‘A rumpled paperback showed me I was not alone’: Charlotte Mendelson, Michael Rosen and others on the books that marked their coming of age

I really did not want to come of age. My primary school had a playing field with a lush, unmown border full of cow parsley, nettles and tall grasses. You could find newts and frogs and birds’ nests in there. Why would I want to be cast out of the Garden of Eden? Then, when the rest of my class was exiled to Big School, I was held back and got to do year 6 all over again. I could not believe my luck. At the same time I was filled with an overwhelming awareness that I was living on borrowed time. Time allows, said Dylan Thomas, so few and such morning songs.
The book that made sense of all this for me was The Railway Children. Here were some kids who were pulled out of London and school and allowed to run riot, be heroic, make friends and choices in the countryside. Noël Coward said Nesbit had an “unparalleled talent for evoking hot summer days”. Reading it as an adult you can see that those hot summer days are menaced by thunder clouds.
It’s a story about a family plunged into poverty by a miscarriage of justice, set against the background of the Dreyfus affair, in which one of the characters is clearly based on the Russian dissident Peter Kropotkin. I wonder if one of the reasons the story is so beloved is that its emotional landscape is so similar to what my parents’ generation experienced when they were evacuated during the war. My mum and her sisters left a tiny two-up two-down terrace near the Liverpool docks and ended up in a mercantile palace on the Clwyd coast with William Morris wallpaper (Nesbit would have liked that) and a walled garden. It must have felt like a wonderful dream. But one night they were taken up on to the roof to be shown a red glow on the horizon. It was Liverpool on fire. Imagine that.
Lionel Jeffries’s flawless film of The Railway Children came out in 1970, just as my parents’ generation were hitting the “buying a load of pick’n’mix and taking the kids to the pictures” phase of their life. The great moment in the film and the book is, of course, when father materialises out of the smoke on the station platform and Bobbie, seeing him, cries out: “Daddy, oh my Daddy!” It’s possibly the most moving utterance in English literature. Why is it that this simple, apparently artless sentence has so much power? Because it offers a moment of grace. It’s Bobbie who discovers the bitter symmetry at the heart of the story – that she and her siblings have gained their freedom precisely because their father has lost his. In that moment, of course, her own freedom evaporates. She has eaten the apple of knowledge. Now as careworn and responsible as her mother, she is thrown out of the garden.
That cry – “Daddy, oh my Daddy” – is the sound of that troubled soul becoming a child again. Being let back into Eden. Time allows her one more morning song. A song about the possibility that one day we will be again as little children.
Millions by Frank Cottrell Boyce (Pan Macmillan, £7.99).
I was raised in a strict Rastafari home in Jamaica, and by the time I was 16, I was taught that my mind was a tool that should be only as sharp as my father needed it to be. An opinionated woman was the mouthpiece of Babylon. Though I was always questioning and curious, at home I lived in the cage of my girlhood and gave only what was expected of me: silence, obedience. For a long time, I felt voiceless, trapped by the boundaries of my sex, until my mother, well read and undeterred, placed a book of poems in her daughter’s hands. In those pages, I discovered that poetry brought the boundless possibility of creation. Beyond the chasm of silence in my household, poetry could be the home I built, a place to invent myself.
I began writing poems that gave shape to my love of the Jamaican landscape. I wrote late into the night and hoped my poems about the sea would sustain me. I had graduated high school, and my parents could not afford to send me to college. We moved houses often, and all my schoolfriends had left Jamaica to study abroad. Under this crush of circumstance, I fell into a kind of despair that threatened to overwhelm me. I was already drawn to melancholia at that age – I memorised Poe and Dylan, I knew every word of the Smiths. But late one night, I stumbled upon the writer who would change the shape of my literary world: Sylvia Plath.
The first Plath poem I ever read was Daddy, which swam with a black furore into my head as if it was written from my own dark need to be heard. “You do not do, you do not do / Any more, black shoe / In which I have lived like a foot … / Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.” The hairs rose on my arm as I read on in the dark. The lucid wrath of her poetry seemed like a kind of truth I knew in my bones, even at 16, and I wept. For so long I had turned my poetic gaze outward – to the blooming trees and the day’s radiance, as a way to make sense of my experiences. But it was here, parsing the somber and sinister crackle of Plath’s nursery rhyme, and the quick salvo of her metaphors that I found what I needed: the home I had been seeking on the page was the inner landscape of the lyric that lived within me. The top of my head, just as Dickinson said, was lopped clean off.
Plath’s images, so visceral and lush and painterly, seeped into my veins and never left. I felt understood in the unruly nature of my womanhood. To be seen that way, by a poet who was no longer in the world, was as close as I’d ever felt to the spiritual. I read every Plath poem I could find on the internet, memorising each one to carry with me, like a little prayer. An incantation. I speak them to myself, even now, in moments of need. At 16, I saw, through her words, all the ways that my life – my rage, the cage, all of it – was the red clay of language and imagery and memory that I could shape into a vessel for meaning. Soon I began to write my own poems that touched on that vein of womanhood; my body was a jungle I could explore in all its verdant anarchy. I began to hone my voice, and with it, my unwavering sense of self. There was nowhere to look now but forward. I was the phoenix and the fire, ready to build whole worlds from the ash.
I was 17, it was summer, and I was ripe for Iris Murdoch. My father, a fiend for hammocks, had precariously put one up in the garden. It was neither stable nor peaceful; then again, neither was I. And even mildewed hammocks were romantic reading places so, resolutely, I lay in the sun, lightly burning, as the pigeons (I thought they were turtle doves, if not cuckoos) cooed and the midges bit and all my adolescent grief, my yearning to be loved, coruscating perfectionism and violent self-loathing were washed away, temporarily, by The Nice and the Good.
I’ve no idea why I picked this paperback. Despite its joyless blurb and sappy title, something about it must have seemed promising; probably the two square inches of Bronzino’s dodgily sexy An Allegory With Venus and Cupid on the mostly white cover. But it was, for the mess that I was then, exactly the right choice.
For in Murdoch’s 11th novel, as in all her others, a cast of brainy, impractical overthinkers, flawed, innocent and uncomfortably full of desire, fall in love with those who are absolutely off limits: their boss’s wife, with whom they’re about to go on holiday; their childhood friend; somebody’s son. They break into each other’s houses in abject jealousy; they swim into dangerous caves of which they are terrified, to prove their angry, pointless devotion. There are impenetrably smug marriages, flammable teenage moods, unhappy small children and fearfully loving parents, but also seaweed, wood, human limbs so minutely described that one can see, even smell them. With subtly switching points of view and ever-increasing emotional pressure, Murdoch builds and builds impossible situations until her characters, whose vulnerability and appallingly poor decisions make us care what will happen, are forced to act, unwisely, dramatically, sometimes explosively. And now I write novels in which I try to do the same.
It’s a shock to realise, in adulthood, how exactly Murdoch’s fictional interests – the power of lust and the pull of despair, emotional peril, physical danger, ill-advised longing, complicated sexuality, the impossible tension between trying to be good and what the heart wants – overlap with my own. Did she shape them with that first reading? Or were my preoccupations always there, waiting to find their echo? So many of my youthful enthusiasms appear in this novel, too: guaranteed waterproof torches; old books with titles such as More Hunting Wasps; interesting pebbles. Let’s be honest; I haven’t moved on.
I can’t say I’d urge anyone to read The Nice and the Good as their first Iris Murdoch. It isn’t one of her best; too much blackmail and black magic, yet not enough darkness. Compared with Under the Net, The Sandcastle, The Sea, The Sea and The Bell, it can be a bit … silly. But it showed me that, for all my agonised shame, I was not alone; that what we want and need can often be different and that this is perfectly fine.
That rumpled paperback, pretentiously inscribed “Charlotte Mendelson, 1990” still has thumbnail marks in the margin for favourite sections; I do them to this day. Compared with that hammock-reader, I have entirely changed, yet am still exactly the same, the difference being that I know myself a little better. Whereas, aged 17, all the longing and desperation were secret, inarticulate, now I can laugh at, or calm, myself; I write novels, as well as read them. The Nice and the Good was, in retrospect, completely unsuitable reading for an innocent, and so it was perfect. It improved my life; in a sense it helped save it.
I’m not sure I’d be a writer now if I hadn’t read this book when I was 14. I borrowed it from a friend and never gave it back. That guilt-laden unreturned copy is still on my shelf, alongside an early edition hardback, an editor’s cut and a complete, unexpurgated edition. I remember making excuses to go straight home after school to get stuck back into it, instead of hanging around smoking cigarettes with the lads and trying vainly to look cool in front of girls, as much as I enjoyed that activity. I couldn’t really admit that I was going home to read a book, or at least I thought I couldn’t.
The Stand describes a world laid waste by a weaponised super-flu virus nicknamed “Captain Trips” that has escaped from a biolab. As the ragged remnants of humanity are guided by their dreams towards the formation of two groups of mysteriously immune survivors, a familiar binary appears: Mother Abigail’s followers are Good; followers of Randall Flagg, “The Walkin’ Dude”, are Evil. King emulates a contextualising device from Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath in his punctuation of the main, polyphonic narrative with a series of intensely exciting and shocking standalone vignettes. These perfect narrative fillips strengthen the current of the story, as it carries the reader, transfixed and breathless, through its almost 1,000 pages.
