My Most Influential books.

 

 My most influential books.

Our daughter spent a few summer weeks with us after graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1989. A friend sent her one of those picture postcards of a collage of pictures of brilliant tropical birds, sumptuous flowers, tangled jungles. It was posted in Queensland and sent to her by a fellow student whose mother was taking him on a world trip to celebrate his graduation. Looking at the small evocative images, I said ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Australia.’

and Kim said ‘Um! I’d like to go too.’

and I said ‘let’s go!’

When Tony came home from work that evening we said ‘We’re going to Australia. Do you want to come?’ and he said ‘Yes.’

Within three months, we were on the plane to Sydney and the rest as they say is history.

When I was about nine, I was given for Christmas a secondhand copy of Swiss Family Robinson. It was a child-friendly story written in German in the early 1800s, and based on the true story of Robinson Crusoe whose shipwreck had occurred a hundred years previously.

My copy, a translation, had a lavish blue, black and silver-coloured cover, and was plentifully illustrated with steel engravings showing all sorts of events, views, animals and adventures which befell the family following their shipwreck on the coast of a tropical island while bound for Australia to become missionaries and settlers.

The sole survivors of the wreck, the parents Robinson and their four sons were able to salvage great quantities of corn, seed, tools, animals and all the commodities that would have been carried in a ship bound for a far colony in those days. By exercising ingenuity and faith, they fabricated a raft from huge casks, and made it onto dry land.

The book was of course of its time and I, as a nine-year-old towards the end of the war with none of the precocious attitudes of kids these days, accepted happily the black and white illustrations, the less-than credible adventures, the unquestioned authority of the father, and the biddable natures of the four sons. Fritz, the eldest at 15, was fiery, hot-headed but still very much under the thumb of the father. Ernest was quiet, of a delicate sensitive disposition, Jack an adventurous 10 year-old and Frank the baby at six.

The father a Swiss pastor never lost an opportunity to hold forth about the morals required of his boys and frequent bending of the knees in thanks to the Almighty encouraged me to skip extensive passages but that never hindered my unbounded pleasure in my many re-readings of the book.

For example, I felt sorry for Jack on one occasion when Sunday was announced by Mr Robinson, who was the narrator of the book:

‘Today is Sunday and we are about to celebrate it as a day consecrated by God to rest.’

‘Sunday!’ cried Jack. ‘Hurrah! I shall go for a walk, hunt, fish, do just as I please. Capital! Capital!’

‘You make a grievous mistake’ I said to the giddy-headed fellow. ‘The Sabbath must be celebrated in quite another way. It is not a day of idleness or sport, but a day of prayer and thanksgiving, of religious thought and exercise.’

And more follows along the same lines for a couple of pages. Skip! Skip!

Dad used to scoff at the unlikely occurrence of the mixture of the animals encountered, from wild asses to lions, tigers to hippos , kangaroos to ostriches, penguins to condors, all hugger-mugger on an East Indian island; but again that never bothered me.

I became very possessive of my Robinsons, living their free, constructive, adventurous and happy life on their desert island, so, in the later chapters when there was the hint of other people and the intimations of rescue, I never ever finished the book. I didn’t want anything to stop, or change.

After a couple of years Dad discovered the sequel, called Willis the Pilot. Like most sequels, it didn’t live up to expectations. It was even written by a different author; the family had been rescued, the boys grown up and scattered. I peeped into the first chapter or two but could never bear to read about the destruction of all my vivid imaginary life with the Robinson family as I knew them. So Willis the Pilot was eventually kicked out to a jumble sale and I picked up another copy of Swiss Family Robinson. But neither did this live up to expectations. It was a bigger, American publication from 1915, on thick foxed and crumbling paper with fewer but coarser illustrations; the text though equally moralistic, differed in places and even Jack was called James!

The saddest part of all, now I want to look again at my old love, I find it isn’t on the bookshelf where it belonged. I can’t believe I’d have parted with it.

What a deeply engraved influence that story, and that particular edition, must have had on my imagination. I think it must have been at the root of my longing to go to Australia.

Dipping into the only copy I now have, I squirm at the moralistic preaching by Pa Robinson but I’m now prepared to accept it as of its time (and skip!) I’m very aware of the difference in the unquestioning acceptance and respect for authority in those days, not all that different to when I was young, unlike the constant challenging of authority by children these days and the liberal attitudes of adults who at the same time wring their hands about ‘the young’. Where is the middle way?

This classic story has been popularised in many subsequent versions including film but I can’t bear to look at any of them, feeling in my bones the original will be simplified, cheapened, dumbed-down, jazzed-up, cartooned, vulgarised or in other ways strayed from ‘my’ version which I will take to the grave with me, for better or worse.

