On reading, with slight sidetracking

There are plenty of pictures of me as a baby and a small girl carrying around or looking at books. In fact, at one place in the ‘Catherine as a baby’ photo album there are three such pictures of me in a row. The books that I had at the time were all either Dr. Seuss books or Little Golden books. I can remember being very fond of both Fox in Socks and The Little Engine That Could.

When I was a little older and living in England, I received a boxed set of the Beatrix Potter books. I loved those books. I loved holding them, I loved looking at the pictures, and I loved having the stories read to me. But it seems that I was not yet interested in reading them for myself. There is an old family story (brought out at times when it would most embarrass me) about the time my mother offered to teach me how to read. I must have been four at the time. Apparently, I proclaimed in a clear voice, “It is not your job to teach me to read. It will be my teacher’s job, when I go to school.”

I started school in the January of 1988 at the age of five. My family and I were living in Crawley at the time. I remember learning the alphabet as ‘Annie Apple,’ ‘Bouncing Ben,’ ‘Clever Cat,’ all the way through to ‘Zig Zag Zebra.'

I do not know if all school libraries in England are organised the same because I did not understand such things at the time, but at my school the books were mostly supplied by one (probably subsidised) publisher, and were colour coded by level. The first level was the white level, which were the books without words in them. I can remember the first book I brought home from the school library. It was a book about a turtle. I wanted my mother to read it to me, but she told me there were no words to read so I would have to make my own story. What freedom! I must have spent the whole afternoon until dinner time just turning the pages of that book and imagining.

I think the next level of books in the library was the yellow level, but I may be wrong. I can remember the first book of that level I got my hands on too. It was a ‘Bangers and Mash’ book. Bangers and Mash were two chimpanzee children, and the book was about them making a mud pie down at the bottom of their back garden.

I had a lot of fun during my fifth year, learning how to read. But for some reason when I was six I went through a phase of not wanting to read. I cannot remember what it was that put me off books; all I can remember is lying to my teacher telling her that I read to my Mother every evening so that I would not have to read to the teacher during class. My teacher spoke to Mum and asked about my reading habits. I got in trouble. My teacher asked me why I did not want to read. I cannot remember giving her any good reason.

It was about this time that I had to keep an illustrated diary of my weekend activities. Every Monday I had to sit down and write about what I had done over the previous two days. I became a compulsive liar. All the other kids at my table were writing about going out with their parents to here or there, or about getting new toys, or about going to Pizza Hut. My family did not do things like that, so I felt left out. I would spin tales about going to Brighton for the day, a place I had visited a few times before starting school. Or about going to London. Or Pizza Hut. It was far more interesting than writing ‘I played with my My Little Ponies and then I watched the Grand Prix on telly.’ But I always made sure that my tales were believable so that the teacher would not know that I was lying to her.

By the time I was seven, my love affair with books had resurfaced. I cannot remember what I read that year. The memories have no doubt been drowned out by memories of our four week trip back to New Zealand and our trip to France.

When I was eight, and in the last year of First School I had a very strange teacher. Early on in the school year he made us write poems, and apparently my poem was the best in the class. I became teacher’s pet, but it was nothing of my doing. My teacher decided for whatever reason that he was going to put me on a separate curriculum of his own devising, although he certainly had no right to do so. Some memories I have from that year:

• All the other kids sitting on the mat for story time, but I was over on the other side of the classroom making a bird’s nest and eggs out of clay. My teacher had been the one to tell me to do that, and then he gushed about the finished product and put it in a place of importance on the windowsill. I wanted to take it home, but he would not let me.
• All the other kids, when they had finished a geography activity had to move onto a maths one. I did not have to do the maths activity and instead got to draw a picture.
• All the other kids were working together getting ready for something, possibly the school play, but I was, at my teacher’s insistence, making a miniature post box out of a toilet roll core and red paint.
• All the other kids were doing English lessons, but I was helping a child from another class type a story onto a computer. Which was funny because we did not even have a computer at home so I was not exactly an expert or anything.

I told my mother about these things, and she wrote a letter of concern to the headmaster. A few days later Mum got a very snooty letter from my teacher telling her to keep her nose out of his business. Of all the nerve!

That teacher’s treatment of me had long-lasting implications for my social life. I was ostracised by my peers, and few of those kids were willing to talk with me again, even after we went to Middle School and right up until the time I left England. At the time I was too young to realise that the aforementioned actions of my teacher were having a negative impact on my schooling. But there was one thing that he was doing that was making me angry.

When I moved into his class I was on the orange level of the library. A few other students were on the same level, but everyone else was lower. The procedure for moving up a reading level was for the pupil to ask for permission to go up a level or the teacher to recommend it, the pupil to read to the teacher, and then the teacher would decide either to move the child up a level or not to. Time after time I went to my teacher and asked to be moved up to the pink level, but he kept saying “You’re not ready yet.” Many other students were moved up a level. I read every single book in the orange and then started reading them again. Still I could not move up. At school I was reading picture books with a few sentences on each page, but at home I was reading Enid Blyton books, and I do not just mean Noddy. I had received a huge collection of musty old Famous Five and Secret Seven books from my next door neighbours, and I was steadily working my way through them. But still I was on the orange level of the library.

