Now that children are umbilically attached to their computers, schoolbook graffiti is a dying art
October 21, 2023 11:00 am
I recently moved house and got rid of dozens of school and university books, nearly 30 years after leaving Oxford.
What a vandal I was! I’d forgotten how I’d scrawled in practically every book from the age of eight to 21.
And thank God I did. Flicking through the pages took me on a time machine back to my young obsessions. It also showed me quite how unfunny I was.
There, on the cover of my university copy of Homer’s Iliad, was my cartoon of Asterix, a hero then and now – not too bad a likeness, though I say so myself. Elvis, too, remains a god to me. He pops up on the flyleaf of my Westminster School copy of Virgil’s Aeneid. As does one of my mirthless jokes. I’ve signed it, “With Best Wishes for a Good Read, Virgil.”
I flogged the joke to death. In the first pages of my university copy of the Aeneid, I wrote a whole page, from Virgil to me: “Dear Harry, I do hope you enjoy the Aeneid – rather a simple name for an epic about a fellow called Aeneas but I like it…” And so it goes on for ages, in pompous, mock-intellectual, mock-matey way.
My brother and sister wrote in their schoolbooks, too. So did practically everyone I knew at school and university. And so they had done for centuries: one rare First Folio of Shakespeare was disastrously graffitied by a child 200 years ago, with a naïve cartoon of a detached house. Now that children are umbilically attached to their computers, schoolbook graffiti is a dying art.
Why did we do it? Boredom, mostly. Long lessons with no diversion, except to take the hoplite (a Greek armed soldier) on the cover of a Thucydides book and give him a pair of sunglasses. And add the doctored lyrics from Easter Parade (1948), still a favourite Fred Astaire and Judy Garland film: “In your Easter bonnet/With flowers all upon it/You’ll be the finest hoplite in the Easter Parade.”
It was also a way of mucking about with friends in a way that was invisible to the teacher. My classics don at Magdalen thought we were translating Virgil, Book 4. In fact, my neighbour was writing, in my copy, “What a smelly fart – grumpy cool Westminster boy called Harry.”
I’ve got no idea who wrote that planet-brained line. That was one of the joys of going through the books before giving them away to the excellent Hellenic Book Service in Kentish Town, north London, which has thousands of second-hand school books. I got a brief insight into the lost mysteries of what I was like when I was young.
I had one book – Kennedy’s Latin Primer – from the age of eight, at my prep school, North Bridge House, just off Regent’s Park, all the way to university, for a total of 13 years.
When I was eight, I changed Kennedy’s Shorter Latin Primer to “Kennedy’s Shorter Eating Primer”. I changed another copy to “Kennedy’s Shortbread Eating Primer”. I marked all the classes I’d used it for: 3El (with divine Miss Eliot), via 3He (when she became divine Mrs Hepworth), 4Pi, 4Ea, 5At, 6Ej, U6 Ba and then, at Westminster, Transitus A, LSX, USX, VI, Rem.
By 1990, the book had followed me to Magdalen College, Oxford, where I inscribed the famous old schoolboy lines:
“If my name you wish to see, turn to page 103”
and
“I hate this book./ After just one page,/ it’s plain to see/ it’s died with age.”
And then, suddenly, a cartoon jumped out at me that shook me to the core. In my copy – bought in 1987, aged 15 – of A Progressive Course of Latin Unseens by Henderson and Baty, I’d scrawled two pictures of ‘The Latin Lover”: one a schoolboy with a copy of Virgil; the other of a moustachioed ladykiller.
In 2006, I wrote a book called Amo, Amas, Amat and All That – How to Become a Latin Lover. I’d completely forgotten that the idea had been in my head almost 20 years earlier.
The child is the father of the man.
Harry Mount is author of Et Tu, Brute? The Best Latin Lines Ever, published by Bloomsbury, £13.49