Gillie Bolton

'tis love, 'tis love, that makes the world go round!

The Duchess in Alice in Wonderland

Desert Island Discs is a kind of radio biography of the interviewed character. This introduction to Desert Island Books in The Writer leans quite heavily towards being autobiographical - a journey with me through my life in reading. Perhaps I should have taken my role as introducer of this column more seriously, and provided a better model? Well, subsequent writers: write proper Desert Island Books, do as I say, not as I do.

Apart from my wise, funny, and wonderful children, and their equally special dad, one of the great pleasures and educative forces in my life has always been reading. It still seems amazing to me that the whole world can be opened up to all my senses (sky eye included) merely by turning pieces of paper and resting my eyes upon black squiggles. Electronic wizardry cannot equal this magic which has been around for thousands of years.

Why did I read?

The world of fiction was more secure than my real live childhood world. Fiction might be full of baddies and problematic situations but they were always situations which resolved themselves. Most particularly they resolved themselves in always the same way in any particular book. So I could reread and reread and the characters always did, said and thought the same things, and the ending was always the same as when I read it last. In my real world people and events were bewildering, inconsistent, and unpredictable. Books could be depended upon, so I retreated into the world of fiction whenever I was allowed.

My reading wasn't only to escape into a dependable world. I read to learn and understand about what one might expect from people and situations - the kind of people one might meet outside my family. I learned that people could love each other wholeheartedly, unreservedly and disinterestedly, for example.

I learned about cause and effect in a dependable world. People doing certain things led to other things happening. People weren't hated because they made errors or were bad. In fact people (or kittens) were often loved as much when they'd been bad - as long as they were sorry and loving themselves.

My girls' boarding school was very strict and very regimented. I think if I couldn't have read I would have died even more psychologically and spiritually than I did. I was probably one of the few girls who found the Sunday afternoon Good Reading hour a haven of peace. Several of my books still bear the housemistress's initials as signifying their appropriateness for this holy hour.

I still find books with very painful plots difficult, and if I suspect the ending is going to be unhappy or problematic for a particular character I skip and read the end before I can bear to continue reading. I'm then forewarned and can continue reading with some degree of composure - the tragedy won't take me devastatingly by surprise. If the ending is too sad or terrible I stop reading, put the book back on the shelf only part digested.

My grandmother was an avid reader who liked a nice tale. She used to swap her books every week at the village hall WI (or was it Derby and Joan or the Mothers' Union , I don't remember; she was never a member of the Derby and Joan anyway: even in her eighties she only ever helped ). Once she told me she'd put a book on the fire as she thought nobody should ever read it again. My elder brother delightedly thought it was sexy, but it was Howard Spring's My Son, My Son . I read it when I was old enough and rather agreed with her. The hero's son commits murder and is hanged, a tragedy almost more than this reader could bear.

An absorbed reader, little distracts me once I'm involved. And I have to finish a novel once I've started. I breathlessly follow the characters in their plot until the final word, finding it difficult to detach myself from their world and return to mine. This means that I can only read novels when I'm on holiday. For that half hour in the bath at night, or on a train when I don't have to work (this is being scribbled and tapped out on Midland Mainline ), I read anything but a novel - poetry, biography, local history, books about things, early literature. It has to have minimal story content or I can't put it down.

When I was very young

When I was little I lapped up Enid Blyton (it was the fifties) - totally involved in the excitement and utter safety of islands and castles and tunnels and treasure and baddies who looked and acted like baddies, so one couldn't mistake them for anything else, and vice versa. And the daring adventurers' supper or cocoa was always hot on their return.

My mother read us Kitty Styles' Nicholas Thomas . He was 'fat and black and bulgy and full of good meals, with a tail that was curiously crooked with questions'. Nicholas was a kitten, whose mother was a member of the Mother Cats Union, just like my Nan , as you'll see later. His father, Mr Thomas Thomas, read the Evening Mews . My father strap-hung home every day on the Central Line , reading the human equivalent, and so Nicholas inhabited a similar world to mine. Of course Nicholas was always in trouble.

One of our favourite stories was when the yard broom became a bucking bronco, and a bent stick a rifle, and Nicholas rode straight through the Quackers meeting. The Quackers were ducks who sat together in solemn silence. I joined the Society of Friends in 1970, and remembered this story with great amusement. Once, on emergency admission in hospital, a little nurse asked me questions in the hush of the early morning hours; I told her I was a Quaker. When I read my notes later I noticed I also had become a Quacker.