Luckily, for me if no one else, I was given a reprieve when my teacher’s pregnant girlfriend got cancer (or something horrible like that) and he took extended leave. For the rest of the year we had a long-term substitute. She was a real bitch, that teacher, but at least she treated me the same as everyone else. Also, she let me move up to the pink level of the library, and only a short while after that up to the purple.

Shortly before I turned nine I and my peers moved to the Middle School. One girl who had been in my class and had been my friend was placed into the other class and she quickly forgot about me. My other friend, the one who I had been friends with since playschool, moved away. That first year I became friends with a girl who was new to the area, but we did not remain friends for long. She learned from the other students how to treat me, and being a rather sadistic individual, she became one of my worst bullies. I had always been a sporadic victim of bullies, but for most of the two and two third years I spent at Three Bridges Middle I was tortured by them.

I could write a whole book about the bullying I experienced at Middle School, but here all I will say is that school sucked, that I sometimes cried in the mornings because I did not want to go there, and that no one really helped me. My parents did not know what to do, and no doubt they knew less than half of what was going on. The school staff seemed not to care.

If there was one good thing about Middle School, it was the library. It was not colour coded like the First School’s had been, and the books were from all sorts of publishers, not just one. The books were also a lot more interesting. I remember reading the Chronicles of Narnia that first year, as well as Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass, and a whole string of Paddington Bear books. I read all the Famous Five books that I had not received from my next door neighbours, as well as all the Roald Dahl books I had not yet received from relatives as Christmas presents. One of the best finds for me in that library was The Princess and the Goblin. I read that when I was nine. I really ought to track down another copy and read it again some time.

I have a rather odd memory from about this time. I think it may be from when I was eight, shortly after going to Middle School. One evening I stapled some paper together intending to write and illustrate my own book. The first thing I did was draw a cover picture for my book. Then on the second page of my handmade book I wrote the contents page. I wrote the titles of twenty chapters, and gave their page numbers. I had already decided that each chapter would be one page long, with an illustration on the opposite page. Then I started my book. It was a story about horses, and it was a terribly obvious plagiarism of Black Beauty. I wrote the first chapter, the second, the third . . . and eventually found that I had only stapled nine pieces of paper together, so there would only be enough room for seven chapters. I think I cried. If only I had not been so stupid as to write the chapter page before writing the chapters.

When I was ten, shortly after my youngest sister was born, my father’s job was taken by a computer. My parents made the decision to move back to New Zealand. I was so happy. I was eleven when we went back to New Zealand. I had been living England for nine years, so I was not used to the culture of my own country. Also we had moved from a city to a small rural area, so I was not used to (but absolutely delighted by) the, well, not-city-ness.

At first we lived with my Grandparents, which was why we moved to the area in the first place. But we stayed even after we had found a place to live. I had a lot of fun exploring the nearby beach, and just generally getting outside on a regular basis which I had not really done in England except for in the middle of summer.

I started at the local school half way through the school year. I was still damaged from the bullying I had experienced in England, so it was very difficult for me to interact with the other children. I was, as I had always been and probably always will be, awkward and shy. Luckily for me, my new teacher asked a girl called Emma to look out for me while I settled in. Emma seemed to care not one bit if I was shy and awkward; she was willing to become friends anyway.

Kids can smell fear; they know who they can and cannot pick on. I do not think that many of my class mates thought much of me, but I had a friend and that meant that I only ever suffered mild bullying at that school, no more than many children.

Emma also likes books, which meant that we could recommend books to each other, hang out in the library and basically be openly as geeky as we really were. It was during that period that I read for the first time some books that left a huge influence on me. Emma found and introduced me to David Eddings. His books left a big impact on me for a period, even though I do not think nearly so highly of them anymore. Also I found Diane Duane and ended up totally addicted to her ‘Young Wizards’ series of books.

At the time there were only four books in the series. I bought the second book at a book sale that was on at school. They happened every now and then, when publishers of childrens books had a few dribs and drabs of stock left over that they could not sell to shops. At the time, the YW books were going out of print on the English publishing circuit, although I did not know that at the time. There were two books in the series available, the fourth and the second. I did not have enough money for both, so I bought the second, not just because it was the earlier book but also because of the cover. It featured a huge shark leaping up out of the sea on a moonlit night. I still love that cover.

I read Deep Wizardry over and over, but it was simply not enough; I needed the rest of the books. They were not available from the bookstore, so my mother had them ordered in for me, one at a time. They cost NZ$11 at the time. When I was twelve I was earning $2 a week in pocket money, so it took me six weeks to save up for each book. I can remember when I finally got the first book, weeks and weeks after getting the second. We went into town to do the grocery shopping. I hardly ever went inside the supermarket. I was always sitting outside in the van reading; we would often go to the library before the supermarket. But that day I had something far more precious. A book that was mine. A book I had been waiting for.

