Brand Bond the Origin Story

WHILE I WAS still at school, in the 1940s, the ballpoint pen was invented. The fountain pen was already in existence, but the cheaper ones were always leaking and messing up one’s fingers. I preferred the old-fashioned quill pens which we were still using in class. The ink came in little pots which fitted into apertures on our desks. The ink on a page of an exercise book did not dry up immediately, and the blotting paper was a necessity. If you made a little ball out of blotting paper and dipped it in your ink-well, it made an effec­tive missile. If the teacher was out of the classroom, ink-ball fights often took place, these missiles flying madly about the classroom.

I wrote my first story with a scratchy quill pen. If a quill pen was good enough for Dickens and Thackeray, it was good enough for me.

The first literary effort was achieved when I was twelve. It wasn’t a story so much as a day-to-day ac­count of the school’s activities, with sidelights on friends, classmates, and teachers. It was, in fact, a journal—and a journal is something I have kept at various periods of my life.

That early journal filled up a couple of exercise books, but one day they disappeared from my desk—taken and probably flung away by a prankster, or even confiscated by a teacher. No matter. It was an early exercise in writing, but no great loss to literature. In those pre-plastic times the pages of exercise books made good paper bags.

BOARDING SCHOOL DOESN’T give you much chance to be alone, by oneself, for any length of time. To keep boys out of trouble they are kept busy from morn to night— in the classroom, on the playing field, in chapel, or gymnasium. It’s all about achieving eminence (on a Lilliputian scale), in sport or academics. No time for reflection and little time for reading. But the school library provided me with an escape route.

Those who think there aren’t many book readers around today would be surprised to know that there were even fewer circa 1950. In a class of twenty, there were only two who actual­ly read any books—a German boy, Kasper Kirschner, who had spent the war years in a detention camp with his parents—and myself. In those days there was no TV, no internet, no multipur­pose cell phones—none of the things we blame today for the lack of readers—but the love of books, of reading, of writing, was a rare gift indeed. There were comics, there was the cinema, there was dance music, but books? No. Reading required some effort, and schoolboys reserved their efforts for the playing field or the tuck shop or exits into town.

A kind housemaster gave me the keys to the library and told me I could use it whenever I liked. I held those keys for at least two terms—1949 and ’50—and made full use of them. With their help, I could dodge morning PT, or extra classes, or— worst of all—bowling to the ‘first eleven’ batsmen in the nets, I’d secrete myself in the library and read or write a little, or just fall asleep in the armchair near the bay window.

IT WASN’T A big library, and not very representative, but there was enough to keep a young bookworm happy. I feasted on the novels of J. B. Priestley, Hugh Walpole, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, and Compton Mackenzie, all big names at the time. The novels that left their mark on

me were Priestley’s The Good Companions, Walpole’s Fortitude, Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, Greene’s Stamboul Train, and Mackenzie’s Carnival— among many others. I was also en­amoured of Conrad’s shorter works and the plays of J. M. Barrie.

The reference section contained the complete plays of Shaw, Barrie, and, of course, Shakespeare. Shaw was clever but cynical and arrogant. Barrie was by then out of fashion (apart from Peter Pan) but I was charmed by the ethereal and tender quality of plays such as Mary Rose, Dear Brutus, and A Kiss for Cinderella. The Anglo-Saxon race derides sentimentality or any show of emotion, and as a result, Barrie is now looked upon as a literary curiosity. But reading his plays was a pleasurable experience.

I did not do much writing in that library, but it certainly set me on my long literary journey, during which I must have read some ten thousand books (purely for pleasure) and even written a few.

A ROOM OF MY own. That’s what I always wanted.

When I was eight or nine, living with my father in New Delhi (1942–43), I had the entire flat to myself, because he went off to work in the mornings, returning only at five or six. Our khansama (cook) came during the day to make lunch for me—we called it tiffin—otherwise I was on my own, the nearest neighbours being our elderly landlord and his wife who lived at the other end of the bungalow on Atul Grove Lane. It was just a two-room flat, bedroom and sitting room, but I had made the sitting room my own, with a dartboard, a small bookshelf, a couple of board games (Snakes and Ladders!), and the old gramophone taking up most of the space.

Except when Daddy was at home that old gramophone was chief companion and friend. It had come with us from Jamnagar, and whenever I felt bored or lonely, I would wind it up, change the needle, and place a record on the turntable.

The record collection had grown over the years, and the records were packed flat in a couple of cardboard boxes. If they weren’t kept flat, they warped in the heat and took on weird shapes and were unplayable. Those records were so familiar to me, that eighty years, later I can still remember most of the songs and the recording artistes.

Just like a sunflower
After a sun shower,
My inspiration is you!
Just like the joy after
Hearing a child’s laughter,
My inspiration is you.

A song forgotten by everyone but me. And the singers were Layton and Johnstone, popular in their time.

And there was a wartime propaganda record, the words sung by the comedian Arthur Askey.

Adolf (meaning Hitler),
You’ve bitten off
Much more than you can chew….
And we’re going to hang up your washing
On the Siegfried line
To remind you of the red, white, and blue!

Or words to that effect.

