Read The Best of Ruskin Bond Online
Authors: Ruskin Bond
M
y father died when I was ten, and for the next few years books became a scare commodity in my life, for my mother and stepfather were not great readers. In my rather lonely early teens I was to discover that books could be good friends, reliable companions, and I seized upon almost any printed matter that came my way, whether it was a girl’s classic like
Little
Women,
or a
Hotspur
or
Champion
comic,
or a detective story, or
The
Naturalist
on
the
River
Amazons
by Henry Walter Bates. The only books I balked at reading were collections of sermons (amazing how often they turned up in those early years) and self-improvement books, since I hadn’t the slightest desire to improve myself in any way.
I think it all began in that forest rest-house in the Siwalik Hills, a sub-tropical range cradling the Doon valley in northern India. Here my stepfather and his guntoting friends were given to hunting birds and animals that roamed those forests. He was a poor shot, so he cannot really be blamed for the absence of wild-life today; but he did his best to eliminate every creature that came within his sights.
On one of these shikar trips, we were staying in a rest-house near the Timli Pass. My stepfather and his friends were ‘after tiger’ (you were out of fashion if you weren’t after big game) and set out every morning with an army of paid villagers to ‘beat’ the jungle, that is, to make enough noise with drums, whistles, tin trumpets and empty kerosene tins, to disturb the tiger and drive the unwilling beast into the open where he could conveniently be dispatched. Truly bored by this form of sport, I stayed behind in the rest-house, and in the course of a morning’s exploration of the bungalow, discovered a dusty but crowded bookshelf half-hidden in a corner of the back veranda.
Who had left them there? A literary forest officer? A memsahib who had been bored by her husband’s camp-fire boasting? Or someone like me who had no enthusiasm for the ‘manly’ sport of slaughtering wild animals, and brought his library along to pass the time?
Possibly the poor fellow had gone into the jungle one day, as a gesture towards his more blood-thirsty companions, and been trampled by an elephant or gored by a wild boar, or (more likely) accidentally shot by one of his companions—and they had taken his remains away and left his books behind. Anyway, there they were—a shelf of some fifty volumes, obviously untouched for several years. I wiped the dust off the covers and examined the titles. As my reading taste had not yet formed, I was ready to try anything. The bookshelf was varied in its contents—and my own interests have remained equally wide-ranging.
On that fateful day in the forest rest-house, I discovered two very funny books. One was P. G. Wodehouse’s
Love
among
the
Chickens,
an early Ukridge story and still one of my favourites. The other was
The
Diary
of
a
Nobody
by George and Weedon Grossmith, who spent more time on the stage than in the study but are now remembered mainly for this hilarious book. It isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Recently I lent my copy to a Swiss friend, who could see nothing funny about it. I must have read it a dozen times; I pick it up whenever I’m feeling low, and on one occasion it even cured me of a peptic ulcer!
Anyway, back to the rest-house. By the time the perspiring hunters came back late in the evening, I had started on M. R. James’s
Ghost
Stories
of
an
Antiquary,
which had me hooked on ghost stories for the rest of my life. It kept me awake most of the night, until the oil in the kerosene lamp had finished.
Next morning, fresh and optimistic again, the shikaris set out for a different area, where they hoped to locate their tiger. All day I could hear the beaters’ drums throbbing in the distance. This did not prevent me from finishing James or a collection of stories called
The
Big
Karoo
by Pauline Smith—wonderfully evocative of the life of the pioneering Boers in South Africa.
My concentration was disturbed only once, when I looked up and saw a spotted deer crossing the open clearing in front of the bungalow. The deer disappeared into the forest and I returned to my book.
Dusk had fallen when I heard the party returning from the hunt. The great men were talking loudly and seemed excited. Perhaps they had got their tiger! I came out on the veranda to meet them.
‘Did you shoot the tiger?’ I asked.
‘No, Ruskin,’ said my stepfather. ‘I think we’ll catch up with it tomorrow. But you should have been with us—we saw a spotted deer!’
