I’ve gone for this poem published in Issue 40 of The Reader.

I would’ve said it’s a poem about being a tomboy. But then it seems to want to shake off any labels which support the idea that boys should behave in one way and girls in another.

I’ve read the poem with several groups now and the main talking point was the sense of feeling somehow other. One group member summed it up when she said, ‘When you’re growing up I think everyone feels abnormal in some way.’ We wondered whether you ever lose the feeling of strangeness in yourself.

The father-daughter relationship is a crucial part of the poem’s thinking about where identity comes from. One group member picked out lines referring to the father:

For years I abandoned him
Too busy being my own version of him.

She said she couldn’t tell whether the daughter was idolising or rejecting the father. Several people talked about cutting their parents out of their lives and others talked about things the other way round- their father abandoning them.

There was a lot of debate about gender stereotypes – the parents in the groups talked about dressing their sons and daughters differently, even when they were babies. Some people had very traditional views, saying, for example, that girls shouldn’t play rugby or football. But, just as the poem does, one person challenged this by saying ‘As long as my children were happy and healthy, I didn’t mind what they did, it didn’t matter if it was my lad or my girl.’

A Father Like Me

I didn’t want to be daddy’s little girl,
I wanted to be daddy’s son, I wanted a football,
a racing track, a power-car, a gun.

I didn’t want Sindy, Polly Pocket, Barbie, I staged
a late night heist, a hit and run involving Ken
and that white Ferrari, Barbie’s dead and Ken’s
to blame, the Ferrari’s in the car wash,
that was my kind of game.

I’d hold Sindy upside-down swirling her hair
in a puddle. What you doin? I’d hear him shout,
but I’d fight off my father’s offer of a cuddle.

One Easter all trussed up – pink frill dress,
shiny new shoes, straw bonnet hat – I went exploring,
ribbons unravelling in the wind, I went
looking for my reflection in a bucket of oil,
its silky surface I swirled with a stick
never finding the bucket’s bottom
only that pink and black don’t mix,
each fingerprint spread as I tried to wipe the last.

Oil became a thing between him and me,
I grew up, bought old bangers of cars
learning measures made by a dipstick,
that everything with a yellow cap in a Ford
could be filled up; oil, water, washers,
ignoring my mother’s new shade of pale pink lipstick.

I held my body rigid as he taught me to check tyres
and water, levels and tread, my back’s axle aching.
When I pulled out the fuse for the wipers
instead of the flip catch for the bonnet
he made a comment about women and cars
and my heart was punctured.

He took my sister’s boyfriend to the scrap yard
searching for spares, as the car turned the corner
of our road, I was left a part
only a front door key on my fob,
to him I was still his little girl,
he wanted me to meet a nice lad, settle down,
have babies I suppose.

He doesn’t know of the army pants in class 3’s
dressing up box, shoving them over my skirt,
he, my father doesn’t know that I was always the dad
while other girls fought over clip-on earrings and
dragged five-sizes-too-big-heels across the orange
carpet, their toes in the points of 1986 stilettos,
I was busy being like him, rolling paper
pretending it was a cigarette, sitting in the chair
watching the news on a cardboard telly,
he didn’t know I’d spent years basing myself on him.

Suddenly I find I’ve grown up all wrong,
Oedipal instead of Electra, got my wires crossed,
circuit board fused, systems shorted.
I was a physics paper problem where you decide
to close AB or DD to get EE, the lighthouse
to light so the boat can see sea.

My walk his, my talk his,
my voice an echo arguing with his,
for years I abandoned him,
too busy being my own version of him,
until I meet this woman who tells me
I’m not him, I’m me and that’s fine.
For the first time I notice as I change gear
my hand actually does look like a woman’s.

And this woman says having crossed wires
is a good thing – she finds them interesting
and this woman comes to know in me
something I never knew existed
this woman teaches me
to know my father as myself.
So, now each year, as we all grow older,
I find I do want to be my father’s daughter.

Emma McGordon

Click to listen to Emma McGordon reading A Father Like Me

Newcastle Library - one of the Libraries We Love

Today is National Libraries Day and to mark this occasion, we’d like to bring your attention to a feature that’s been running on our website for about a year, but many blog readers may be unaware of: Libraries We Love.

