The author on the lascivious subtexts of Catullus, mistaking Lord of the Flies for a satanic text and CS Lewis’s ‘totalitarian’ fantasy epics
My earliest reading memory
In March 1941, aged six, I was lying in bed in an isolation hospital, recovering from measles, whooping cough and meningitis, and looking at the Knockout comic. My favourite character was Stonehenge Kit the Ancient Brit. I could read the speech bubbles because my mother had taught me capital letters, but the extended captions under the pictures in upper and lower case were beyond me. I must have been decoding them unconsciously for some time, but the moment of realising that I understood the words, that I could read All By Myself, seemed to be instantaneous. I fell back in the bed and stared through the window at a silver barrage balloon hanging in the sky above Manchester and couldn’t stop trembling. From then on I binged on words: The Dandy, The Beano, Shakespeare, Leslie Charteris’s The Saint books, ghost stories and science fiction, comics and pulp magazines cadged from US soldiers; whatever came my way. I was omnivorous.
My favourite book growing up
While recuperating, I discovered a tattered copy of Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The final pages were missing, and I read the book 11 times, hoping to find them. But all I learned was how to say “Kagoda” – “I surrender”, in Mangani Gorilla language. After that, I immersed myself in my grandmother’s eight volumes of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia of 1910, which were the main source of education for me in my primary school years while I continued to be frequently and spectacularly ill.