There were three days left and I knew I would never get through the entire bookshelf. So I chose
David
Copperfield
—my first encounter with Dickens—and settled down in the veranda armchair to make the acquaintance of Mr Micawber and his family, along with Aunt Betsy Trotwood, Mr Dick, Peggotty, and a host of other larger-than-life characters. I think it would be true to say that Copperfield set me off on the road to literature; I identified with young David and wanted to grow up to be a writer like him.
But on my second day with the book an event occurred which interrupted my reading for a little while.
I had noticed, on the previous day, that a number of stray dogs—some of them belonging to watchmen, villagers and forest rangers—always hung about the bungalow, waiting for scraps of food to be thrown away. It was about ten in the morning (a time when wild animals seldom come into the open), when I heard a sudden yelp coming from the clearing. Looking up, I saw a large, full-grown leopard making off with one of the dogs. The other dogs, while keeping their distance, set up a furious barking, but the leopard and its victim had soon disappeared. I returned to Copperfield, and it was getting late when the shikaris returned. They looked dirty, sweaty and disgruntled. Next day we were to return to the city, and none of them had anything to show for a week in the jungle.
‘I saw a leopard this morning,’ I said modestly.
No one took me seriously. ‘Did you really?’ said the leading shikari, glancing at the book in my hands. ‘Young Master Copperfield says he saw a leopard!’
‘Too imaginative for his age,’ said my stepfather. ‘Comes from reading so much, I expect.’
I went to bed and left them to their tales of ‘good old days’ when rhinos, cheetahs and possibly even unicorns were still available for slaughter. Camp broke up before I could finish Copperfield, but the forest ranger said I could keep the book. And so I became the only member of the expedition with a trophy to take home.
After that adventure, I was always looking for books in unlikely places. Although I never went to college, I think I have read as much, if not more, than most collegiates, and it would be true to say that I received a large part of my education in second-hand bookshops. London had many, and Calcutta once had a large number of them, but I think the prize must go to a small town in Wales called Hay-on-Wye, which has twenty-six bookshops and over a million books. It’s in the world’s quiet corners that book lovers still flourish—a far from dying species!
One of my treasures is a little novel called
Sweet
Rocket
by Mary Johnston. It was a failure when it was first published in 1920. It has only the thinnest outline of a story but the author sets out her ideas in lyrical prose that seduces me at every turn of the page. Miss Johnston was a Virginian. She did not travel outside America. But her little book did. I found it buried under a pile of railway timetables at a bookstall in Simla, the old summer capital of India—almost as though it had been waiting there for me, these seventy years!
Among my souvenirs is a charming little recipe book, small enough to slip into an apron pocket. (You need to be a weightlifter to pick up some of the cookery books that are published today.) This one’s charm lies not so much in its recipes for roast lamb and mint sauce (which are very good too) but in the margins of each page, enlivened with little Victorian maxims concerning good food and wise eating. Here are a few chosen at random:
I have collected a number of ‘little’ books, like my father’s
Finger
Prayer
Book,
which is the size of a small finger but is replete with Psalms and the complete Book of Common Prayer. Another is
The
Pocket
Trivet:
An
Anthology
for
Optimists,
published by
The
Morning
Post
newspaper in 1932 and designed to slip into the waistcoat pocket. But what is a trivet, one might well ask.
Well, it’s a stand for a small pot or kettle, fixed securely over a grate. To be right as a trivet is to be perfectly and thoroughly right—just right, like the short sayings in this tiny anthology which range from Emerson’s ‘Hitch your wagon to a star!’ to the Japanese proverb: ‘In the market place there is money to be made, but under the cherry tree there is rest.’
It helps me forget the dilapidated old building in which I live and work, and to look instead at the ever-changing cloud patterns as seen from my small bedroom-cum-study window. There is no end to the shapes made by the clouds, or to the stories they set off in my head.
Most of our living has to happen in the mind. And, to quote an anonymous sage from my
Trivet:
‘The world is only the size of each man’s head.’
I
t is time to confess that at least half my life has been spent in idleness. My old school would not be proud of me. Nor would my Aunt Muriel.
