My mother taught me to read in the summer of 1945, between VE Day and VJ Day, when I was turning three. Time lay on her hands: my father, a major in the Territorials, was away in Palestine, battling Irgun and the Stern Gang in the latter days of the British Mandate, and wasn't due to be demobilised from the army until the end of the year; and I was a pushover for her deck of home-made flash cards and a game I found more fun than our previous sessions of Animal Snap. In the cluttered, narrow-windowed living-room of our house in the village of Hempton Green in Norfolk, my mother and I progressed from letters to words to sentences, stopping the game at intervals to listen to the BBC news crackling from the wireless, its fretwork grill sawn to represent an inappropriately Japanese-style rising sun. By the time we reached sentences, and the cards had given way to headlines from the day's Times, Japan had surrendered to the Allies, and the wireless was reporting that our troops in the Far East were fighting 'pockets of gorillas' - an idea that excited me much more than anything in my father's letters home from Transjordan. Gorilla warfare was something that any three-year-old could warm to in his imagination: I sought out coloured pictures of gorillas to feed my understanding of the conflict, and it was years before I realised that I was the victim of a deceiving homophone - an early case of the linguistic misunderstanding to which I've been prone all my life.

LRB 5 November 2009 | PDF Download