GILES COREN

In his latest dispatch from the classroom of fatherhood, he frets over his boy’s reading

BY THE TIME MY DAUGHTER TURNED THREE, I had taught her to read, and considered it the greatest achievement of my life. Which admittedly is not saying much. But it certainly beat such previous contenders as coming second in the “humour” category at the British Press Awards and my thirdplace medal in the Hall School under-11 diving competition, when only four kids entered and Jason “Fatty” Boyd had an ear infection on the day, which meant he wasn’t allowed in the water.

As Kitty ripped through Biff, Chip & Kipper in a week, hit “chapter books” at four and arrived for her first day at primary school with a bag full of books she had not only read but written full and sometimes damning appraisals of in joined-up writing in little ring-bound notebooks, I allowed myself to believe that I was truly Super Dad. Check out this little Virginia Woolf I have made. See what I have created.

But I had been pushing at an open door. I hadn’t really done shit. From before she was one, Kitty had always demanded “10 books” when she was put down in her cot, and would sit with them, long before she could walk, turning the pages and mouthing sounds and gradually, as vocabulary came to her, making up stories to go with the pictures. I showed her the alphabet once and she was off. She invented “silly letters” to account for

those that did not require enunciation and a situation developed in which, far from offering her treats if she sat and read with me — the classical middle-class paradigm — I would bribe Kitty to finish her dinner or brush her teeth with a promise to let her read afterwards. Now seven, she has recently grown out of Enid Blyton and started on PG Wodehouse. My work with her is done. The only reason for sending her to school now is so she can do drugs and get laid.

Sam, on the other hand, is a… well, he’s a… I don’t know what word I can use in this enlightened and sympathetic age without appearing to stigmatise him and the group of unfortunates with whom I cruelly choose to lump him, based on his inability to grasp even the most basic fucking three-letter words. Or to give the remotest shit.

I have asked around at school, among other parents, serious educational professionals and the wardens of the most brutal child correction facilities, and the word they all come up with to explain Sam’s lack of ability or interest is, “Boy”.

That’s what they tell me. They say I just have to deal with it. He can’t get this shit into his thick skull because he has this terrible birth defect — I blame the wife for eating raw fish during her pregnancy; she says it’s because tight trousers kept my nuts too warm — of being a manchild. And they apparently just can’t do it.

When I started trying to teach Sam at two-anda-half the basic principles that Kitty had picked up so easily at the same age, it was like talking to a watermelon.

“What does C-A-T make?” I’d say. And he’d just sit there, round and meaty, staring at the sky.

A year later, Sammy was a bit more evolved. It was like giving reading lessons to a chicken. I’d grab him and pin him down and open a book but as I relinquished my grip on his neck to turn a page he’d leap up out of my lap and run off across the kitchen, banging into things and squawking.

By the time he was four and coming to the end of nursery — which was the stage at which Kitty was flicking through the last chapters of The House at Pooh Corner and finding the whole “talking bear” thing a little trite — Sam still hadn’t grasped the concept of a letter. I’d show him a “T” and he’d go: “Is it a seven?”

No.

“An eight?”

No.

“Is it an aeroplane?”

And when I said that it wasn’t he’d hit me in the nuts and run away laughing.

No book ever did me any good. Except the odd one to squash a mosquito against a tropical hotel wall. Let’s forget it, Sammy boy. Leave reading to the girls. All these silly letters are getting in the way of your youth. Just get out there and smash things

Now five, the closest he will come to reading is when we play Top Trumps Supercars. I bought these with the cunning plan in mind of getting him to read such words as “speed”, “range” and “cool factor”, working our way eventually towards “Lamborghini” and “Testarossa”. But Sam has found a different way to play.

“What colour is yours?” he asks.

“Er, blue,” I reply.

“Green!” he shouts. “I win!”

And when I tell him that’s not how the game works, he throws the deck at my head and blows a massive raspberry.

This is very worrying to me. Life is so short. He needs to get going on the basics, your Willard Price, your Jennings and Darbishire, your Swallows and Amazons, in time to move on soon to Orwell and Waugh and Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dickens and Walter Scott. And then, when his imagination is aflame, on to Shakespeare and the Romantic poets, the Greeks, a degree at Oxford and…

“Why?” says my wife. “So he can cry his way through school, live his life entirely through books, have no friends, never meet a girl, stay a virgin till he’s 25, jump 10ft at the sight of his own shadow and end up scratching a living with his pen across various dying media such as books, newspapers and magazines, and railing endlessly at the illiteracy of a world he never looked up from a book long enough to have even a basic working grasp of ?”

“Like, er, whom, for example?” I asked. A little taken aback at the vehemence of her onslaught.

“Oh, nobody,” she replied, rolling her eyes to the ceiling.

And she’s right, of course. No book ever did me any good. Except the odd one I might have used to squash a mosquito against a tropical hotel wall. So let’s forget it, Sammy boy. Leave reading to the girls. All these silly letters are getting in the way of your youth. Just get out there and smash things.