And the #1956Club is open for business and this time I’m joining and you can too..
I’m old enough to actually remember quite a bit about 1956 and it’s technically possible that I read some of these books in the year they were published.
I was an avid three books plus a week reader as a child and at eight was already working my way through the better parts of Enid Blyton (forget Noddy – way too babyish and creepy to boot. And The Secret Seven were beneath my dignity except in a pinch.)
Depending on the acquisition speed of the Swindon Library, I read Five on a Secret Trail in 1956 or shortly thereafter. Ditto with the other series books I was churning my way through which from 1956 would include Wings Over Witchend – the ninth in the Lone Pine Series by Malcolm Saville; William and the Space Animal (Richmal Crompton was beginning to jump the shark by trying to stay topical with that one) and Biggles takes Charge (W.E.Johns).
So one way and another looks like I’ve read quite of lot of books first published in 1956 although I can’t say I remember much about many of them.
Here – just for fun – are 22 first lines from 1956ers that I’ve read in the last 64 years. How many can you match with the right book?
|
A. Not long ago, there lived in London a young married couple of Dalmatian dogs named Pongo and Missis Pongo. |
1. Five on a Secret Trail – Enid Blyton |
|
B. This is the story of a Polish family, and of what happened to them during the Second WorldWar and immediately afterwards. |
2. Look Back in Anger – John Osborne |
|
C. This is the story of a five-year sojourn that I and my family made on the Greek island of Corfu. |
3. Seize the Day – Saul Bellow |
| D. When it came to concealing his troubles, Tommy Wilhelm was not less capable than the next fellow. | 4. Dead Man’s Folly – Agatha Christie |
|
E. They called him Moshe the Beadle, as though he had never had a surname in his life. |
5. My Family and Other Animals– Gerald Durrell |
| F. One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur as if it is not London at all but some strange place on another planet, Moses Aloetta hop on a number 46 bus at the corner of Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove to go to Waterloo to meet a fellar who was coming from Trinidad on the boat train. | 6. The Silver Sword/ Escape from Warsaw – Ian Serraillier |
| G. “‘Take my camel, dear’, said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. | 7. The Lonely Londoners – Sam Selvon |
| H.. It was Miss Lemon, Poirot’s efficient secretary who took the telephone call. | 8. Flight from the Enchanter – Iris Murdoch |
| I. Why do I do this every Sunday? | 9. Beyond the Black Stump – Nevil Shute |
| J. Flight Lieutenant the honourable Algernon Lacey D.F.C RAF (retired) stopped his car for the second time in five minutes and with a gloved hand wiped away the snow that clogged the windscreen wipers. | 10. 101 Dalmatians – Dodie Smith |
| K. In all the whole town, the most wonderful spot | 11. Train to Pakistan –Khushwant Singh |
| L. A number of substances that are trapped in the earth’s crust will influence a Geiger counter sufficiently to set it clicking, and one of the feeblest of these influences is oil imprisoned in a salt dome or an anticline. | 12. Fifteen – Beverley Cleary |
| M.. A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness. I was tired and very cold; a little scared, too | 13. My Dog Tulip – J.R.Ackerley |
| N. Gerald Middleton was a man of mildly but persistently depressive temperament. | 14. Wings Over Witchend – Malcolm Saville |
| O.. I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life. | 15. The Wreck of the Mary Deare – Hammond Innes |
| P.. The summer of 1947 was not like other Indian summers. | 16. Bonjour Tristesse – Francois Sagan |
| Q. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked. | 17. Biggles in Charge – W.E.Johns |
| R.. Today I’m going to meet a boy, Jane Purdy told herself, as she walked up Blossom Street toward her babysitting job. | 18. Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin |
| S.. When the long Birkenhead train ran into Birmingham on time, three women got out of the non-smoking compartment in which the Morton twins were travelling but two more got in. | 19. Howl – Allen Ginsberg |
| T. ‘Mother! Mother, where are you?’ shouted George, rushing into the house. | 20 If I Ran the Circus – Dr.Seuss |
| U. I was tired and very cold; a little scared, too. | 21. Night – Elie Weisel |
| V. Some years ago, when I was walking with my dog in Fulham Palace Gardens, we overtook an old woman who was wheeling a baby carriage. | 22. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes – Angus Wilson |
| W. It was about three o’clock on a Friday afternoon when Annette decided to leave school. | 23, The Towers of Trebizond – Rose Macauley |
How well did you do?
1956 Was a Big Year For Me
I changed teachers three times and went from paradise to the shades of the prison-house closing in on the growing child. We moved from the hut encampment of Lydiard to a new council house in Swindon proper. I got hit over the knuckles with a ruler and broke my arm on Bonfire Night.