The idea of Libraries We Love is to focus on the things to love about libraries, and not just in the UK but all over the world. So far we’ve featured this diverse selection, which offer something unique and brilliant in every case:

Walsall Central Library, UK

Stoke on Trent Library, UK

Burnley Library, UK

African Library Project, Africa/USA

The Travelling Suitcase Library (based in Leeds, UK)

Woodchurch Library, Wirral, UK

Halton Lea Library, UK

Oswestry Library, Shropshire, UK

Seattle Public Library, USA

Newcastle City Library, UK

Read all about why we love them on our website.

We’ve asked actor David Morrissey, who is interviewed in the forthcoming issue of The Reader magazine (issue 45, March 2012), to tell us about the Library (Libraries) He Loves especially for this feature:

I had spent many happy hours in Liverpool Central Library when I was growing up. And when I moved to London I couldn’t believe there wasn’t just one central place I could walk into. A tutor at RADA told me about the British Library reading room at the British Museum and I went to check it out. I had to fill in various forms and also get verification from RADA before being allowed in, but once I had my pass, there was no stopping me. I was amazed by the low lighting and green leather tops on the tables. The wood and brass. It was like some grand gentleman’s club. It was different from Liverpool central library in design but the feeling of hushed collective learning was just the same. I now work a lot in the New British Library (not that new any more I grant you!) and am so thankful for its existence. When I travel up and down the country I often visit local libraries, it is never about the books they can provide, but the peace and calm they provide for my ever ticking brain. It’s a place to totally concentrate.

If there’s a library you love that you’d like to see us feature, please contact us and tell us about it.

The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean by David Almond
(Puffin, 2011)

Billy is an illegitimate child, born and kept in secret. In justification of his confinement, he becomes the subject of a moral experiment to create a human untouched by the evils of the world. His only human contact is with his parents. But after the disappearance of Billy’s father, Wilfred, he is released from the room in which he has been isolated for thirteen years.

Billy’s very focused fascinations – with birds, blood, stars, angels, hair… –bloom out into the newfound boundlessness of the universe.

Billy is not like any child and yet he is just like every child – he still has to learn about God and to have the birds and the bees (‘the mistry of the fish and the eggs’) talk with his mother and he still has to learn to walk and write – hence Billy’s poor spelling throughout. It is only that Billy’s is a belated and very sudden process of discovery in which his childhood is squeezed into his teenage years. This compression of his coming of age is a continuation of his physical compression, growing weak and frail in cramped conditions. Billy’s ‘world’ had been four walls, a closed door and a window. He is entranced by the square of sky he can see. On just one occasion his mother accidently (on purpose?) leaves the window open and he gets a taste of the outdoors:

‘For the first tym in my life I felt rane farl down on me. I turnd my fase to it. I felt the sharp swete isy ping of drops of warter on my skin. I lickd it wer it fel upon my lips and cheeks.’

This is Billy’s baptism into the world he has never known.

Like any child learning to make sense of the world, Billy must come to terms with where, or who, he has comes from. Most of the time it all seems a bit much. Looking at the stars Billy wonders:

‘How could they be so big and fit into such a little windo? How cud they fit into my eyes? How cud they fit into my little hed?’

His interest in space is perhaps a consequence of his own lack of space. Whilst he is contained, Billy’s bafflement is amplified, and his default reply to any question or line of thought is ‘I don’t know’, but upon his release his responses become varied and wild and imaginative: ‘ “What you doing Billy?” laffs my mam. “Turning into a sugahed” I say’. The ‘sugahed’ is this wonderful child, growing up and away from the suppressed, ‘emptyheded thing’ of his captivity.

The book plays with repulsion. Like when Billy amalgamates animal corpses to form his hybrid ‘mowsburd’:

‘I got the scissors and I cut little holes in the sholders of the mows. I got the wings of the burd & stuck them into those holes….the blud of the mows trickled down my fingas & the stink of the wings mixd with my breth but I had made sumthin new & speshul…’

Billy’s destruction of the dead animals is his power of creation. His impulse is experimental and ambitious rather than depraved and so our disgust is neutralised. It is grotesquely aesthetic.

