A Nice Read
By JOYCE GRENFELL GG OARSE jolly woman learning to read wants letters from men.' This heart cry appeared in an American weekly review a few years ago and was pounced on by collectors of such trifles on both sides of the water. What a skilful appeal it is ! " Learning to react" is flung in casually with deceptive humility so as not to frighten away the reader. Learning to read what ? Beowulf ? The-cat-sat-on-the-mat ? Never was an invitation more neatly framed. There she sits, this coarse jolly woman, laughing her head off while she waits for letters from men. I hope she .got sacks full. It nrust have put a stop to her reading, though, if she did, and that is where she has my sympathy. I read advertisements in buses and tubes. I read adver- tisements, plain and strip, in papers and periodicals. I read Letters to the Editor and Personal Columns and Can I Help You pages; book reviews, and theatre and concert notices; and 1 also read the clues and struggle with the crossword puzzle at intervals all 'day long. Faithfully I subscribe to two national newspapers, two evening papers, a transatlantic urban magazine and the Spectator. It so happens that I don't read much political and no sporting news. Every circular that thuds through the letter box gets a fair glance from me. These are the reasons why I don't read very many books.
I am ready to admit that the whole problem is one of laziness. Books take concentration and application and the odd ten minutes that occasionally offer themselves between jobs are not long enough for more than nibbles. I read Anna Karenina in nibbles one blacked-out winter in the war and it led to all sorts of hazards. I got carried beyond bus stops, I ignored the call boy in the theatre where I was working then and was nearly " off," and I read just one more page until my eyes closed up on me at night. It took about three months to finish it and all the time the crossword puzzle went unsolved, I only looked at the drawings in the American weekly and I must have missed all sorts of plums in the Spectator and in personal columns everywhere. It was one hundred per cent. rewarding and I cannot think why I don't do it again. • It isn't only the written word that gets in the way. Writing takes time from reading. I am one of those people for whom an experience isn't complete until it has been written down. Diaries mop up a lot of this overflow but letters to people for whom one need not edit are a self-indulgence hard to resist. And then there is the wireless. So far, touch wood, we have no television set and though I feel that I should profession- ally perhaps be studying the un-numbered ways the camera has of distorting the human face beyond recognition, so far we have resisted the temptation to get one.
It is a fact that the written word does a lot to impede domestic chores like laying fires and putting away summer clothes. There I am kneeling at an open drawer shaking anti-moth powder on to an old newspaper when I am lured by a strip advertisement, half a page of it, and I read every balloon-thought of the promising young girl violinist as we trace her career through night starvation and faulty intonation to glorious triumph on the concert platforms. (Thinks: If it hadn't been for the kindly doctor's advice I would never have won the prize—and Ronnie !) For a long time 1 have kept a tomato-coloured folder marked Misc. Treasures and into it go all the, advertisements and cuttings I have remembered to cut out after discovery. It is nearly twenty years ago since I found this in The' Times: " Yesterday our butler was pedal-cycling near Bourne- mouth when a cigarette end thrown from a car lodged inside his waistcoat. He hardly noticed it at the time but after a while felt his chest burning and opening his coat found he was on fire. His waistcoat was burnt through, together with important letters and a ten shilling note (of the latter only a small fragment remained). The fire had extended to his pants and trousers. Yours truly, etc., etc., etc."
But it wasn't till I went to India that I came upon the richest field of all. Under the simple heading " Matrimonial " I found this: " Exquisitely beautiful educated well versed in music and household affairs jolly life partner of fourteen for my friend a millionaire highly educated handsome Oswald of nineteen. Father big land lord and a business man. Apply Box etc." I had meant to be ruthless this winter and resist all temptations to read circulars and personal columns. I had meant to have a go at Browning. I wonder. ...
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