Fifty Years Ago: Tuesday, 3 August 1976
Mum brought me tea in bed because she was making some, though it was less an indulgence than a warning to get up. She had an aversion to anyone sleeping in unless they were ill.
She challenged me to Word Power in the Reader’s Digest. The heading promised, rather grandly, that It Pays to Enrich Your Word Power.
The Reader’s Digest arrived monthly, perhaps as a hangover from when Mum and Dad were still together. The house was full of things bought through its special offers: books about garden birds, gardening manuals and an atlas or two.
Mum was well-read, though her spelling was notoriously poor. So were her malapropisms. She once referred to the clematis climbing a tree in the garden as the “clitoris plant,” a reference that entered family legend.
I did not do very well at Word Power. This bothered me because I already believed that whatever I achieved would depend upon my ability to communicate, and that depended upon words. More than that, I thought a large vocabulary was my route to success as an author. The fancier the words at my command, the greater my literary claim.
There were twenty difficult words, each followed by three or four possible meanings. You chose one, then turned the page to discover whether you knew anything at all.
A word such as lugubrious might mean:
A. strong and muscular
B. mournful and gloomy
C. awkwardly shaped
D. fond of arguing
I would probably choose “awkwardly shaped”, because lugubrious sounds like something large and lumpy.
Or perspicacious:
A. able to see things clearly
B. inclined to perspire
C. stubbornly persistent
D. excessively polite
I might decide it meant someone who perspired a lot. It seemed perfectly feasible.
Then there might be recalcitrant:
A. good at mental arithmetic
B. refusing to obey
C. able to recover quickly
D. inclined to exaggerate
I would believe the arithmetic one because of the calc in the middle.
Once we had committed ourselves, we turned the page. There was the correct answer, a proper definition, an example sentence and often the word’s Latin or Greek origin. At the bottom was a score chart telling you whether your vocabulary was exceptional, excellent, good or in urgent need of improvement.
That was the cleverness of Word Power. It did not merely test whether you knew a word. It exposed how easily you could persuade yourself that a false meaning must be true.
It also gave me the false belief that using big words was what made you an author.
I tried to continue with my science-fiction novel. I made seven attempts at the first page, all typed on my Smith-Corona. I still have them somewhere, fifty years later: a record, if nothing else, of how my brain worked then and still works today.
They are agony to look at. A spider trying ice-skates for the first time. Jackson Pollock let loose across the page—though that, at least, would have been art.
I had no idea what I was getting wrong. I described everything except what mattered. The setting sprawled everywhere, the characters could hardly be told apart, there was no real plot and certainly no dramatic drive.
I had no system for studying writers or writing, or even for thinking through what worked, why it worked or how it had been done. I thought writing was like jumping into water to learn to swim, or throwing yourself down a snow-covered mountain to learn to ski. I probably imagined lovemaking worked in much the same way: it began with a kiss, and whatever happened next the two of you made up as you went along.
Mum had always told me, when I was drawing, to “keep your workings”. I am not sure that advice was intended to include every previous attempt at writing a novel, but I kept them anyway.
At three o’clock I went into Newcastle with Mum. We parked off the Haymarket in the spiral car park. Town was absolutely packed—perhaps it was the Tyneside Summer Show, or perhaps it was simply the summer holidays.
Mum dragged me round the shops. She had told me that Dad expected us to be well turned out when we went to stay with him. He was paying her for our upkeep, and that included clothes.
In eighteen months I had grown from five feet five to nearly six feet. At fourteen years and ten months I was gangly and suddenly the tallest person in the family. Three pairs of trousers and a jacket were not extravagance so much as reconstruction.
We went to Bainbridge, Fenwick and Marcus Price. Mum chose because she was paying; I was there to try things on. I got flared trousers, including cords, and either a corduroy or denim jacket.
We stopped in Gosforth, parked opposite the Post Office and bought a blouse for Jo, my younger sister. Then we did some shopping in Lipton’s on the High Street, one of the two supermarkets there.
There was plenty to do in the garden. If Grandpa had not cut the lawn, I would have to do it. He lived a little over half a mile away and often came round. The flowerbeds always needed weeding. I did not mind. Gardening, like cooking, was something I enjoyed.
At swimming club I saw the two Penny girls. They were sisters of a Sedbergh boy and trained regularly with Newcastle City Squad. They were completely out of my league. In a week they probably did ten times the training I ever managed at Sedbergh.
Newcastle swimmers were loud, popular and fiercely competitive. The squad had a reputation for producing national swimmers. At Sedbergh I could maintain the status of being one of the best swimmers in the school. Against Newcastle City Squad, I was inconsequential.
This was not humiliating so much as instructive. It showed me that rankings inside a tired, middle-ranking public school had little basis in reality once you were placed against the wider world.
I never thought of girls I trained with as girls in that sense. Swimming was more like being in the army. Everyone was reduced to times, lengths, lanes and whether they could keep up.
I was much better today. After only three sessions, my strength and stamina were already returning. You can do that at fourteen years and ten months.
I was testing myself with Newcastle City Squad to maintain my status as a top swimmer at school. To them, I hardly registered. I could not have measured up, as it were.
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