Billy has the abilities of a mystic, and he becomes renowned for being able to communicate with the dead. He wonders whether he will encounter his absent father during his sojourns into the afterlife but Wilfred turns up in real life, set on some kind of reckoning…

This is a book for thinking about parents who have done more harm to their children than good; about child development and the stilting of it; and the renewal of life, through reproduction and creative energy.

An extract from The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean is published in the latest issue (#43) of The Reader magazine.

In early December I attended a conference in London run by the Princes Teaching Institute.  We were spending the day considering the vital interface of literature and history.  The Institute itself was established in part to affirm traditional teaching methods in a number of subjects, including English Literature, and it represents a kind of haven for hard-pressed school teachers to take a day out of their classrooms and mix with expert academics in their fields in order to share ideas.  The lectures were enriching and the seminars full of stimulating discussion, with all of us able to test out our ideas and garner those of others.  What was particularly striking and enjoyable was the free range of thought encouraged; intellectual tangents were commonplace and led to some intriguing destinations.

However, A level and GCSE students of English Literature now rarely enjoy such a style of learning.   The nature of how our subject is taught and assessed has been changing radically in the last few years, and very much for the worse.  Students are not encouraged, as we were at the conference, to explore the quirky or the unusual in their A level set texts, let alone at GCSE, at which early stage so much of the damage I will describe is done.  The introduction of Curriculum 2000 (in the same year) brought with it the enactment of ‘Assessment Objectives’* and a new, more reductive way of teaching and examining literary study.   In one of the seminars a Cambridge don was asked his view of assessment objectives at A level.  He looked puzzled, and then had to ask exactly what the questioner was referring to.  A brief explanation was offered, to which the noble professor crisply denounced the very idea of such examining methodology as ‘counter-educational’.

And so, of course, it is.  But whilst agreeing wholeheartedly with his view, nonetheless it disturbed me that a leading academic in one of our top two universities could be so apparently unaware of what has been happening to our subject in schools.  I’ve heard of ivory towers, but this seemed ridiculous.  It isn’t as though this issue is new and hasn’t been discussed widely in the media…

Read it in full here.

In our Poet on Her Work series, Gwyneth Lewis movingly writes about her great long poem A Hospital Odyssey, written while her husband was suffering from cancer.

We have some great new fiction for you to sample with two extracts from Steve Sem-Sandberg’s mortifyingly powerful Emperor of Lies (Faber, July 2011), set in the Łodz ghetto. And David Almond’s ‘The Book of Beasts’ is taken from his first novel for adults, The True Tale of Monster Billy Dean (Viking, September 2011), a test of a child’s innocence. David Constantine’s short story, ‘Strong Enough to Help’ revolves about the way books and poems can connect people up both to each other and to themselves.

Angela Macmillan talks about putting together her new anthology for a younger audience, A Little, Aloud for Children.

We welcome two new essayists whom we hope to hear from regularly: Andrew Crompton writing and drawing on almost anything and everything, and Alan Wall offering an occasional series on the way that words’ meanings or forms change over time, and yet they stick around part of our everyday usage. It’s like the archaeology of the spoken word. And we welcome back and old friend, Kenneth Steven, who writes of the mountains.

Buy your copy, or subscribe for the year, simply by clicking here.

Patrick McGuinness‘ debut novel, The Last Hundred Days, has been longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize. Set in late 1980s Bucharest, during the violent overthrow of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the thriller follows a young English student as he witnesses the last days of the violent regime. McGuinness’ work has featured in The Reader magazine a few times, with excerpts  from the start of The Last Hundred Days published in the Spring 2010 issue. Ordinarily a poet, he turned to prose form to depict a time and place he experienced first-hand whilst working as a teaching assistant at 19. Infused with the vivid style of a thriller, The Last Hundred Days presents the lives of dissidents and students working against the secret police, and experiencing the destruction of the city around them, in totalitarian Romania.

The Shortlist of six authors will be announced on 6th September with the overall winner being declared on 18th October at London’s Guildhall, and will be broadcast on the BBC. We will be keeping our figures crossed for Patrick!

The Reader, reaching 42, has had a bit of a makeover. You’ll be seeing a rainbow of colours coming your way as each issue arrives through your letterbox – making your collection of readers even more stimulating.