One of the joys of these books was that Kitty Styles wrote in iambics, although the text looks like prose. My mother rollicked through reading it, just as she recited GK Chesterton ('The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road, a reeling road, a rolling road, that rambled through the shire.'), and Hiawatha . What child would not be stirred by: 'Mudgekeewis, ruler of the winds of heaven'? Later my children loved it too, and my son adopted for a swear word the name of the swan - Pooey Huck .

Teenage reading

When I was about 14, I made my biggest and most enduring literary discovery - Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. I have no idea how many times I've read and reread these texts, which I consider to be the best in English Literature. They have informed my thinking and steered my psychological and philosophical understandings. If you don't know the Alice books, or - terrible heresy - think of them as mere childrens' fantasy tales, then I beg you to dust off the copy which is bound to be on your shelf, open it up, and disappear into a magical world. Start with the Mad Hatters Tea-arty if you don't want to read it all.

Writing philosophically about life's problems is a clever thing to do. Writing philosophically about life's dilemmas, puzzles and absurdities in a simple, funny and utterly accessible way is genius. Charles Dodgson was a genius. He also possibly had Aspergers, but then these two often go together.

Once Alice had entered Looking Glass World where everything is back to front, she left the house, walked through the garden (I wish I could tell you everything, but I'm trusting you to go and read it) and wanted to get to a little hill. Every time she tried to get there, she bumped her nose again on the house. The rose told her not to be daft, and to walk AWAY from whatever she wanted to reach. She accordingly turned away from the hill, walked towards the house and there was the hill.

Well - life's just like that. You're all doctors - I'm sure you use this approach time and again with your patients, especially children. It's what we do in my work. If I want medical or healthcare practitioners to write a story about the most important event in their life (for professional development), I ask them not to think hard about what that event might be. They turn their back on thinking of important things, and the most important thing pops up like a jackinabox. Try it.

Carroll plays with language with inimical wit. How many people in our society don't know that the 'the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe'? and that if we only have jam every other day, rather than every day, we will in fact never have any, as tomorrow never comes; it's always today? And I'm always giving 'unbirthday presents'; Humpty Dumpty's quite right they're better than the 1 in 365 sort.

The strength and courage of Alice to survive such a perplexing world was a powerful model for me. Alice gives as good as she gets, and strides about those amazing worlds making decisions, asking questions fearlessly and exploring and discovering - all things I was too frightened to do. A marvellous role model for me. So much so that my plucky, creative and witty daughter is called Alice.

Before I discovered Alice, I swam through Jane Austen, the Brontes, Thackeray. I've never been a Dickens fan - he uses too many words, and has too heavy a wit.

In my early teens I became absorbed in Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn. Massive characters, loves, hates, world dramas all rolled through my mind. This was the world in which I grew up, rather than the appallingly confined and confining space of my boarding school. And of course Tolkein - we are moving into the nineteen-sixties. Heroism, courage, true friendship all fired me. The shortage of strong women was a shame, but Alice made up for a great deal.

In my late teens I wallowed in DH Lawrence's deep lakes of emotion. All this sex and love and hate was safe between the pages of a book. A boarding school girl, I didn't even really know the facts of life, apart from what Lawrence taught me. And the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth was fantastic. As a country child, I related to all that nature, and human emotion. I still think Wordsworth's The Prelude should be read by everyone. The autobiography of his childhood, it's deeply perceptive of the power of nature, and developing human emotions and feelings. 'Cut across the reflex of a star', and explore the Lake District through childish senses with him. If you've never read poetry, and think it might be difficult - well this falls off the easy end of the poetry difficulty scale.

And everyone should Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner . I won't say any more as you can read what I think in John Salinsky's excellent Literature and Medicine (Radcliffe Books). And you can read what I think about another romantic text - Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - in John Salinsky's sequel (also Radcliffe). Both these are musts for docs to read.

Young adult literary loves

Virginia Woolf was a great love of my late teens and early twenties. I must've read everything she's written - letters and diaries included. Her way of worming into the minds of her characters is extraordinary - to feel other people think like you can her characters, is enlightening. I returned again and again to Jane Austen during this period, for her wisdom and insight into the way people relate, or perhaps don't relate to each other, the way they misinterpret and mishear, and construe according to what they want to hear and perceive. And she's so concisely funny too.