Another book which influenced me hugely as a child of the war years, was my father’s copy of a book by the celebrated Grey Owl in his ‘Tales of an Empty Cabin.’ published in 1936 . This was a haunting collection of tales of life and trapping in the Canadian wilderness by a man who claimed to be part- American Indian. For children already interested in spending all our available leisure time in the countryside ‘in nature’ as the popular term has it today, Grey Owl’s stories of living in the wild, living invisibly, following tracks, infected us with longings to live in the same way. We moved invisibly and soundlessly in our nearby woods, making simple camps hidden in the undergrowth, tracking each other in games of skill, even making ourselves chieftains’ head-dresses, not of eagle feathers but pigeons’ tail feathers. Tepees were problematical: We had of course to substitute hides with cloth, but even acquiring pieces of cloth during war-time when everything was rationed, meant that our hard-pressed mums had to ransack rag-bags for ancient fragments of curtains.

These invented games unconsciously developed our field-craft and observational skills, but what we did take seriously was the ‘copying of American Indian ways’ rather than any thoughts of ‘conservation’. We nicked our fingers and mixed our blood to become ‘blood brothers’.

And we took Grey Owl at face value. It was many years into my adulthood before I came across him again. He was by then revealed as a fraud. He was English, a boy with a difficult background but always fascinated by American Indian life and culture. He emigrated to Canada and as an adult became a trapper and a wilderness ranger, later becoming a noted public speaker and conservationist while by this time claiming to have come from Mexico and had an Apache mother. His past history as a trapper was quietly ‘forgotten’ but he was not forgiven for his fraudulent claim nor what was found to be his illegal marriages and liaisons with four wives and he was dropped by the publishers of his several books. He was an alcoholic and died of pneumonia alone in the wilderness at the age of 48.

With hindsight, it seems odd to have such a flawed character as an early inspiration but his then unsuspected personal flaws didn’t affect us as children . We simply sang his song in the wild. And whatever his flaws, they must have been more than balanced by his talks and books raising awareness of the value of old-growth forest and wildlife in the pre-war days when conservation as a concept was virtually unknown.

By far the greatest impact on my childhood and indeed the rest of my life was  the book written by a school science teacher in the late 1800s. My father had bought his copy in 1918 and as soon as I discovered it at about 8, I took it over. It was RS Furneaux’ ‘The Outdoor World: a young collector’s handbook’.

My childhood was spent during the war, but had the double advantage of living close to unspoilt Hertfordshire countryside, with the freedom to range as far afield as I wished, without constraint. These wanderings were invariably with the boy next door, much the same age and with the same deep fascination with nature. This freedom, compared with the constraints and perpetual overseeing by adults these day days, was a pearl beyond price.

The seasons dictated our craze of the moment, varying from winter damming the little woodland springs and searching for fossils in the several disused chalk-pits in the surrounding countryside, to bird watching, nest hunting in the spring, seeking out ‘first flowers to open’ as the season advanced; catching water creatures from frogspawn time to sticklebacks and crayfish as the chalk streams warmed, and the summers of butterfly and then moth-catching.

Our bible was ‘Furneaux’ which was very readable and full of illustrations and descriptions of how to collect, preserve, label, store one’s trophies. The modern castigation of collecting, picking let alone killing any kind of wildlife was completely un-heard of back in the 1940s. I still feel that over-riding the killing of specimens was a mere tiny part of the later despoliation of wildlife triggered by agricultural intensification, other causes of habitat loss, use of chemicals, pollution etc . The amount we learnt about natural history vastly outweighed the harm we did to the natural world and led us as adults to recognize the harm being done in the subsequent decades and hopefully to live in a less damaging way.

As children, our principal interest was not only to see but to collect and so The Outdoor World was a treasure. Written in a straightforward manner, aimed at boys (girls didn’t enter the mindset of those times!) it was divided into three parts; The Animal World, Plants, and a very brief section on Geology at the end.

Each section gave a comprehensive overview of the animals and plants that could be found, so the book was a very instructive manual of general natural history, and each section gave a wealth of illustrated information on how to collect and preserve your finds. Some of the killing methods and poisons advocated would make your hair stand on end these days. To make a killing jar in which to slaughter your butterfly, for example, ether was recommended. We replaced it with ammonia, scrounged off our mums who used it in the washing in those days!

I should imagine this book would be burnt by horrified conservationists of today who never experienced the times of plentiful wildlife before the war and indeed into the 1940s. Of course I can’t condone the profligate killing that went into the collecting fevers of Victorian times but our youthful exploits taught us so much more than the formalized and ultra-protective culture of today.

How have these three books influenced me? I can’t say whether Swiss Family Robinson encouraged my urge to travel but it certainly fired me; I can remember exploits, illustrations and so many details of this superb story first read over 80 years ago.

Grey Owl taught me to to see, hear, feel, the detail of the country.

And The Outdoor World nurtured and informed the collecting instinct which is within so many children. My collecting these days lies in my amateurish photography, so much more accessible in these digital days. But how often do I look back at these images now, unless to check or verify something, whereas the long-term pleasure and satisfaction we got from collecting, identifying, displaying, labelling our trophies as well as the general field craft and careful observing in the process is a priceless value.