Inside this issue, we promised you that a couple of things would be available online, so here they are:

The full interview with A B Yehoshua.

A third poem, ‘Lemons’,  from John Levett.

There will be new poetry from Bernard O’Donoghue, Elizabeth Barrett, Linda Chase, John Mole and John Levett. Andrew McNeillie writes on his poem ‘The Devil’s Elbow’ in the Poet on His Work series.

New fiction comes from A. B. Yehoshua and Angela Leighton. We also have a wide-ranging and always-topical conversation between Tom Sperlinger and Israeli writer A. B. Yehoshua.

In addition there will be essays and recommendations from:

Penny Feeny’s debut novel, That Summer in Ischia, will be published by the prestigious Tindal St Press on May 5th 2011. A story of dangerous love affairs, kidnap and a quest for identity, the novel has been called ‘sun-drenched, dark and intriguing’ (Kate Long) and ‘vivid and gripping’ (Barbara Trapido).

To celebrate the launch, all are invited to an event at Liverpool’s Parr St Studios, to hear Penny read from the novel and raise a glass to its success.

That Summer in Ischia launch night

Friday 13th May

7.30pm for an 8pm start

Studio 2, Parr St, Liverpool L1 4JN (map: http://bit.ly/h9ZUg)

 The Reader and Penny have some history: we first published her story ‘At The End of the Line’ in issue 15 of The Reader and subsequently included it in our A Little, Aloud anthology. We are delighted to witness Penny’s ongoing success and wish her the best of luck with her first novel.

I was going to include a much more serious and dour-minded example of a review , until reading Brian Nellist’s ‘Ask the Reader’ in the upcoming issue of The Reader, where he talks about Bertie Wooster with great affection. So here’s David Leyland’s review of Robert McCrum’s biography of Wodehouse.

A Plum Not Ripe For the Picking

Robert McCrum, Wodehouse: A Life

London: Viking, 2004

ISBN 0-670-89692-6, £20

David Leyland

In these heathenish times, it is reassuring to recollect an era when ‘comedy’ meant something more sophisticated than Little Britain. Humour once had the panache of a pair of plus fours, and wit was not synonymous with feeble caricatures of the least privileged or banal catchphrases repeated until they become seared into a public’s consciousness. There were halcyon days of British comedy: days when our comedy was a little special.

Sometimes, however, it is hard to remember that British comedy is also the story of British comedy writing. After the sublime genius of Chaplin, who embodied the two skills so utterly, comedy became a matter of the actor and the script in distinct separation. There were occasional exceptions to the rule, ranging from Noel Coward to the Pythons, but it was usually the performers that reaped the glory and retained the public’s affection at the expense of the writer. All of which is apposite when one considers the publication of Robert McCrum’s biography of P.G. Wodehouse last year. In Wodehouse: A Life, McCrum reminds us that Britain’s greatest humorist (Plum to his friends and ‘The Master’ to his admirers) was himself overshadowed by a performer. That performer was a certain Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, and the performances of note were radio broadcasts made from Nazi-occupied Berlin in 1941.

Although Wodehouse was worldly in the sense that he made homes in England, America, and France, he was less so when it came to understanding the workings of that world. Living in Le Touquet at the beginning of May 1940, Wodehouse fatefully miscalculated the course of events and was trapped by the German war machine. After trying to live oblivious to the occupation, he was swept up by events and subsequently imprisoned, taken to an internment camp, and then on to Berlin from where he was persuaded to make the five, now notorious, non-political broadcasts. He was finally liberated in Paris, when the allies entered the city on 25 August 1944.

Although one of the more dramatic events in Wodehouse’s life, the ‘German problem’ might still be thought of as being of incidental note to any Wodehouse biographer. It occurred well into Wodehouse’s adulthood and had no bearing on his work. Even when charges of treachery were levelled at him, they brought out significant defenders. When the Allies took Paris, a young MI6 officer had been given charge of Wodehouse’s case. That officer was Malcolm Muggeridge who, after being initially indifferent to Wodehouse, became a close friend and dismissed Plum’s problems as stemming from his being ‘a-worldly; a born neutral’. More famously, George Orwell picked apart what he saw as the ‘out-of-dateness’ of his hero’s novels, and went on to argue that the ‘wretched’ Wodehouse had simply ‘remain[ed] mentally in the Edwardian age’. Wodehouse himself admitted that he’d developed little after the age of eighteen, and he was still penning adventures of the high Edwardian, Bertie Wooster, into the decade of the hippies and beyond. By then, even the British establishment had forgiven him. Wodehouse received a knighthood in 1975, in the same New Year honours list in which Britain also acknowledged another of its wayward sons, Charles Chaplin.

