Friday Afternoon

There was something special about Friday afternoons. The week was almost over, two days of freedom beckoned. This is 1969. I’m in my second year at junior school. Afternoons are divided into two lesson periods, around a mid-afternoon ‘playtime’ at 3pm. But there’s no work to do when we come back to the classroom. Books, pencils and paper are put away in our desks until Monday. Our teacher – young, brunette, bespectacled Miss Read – is going to do as her name suggests. Last thing on Friday afternoons is story time. Like Jackanory, only in real life.

Miss Read started as she meant to go on, in September of 1969, with stories of Milly-Molly-Mandy, a perennial favourite and still in print to this day. Joyce Lancaster Brisley wrote and illustrated the six Milly-Molly-Mandy books over a period spanning thirty-nine years, beginning in the mid-twenties. The first stories were published in the Christian Science Monitor, with a collection appearing in 1928. To us, hearing them forty odd years later, there seemed nothing unusally old fashioned about the tales. The stories embraced the cosy, semi-rural provincial England of the years between the wars, but their setting wasn’t a million miles away from cosy, provincial Sutton Coldfield, then a part of Warwickshire, where we lived.

Miss Read would hold up the book so we could see the drawings on the cover and on the inside pages, but for the most part, we used our imaginations. The stories weren’t really aimed at eight-year-old boys like myself, but I found them congenial and entertaining. Miss Read’s volume, possibly a relic of her own girlhood, comprised short stories of an ideal length for reading aloud. I have vivid memories of sitting in the bright classroom (ours was a modern school, with wide picture windows along two walls), listening to Miss Read, and sensing a warm, welcoming atmosphere, setting us up for the weekend to come: a feeling of ‘school is almost over, nearly time to go home, and here’s a nice story to round off the week.’ That feeling came to define Friday afternoon in a way that would remain with me long after I left school and entered the world of work.

Milly-Molly-Mandy Stories contained thirteen tales of the eponymous little girl and her friends, which by my reckoning would have taken us right through to Christmas 1969. But to follow them up, Miss Read had something even better waiting in her desk drawer. She clearly knew that the next book was special, as I remember coming in from afternoon playtime to see a series of chalk drawings on the blackboard, depicting a curious tower-shaped house, a map, and a creature that looked like a Hippopotamus standing on two legs. I was about to be introduced to the world of the Moomins.

If Miss Read is still out there somewhere – by any other name, no doubt – I’d like to find her and shake her by the hand, for the Moomins became a great personal favourite that I may never have discovered without her. The book she had chosen for us was Finn Family Moomintroll by the Finnish author and illustrator Tove Janssen. First published in 1946, the book was translated into English in 1950 and whilst not chronologically the first in the Moomin series, was presented thus by Penguin, who commissioned a special foreword from ‘Moominmamma’ that appeared in the 1961 paperback imprint.

The Moomins clicked with me immediately. The stories were wistful, whimsical, comical and sometimes (especially in the later volumes), melancholic. I loved all the characters. Each time a new one was introduced in the text – the Hemulen, the Snork Maiden, the Hattifatteners – Miss Read would point them out on the colourfully illustrated front cover. I knew at once that this was a book I needed to own myself.

Our dad had formed the quaint habit of buying my brother and myself presents on each other’s birthdays: just a small item like a toy car, so we wouldn’t feel left out. He called them ‘short presents’. My brother’s birthday fell in early February, not many weeks after we’d set out on our Friday afternoon adventures with the Moomins, and on a trip into Birmingham, I asked for one of the books for my ‘short present.’ When my own birthday came around, I was bought two more: Finn Family, and its follow-up, Comet in Moominland (purists would remind us that Comet... actually preceded Finn Family in the original Finnish publication).