Now, there's one text which I have reread nearly as much as the Alice books - Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne. My brother discovered it as a young undergraduate, and introduced me to an adult appreciation. All character archetypes are covered here. In my medical education work, I often look round a group and identify Eeyore, Kanga or Owl. Perhaps even more than Lewis Carroll, Milne manages to express deep wisdoms and social and psychological truths in very few words. This is remarkable writing which should never be sidelined to parents and children. What young person would not relate to:

"Honey or condensed milk with your bread?" Pooh was so excited that he said "Both," and then, so as not to seem greedy, he added, "ut don't bother about the bread, please."
Pooh adds to Alice 's discovery about how to get where she really wanted to be. Pooh, Piglet and Rabbit are lost in the fog. Rabbit is typically Clever and knows exactly where Home is, but always leads them back to the Pit where they Do Not Want to Be:
"How would it be," said Pooh slowly, "if as soon as we are out of sight of this Pit we try to find it again?"
"What's the good of that?" said Rabbit.
'"Well", said Pooh, "we keep looking for Home and not finding it, so I thought that if we looked for this Pit, we'd be sure not to find it, which would be a Good Thing, because then we might find something that we weren't looking for, which might be just what we were looking for, really."
And it works - they arrive Home in no time.
There are lots of Rabbits in medicine:
'Rabbit's clever'. Said Pooh thoughtfully.
'Yes', said Piglet, 'Rabbit's clever.'
'And he has brain.'
'Yes', said Piglet, 'Rabbit has brain.'
There was a long silence.
'I suppose', said Pooh, 'that's why he never understands anything.'
Or the wisdom of: ' "I think -" said Pooh. "Don't", said Rabbit.

And so towards middle age

One of my adult reading projects has been to read as much of the world's early literature as possible. The spiritual guidance and insight of The Tao te Ching of Lao Tsu has informed much of my understandings of people in relation to each other and the world. One of the oldest texts we have, it's very short, and amazingly to the point: a text to reread and reread and meditate upon. Here is section 11:

Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
It is the centre whole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cur doors and window for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness form what is not there.

I have been taken on adventures over 'wine dark seas' by Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Sappho. One of my sadnesses is not knowing ancient Greek, reading this wonderful stuff in the original would be incredible. Beowulf is a stunning read, as are the Icelandic Sagas. Dante's adventures in hell are a delight - 'Abandon all hope, all you who enter here' and adventure through the underworld. Milton 's Paradise Lost is different but equally dynamic and fun .

These texts are some of the foundations of our literature and our society. They, along with the wisdom of Socrates (would that all more recent philosophy was as readable as Plato), and Aristotle are vital to our culture. Reading them is a heady way of exploring human thought, emotion, spirituality, relationships. Shakespeare of course, is a later British writer in the same vein - what a depth of understanding of what it is to be a human in our society. How often have I said to myself along with Lady Macbeth: 'Screw your courage to the sticking post', Gillie! And of course Shakespeare's a past master at poking fun at people and culture.

There's lots more - contemporary poetry, and novels. I often read children's novels as some of our best writing is to be found here, as the Booker has now discovered. I do like characterisation in fiction. I don't really relate to boy's stories which are all plot. I thought Philip Pullman's trilogy was marvellous, but it really is a boy's story. Theresa Tomlinson's Moonriders , about the fall of Troy and the Amazons, I had to get to the end and finished at my desk like a naughty schoolgirl.

Lesley Glaister's novels are extraordinary psychological studies - ONLY to be read on holiday. Helen Dunmore's Zennor in Darkness is a beautiful story of DH Lawrence when he lived on the North Cornish coast. Helen is a poet, so the prose is beautiful. Jane Rogers' Island is a study of a young person - haunting and profound.

I like to get inside characters - what they think and feel, and why they do what they do. Characters in fiction are naked to their readers, even more so than patients are to their medical and healthcare carers. Their thoughts and feelings are open to my gaze as reader, infinitely more so than my loved ones who are so close to me. This is why I read, I think. People become doctors because they are nosy (or so I've reliably been told by an experienced senior doc). I read social anthropology at university, do the work I do, and read - because I'm nosy.

These are the texts that grew me up, and are still growing me.

Gillie Bolton

This article was originally published in:
The Writer: Journal of the Society of Medical Writers 2 ( 2)
pp18-22 Autumn 2003