So while we have before us an admirable biography, it really does leap into the fold like an over-zealous defender of the faith. Why rehearse an argument made so convincingly decades ago?

McCrum may have good reasons for rehashing the German business. When the story is marketed well, it grabs the attention. This last year has seen Wodehouse’s reputation re-evaluated by a BBC documentary that treated the broadcasts as a dark secret. McCrum foregrounds Wodehouse’s capture in both the preface and flyleaf of his book, where Wodehouse is described as ‘notorious for one historic blunder during the Second World War’. This must be an example of what magicians call ‘misdirection’. You wave your arm flamboyantly thus… while you stuff a chicken down your trousers. In McCrum’s case, the elaborate ruse is meant to distract us from the foul deeds for which Wodehouse is really much more guilty.

After all, Wodehouse has never had an easy time of it. His gentle wit doesn’t exactly fit with modern tastes. One wouldn’t think of including him in a study of English Literature, whereas Oscar Wilde is quite at home in the university tutorial. Wodehouse is not quite right for the age, and lacks a real defence against the charge that he embodies many things that are an anathema to our modernity. The lyrics for which he achieved a secondary fame (writing for Jerome Kern) are no longer in fashion, and the 300-plus short stories and over 70 novels are, for the most part, mannered comedies of the upper classes. His characters hunt with hounds, smoke in public places, drive fast cars, breed pigs, keep servants, are rude to aunts, and no friend to congestion charges would be found inside the Drones Club. All of which, I should hasten to add, are damn good reasons why we should embrace Wodehouse, a genuinely alternative comedian.

Wodehouse was funny down to his knuckles, and this biography reminds us of this on every page. Yet it also teaches us that humour involves the day-to-day toil of learning a craft. Wodehouse was a craftsman, ‘The Master’ in the old sense of the laugh won by hard work, guile, and craftsmanship. He was a ceaseless worker: plotting, revising, polishing. His humour is about stressing linguistic muscles. Smiles come via the unexpected clashing with the customary, and each work is a piece of literary engineering without peer.

McCrum only fails when he undermines his own success. McCrum is so good at introducing us to Plum that Wodehouse emerges as a genial man, without a bad word said by him or by others. His biographer’s effortless prose encourages us to like the man, which we do. Yet, by doing so, it feels as though we put our delight in peril in two respects.

Firstly, the awareness of craft comes close to exposing the secret of Wodehouse’s comedy. It is like seeing the effort below decks on one of those Roman galleons: sweating slaves, the beat of the drum, Kirk Douglas in Spartacus or Jim Dale in Carry on Cleo. To the biographer, such things impel the biography forward, but for us languid souls riding along, we may not want our delight spoiled by the sight of the lash, or here, the sight of Wodehouse’s isolation within his toil.

Secondly, Wodehouse was an intensely private man, and the same defence that Orwell used to protect his hero from the real world can be made to say that sometimes you want to retain the proper distance between the author and the reader. Wodehouse’s private life was more private than most, and there is something distasteful about invading that privacy. When McCrum discusses Wodehouse’s sex life (even writing that phrase feels somehow wrong), you sense that McCrum himself is uncomfortable acknowledging this compulsory requirement of modern biography. For much of the time, sex appears like a contracted player with no part to play; as, too, does the issue of the psychological depth of character in Wodehouse’s novels, or the search for tender personal expression in his lyrics.

Wodehouse was uniquely Wodehouse, and sometimes the type of details we expect from a biography fit this book like John McCririck’s deerstalker would suit Caprice. This said, McCrum manages to retain a respect for his subject that is apparent on every page. What makes this biography succeed so well is that it is not directed by what we expect. McCrum allows Wodehouse to guide the tale, and the result is a unique biography for a unique man.