Graham Greene
Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives.In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what is in our minds already: as in a love affair it is our own features that we see reflected flatteringly back.
But in childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future.I suppose that is why books excited us so much.What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years? Of course I should be interested to hear that a new novel by Mr.E.M.Forster was going to appear this spring, but I could never compare that mild expectation of civilized pleasure with the missed heartbeat, the appalled glee I felt when I found on a library shelf a novel by Rider Haggard, Percy Westerman, Captain Brereton or Stanley Weyman which I had not read before.No, it is in those early years that I would look for the crisis, the moment when life took a new slant in its journey towards death.
I remember distinctly the suddenness with which a key turned in a lock and I found I could read—not just the sentences in a reading book with the syllables coupled like railway carriages, but a real book.It was paper-covered with the picture of a boy, bound and gagged, dangling at the end of a rope inside a well with the water rising above the waist—an adventure of Dixon Brett, detective.All a long summer holiday I kept my secret, as I believed: I did not want anybody to know that I could read.I suppose I half consciously realized even then that this was the dangerous moment.I was safe so long as I could not read—the wheels had not begun to turn, but now the future stood around on bookshelves everywhere waiting for the child to choose—the life of a chartered accountant perhaps, a colonial civil servant, a planter in China, a steady job in a bank, happiness and misery, eventually one particular form of death, for surely we choose our death much as we choose our job.It grows out of our acts and our evasions, out of our fears and out of our moments of courage.I suppose my mother must have discovered my secret, for on the journey home I was presented for the train with another real book, a copy of Ballantyne’s The Coral Island with only a single picture to look at, a colored frontispiece.But I would admit nothing.All the long journey I stared at the one picture and never opened the book.