‘You spend most of your time sitting on that wall, doing nothing,’ scolded Aunt Muriel, when I was seven or eight. ‘Are you
thinking
about something?’
‘No, Aunt Muriel.’
‘Are you
dreaming?’
‘I’m awake!’
‘Then what on earth are you doing there?’
‘Nothing, Aunt Muriel.’
‘He’ll come to no good,’ she warned the world at large. ‘He’ll spend all his life sitting on walls, doing nothing.’
And how right she proved to be! Sometimes I bestir myself, and bang out a few sentences on my old typewriter, but most of the time I’m still sitting on that wall, preferably in the winter sunshine. Thinking? Not very deeply. Dreaming? But I’ve grown too old to dream. Meditation, perhaps. That’s been fashionable for some time. But it isn’t that either. Contemplation might come closer to the mark.
Was I born with a silver spoon in my mouth that I could afford to sit in the sun for hours, doing nothing? Far from it; I was born poor and remained poor, as far as worldly riches went. But one has to eat and pay the rent. And there have been others to feed too. So I have to admit that between long bouts of idleness there have been short bursts of creativity. My typewriter after more than thirty years of loyal service, has finally collapsed, proof enough that it has not lain idle all this time.
Sitting on walls, apparently doing nothing, has always been my favourite form of inactivity. But for these walls, and the many idle hours I have spent upon them, I would not have written even a fraction of the hundreds of stories, essays and other diversions that have been banged out on the typewriter over the years. It is not the walls themselves that set me off or give me ideas, but a personal view of the world that I receive from sitting there.
Creative idleness, you could call it. A receptivity to the world around me—the breeze, the warmth of the old stone, the lizard on the rock, a raindrop on a blade of grass—these and other impressions impinge upon me as I sit in that passive, benign condition that makes people smile tolerantly at me as they pass. ‘Eccentric writer,’ they remark to each other, as they drive on, hurrying in a heat of hope, towards the pot of gold at the end of their personal rainbows.
It’s true that I am eccentric in many ways, and old walls bring out the essence of my eccentricity.
I do not have a garden wall. This shaky tumbledown house in the hills is perched directly above a motorable road, making me both accessible and vulnerable to casual callers of all kinds—inquisitive tourists, local busybodies, schoolgirls with their poems, hawkers selling candy-floss, itinerant sadhus, scrap merchants, potential Nobel prize winners. . . .
To escape them, and to set my thoughts in order, I walk a little way up the road, cross it, and sit down on a parapet wall overlooking the Woodstock spur. Here, partially shaded by an overhanging oak, I am usually left alone. I look suitably down and out, shabbily dressed, a complete nonentity—not the sort of person you would want to be seen talking to!
Stray dogs sometimes join me here. Having been a stray dog myself at various periods of my life, I can empathize with these friendly vagabonds of the road. Far more intelligent than your inbred Pom or Peke, they let me know by their silent companionship that they are on the same wave-length. They sport about on the road, but they do not yap at all and sundry.
Left to myself on the wall, I am soon in the throes of composing a story or poem. I do not write it down—that can be done later—I just work it out in my mind, memorize my words, so to speak, and keep them stored up for my next writing session.
Occasionally a car will stop, and someone I know will stick his head out and say, ‘No work today, Mr Bond? How I envy you! Not a care in the world!’
I travel back in time some fifty years to Aunt Muriel asking me the same question. The years melt away, and I am a child again, sitting on the garden wall, doing nothing.
‘Don’t you get bored sitting there?’ asks the latest passing motorist, who has one of those half beards which are in vogue with TV news readers. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing, aunty,’ I reply.
He gives me a long hard stare.
‘You must be dreaming. Don’t you recognize me?’
‘Yes, Aunt Muriel.’
He shakes his head sadly, steps on the gas, and goes roaring up the hill in a cloud of dust.
‘Poor old Bond,’ he tells his friends over evening cocktails. ‘Must be going round the bend. This morning he called me Aunty.’