TThis isn’t one of those social media writing contests or book trends like NaNoWriMo or #ReadWomen that you’ve missed. But maybe it should be. Rereading the first chapter of Animal Farm is like turning a page in an old photo album. There I am, a teenager in an ill-fitting Punkyfish T-shirt under my white nylon school shirt. My hair is tied back with plastic butterfly clips, my armpits smell of my mom’s Amplex deodorant, and I have a nearly constant taste of blood in my mouth from the loose wires of my braces cutting the flesh on the inside of my cheek.
Reading about Boxer and Clover’s quiet love makes me yearn again for a bright-coloured boy in skater sneakers, listening to Finley Quaye and pulling the curtains over his eyes so regularly that he develops a new muscle on the side of his neck. And yet, at 39, the book affects me in a whole new light. Since that first reading, I have actually been to Russia; I have been in a trade union; I have sat through endless local government meetings; and I have mixed cement on a building site. Not to mention the rest of Orwell’s books. So many of the political nuances, the simplicity of the prose, the post-war depiction of the English countryside escaped me at 14.
But the biggest surprise? I managed to re-read the whole book in a single ferry ride to Dublin. Animal Farm is not a thick book! How did we stretch it to a whole semester? Well, I’m about to find out because like 26,955 other people last year, I’ve decided to finally study to be a teacher and Animal Farm will be one of the texts on the syllabus. I can do it part-time, I’ll get a scholarship that covers most of my fees and, most excitingly, I can buy myself a new pencil case.
Animal Farm isn’t the only book whose apparent brevity has shocked me. A Christmas Carol? You could read it in a day! Now, 20 years and a whole career later, I realize Dickens was a journalist. I didn’t know this at 16—I’d never really read any other Victorian literature, and I’d never been hired by an editor myself—but he takes as much delight in biting details and witty idiosyncrasies as any political diarist, hipster magazine writer, or celebrity interviewer. And yet somehow the whole thing fits into 112 pages—this is a man who knew how to hit a word count. What stuck with me most about reading the book isn’t Tiny Tim’s death or the description of a run-down inner London. Rather, it’s the view from my English classroom into the dining hall, where they served a version of street food created in a stomach-burning fever dream: pizza baguettes, spicy chicken tikka rolls, and chips with bacon and mayonnaise. I remember the Virginia Woolf poster on the wall. I remember the strange and stiff way my skirt folded under my knees, because of course I had sewn my own school skirt from a piece of wetsuit fabric I’d found in a fabric shop with my mother. When I moved, it sounded like someone was shuffling a deck of cards.
I had forgotten so many details over the years – Frankenstein comes from Geneva? Boxer splits his hoof? Jack makes himself a crown? – but not those of my own life. The books may have turned into a muddy landscape of scenes and characters, but as I leaf through the pages, the details of my own youth come back with almost frightening clarity.
So I’d like to take this opportunity to recommend to anyone who picked up their exam results this summer that you write a note in your phone and re-read Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 2053, when you actually lived in a one-bedroom rented flat, had a crappy boyfriend and were temporarily driven mad by the wrong contraceptive pill. Or Lord of the Flies in 2051, when the kids have started school and one of your colleagues gets promoted and, for no apparent reason, immediately replaces all the cutlery in the kitchen with little wooden stirrers. Or Pride and Prejudice, when you’re 40, have been married for 12 years and spend most evenings talking about how to load the dishwasher. Because then those books will have a different meaning for you; and you’ll be able to time travel.
Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood
