you're looking for an atypical but thoroughly entertaining read for a short train journey or a rainy afternoon, you could do a lot worse than this.

Biggles: Charter Pilot is available here.

A Plethora of Puffins

Some things will always remind of being ill as a child. Lying on the settee in the middle of the afternoon, hypnotised by the brown and orange palette of Crown Court, eating saps (white bread soaked in hot milk and sprinkled with sugar) on a tray, the smell of wet clothes hung out in front of the fire - and reading books full of stories of people caught up in unlikely adventures.

Sometimes the books came in carrier bags from my nana, paperback Louis L’Amour westerns, nicotine yellow at the edges, with pencil drawn front covers of dusty cowboys; sometimes library books from the mobile library, wrapped in clear plastic to keep them safe as they passed through a multitude of grubby hands, chosen by my dad and so likely to be Rudyard Kipling or Arthur Ransome, wholesome adventures of posh kids I didn’t really recognise; even occasionally brand new books from W H Smith or Menzies (though in those cases they were invariably Target Doctor Who books. They had to be or the disappointment would undoubtedly have caused a relapse).

My favourite books, though, were what seemed to be a multitude of Puffins and Penguins full of genteel and inexplicable time travel. Children, often sick and frequently poor, would set off on a journey, and once there they would stumble over something magical, and the journey would become far greater than they could ever have expected.

I quickly learned to spot this kind of book, and when one pitched up I’d start reading with one eye already anticipating the moment at which the magic would begin. As Tolly crossed the floodwaters on the way to Green Knowe or sickly Mary arrived in England from India and explored the Secret Garden; when the Five Children arrived in the country and headed for the beach or unrolled a nursery carpet at home, or when Lucy and Jamie followed Mr Blunden into the countryside – on every occasion I knew that magic was just round the corner.

A journey to the country was frequently a starting point, in fact – a concept I could entirely understand as a young boy living in the high flats on an estate in the city. Of course the countryside was full of mysterious shenanigans and unexpected goings-on! That was obviously the kind of thing that happened there...

Only as an adult though did I find out how many of those books were successful enough to be made into television. Or thought worthy enough, perhaps – I never did know what special quality it was that meant one book was deemed good enough for a BBC serial whilst another book, equally good in my eyes, remained forever unadapted.

I now imagine the transition from page to screen as though the process itself were in a movie, like those wonderful bits in the Disney Winnie the Pooh film where the words on the page fall off in the flood. The images created in my head by the text gradually fade and merge with those on the television, until the one has replaced the other entirely and where once I had been lost in a welter of words now I find myself mesmerised by those characters come alive on the screen.

And there are so many of them! So many classic serials on radio and TV, so many half forgotten books from my younger days which Amazon and the internet have brought back to mind and which the postman has dropped through the letterbox. And at the same time dvd companies seem to be releasing everything I could possibly want to watch. News about dramatisations I never even knew existed seem to appear at fairly regular intervals in newletters and adverts, falling into my Inbox with a satisfying thud.

Moondial, The Phoenix and the Carpet, Red Shift, Children of Green Knowe, The Snow Spider...the list is endless and brilliant and reminds me of being young and having enough of a cold to stay off school but not enough to want to waste time sleeping...sitting on the settee under a thick golden quilt with a lion embroidered in one corner, eating Rich Tea with margarine on and reading, reading, reading...