WHATBOOK..?

…are you reading now?

BRITISH Summer Time Begins by Ysenda Maxtone Graham. Whoever first said that ‘the English take their pleasures sadly’ must have had a sneak preview of this glorious survey of the British summer holiday between 1930 and 1980.

How poignantly the author brings it all back: the sodden beaches, the freezing picnics, the smell of vinegar from the chippie, the grumpy fathers and the anxious mothers, the sickmaking car journeys, the all-pervading austerity.

Curiously, rich families in their rented hunting lodges and the poor in seaside boarding houses seemed somehow to be having the same sort of holiday. I defy anyone over 40 to read this book and not come away saying, ‘Yes, that was us.’

…would you take to a desert island?

JOHN BETJEMAN’S Collected Poems. Nobody evokes better the variety of England: the wild flowers on the Cornish cliffs, the horses strung out over the Berkshire Downs, the church bells of Oxford on a May morning. Betjeman would surely be the best distraction from the monotonous moan of the tropical surf.

…first gave you the reading bug?

ANIMAL Farm by George Orwell. I was rising seven when the book came out in 1945. I grabbed my parents’ copy, thinking from the title it must be a book for children. I read it almost without stopping, at first enthralled by the heroism of the animals, then disgusted by the treachery of the pigs. I was rather annoyed when my father told me that the book was really an allegory which I was too young to understand. My aunt Violet was a friend of Orwell’s and reported to him that I had enjoyed the book because ‘there were no difficult words in it’. Orwell was delighted to think he had written so simply that a child of seven could love the book.

…left you cold?

MOBY-DICK, or The Whale, by Herman Melville. What an awful hodge-podge it is. Nothing prepares you for the huge amount of undigested information about the whaling industry it contains.

It’s like an Economist supplement combined with the Book of Jonah. To me it all smells of cod: cod Bible, cod Homer. All those one-legged pirates and Native Americans speaking in stilted pidgin are about as believable as the supporting cast in Tintin’s adventures.

FERDINAND MOUNT’s new book, Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives Of Aunt Munca, is out October 29 (Bloomsbury, £20).