Outside of a Dog Read Online Free Page A

sleep, with a
chapter from, say, Dr Dolittle . Dr Dolittle! That was terrific, even with its paucity of elephants. And Jack and Jill ? Junk. The lesson of this was obvious, and – learned early
– has been a tenet for most of my adult life: never do for yourself what others can do better for you.
    It was the same with writing, for learning to read is also learning to write: why bother? Other people were much better at it than me. Let them write and me listen or, if I had to, read. For my
earliest efforts at writing were even less interesting than the Jack and Jill books on which I painstakingly learned to read. I wrote my first book at the age of six. It consisted of a few
sheets of scrappy paper, cut clumsily with scissors into pieces, chunks really, about two inches square, and stapled together. It bore its title in crayon on the front page: A Friend for
Mickey . The text followed on the next four pages, also inscribed in crayon. It read: ‘Once upon a time a boy went wakking down the street to see his friend his friend was a good
friend.’
    It was probably the product of a task set on a difficult day, buying my mother a few moments’ respite from my relentless counting and general fidgetiness. There is something rushed and
uncommitted about my fulfilment of the assignment, characteristics that are an abiding part of my nature. But my mother, nonetheless, was sufficiently proud of my little book that it became the
foundation document of her Old Age Box. It rather surprised me, rediscovering Mickey after she died in 1974, to find myself embarrassed by this palpable reminder of my early lack of anything
approaching high intelligence or, at the very least, some small creative spark.
    Neither of the above. There was nothing promising in A Friend for Mickey . If it vaguely echoes – as I later imagined – the opening paragraph about Baby Tuckoo and his
friend the moocow of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , it can only be at the most fundamental archetypal level: an isolated child, the voyage down the road, the search
for a boon companion. No, if books were to be a part of my life it was likely that somebody else was going to have to write them.
    But once I had read, indeed memorized, the available Dr Seuss books, it wasn’t entirely clear what to read next. Nothing was as good as them. My parents cast about for tempting
material, but their frustration reflected something about the culture in which they found themselves: the choices were limited. There were the Babar books, but he (King of the Elephants!), his
Queen Celeste and their children Pom, Flora and Alexander were rather inferior elephants compared to Horton. They didn’t hatch a single egg between them. A series of deliciously illustrated
books about Madeline and some nuns interested me for a time, but the texts were dull compared to Dr Seuss, and Madeline was too small and inexplicably fond of lining up in rows. No, children were
better catered for by the comics (the years 1949/1950 alone saw the first strips of Peanuts, Beetle Bailey, Pogo and Dennis the Menace ), and shortly by that captivating new medium,
television, than by the written word.
    By the middle of the 1950s the effect of television on reading was becoming evident. We loved The Howdy Doody Show , a captivatingly inane programme hosted by a toothy, freckled,
red-haired puppet who had absolutely nothing to say for himself. He didn’t need to. He was there . At the age of four Ruthie, a beautiful and silent child who loitered on the edge of
things, partaking rather than participating, was asked, as dessert was being served by our neighbours in the upstairs apartment, if she liked jelly roll?
    ‘I love him!’ she replied. ‘What channel is he on?’
    Within a year we got a TV too, and we spent our time either in front of it, or begging to be in front of it, though there was almost nothing worth watching. But it sure was better than
reading.
    In 1955, Rudolf