Shut Up and Listen

I owe a lot to my mother’s laziness.

When I was little I always wanted to be read to. It wasn’t enough to hear one short story then switch off the light. And picture books were useless, pallid little things. Where was the story? I wanted a good couple of chapters and, most importantly, I wanted to fall asleep while the reading was still going on.  That was key. If I woke up in the middle of the night I wanted more reading.

I hated lying awake in the dark unable to sleep. I’d lie there — happy, well-adjusted child that I was — sorting through my mind looking for things to worry about. Only listening to an absorbing story could distract me for long enough to fall asleep.  And a sufficiently distracting story would generally equal a well written one.

Luckily, my mother was a children’s librarian so the solution was pretty easy. Talking books. Everyone calls them audio books now, but I like talking books better. Every week my mother would bring home a couple of children’s talking books and I’d listen to them as I went to sleep or played in my room or wandered about with my walkman. I really liked talking books.

There’s some point I would like to make here about how talking books were a catalyst for me. How I owe them my love of narrative and my tricky relationship with actual, physical, non read-by-Nigel-Lambert books. I’m not really sure though. Possibly I am just too lazy to read if it’s even the slightest bit taxing. Hence why I can’t get through Paradise Lost, comedic anti-hero Satan or no.

I know I remember more when someone tells something to me than if I read it on the page. And I’m a terrible skimmer. A good book for me is one where I don’t want to skim in search of key plot points and dialogue.  Description and pretty language can go boil their heads. What I want really out of any narrative is jokes and plot twists. Which is why season 3 of Deadwood is the best — it’s the funniest.

At this point it seems appropriate to inform/remind you of the glory that was Helen Cresswell. She wrote about a gazillion children’s books in her 71 years, but the best were those about the Bagthorpe family.

The patriarch of the chaotic, surreal and continually malcontent Bagthorpes is Henry Bagthorpe. He’s what Bernard Black would be if he weren’t Irish. Henry Bagthorpe works as a writer for the BBC, and really, that’s all you need to know about him or the entire series. No one in children’s books has a job like that. He’s also a complete bastard of a character, petty and self important and argumentative. It’s fucking brilliant.

The Bagthorpes, Vlad the Drac, Pongwiffy and so many others that I can’t quite remember at this distance in time were products of children’s writers from the 80s and early 90s. Writers who had watched Monty Python and the Young Ones. They were funny. Not kid funny, but actual funny. You could tell that they weren’t just writing kids books because their other job hadn’t worked out.

And I met all these authors through talking books. Chivers Children’s Audiobooks are an English company who produced most of the talking books bought by Australian libraries. Even before I lived in England I had spent years there. And Chivers also had impeccable taste. If they had produced it, I knew I would like it. And their voice talent! Fuck. Every short-on-work British actor from Dench downward took a turn reading me to sleep in my suburban Canberra bedroom.

Talking books are the reason I got through Jane Eyre. They’re the reason I know the Greek Myths in some detail. They’re the one and only reason I finished True History of the Kelly Gang. They taught me how to unscrew tapes, cut out damaged sections and repair the whole thing without the library ever knowing the service I had rendered them.

Mostly they trained my mind to listen and remember. And though I only ever met one other person who even vaguely shared my love for talking books as a child, I know there are others out there, alone in their bedrooms, listening.

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