My Back Pages

Afternoon! How's the wife? The husband? The life partner? The dog? The crippling sense of existential angst? Whoever it is that you go home to. How are they?


Good. Probably. I wasn't listening. I was thinking about something else. I was thinking about books.

Yesterday was World Book Day. And everyone spent all day saying, "Books are ace!" Parents sent their kids to school dressed as characters from books. I know because they put millions of photos of these kids on Twitter. It seemed to be Harry Potter, mostly, which is fine. Though there was the occasional example of a poor child dressed as Offred from The Handmaid's Tale, or something similar - a confused but obedient pawn in the war between parents who were trying to out-clever one another. "Oh, Jemima's dressed as the Struggle of the Proletariat from Das Kapital. Yes it's her favourite."


I did not dress up. Unless, somewhere, there's a book about a middle aged man trying to disguise his excessive wine consumption with a range of exciting waistcoats. That would be a good book. But no. Instead I posted, online, the covers of some books that had meant something to me, in my formative years.


The first of those books was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a Doctor Who book. Doctor Who and the Daleks, to be precise. It's a powerful, totemic item for many a geek of my generation. It was the beginning of many things that are still important to me and, like so many books, a fundamental part of who I was to become.

Here's how it started.

When I was nine I went to Middle School and I was put in Mrs Skelding's class. She was a tall, possibly-Scottish woman who enjoyed reading out loud and was mostly very pleasant. In the corner of her classroom was the Best Thing Ever - and that best thing ever was a shelf.


On the shelf were some books. Very specific books. Doctor Who books. Apparently her son had owned them and no longer wanted them. What a moron! Why did he do that? They're great! And now I was allowed to borrow them!


I first went for The Dalek Invasion of Earth. I'd recently seen the film version on a Saturday morning matinee at the Odeon, and I had loved it with all my tiny heart. And here that film was again, living inside this book. All the colours and explosions and heroes and traitors and races against time. Wonderful.


And that was my gateway drug. Mrs. Skelding's idiot son had given her loads of books, and I read every single one. What an amazing world of stuff to discover. Dozens of wild, insanely creative stories, ranging across time and space. All in the company of a magical crazy space guy who made me feel OK to be weird.

The books existed before VHS and DVD, so they were the only way into the past of Doctor Who. He was still kicking around on television, in the gangly, toothy form of Tom Baker, but his past adventures were a mystery. These stories - novelisations of the adventures that had been broadcast before I was born - were all I had.


I'm glad, for many reasons, that my exposure to these stories was through the novelisations. If I could have watched the actual old TV stories, back then as a child, I might not have fallen in love in the same way. Brilliant as Doctor Who is, there are things in the old TV stories that might have proved offputting to a young creature like myself.


The novels are fast and thrilling where the TV could be slow and ponderous. Monsters, planets and spaceships flew colourfully around my head, carved into life by the words in these brilliant books. Having watched the TV versions in recent years, I can testify that the special effects do not always live up to this promise.

Best of all, for an introverted young thing like me, books allowed you inside the heads of the characters. I could read their minds and know their feelings. I knew that the heroes were often scared on the inside. Villains were rarely just evil, but often believed that their actions really were for the best. Nothing was simple, and that was true for the grown ups too.


The writers of these books gave life to characters who might only have a few lines on screen. Everyone was important. Everyone had a story. As the Doctor would say, years later, "I've never met anyone unimportant."


I loved these books and I still do. They became part of who I am and I was very much formed by them. Unlike Mrs. Skelding's insane son, I never gave mine away. I don't know if I'll ever read them again but they sit in the attic, in correct chronological order, their pages mumbling with tales of Sea Devils, dinosaurs and Daleks. They're wonderful.