Paperboy by Christopher Fowler Read Free Book Online

unthinkingly into daily life. One day Bill opened these books to see what I found so fascinating, tutted (not because they were gruesome but because they weren’t about anything real or useful) and threw them all into his weekly garden bonfire. He liked to poke a fire with a stick.
    The most obscure book I ever found in the little orange-bricked house in Westerdale Road was Maurice Richardson’s
The Exploits of Engelbrecht
, the adventures of the Surrealist Sportsman’s Club that included chapters on witch hunting, going ten rounds in the boxing ring with a grandfather clock and a game of rugby on Mars. So carefully did I guard this from the garden bonfire that it remained lost in the house until we finally moved.
    Gradually, I came to understand the genesis of reading books:
    As a child you started with Janet and John 5 rag-books (which my ‘Aunt’ Mary, who had invented the concept of ‘re-gifting’, continued to send on birthdays until I was twelve, along with old jigsaws that had pieces missing and boxes of chocolates that had turned white with heat and time).
    Then you progressed to punishment-filled fairy tales, and Babar the Elephant, Gallic tales perversely translated and printed in joined-up handwriting by publishers who clearly wanted you to become annoyed with the French at an early age.
    Then you moved on to Winnie the Pooh, Finn Family Moomintroll and Toby Twirl, weirdly asexual creatures who had adventures in places that were alien to a suburban child, like woods and meadows.
    Then you made your first critical decision by ditching Rupert the Bear because he was boring and wet and presumably only appealed to posh, cosseted children who looked like extras from
Brideshead Revisited
.
    After that it was anything the library could provide, including Edward Lear, Professor Branestawm, Dr Dolittle and Biggles. This last one was a big jump into Boys’ Adventure, and opened the world to Robert Louis Stevenson, R. M. Ballantyne, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and anything with pirates, tigers, caves, airships or secret Chinese societies in.
    Finally, I started making mental lists of words I didn’t quite understand:
    Incognito
    Copse
    Ingot
    Pipette
    Zeppelin
    Contraband
    Hottentot
    Capstan
    Runcible
    Quartermaster
    Chocks
    Infidel
    There seemed to be little place for the fantastic in a commuter-belt white-collar household, which was a shame because the grandfather of such tales, H. G. Wells, came from just such a cosy background. On an inaccessibly high shelf, my father kept a full set of Dennis Wheatley paperbacks, which were out of date long before I could reach to read them. These eventually faded from fashion due to their peculiar mix of Nazism, racial stereotyping and the luridly supernatural. Bill’s volumes of bizarre Fu Manchu tales by Sax Rohmer were peppered with wily, snickering Orientals who planned to take over the world via Limehouse opium dens, which was surely not a very sensible idea.
    I plumped for the Dennis Wheatleys. The once-ubiquitous witchcraft novels reflected the period’s obsession with the idea that England might become enslaved by sinister foreigner powers. Even when they were first published, the books must have appeared archaic and stilted, rather like charming, ridiculous fairy tales, although
The Haunting of Toby Jugg
, with its monstrous fascist-empowered spider tapping the bedroom windows at night, could still keep any child awake and quaking beneath the candlewick. Wheatley’s absurd frontispieces featured dire warnings of the real threats posed by witchcraft, but Bill took them as seriously as his own mother had probably taken the threat of white slave-traders. ‘This is a very dangerous book in the wrong hands,’ he would say, tapping the spine against his calloused palm as if discussing a bomb-making manual.
    Actually, he had one of those, too. It was called
How to Make Explosives
and featured photographs of beaming housewives in Marcel waves mixing volatile cocktails from