THE SIREN
Precocious was what I was as a youngster. I read and understood beyond my years. No one read to me really. Still, it came effortlessly to an only child of older parents. I was formed in a world of adult conversation and concerns. It wasn’t much of a free-range childhood, I suppose, but it did gift me a love of reading and of the lyrical sound of poetry. The house would fill with it. Mum’s soft voice lifting Keats and Shelley from the pages of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, a small blue book of wafer-thin paper and inscribed ‘To Elsie Forever, October 1948. My dad had the Voice. It could range from tender love sonnets to the bathos of Coleridge, a robust Tennyson, and to the doom laden Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. For the most part he would recite from memory, glancing down only for prompts. In his voice, phrases were made music.
I struggled to read poems, even out loud. Try as I might I could not capture the cadence and rhythm achieved by my parents. I found solace and fascination in the worlds of The House at Pooh Corner, Kidnapped, Gulliver’s Travels, Aesop’s Fables, the Cruel Sea, Greek mythology and others. If the first pages grabbed me, I read it; I may not have understood it all but …. A favourite? Probably Moonfleet by John Meade Faulkner. A sadness-tinged tale for all its happy endings. A story that lingers.
These all came from the local library on a Saturday. School was out and the library was in. All four of us (including Cariad our dog) would bundle into the Rover and make the short trip into town. It really wasn’t far – Mum and I and Cariad used to walk it; Dad, though, wasn’t one for walking. The library had a children’s section that got refreshed every so often. I would check every book on every shelf before wandering over to the adults’ collection and, finally, picking two precious books. The loans were for two weeks but I needed a weekly fix.
Then came the Encyclopedia Britannica. My dad never did say why he bought the 24 volumes and the splendid bookcase. Perhaps he was looking to my future. All I knew was that this solid black mass of books was very expensive. It stood, pages unturned, for two years – simply a status symbol, untouched, a slumbering cornucopia of knowledge past and present.
Until, that is, at 11, I found myself in secondary school, faced, daily, with two sets of homework (three for the weekend). The textbooks never had enough to complete the assignments – but the encyclopedia did. True, I struggled at times to find the needed knowledge amongst the thousands of pages but I don’t recall it ever letting me down.
With every treasure, though, there’s a trap. The encyclopedia was a creature out of Greek mythology – a Siren. The links to other texts sang to me. Soon, I would be lying on the dining room floor, homework forgotten, sucking up everything the book had to offer on a subject, page after page, like Bastian in A Never-Ending Story.
My reading universe was now replete – the library, Britannica, plus my weekly comic, the Eagle. Their pages slaked my thirst for entertainment, my thirst for knowledge. They created roots that were as deep as they were early. And incubated the perfect victim for today’s Siren – the Internet.
