Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Yet more ponies for Jean

In her delightful memoir of childhood reading she admits to a deep distrust of Babar’s obsession with smart suits

After three hot-water-bottle-warmed evenings of highly satisfying bedtime reading, I can confirm that, even in a world where Francis Spufford’s superb The Child that Books Built exists, we need this new memoir by Lucy Mangan, about her childhood of being a bookworm. It’s enchanting.

Where Spufford mined the depths of his childhood anguish in his urge to get to the bottom of his pre-adolescent craving for escape into ‘the Forest’, ‘the Island’, ‘the Town’ and ‘the Hole’ (as he named the four varieties of childhood fantasy), Mangan just grabs us by both hands and takes us for a whirlwind romp through her antisocial childhood in a happy family home in Catford — where, if anyone was looking for her, she was probably to be found exactly where she had been eight hours before. ‘I didn’t need parenting,’ she writes, ‘just feeding and rotating every few hours on the sofa to avoid pressure sores.’ Banned from reading books at the breakfast table, she just read and re-read the cornflakes packet.

I’ve heard it said of certain people that their energy would be enough to power the National Grid. The comic energy in this book is of that sort. It’s a force. Clearly, Mangan’s physical energy as a child was severely lacking. All she wanted to do was not talk to anyone and devour the complete series of whichever book she was currently reading, be it The Famous Five or Milly-Molly-Mandy. Going to school was a terrible shock: up till then, as she writes, ‘you’ve just been a soft, larval mass of love for books and reading. Now, through repeated exposure to Other People, you begin to acquire a carapace that will both protect you and alienate you from them.’

Perhaps some kind of energy transfer has happened, and she’s managed to harness those two decades of unspent physical energy and unleash it in comic energy form.

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