THE BOY BOOKWORM.

Recollections from my childhood

I’m on my way to thinking myself as old, but I can still remember the yawning chasm of time before I was old enough to be considered a man. With my widowed mother and younger brother, I lived in a prefabricated steel house built on a sizeable council estate after world war two, replacing the many homes that had been destroyed during that dreadful conflict.

It was the forties, then the fifties, and there wasn’t a great deal for me to do. Friends were few and far between and those with whom I formed a reasonable friendship at school were invariably a good walk away from our home, too far for me to be allowed to navigate when I was in single figures, though I did occasionally when no-one was looking.

We had little in the way of entertainment at home. I dared say modern children would be horrified if they lost access to television sets, hand held games consoles, X-boxes and the huge range of similar devices that have been around for some years now. We didn’t even have a telephone, and by telephone I mean one of those landline things that were attached to the wall by a wire and that had never been involved in anything more sophisticated than crackly speech.

So what did we do?

Well, we had the radio, a large wooden radiogram with a magic eye and electric pick-up, though its only speed was 78 rpm and a sliding control that varied it slightly. And a handful of old war-time or immediately post-war records. And by handful I mean just that.

The radio was attached to the rest of the world via an aerial that consisted of a single wire that was tucked behind the picture dado rail and ran along it all round the room. Being really long we got good reception!

But there weren’t that many programmes on the radio to satisfy a growing boy, and as for music they hadn’t invented pop back then. There were dramas, though. I can still remember the anticipation I felt returning from school and listening to a serial drama called Until the Day She Dies. Maybe I was a bit young to be entertained by murder, but it was good and filled half an hour of every week with a story that I’ve quite forgotten.

And there was the printed word. Books.

The library.

There was a decent children’s library in Rugby where I lived and I was a it every Saturday. I remember on one occasion taking a couple of books home, reading them and returning to the library later in the same day, before the girl serving at the counter had put them away!

I did Enid Blyton until I’d done all of her, then went on to Biggles, which is why I’m writing this little piece. The author of those adventures, mainly set in the early years of war in the air and before the RAF was established, was Captain W. E Johns. The stories, so far as I can remember them, were darned good. There was even a love story amongst them, Affaire de Coeur it was called, in which I think I discovered the simple truth that an air ace can actually find a girl heart-stopping!

But it isn’t Biggles I’m thinking about. The good Captain also introduced me to space adventures and in what I recall as a short series about going to Mars he provided me with a thought that I haven’t forgotten and that seems ever more important today.

You see, it’s been raining a lot and there can be no doubt that weather that’s more extreme than it used to be has been modified by climate change. Or by carbon dioxide.

And according to one of the Captain Johns books it also happened on Mars, which is why the planet is dry and dead. There were Martians there once, the story told me, and they pumped far too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and destroyed their trees and killed their planet.

That was in the forties or fifties and the greenhouse effect was obviously known about then. The fact that it became part of the plot of a children’s science fiction story as long ago as that, and was based on sound scientific fact, is quite surprising.

Now, seventy years later, we are witnessing the opening overtures to our own planetary disasters and we’ve known for goodness-knows how long that it would happen.

Our problem as a species is that we’ve put all of our faith in profit and loss and the wealth of a few already rich people. We’ve known about the greenhouse effect. We’ve known about carbon gases. We’ve known about carbon neutral energy, solar and wind power and that it’s free. But there’s no profit in such freebies, so we’ve stuck to fossil fuels (which are carbon based) and now the weather's changing because of it. We even know fully well that trees absorb carbon dioxide and convert it into carbon and oxygen, using sunlight in a process known as photosynthesis.

I wonder if any boy right now, hungry for knowledge, is reading a really old science fiction story about an adventure on Mars and has got to wondering how come the Martians let it happen? He might, you know, if there’s floods outside his home, the power’s down, and he’s got nothing better to do than thumb through a tatty old book…

© Peter Rogerson 30.07.21

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