This isn’t one of those social media writing challenges or book trends you’ve missed such as NaNoWriMo or #ReadWomen. But perhaps it should be. Re-reading the opening chapter of Animal Farm is like turning the page on an old photo album. There I am, a teenager in an ill-fitting Punkyfish T-shirt, under my white nylon school shirt. My hair is tied up with plastic butterfly clips, my armpits smell of my mum’s Amplex deodorant, and there is the near-constant taste of blood in my mouth thanks to the loose wires of my braces slicing the flesh on the inside of my cheek.
Reading about Boxer and Clover’s quiet love, I am filled once again with longing for a miscellaneous boy in skater trainers, who listens to Finley Quaye and flicks his curtains out of his eyes so regularly that he’s developing a new muscle down the side of his neck. And yet, aged 39, much of the book strikes me in a totally new way. Since that first reading I have actually been to Russia; I have been in a union; I have sat through interminable local government meetings; and I have mixed cement on a building site. Not to mention reading the rest of Orwell’s books. So much of the political nuance, the simplicity of the prose, the postwar depiction of the English countryside slipped past me when I was 14.
But the biggest surprise? I managed to re-read the whole thing during one ferry ride to Dublin. Animal Farm is not a long book! How did we stretch it out over a whole term? Well, I’m about to find out, because like 26,955 other people last year, I’ve decided to finally study for a teaching qualification, and Animal Farm will be one of the texts on the curriculum. I can do it part-time, I get a bursary to cover most of my fees and, most excitingly of all, I can buy a new pencil case.
Animal Farm is not the only book that has shocked me with its apparent brevity. A Christmas Carol? You could finish it in a day! Dickens, it is now obvious to me, 20 years and a whole career later, was a journalist. I didn’t know it at 16 – I had never really read any other Victorian literature, nor been commissioned by an editor myself – but he delights in the snide details and funny idiosyncrasies as much as any political diarist, hipster magazine writer or celebrity interviewer. And yet, somehow, the whole thing fits in 112 pages – that’s a man who knew how to hit a word count. What I remember most about reading the book isn’t Tiny Tim’s demise or the description of a squalid central London. Instead it’s the view out of my English classroom on to the dinner hall, where they served up a version of street food created in a gastrointestinal fever dream: pizza baguettes, hot chicken tikka rolls and chips with ham and mayonnaise. I remember the Virginia Woolf poster on the wall. I remember the strange and starchy way my skirt folded under my knees because, of course, I had sewn my own school skirt out of a piece of wetsuit material I’d found in a scrap shop with my mum. When I moved it sounded like someone shuffling a deck of cards.
There are so many details I’d lost over the years – Frankenstein is from Geneva? Boxer splits his hoof? Jack makes himself a crown? – but not the ones from my own life. The books may have turned into a muddy landscape of scenes and characters but in scanning the pages, the specifics of my own adolescence come roaring back with an almost frightening degree of clarity.
Which is why I would like to take this opportunity to suggest to anyone who picked up a set of exam results this summer to put a note in your phone to re-read Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 2053, when you’ve actually lived in a rented one-bedroom flat, had a shit boyfriend and been sent temporarily insane by the wrong contraceptive pill. Or Lord of the Flies in 2051, after your children have started school and one of your colleagues gets promoted and immediately replaces all the cutlery in the kitchen with small wooden stirrers for no apparent reason. Or Pride and Prejudice when you’re 40 and have been married for 12 years and spend most evenings talking about how to stack the dishwasher. Because these books will mean something different to you then; and you’ll be able to travel through time.
• Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood
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