However, I did have a facility for languages.
After a period of unfocused growing unease, I had a Damascene moment where I “saw” that I had to follow my family of creative manual craftsmen in Cheshire. The book that made me want to be a writer Reading his Oresteia aged 17 made me aware more than any other text of the power of language, and its examination of matricide came at an opportune moment. TS Eliot’s The Wasteland irritated me when I first met it in 1950, and still doesĪeschylus. I was a sixth-form classicist at Manchester grammar school, where we were given the opportunity to study in depth the erotic subtleties of the poems of Catullus, which did wonders for adolescent male angst. Sign up to our Inside Saturday newsletter for an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of the magazine’s biggest features, as well as a curated list of our weekly highlights. After that, I immersed myself in my grandmother’s eight volumes of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia of 1910, which were the main source of education for me in my primary school years while I continued to be frequently and spectacularly ill.
But all I learned was how to say “Kagoda” – “I surrender”, in Mangani Gorilla language. The final pages were missing, and I read the book 11 times, hoping to find them. While recuperating, I discovered a tattered copy of Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs. From then on I binged on words: The Dandy, The Beano, Shakespeare, Leslie Charteris’s The Saint books, ghost stories and science fiction, comics and pulp magazines cadged from US soldiers whatever came my way. I fell back in the bed and stared through the window at a silver barrage balloon hanging in the sky above Manchester and couldn’t stop trembling. I must have been decoding them unconsciously for some time, but the moment of realising that I understood the words, that I could read All By Myself, seemed to be instantaneous.
I could read the speech bubbles because my mother had taught me capital letters, but the extended captions under the pictures in upper and lower case were beyond me. My favourite character was Stonehenge Kit the Ancient Brit.
In March 1941, aged six, I was lying in bed in an isolation hospital, recovering from measles, whooping cough and meningitis, and looking at the Knockout comic.