Richard Butchins's Blog: Angels stand corrected... - Posts Tagged "escape"

My childhood was a fucking disaster. I was a crippled kid and had constant trips to hospitals where, as far as I was concerned I was tortured - to make me better - it didn't work. Then there were the beatings at home. I could never tell what response any action might generate. One day I could spill a glass of milk and nothing would happen the next day I could do the same thing and be lifted up by my ears and thwacked soundly. As I grew into a teenager the beatings at home stopped (mainly because my mother and father had split up after years of beating the crap out of me and each other). But I was relentlessly bullied at school. It was terrible. The one thing I had to escape into were books, I read everything, like Scout in "To Kill a Mockingbird" I had been able to read since forever; though my father was no Atticus Finch.

I read all that I could get my hands on - like a drowning man I grasped at the books and the worlds they portrayed. They were a life buoy for me. I would retreat into my room and read. I'm not exactly sure but I think I read all the Narnia books by the time I was 10 and everything by Orwell by 14 and books like "The Wolves of Willougby Chase" and everything by Alan Garner.

I can't remember a time I didn't read. Later I read Kafka and Bulgakov and Beckett and, well, everything. I escaped into other worlds because I thought that what was happening in my world was my fault. I was wrong but that's how children's minds work.

The books saved my life, they gave me hope and nurtured the possibility that I might escape in the future as it happened I took the pain with me and it was many years before I had the confidence to write but I do now and my book is the result