By this time, we were already part way into Comet... with Miss Read, but I was able to steal a march on the rest of the class and read ahead: not that this in any way diminished the experience of having the stories read aloud to us. Once we were done with Comet, I brought in my own copy of The Exploits of Moominpapa (that ‘short present’ purchase) for Miss Read to read; but the well-loved, familiar characters were mostly absent from the narrative, and we didn’t get past the first chapter. 

Those two Moomin books must have seen us through to Easter 1970 and perhaps a bit beyond. But sadly, I don’t recall any more of Miss Read’s Friday afternoon tales. Maybe we went back to Milly-Molly-Mandy? But the Moomins were a hard act to follow. We only ever had those first two volumes read to us, and they’re still my personal favourites from the series. ‘Serious’ fans will assure you that Moominpapa at Sea is the true masterpiece of Janssen’s oeuvre, and it’s hard to argue with that. But those first two are special to me. Reading them in later years, I could still imagine the scene in the classroom when I first heard them read aloud. 

Friday afternoons with Miss Read will be with me forever. But we all moved on. The next year saw us taught by a Mrs. Garland – older, frumpier and not as congenial as Miss Read. I don’t remember her reading to us on Friday afternoons, which isn’t to say that she didn’t. But if she did, it failed to leave the impression of Miss Read and the Moomins.

Another year on, and we were in what should have been our last year in the junior school. Our teacher was a Mr. Dyson, bearded and benign, but again, I don’t remember any Friday afternoon stories. Instead, we got to hear taped editions of the BBC’s Singing Together. In any case, we were now all eleven going on twelve and probably considered ourselves too grown up to have childish stories read aloud to us. But Friday afternoons had one last ace to play.

Our year was held over at junior school as part of a misguided experiment to raise the age for secondary education from eleven to twelve. That final year was supposed to provide us with the equivalent of what we would have been taught at any grammar or comprehensive, but the reality was that we merely coasted through twelve months achieving very little. I know for a fact that our grammar school staff were shocked at how ill-prepared our intake was when we finally got there in September 1973. But the year wasn’t entirely wasted. As compensation, our teacher for that final year was one of the best ever – witty, easy-going, a dab hand on the acoustic guitar, and a lover of science fiction short stories – that was Philip Bashford. Now Friday afternoons would see him regale us with selections from the Paul Simon songbook, and other folk club favourites. He read to us too. Not stories for children, but for grown-ups. One day he produced a paperback book with a weird airbrushed cover showing an alien being in a mysterious landscape. This was the NEL paperback imprint of the 1957 short story collection Space, Time and Nathaniel, which had launched the writing career of prolific S-F author Brian Aldiss. Aldiss’ stories were witty, occasionally cruel, sometimes even poetic. They had plot twists better than any ever conceived by Roald Dahl, and they were of an ideal length to be read aloud to a class full of 12-year-olds on Friday afternoons in 1973. The book was divided into three sections, headed ‘Space’, ‘Time’ and… (you’ve got it). Mr. Bashford started at the beginning with ‘T’, a neat little vignette of an alien on his way to obliterate the Earth. The next time he produced the book, he opened it at almost the last page, and read to us an atmospheric and quite affecting story about a middle-aged woman and a small child who become victims of a war waged using sound as a weapon. The last paragraph of this story, ‘Dumb Show’, is as good as anything I’ve ever read, anywhere else. And without Mr. Bashford, I’d almost certainly never have come across it. To this day, whenever I re-read that tale, I visualise it exactly as it came to my mind hearing it on that Friday afternoon back in the early 70s.

From Milly-Molly-Mandy to sonic warfare is a strange journey by any standards, but such was the world of Friday afternoon. The very idea of Friday afternoon now contains a potent seed of nostalgia, as for me, the days of the week, like meterological depressions, lost their identity just over twelve months ago when I was put out of work. Perhaps that’s why those Friday afternoons with Miss Read and Mr. Bashford still seem so alive. I will always return to those books, and when I next take them down from the shelf, I know that, whatever time of day, or day of the week it might be, in a distant part of my mind it will still be Friday afternoon.