The novel sweeps majestically towards an inevitably conflagratory ending, and this reader’s worldview and literary pretensions were similarly exploded. When I first read The Stand I was a very typical broil of teenage bravado, fear, wonder, arrogance, idiocy and frustrated desires. This huge book felt like an escape from my own unfathomable, contradictory thoughts and emotions. I unconsciously, instinctively mapped my burgeoning sense of self to the revelatory, redemptory fictive journeys of the book’s many characters. I remember thinking, “how is this possible?” and doing my best to work out the techniques behind the swaggering genius of the story’s construction. I still try to live up to the ambitions it ignited in me, to someday cause a reader to be even a fraction as invested in a story of my making as I was in this story of Stephen King’s.
I met my friend Anne when we were both 18, at a freshers’ mixer event organised by the English Literature Department at UCL. I was sitting in a corner, wearing a gauche little hat that made me look like a Beatrix Potter character, and for some reason Anne decided to be my friend. It was Anne who first lent me Gordon by Edith Templeton. The cover – the hardback Viking edition – showed a woman in pearls and an open blouse, revealing her right breast. “Wow,” I thought, “this looks … sophisticated.”
Gordon was first published by The New English Library in 1966, under the pseudonym Louise Walbrook. It follows a 28-year-old woman named Louisa, who, in 1946, returns to London after being demobbed. She meets psychiatrist Richard Gordon – a man 20 years her senior – in a pub. Within an hour he has her flat on her back on a stone bench in a public garden; and so begins an unhinged account of a nine-month sadomasochistic affair.
At 18, my chief reading material was Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels and the classics bay at my local library. I was not expecting the violence and weirdness of Gordon. I don’t think I was even aware authors could write like that: literary virtuosity with no lessons or morals. I recall feeling scoured and simultaneously relieved. Here was a writer who didn’t give a solitary damn about how her audience received her.
Even now, I hesitate to recommend Gordon. Its sexual and class politics do not hold up, and probably never held up in the first place – that’s almost the point. It’s bluntly post-Freudian, grimly unfeminist. But Templeton’s writing has clarity, acid, poise, an irony that I didn’t clock until I reread it in my 20s. The temperature of the whole book feels chilled, like champagne, or corpses. It never ceases to captivate me.
In the wake of my first reading, I dug around for more of Templeton’s (largely out-of-print) work. I was astonished at what I found. In a short story in the collection The Darts of Cupid, an almost exact reproduction of the sexual dynamic in Gordon; in the novel The Island of Desire, almost word-for-word identical dialogue. In interviews, Templeton’s unabashed admission that Gordon was based on an affair she had had just after the war.
Reading Gordon, then, is the bracing experience of tasting someone else’s obsession, savoury and strange. There’s something miraculous, a little ghastly, maybe, a little sublime, in witnessing an author write with such haunted single-mindedness. Eventually, I experienced it as permission: you are allowed to go bonkers about something that no one else cares about. The coils and knots of the interior life are as momentous as any historical event.
It was 1966 and I was studying English language and literature at Oxford, which at the time felt as if you were in an English Corridor stretching from Old English and ending abruptly and compulsorily in 1900, halfway through the works of Bernard Shaw. The study of language seemed limited to the idea that one word begat another through the centuries. There was little sense that words are what real people speak and write. Though it was never put like this, it was as if language had a life of its own, separate from real existence, and endowed with the special power of being able to change itself.
Then I read a book that turned all this on its head. In Owen Barfield’s book, it was possible to see changes in language differently. New things were invented. People’s needs changed. In order to express new ways of being, people needed new words. A connection was made between language and people.
In the English Corridor I had been inhabiting, I had been immersed in the history of words, without placing the history of words in history! In Barfield’s book, history unfolds and words emerge within the events of history.
One example: in his chapter Personality and Reason, Barfield maps the changes in how people saw “self” and “character”. Having talked of changes in society, he writes: “In the eighteenth century we notice, as we should expect, a considerable increase in the number of these words which attempt to portray character or feeling from within; such are apathy, chagrin, diffidence, ennui, homesickness, together with the expression ‘the feelings’, while agitation, constraint, disappointment, embarrassment, excitement are transferred from the outer to the inner world.”
Modern linguists armed with databases, corpuses, instant search engines and much less fanciful, sexist and colonialist ways of looking at language, may well cast Barfield aside. Even so, I still think that his intention, his direction of travel, if you like, was right. And I can honestly say that I’ve not thought about language in the same way since.