Wrestling with South Oxhey and the Late Walter Benjamin

“Yes I did but hearing about Carrie and Sophie raving about the book, I thought I would try to read it again. I still reckon it is in the list of ten best books I have read,” she said.

The thought of the book being rated so highly some 170 years after his death might have caused Alexandre Dumas to be smiling in his grave in Picardy I mused, but then recalled his ashes had been re-interred in the Pantheon in Paris alongside those of Zola and Hugo and other fellow luminaries. That had righted a previous wrong, for he had been excluded from such recognition in post-revolutionary France, because his mother had been an enslaved African.

Back in my schooldays, my mother tended to pass on books she thought I would enjoy and I was grateful for her choice. My father, perhaps fearful that there might be an area in which he was not omnipotent, jumped in and handed me The Three Musketeers, which has been hackneyed by film and television but remains a far better book. I read the little-known sequels: Twenty Years After and Ten Years Later and was thrilled as the quartet’s activities wove through history.

Impressed, I researched Dumas and bought The Count of Monte Cristo, which is another example of how a book is far greater than the sum of all the celluloid attempts to depict a story full of subtleties and sub-plots.

Upon retirement and filling the bookcase in France back in 2005, I happened across my copy of Monte Cristo and wondered if it still had the same appeal. A week later, Ellie asked me what was the book that I seemed unable to put down. When I finished it, she commenced to read it and, for a number of days, I lost her as she devoured it.

“Who would have thought something I was aware of and knew a bit about nearly all my life, would be that enjoyable,” she said.

Over the years, your tastes change. I would no longer rate the 1951 Rupert Annual among my all-time favourites but I do not apologise for the fact I have also re-read The House at Pooh Corner, Wind in the Willows and the wonderful Mowgli Stories. It was also gratifying to know The Count still held an appeal for me.

We were relating the anecdote about being hooked on Dumas’ epic some years later and the next thing I knew was that two son-in-laws were complaining their wives had disappeared into a monumental book I had recommended and could not put it down. Both daughters admitted to an outbreak of compulsive reading.

It was their belated discovery of the magic of the book that sparked Lucie to read it again.

Yes, I admitted, it would still be in my Top 20 books of all time.

“It is in my top ten,” said Lucie, who was soon reading avariciously, every time she had a moment to herself.

I attempt to keep up with the more modern books but apart from the odd john Irving; Sleepers by Lorenzo Carcaterra, and The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, I cannot remember too many crying out as I put them down to suggest I might like to read them again sometime in the future. Then again, 80 per cent of my reading has always been non-fiction, so who am I to judge?

I mention all the foregoing because I have an apology to make. Searching in my overhead locker of our motor home on holiday, I unearthed a book I had never seen before. It was titled The Late Walter Benjamin by John Schad. I could not recollect buying it or being given it but I sat down and I was stunned to read a pleasant and flattering message from the author to me on the fly-leaf.

When someone suggests you haven’t done badly in a certain field, you tend to remember it but it was not until I read through the acknowledgements that it all fell into place. Colleague Grelle White is given a mention and then I recalled she had passed the book on to me: the author is or was local.

The book is about South Oxhey Estate, yet it is not. I must confess, I was as lost as I would be had I been locked in a room with only modern jazz for company. Yes, I am that low brow.

As explained above, my reading tastes are a little too basic and I found this surrealist approach to the emergence of South Oxhey Estate, beyond my understanding. There are plenty of oases provided by cuttings from the Watford Observer and I did finish the book fully appreciating the well-intentioned stupidity of the concept of transporting so many Londoners out to a soulless estate, with neither community facilities, pubs, corner shops nor an identity. Not surprisingly almost half the new arrivals headed out within a decade: a misguided social experiment on our doorstep.

I kept soldiering on, trying to come to terms with it but I was grateful when contacting others who had read it, that I was not alone in finding it “off the wall”.

I am informed a stage version played well at The Palace theatre this summer and there are further plans for the production which can be seen on the website Nowhere Near London So belatedly, thank you John for your gracious comments on my local career and I am sorry that I not “get” your book. Ironically, even as I checked the title for this article, I found myself dipping in and out, trying to fathom it. But I had, finally, to wave the white flag.

I was grateful when the next book I picked up for holiday reading was Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, rated a marvel in 1920 and I was still impressed when finally, after having it in my possession for some 40 years, I got round to reading it.

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