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.Sherlock Holmes, Dr Nikola, The Iron Pirate, Dracula, Raffles.And Nat Gould and Ranger Gull and a chap whose name I forget who wrote boxing stories almost as rapidly as Nat Gould wrote racing ones.I suppose if my parents had been a little better educated I'd have had 'good' books shoved down my throat, Dickens and Thackeray and so forth, and in fact they did drive us through Quentin Durward at school and Uncle Ezekiel sometimes tried to incite me to read Ruskin and Carlyle.But there were practically no books in our house.Father had never read a book in his life, except the Bible and Smiles's Self Help, and I didn't of my own accord read a 'good' book till much later.I'm not sorry it happened that way.I read the things I wanted to read, and I got more out of them than I ever got out of the stuff they taught me at school.The old penny dreadfuls were already going out when I was a kid, and I can barely remember them, but there was a regular line of boys' weeklies, some of which still exist.The Buffalo Bill stories have gone out, I think, and Nat Gould probably isn't read any longer, but Nick Carter and Sexton Blake seem to be still the same as ever.The Gem and the Magnet, if I'm remembering rightly, started about 1905.The B.O.P.was still rather pi in those days, but Chums, which I think must have started about 1903, was splendid.Then there was an encyclopedia--I don't remember its exact name--which was issued in penny numbers.It never seemed quite worth buying, but a boy at school used to give away back numbers sometimes.If I now know the length of the Mississippi or the difference between an octopus and a cuttle-fish or the exact composition of bell-metal, that's where I learned it from.Joe never read.He was one of those boys who can go through years of schooling and at the end of it are unable to read ten lines consecutively.The sight of print made him feel sick.I've seen him pick up one of my numbers of Chums, read a paragraph or two and then turn away with just the same movement of disgust as a horse when it smells stale hay.He tried to kick me out of reading, but Mother and Father, who had decided that I was 'the clever one', backed me up.They were rather proud that I showed a taste for 'book-learning', as they called it.But it was typical of both of them that they were vaguely upset by my reading things like Chums and the Union Jack, thought that I ought to read something 'improving' but didn't know enough about books to be sure which books were 'improving'.Finally Mother got hold of a second-hand copy of Foxe's Book of Martyrs, which I didn't read, though the illustrations weren't half bad.All through the winter of 1905 I spent a penny on Chums every week.I was following up their serial story, 'Donovan the Dauntless'.Donovan the Dauntless was an explorer who was employed by an American millionaire to fetch incredible things from various corners of the earth.Sometimes it was diamonds the size of golf balls from the craters of volcanoes in Africa, sometimes it was petrified mammoths' tusks from the frozen forests of Siberia, sometimes it was buried Inca treasures from the lost cities of Peru.Donovan went on a new journey every week, and he always made good.My favourite place for reading was the loft behind the yard.Except when Father was getting out fresh sacks of grain it was the quietest place in the house.There were huge piles of sacks to lie on, and a sort of plastery smell mixed up with the smell of sainfoin, and bunches of cobwebs in all the corners, and just over the place where I used to lie there was a hole in the ceiling and a lath sticking out of the plaster.I can feel the feeling of it now.A winter day, just warm enough to lie still.I'm lying on my belly with Chums open in front of me.A mouse runs up the side of a sack like a clockwork toy, then suddenly stops dead and watches me with his little eyes like tiny jet beads.I'm twelve years old, but I'm Donovan the Dauntless.Two thousand miles up the Amazon I've just pitched my tent, and the roots of the mysterious orchid that blooms once in a hundred years are safe in the tin box under my camp bed.In the forests all round Hopi-Hopi Indians, who paint their teeth scarlet and skin white men alive, are beating their war-drums.I'm watching the mouse and the mouse is watching me, and I can smell the dust and sainfoin and the cool plastery smell, and I'm up the Amazon, and it's bliss, pure bliss.7That's all, really.I've tried to tell you something about the world before the war, the world I got a sniff of when I saw King Zog's name on the poster, and the chances are that I've told you nothing.Either you remember before the war and don't need to be told about it, or you don't remember, and it's no use telling you.So far I've only spoken about the things that happened to me before I was sixteen.Up to that time things had gone pretty well with the family.It was a bit before my sixteenth birthday that I began to get glimpses of what people call 'real life', meaning unpleasantness.About three days after I'd seen the big carp at Binfield House, Father came in to tea looking very worried and even more grey and mealy than usual.He ate his way solemnly through his tea and didn't talk much.In those days he had a rather preoccupied way of eating, and his moustache used to work up and down with a sidelong movement, because he hadn't many back teeth left.I was just getting up from table when he called me back.'Wait a minute, George, my boy.I got suthing to say to you.Sit down jest a minute.Mother, you heard what I got to say last night.'Mother, behind the huge brown teapot, folded her hands in her lap and looked solemn.Father went on, speaking very seriously but rather spoiling the effect by trying to deal with a crumb that lodged somewhere in what was left of his back teeth:'George, my boy, I got suthing to say to you.I been thinking it over, and it's about time you left school.'Fraid you'll have to get to work now and start earning a bit to bring home to your mother.I wrote to Mr Wicksey last night and told him as I should have to take you away.'Of course this was quite according to precedent--his writing to Mr Wicksey before telling me, I mean.Parents in those days, as a matter of course, always arranged everything over their children's heads.Father went on to make some rather mumbling and worried explanations.He'd 'had bad times lately', things had 'been a bit difficult', and the upshot was that Joe and I would have to start earning our living.At that time I didn't either know or greatly care whether the business was really in a bad way or not.I hadn't even enough commercial instinct to see the reason why things were 'difficult'.The fact was that Father had been hit by competition.Sarazins', the big retail seedsmen who had branches all over the home counties, had stuck a tentacle into Lower Binfield.Six months earlier they'd taken the lease of a shop in the market-place and dolled it up until what with bright green paint, gilt lettering, gardening tools painted red and green, and huge advertisements for sweet peas, it hit you in the eye at a hundred yards' distance [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]