The book that I couldn't live without

The most precious book I've read (to date)

Sharon Bakar of the informative plus influential Bibliobibuli blog it was who first alerted me to the fact that the 1st of March is World Book Day in Britain. Also, that for the event's tenth anniversary this year, a survey was conducted as what are the ten books that people feel that they can't live without.

A list of the top ten vote-getting books can be found over here. Looking at it, I'm a bit embarrassed to discover that while I've actually tried reading nine out of the ten books -- if you count, as was done by the poll organizers, the Harry Potter series as a single tome -- on the list, I was disinclined to complete my checking out of those that occupy the first two as well as ninth place on it!

Interested readers also can find a list of the top 100 hundred vote-getting books over here. Sadly though, while there's room for such as one Louisa M. Alcott novel and another by Enid Blyton on it, the published tome with which I'd answer Sharon's posed question of "So what's your book you couldn't live without?" is no where to be found on that lengthier roll of honor.

As one of the book in question's reviewers and proponents lamented, interest in the works of its author has waned in recent years. For all this, however, (s)he feels confident enough to state that R. F. Delderfield's To Serve Them All My Days is "one of the greatest novels of the 20th century" and predict that in time, "the epic book will have its day once again and a new generation will give Delderfield his proper place in the pantheon of literary greats."

My battered Coronet paperback edition of this book which was originally published in 1972 is 572 pages long. And just about the best testimony that I can give for this thick tome is that I've read it countless times since I first came across a copy of To Serve Them All My Days more than two decades ago while rooting through the library of the very English couple who were my legal guardians when I was at boarding school in Britain.

Also, that at various times in my itself rather tumultous life, this obviously lovingly written socio-historical saga about a shell-shocked First World War veteran turned boarding schoolmaster has been the book that I've turned to for comfort, inspiration and solace.

Like many other favorite books, that which a blogger called Kittman has named as the best purchase (s)he's ever made contains more than its fair share of passages which really "speak" to me (and I think might to many of you too). Then there are the wonderful descriptions of various of the protagonist, Welshman David Powlett-Jones's pupils, colleagues, elders and lady loves: many of which make me chortle every time I read them; but others of which are more likely to draw out a sentimental tear or more from my eyes.

To quote again -- but this time at greater length -- from the rave review of To Serve Them All My Days on the BBC website which I had earlier alluded to:-

The appeal of this book lies in the well-crafted central characters who are instantly recognisable as real people...[For all this though, w]hat sets this novel apart is the minor characters. Often in other novels, these characters become ciphers with no other role than to move the story along. [But] Delderfield treats these people with extraordinary care by giving them backgrounds and by reintroducing them later in the book to tie up loose ends or to reveal unexpected traits that make them fully-rounded human beings.

In closing: I do tend to the view that it's best to leave the final words about a book to its author. In this case, I've decided after some deliberation against providing excerpts from the story itself to give you a flavor of Delderfield's writing style and general authorial proclivities. Instead, I'm trusting that the accompanying A Qualified Disclaimer which I'm copying out in its entirety -- but am taking the liberty to break up into three paragraphs for easier reading! -- will do a better job of providing some evidence plus insights as to how come this book and author are as special as I believe that they are:-

Almost every writer of fiction inserts the obligatory disclaimer in his work and some, I suspect, do it with tongue in cheek. The truth is, of course, no one ever invented anyone. Every character in fiction is an amalgam of factors drawn from the author's memory and imagination and this is particularly true of To Serve Them All My Days.

No character here is a true portrait, or caricature, of any master or boy I ever encountered at my six schools and one commercial college, between 1917 and 1929, but aspects of people I met are embodied in all of them, and I have even used nicknames I recalled, as well as several scholastic backgrounds. To write fiction in any other way would be to divorce oneself from reality and what kind of book would emerge from that?

In using, say, an average of six schoolmasters and six boys for every one between these pages, I intended no slight or criticism, only to portray life at school as I saw it up to 1940, when I entered my twenty-ninth year. I was glad to leave five of the six schools but there is one I still regard with the greatest affection. I leave it to the reader to sort the wheat from the chaff.

R. F. D.
February 1971