How reading James Herriot saved my life
Where Mark Hodkinson grew up, books were only for geeks. But aged 12 he found novels going cheap on a market stall and unlocked a magical talent
BOOK OF THE WEEK NO ONE ROUND HERE READS TOLSTOY: MEMOIRS OF A WORKING-CLASS READER by Mark Hodkinson (Canongate £16.99, 368pp)
AnyonE who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s and who is, like me, a bit common will relish the period details in Mark Hodkinson’s compelling memoir, set in a pungent Manchester and Rochdale — places, like my own industrial South Wales, unpenetrated at any time by flower power, free love, olives, lasagne, garlic, asparagus or avocados.
The closest we working-class sorts got to pasta was a tin of spaghetti hoops.
‘My parents drank tea,’ says Hodkinson, because coffee was ‘considered hoity-toity’, wine was unheard of and his mother couldn’t believe cheesecake was a dessert, so served it with chips. Dinner was at noon, tea was the evening meal, and no one dreamt of eating out in a restaurant, as that was a pretentious waste of money and not for the likes of us.
There were no pictures on the walls, the TV was never switched off, and foreign holidays were the preserve of film stars and Pools winners. Torquay was as far as Hodkinson travelled, but at least there were allegedly palm trees. His talk of handme-down clothes, making mixes on C90 cassette tapes and riding Raleigh Choppers made me nostalgic.
THERE was seldom any tactile affection between family members, only thumps. Back in the last century, husbands never did the shopping, the cooking or housework. The man’s job was to keep a roof over people’s heads, pay the rent, fix cars and go down the pub with his mates.
If it all sounds rather neanderthal, it was. Hodkinson says: ‘no one I knew owned or played a musical instrument’, and there was as much chance of catching his parents reading as of finding them ‘trampolining in the back garden’.
Indeed, books were anathema. Hodkinson’s father thought reading was girlish, like sewing or netball. nor was his mother supportive: ‘It’s not normal, a lad of your age on your own so much.’
His father went so far as to imply bookworms were homosexuals: ‘If you’re stuck up here day after day reading, you’ll never get yourself a girlfriend. That’s if it’s a girlfriend you want.’
The sad lesson throughout no one Round Here Reads Tolstoy, chiming with my own experience in the Rhymney Valley, is that the working class is its own worst enemy, quick to stamp out and deride anyone aspirational: ‘If you become clever, you walk away, leave them behind’, in a betrayal of the tribe.
In the days of grammar schools, to pass the 11-Plus could brand you a snob — just as Hodkinson was called a snob for opening a John Updike novel. Hodkinson’s descriptions of his comprehensive are harrowing. In class, ‘kids shouted out, answered back and provoked facile arguments’. Should a pupil show interest in a lesson or submit homework, they were mocked as creeps. More often the cry would go up: ‘Let’s find a cat and kill it!’
The PE lessons were notable horrors. Being ‘sent out on a frozen February morning in flimsy nylon shorts and shirts, shivering, skin turning red’ was matched for joy only by the thought of double maths.
Many teachers were peevish and apathetic, and had given up thinking they could do anything about their pupils’ ‘lack of self-worth’, other than rub it in. Hodkinson was told never to set his sights higher than becoming a trainee manager at Marks & Spencer, where there was a staff chiropody scheme.
He was saved by a bout of asthma, which kept him at home. ‘This poorly time was when I discovered my love of reading.’
Hodkinson particularly enjoyed James Herriot’s vet stories and Tolkien’s sagas about wizards, dwarves, trolls and dragons. next came Jerome K. Jerome, The Diary of A nobody and Catcher In The Rye. He re-reads the Salinger each year, as ‘it still
smarts with a lust for life… I had forged a union with millions of others across the globe by simply reading a book’.
Barry Hines’s A Kestrel For A Knave, which formed the basis of the classic film Kes, struck a chord — northern working-class lad finding something to be passionate about.
Hodkinson bought his books from a barrow in the market, where he was informed: ‘No one from round here reads Tolstoy.’ The stall-holder also mentioned authors he believed were named Dotsandeffski and Mario Vases Lager. Before the internet, out-of-print titles were impossible to find and second-hand bookshops were ‘claustrophobic taverns’, gloomy and seedy. I for one am quite happy to feed my own book addiction with the ‘buy it now’ button on Amazon, even if it means contributing to the $230,000 which Hodkinson says Jeff Bezos makes every single minute.
Preston Polytechnic was no better than Hodkinson’s school. His journalism course was on a par with diplomas in hairdressing and dry-stone walling. He proceeded to work on —and is funny about — provincial newspapers, where sour old editors relished crushing ‘enthusiasm and initiative’.
Hodkinson got to review amateur dramatics and to cover inquests and council meetings. Once there was a scoop about a chip pan fire.
In the meantime, reading was more than a hobby. Books were ‘a portal to a new world or a new version of the world’, which left Hodkinson animated and excited, ‘lit up by these characters’ and their locales.
In time he’d accumulated a collection of 3,500 volumes and was a structural liability to any house he inhabited. Sagging shelves were reinforced with blocks of wood.
Though books became ‘crucial in reinforcing my outsider stance, getting me through and forging my personality’, Hodkinson’s mother still said, with an edge, ‘You’re not going to read all these!’ The workingclass suspicion of the written word was ingrained. His father continued to maintain real men toiled with their hands, played sport outside and loitered at lathes.
HODKINSON, who became a successful author of football-team and pop-group histories, has spent his life fighting against an upbringing and background where ‘books were objects of disdain’. Even library books were banned from his home, as the pages were believed to harbour germs.
Whether or not this is the reason, it’s tragic to hear only five per cent of the population bother to use public libraries today; 800 branches closed in the decade after 2005.
Allen Lane, co-founder of Penguin Books, fully believed in the existence of ‘a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price’.
He’d shifted millions of paperbacks by 1961. Where have these general readers gone?
I was alarmed to discover being a bookworm is now a pathological syndrome called Book Accumulation Beyond Life Expectancy, for which counselling is available. Yet it’s fine to text, tweet and have the concentration span of a goldfish.
Everyone is against literature, not only the working class. As Hodkinson says, ethnicity and ‘the demarcation of genders’ matter more to universities and publishers than whether something is any good.
Fair play to Hodkinson, he has had a go at being a publisher himself, which turned into a nightmare of ‘treachery, impecuniousness, bureaucracy and disappointment’. A biography of J.D. Salinger flopped and 3,000 copies were chucked in skips or given to charity shops. A film was made starring Nicholas Hoult, but Kevin Spacey was also in the cast, which meant distributors ran a mile when he was ‘cancelled’.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not a maudlin book. It is written with verve. Hodkinson is sticking to his guns. I think he is a hero.