Anyway, there I sat in the van in the supermarket parking lot, sort of grunting at my Mum when she asked if I was going to stay in the van and read because I could not pay any more attention to her than that. I opened the little Whitcoulls bag and pulled out So You Want To Be A Wizard. I spared a few moments to stare at the cover before diving head-first into the book. I was so elated that I felt like I was floating, and therefore I had to sit in my baby sister’s car seat and put my feet up on the dashboard to get myself as high up as possible. My childhood was absolutely filled with wonderful logic like that. I finished the book early the next day. I could not help myself. But I read it many more times, so it was not a waste.

Eventually I got the third book, High Wizardry, and the fourth book, A Wizard Abroad. The series could possibly have finished with High Wizardry (my joint favourite book in the series, equal with Deep Wizardry), but there was also A Wizard Abroad, and the series could not end with that book. And there were no more. I pined away for years, occasionally re-reading the four books, wanting to know what happened next. I found out eventually when the fifth book was published while I was at University. There are eight books now, and a ninth one is on the way.

The two years I spent living at the beach were the happiest and most ideal of my childhood. I had a whole beach town to explore and I had a friend who was interested in the same things as me and who gave me the confidence and the excuse to be myself.

I got to do some interesting things at school too. I remember one day we had to write a fairytale and make our own handmade book to write it in. We sewed the paper together with dental floss. The covers were paper-covered cardboard. I made another book at home shortly after. I used dental floss just as we had done at school, but the dental floss we had at home at the time was mint flavoured so my book smelt like toothpaste. I have hand-made several notebooks over the years, and am slowly getting better at it.

We did not stay at the beach for long. My father got a better job in Wellington, and so when I was thirteen, a few weeks after I started college (the New Zealand equivalent of high school) we had to move again. We could not afford to live in Wellington proper, or even in the town nearby where we had lived when I was a Fox in Sox loving baby. We had to live in a town slightly further away, a town with a ‘reputation.’

I had to start college twice in a few weeks. At my new school I was put in with a class of odds and ends. The class was mostly boys, and they had already been together for four weeks and had started to settle in. I felt very left out. At thirteen, it is very difficult for non-popular girls and boys to make friends of the opposite sex, which was especially true in that class. Since there were only a few girls in the class, I only had a choice between two groups. I fell in with one of the groups. They were nice enough people, I think. I ended up attached to their group until the end of school. But none of them shared the same interests as me. Also, even though they were not bad people, they did not always treat me well. Because they did not understand my interests, they tried peer pressure and mocking to get me to conform, and when I would not, they often ignored me. I think it was just because they did not quite know what to do with me.

I still loved books, no matter what my friends thought of that. I read many books during my thirteenth year, mostly of science fiction or fantasy. Although I had no friends who I saw on a regular basis who liked books, Emma and I would often talk on the phone, and we would of course talk about what we were reading.

It was about then that I decided that, whatever else I might become (astronomer, biologist, whatever) that I would also be a writer. I started drawing maps and inventing characters, designing currencies and making religions. Nothing came of all that effort, but I kept all that information and I may recycle it one day.

In my fourteenth year, we had to do a year-long ‘Ribit Reading programme.’ What we had to do, right at the beginning of the school year, was assign ourselves a target number of books to read before the end of the year. Or rather, we had to assign ourselves a number of points. One book was worth one point unless the book had two hundred pages or more. Both a 30 page book and a 199 page book were worth one point, whereas a 200 page book was worth two points. 300 or more pages became three points, 400 pages or more were four points, and so on.

I could overheard my classmates as they told the teacher how many points they wanted to assign as their goals for the year. I laughed inside to hear most students ask for one or two point targets and have the teacher argue them up to four or five points. It was soon my turn. I went up to the teacher’s desk. “How many books do you think you can read this year?” she asked.

“I want one hundred points,” said I.

“One hundred?” said the teacher. “Be reasonable! You can’t read one hundred books in a year. How about twenty?”

“But most of the books I read are between three hundred and seven hundred pages long, so it wouldn’t be a hundred books.”

“I can’t let you choose one hundred points. It’s too much.”

“Eighty?”

“Fifty.”

“Sixty?”

“. . . Okay. Sixty points.”

I decided to not record on the Ribit sheet or add to my score David Edding’s Belgariad and Malloreon books when I re-read them that year, because I had already read them so many times and they took up too much space on the sheet. Even so, I handed in the report at the end of the year with 66 points total.

That year was the pinnacle of my bulk reading career. Since then I have been distracted by exams, Playstation, jobs, travel and a brief attempt at a social life.

Ever since I was thirteen I have constantly been in a state of ‘planning a novel’ although the novel in question has changed almost every year since then. Last year I finally became mature enough to (I hope) properly review what I can write, what I want to write, and what is original. Last January I started writing a book that I actually stuck with, and now I am nearly finished. I have no idea how good my story is. A life-long love of books does not necessarily lead to a publishable writing style. But I hope that in my case it has.