5:46pm Tuesday 7th July 2009
By Denis Watkins
Karl, our helpful librarian arrived today and, as usual, the selection of books is excellent.
I grew up spending much of my time in the local library. The books were limited to only four so I liked to choose with care. Those were the days of library cards, no computers, and if you brought a book back late there was a fine.
I would cycle to the library every Thursday evening, leave my bike outside with no worry about theft or damage, and try to choose. I liked historical adventures and my favourite author at around age 15 was Dennis Wheatley. Later I learned he was a wine merchant and expert which explains the knowledge of wine in his stories.
And I really ached, in what seemed my dull life, to be "Roger Brooke, the most trusted secret agent of the Prime Minister, Mr Pitt." And Roger had the lot: daring, dash and he seemed to score (sexually and regularly) with the most enticing and beautiful younger aristocracy.
Throw in his ability to outwit Robespierre and others from the very blade of the guillotine and it was easy to see why I preferred living in Roger Brooke's world to my own.
Dennis Wheatley did not deny his readers lots of romance/sex - same thing often - violence and examples of brute endurance. He also introduced me in another of his series to Black Magic and, at age 15, his warning not to dabble in it added to the feeling that this was for real.
I think Wheatley may have been a bit of a right wing snob as his heroes seemed to be aristocrats or from the upper echelons of society. The Duke de Richelieu was the black magic expert. At one time, feeling a need for revenge on some out of reach adult, I wondered whether I might manage to acquire some devilish powers.
I decided that how I could "cross the chasm and become an Ipssissimus" was not entirely clear. So I did not pursue this.
I also read Conan Doyle, I particularly liked the Somerset Maugham short stories, Rudyard Kipling was a big favourite, Two Years before the Mast" by Richard Dana, all the Scarlett Pimpernel stories, White Fang and other Jack London stories - one in particular about a man freezing in the Yukon and trying to light a fire.
Later, a long time later, I caught up with so many books I missed by reading them to Roz and Julian: a ritual every evening when they were in bed. Peter Rabbit and the rest of the Beatrix Potter stories, C.S. Lewis, Just William so many of the Greek legends such as Theseus and the Minotaur, Odysseus, Circe of her Island and so many others.
Not quite sure how I meandered into all this. But the pleasure in reading continues and that in the result, to a great extent, to the Mobile Library - thanks Karl.
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