Daddy had joined the RAF at the outbreak of the war. Too old for active service, he had gone to work in the Codes and Cyphers unit. All very secret and mystifying. But when he came home in the evenings, he would devote himself to his real pas­sion, stamp collecting, and he had an extensive and valuable collection. He told me the stories behind the stamps, and that way I learnt a lot of history and geography. That good-looking boy king on the Iraqi postage stamp… one day he would be as­sassinated! Stamps told stories.

Daddy was subject to bouts of malaria, and during one severe attack he had to be admitted to the military hospital at Palam. I was on my own for a week, although our landlord Mr D’Souza, looked in from time to time to see if I was all right.

I spent about a week on my own in that flat. I did not sleep much on the first night. I kept the light on, reading The Swiss Family Robinson till about midnight. I recommend that classic for any boy or girl who has to spend a night on his or her own. If that family could deal with so many challenges and dangers, so could I! I put out the light and listened to the sounds of the night. Jackals howled. New Delhi was still surrounded by wilderness and a forested ridge, and the jackal population was formidable, outnumbering street dogs. Night birds called. In the room a mouse squeaked. No, it wasn’t a mouse, it was a little half-blind shrew who shared the room with me. ‘A chuchun­dar,’ said the khansama when he saw it the next day. ‘It’s lucky. You will get money!’

He was right. When my father came home my pocket money was increased and so was the cook’s pay. He made great chocolate puddings and fish cutlets. Like Jeeves, I believe that fish is good for the brain.

I had learnt to live alone in the dark, and since then I have never been afraid of the dark. I see the night as a friend. Some­times I get up in the middle of the night and take a stroll up the road. The mountains beckon and the stars shine bright. Jackals slink away. Humans are abed. Except for a solitary drunk stag­gering home to a lonely bed or a hostile wife.

The middle of the night is a good time to write a poem or a rhyme or even a limerick. I enjoyed writing tongue-twisters, like this one, preserved over the years and improved upon from time to time: slippery slippers skid and slide as I slink along the slimy sinuous slithery ship! (You have to say it quickly!)

But at the age of eight, on Atul Grove Lane, I wasn’t thinking of being a writer, I was busy making lists.

I was obsessed with making lists. Lists of all the films I had seen with my father, and their casts too. The cinemas of Connaught Place—the Plaza, the Odeon, the Rivoli, the Regal, were all familiar to me. At the Regal there was even the odd variety show, put on by American troops on recreational leave. There were bookshops and music shops, and my record collection increased. I made lists of songs and singers. I made lists of birds. And flowers. And trees. And books.

Was this making of lists of any use? I don’t really know. Perhaps it helped to give me a tidy mind, enabled me to compartmentalize things as I grew older. And it helped to train my memory. If you give me the title of a well-known film made in the 1940s, I will give you its cast. And two or three years later, when I took charge of the school library, I was soon able to name any author and his (or her) major works without any difficulty.

But I never made lists of friends. If you make lists of friends you are in danger of losing them, a superstition I picked up along the way.

And I stopped making lists when I started writing stories. Because stories are about people, and people refuse to be listed or placed in categories.

I WAS LONELY WHEN my father died. I had lost my only companion. The news was broken to me by one of the teach­ers in my prep school—he said something about the good Lord needing my father more than I did, which I resented. What could the good Lord need my father for? Did he want his stamp collection? It took me years to reconcile myself to this loss.

They kept me in the school’s small hospital for a few days, until I ‘felt better’. There was no one else in the ward, and so I was left to my own thoughts and predilections. An ayah brought me my meals, and the school nurse looked in now and then, making valiant attempts to cheer me up. But the future, without my father, looked bleak.

When school closed for the winter break, I was sent to my mother and stepfather in Dehradun. I shared a bedroom with my small brother and two half-brothers. I had a small cupboard to myself, in which I kept my books and clothes. The gramo­phone had gone. So had my father’s valuable stamp collection, appropriated by ‘relatives’ in Calcutta. My sister Ellen, a back­ward child, was to join us later.

I was used to being on my own, and I now felt the need for pri­vacy. If there wasn’t privacy in the house, I would seek it outdoors.

Dehradun, in 1944, was a small town of 40,000 souls. (Today it is a city with a population of more than 10 lakhs.) In a few days of wandering I discovered almost all that there was to discover—the Paltan Bazaar, railway station, parade ground or maidan, cinemas (4), bookshops (2), schools (4), a few restaurants, the Survey of India estate, forest areas, leper colony, leper hospital, police stations (5), clock tower, mango groves, eucalyptus avenues, litchi orchards, tea estates (2), canals (2), dry watercourses, hotels (3), waterworks, main post office, small bakeries (several), fish market, sabzi mandi, schools, temples, churches, mosques. A spacious cantonment, Gorkha soldiers. A winding road to the hills.

I went (that is, I walked) everywhere, and saw everything, but I was never a part of anything. I was the outsider looking in. It was only when I got older that I finally went in—and discovered people.

All that I saw on these walkabouts must have been stored in my head because many years later these people and places reappeared in my stories. I have a good visual memory, and the past—especially those childhood years—comes back to me in the form of pictures. And I stitch them together to make a story.

(This is an edited excerpt from The Hill of Enchantment: The Story of My Life as a Writer by Ruskin Bond)

authorchildhoodlonelinessRuskin BondstorytellersThe Hill of Enchantment: The Story of My Life