Three Days In June

I watched the train inch out of Victoria Station starting on its journey to Leeds, winding its way through the Pennines. Its first stop would be Bolton where my girlfriend would dutifully spend some leave with her parents leaving me to study for my second-year engineering finals. I stuffed my hands into my greatcoat and wandered away.

Victoria was Manchester’s biggest station, both a terminus and a way station. It was blessed with a substantial WH Smiths bookstore. I headed over – only to browse – before I started walking back the two miles to my room. There were many authors that I recognised and passed by. One name stood out from my early teens – Tolkien. Squeezed on the shelves was The Lord of the Rings – a story that I truly – truly -hadn’t known existed. Its back cover called up the Hobbit, a book that I had loved. This single volume claimed to be a compendium of three books (Fellowship, Towers and Return), unabridged and with maps. It ran to about 1,000 small-typed pages – it could be mine for one pound and ten shillings. One third of the week’s beer money, I figured. Impulsively, I handed over the cash, tucked the paper bag inside my coat and set off down Oxford Road, seriously doubting what I had just done.

Forty-nine pages of Frodo and the idylls of the Shire, convinced me that I had blundered big time. Bilbo’s birthday party was a bore. Then the Witch King of Angmar, the laying waste of Arnor, the Nazgul and Strider debuted. Now, I wanted more. I followed the Ring and every actor throughout Middle Earth and into every appendix – soaking up the language and the myth telling as much as the action. How I wished I could read Elvish. From Isildur to Boromir and Denethor, avarice and weakness laid bare before the virtues of the heroes and heroines. The orcs and goblins and Balrogs have due attention, as do the Nazgul. The story is laced with melancholy and unlikely stalwarts. So many strands, so much history and legend.

I read the 1,000 pages in three days. Three days supposed to be a break for extra revision. But I was lost beyond simple addiction, I read from breakfast to midnight and beyond. Each chapter a hook for the next. I was simply devastated when I hit the back cover. What would I do now? Where was my next fix?

Exams and desperate revision brought me out of my dreams (I did OK). There was no quenching the passion, though. I have every Tolkien book, either his or his son’s – Silmarillion, Lost Tales, Children of Hurin, The Fall of Gondolin and all the others.

Those three days taught me how much books – stories of fiction and of fact – meant to me. I realised, as I had suspected in my senior high school years, that I was doing the wrong thing. I was not an engineer, nor would I ever become a polished one, no matter how much my works were praised. My loves were English (so disliked when I was 16), history – on which I had always fixated – and classical languages – Elvish in Tolkien’s world and Latin in mine. To study, to understand and to write – in, and about – them all. I had turned away from these for the profit and security of industry. There was no turning back. I had chosen my path in high school.

My senior math teacher loved language and history as much as I did. I asked why he had chosen to teach math when his heart clearly lay elsewhere. ‘What then would I have for a hobby?’ he asked me. It’s not really an answer but it’s a quiet comfort when my regrets come calling.