The pages of puberty

By Conrad Walters

In the summer of 1973, I read Summer of ’42. At the age of 14, I was supposed to be discovering the opposite sex, which is what the story’s narrator does, but books were proving more dependable and predictable than girls.

I can still recite a sentence from the first page of Herman Raucher’s novel: ‘‘Cars come to this f—in’ island to die.’’ It was the first real obscenity I’d seen in print, other than in the enormous dictionary in the library where Mike Sperling and I had once gone to confirm a rumour the great unspeakable F word was not only listed but conjugated. The claim was true, although the definitions were disappointing.

Summer of ’42 was an early book in my conversion to literature but not the first. That distinction belonged to True Grit, the novel of a child’s effort to avenge her father’s murder aided by a drunken one-eyed marshal. On a bored summer’s night, freed at last from the gulag of homework, I’d looked through my mother’s novels, stored in my closet because she’d already filled everywhere else. I was inspecting the cover of True Grit when she came in.

‘‘You might like that,’’ she said. ‘‘Want to read it?’’

I was quietly honoured. I’d read loads of children’s books but never anything belonging to an adult. With a teenager’s honed nonchalance, I acceded — ‘‘Yeah, OK, I guess’’ — and subsequently devoured my way through her discards.

Until I landed on Summer of ’42. When I’d started, I hadn’t realised what it was: the story of a boy’s infatuation with a woman whose husband is away at World War II. After fumblings with girls his age, the boy achieves his goal of sexual conquest but only after the woman learns her husband has been killed and seeks solace for her grief.

When my mother discovered what I was reading, she looked surprised. ‘‘Oh. You’re reading that. Oh. How are you finding it?’’

‘‘Yeah, OK, I guess.’’

Later, she admitted she and my father had debated whether I was too young to read Summer of ’42. ‘‘But by the time we decided, you’d finished it.’’

I didn’t ask what verdict they’d reached, lest I be denied the source of my addiction. But I longed for the answer. Had I got away with peeking inside adulthood? Or had they agreed to let me in? My mother died in 2002 but eventually I put the question to my father.

Did he remember the book? Of course.

‘‘That’s the one where the kid gets laid.’’

Well, yes, Dad, but there were other larger themes, too. What about the debate? What had they decided?

‘‘I don’t remember what I did last week,’’ he said.

Thanks, Dad.

There were other books and for a few years I recorded everything I read. The 1973 list contains Chariots Of The Gods? (industrious aliens lay groundwork for The X-Files), Jonathan Livingston Seagull (non-conformist bird finds God) and, having been previously corrupted, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (teenage boy’s El Dorado). I’d managed to purloin this from the world’s greatest library which also operated a book exchange. Bring in any old lump of paper bound by glue, say Chariots Of The Gods?, and take home the book of your choice.

Our family moved two months later and I bestowed the great yellow sex manual on a friend hours before my departure. Frankly, I was glad to get rid of the thing. It was terrifying stuff, filled with answers I never suspected had questions. The next summer, I was on the straight and narrow.

The 1974 list boasts The Great Gatsby, Siddhartha and Brave New World. And 1975’s readings included Of Mice And Men, The Odyssey and The Wisdom Of Kung Fu (thank you, David Carradine).

But it couldn’t last forever. Puberty and its accompaniment — stupidity — arrived in 1976. Hidden between TM (transcendental meditation) and Watership Down (bunnies pay ultimate price for digging up backyard) was my literary shame: How to Pick Up Girls.

It was more disappointing than an unabridged dictionary and more fraudulent than jailed Earthling Erich von Daniken. It was also the last straw. Reading time, I decided, was too important to be wasted on nonsense. Not every book I’ve read since has had literary-list lineage, but I’d learned the hard way the value of a good book on a summer’s day.

I did eventually — and enthusiastically — also discover girls. I even married one, and in bed she’s a voracious reader.

Published in The Sydney Morning Herald, January 9 2008.