I was old enough to travel on the bus so I was able to get to the library often enough to manage their book limit of three per visit (one of which had to be non-fiction.) Fortunately, the library did not ban Enid Blyton.
1956 was a Big Year for Books
1956 was a banner year. Old-timers were still churning them out – Erle Stanley Gardner, Nevil Shute, Richmal Crompton, P.G.Wodehouse, Agatha Christie and Enid Blyton among them. It was a dry year for Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh but newcomers – Saul Bellow, Iris Murdoch, John Ashbery among them – were making their mark. Angus Wilson was hitting his stride. It was the year of The Outsider and Gallipoli and angry young men.
Andrea Levy, Patricia Cornwall, Amitav Ghosh, and Tim Pears were born and the world said goodbye to Walter de la Mare, A. A. Milne, Max Beerbohm, Bertholt Brecht, and H.L. Mencken
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes married And so did Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe.
1956 was a Big Year for the World
The world was busy in 1956 and I was dimly aware of it. My parents took the Daily Herald and I usually took a look and sometimes heard the news on the wireless.
Checking back now all these years later, I distinctly remember a few of the major events in some form or another.
Frogman Buster Crabb’s disappearance in Portsmouth Harbour and the arrest of the oddly named John Bodkin Adams captured my imagination. One story had to do with espionage and the other with a society doctor charged with multiple murders. One was John Le Carre and the other pure Agatha Christie.
I remember the Davy Crocket craze and my brother making dark remarks about missing cats and Davy Crocket hats. Teenagers were in the process of being invented and were doing terrible damage to cinema seats in their frenzy over Rock Around the Clock. A boy in my class mentioned the sewage canal and of course, I knew he meant Suez and how Sir Antony Eden trashed his own reputation and the Tories embarrassed Britain. (My parents voted Labour.)
I did hear of tanks in Hungary and talk of refugees. There was strontium 90 in the milk, the Bomb and the iron lung to haunt the imagination. 1956 was the year children were lined up at school to be vaccinated against polio. I was not among them as my mother was a health nut. You might imagine that that would lead me to have sympathy with today’s anti-vaxxers. To the contrary – they are nuts.
I knew there was an election in the US and that the wrong person won and that Doris Day sang something that my father – who love to play with words – rendered as Que sera, sera, the fuschia’s not ours to see. It was the Cold War and Nikita Khrushchev was always on about something and spies and traitors turned up in Moscow.
Now to choose some books.
A delightful blend of nostalgia and engagement! The 1956 Book Club and game concept is a creative way to revisit classic literature. The combination of literary exploration and interactive fun adds a unique twist to book club dynamics. It’s wonderful to see a fresh approach to fostering a love for timeless stories. Kudos to the organizer for infusing excitement into the reading experience. Looking forward to joining in and celebrating the literary gems of 1956 together!
You could join in with next Club Week which will run from 15th to 21st April 2024. The year in question is 1937!
Read more abut it here: https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/
Quite a year indeed. I was not able to participate in the club as I was away at the crucial time, but I was quite surprised to note that I have already blogged about several 1956 books (101 Dalmatians, The Towers of Trebizond, and My Family and Other Animals), and I’ve also read The Silver Sword. I could spot those first lines of course, and I know the Poirot one must be Christie, but I don’t think I’d do very well on the others. Fun game though!
I tried to do the quiz but the first line of the Murdoch novel isn’t there, and the camel line is from The Towers of Trebizond which also isn’t there, so I’ve given up.
Hi Tracey – Sounds as if you didn’t give up but rather that you persisted! Thanks for letting me know I dropped a line somewhere. I would blame it on the block editor adjustment but more likely it was just a failure to double and triple check. Anyway – now you can shine and get 100%. Cheers.
Thanks for fixing it – I shall try again!
Cheers Tracey – And I just know you are headed for a 100% triple Gold Star result.
Do I qualify for the 1956 book club, given that this is the year of my birth?
Coincidentally I recently blogged about corporal punishment at my secondary school (I refer to your wrap over the knuckles). I also posted a comment on another blogger’s account concerning holding onto books, expressing a wish I’d held onto my collection of Enid Blyton’s ‘Adventure’ series. I have to admit that I have only scanned this blog as I need to dash off, but I saw enough to know that I will be reading in more depth when I return. Great work..nostalgia rules!!
I read those posts of yours Graham. Liked them very much. And as for that sadistic teacher – he deserved a comeuppance. The routine acceptance of violence against children – absurd.
And as for “joining” the club. I don’t make the rules but they seem to suggest that to join all you need to do is to read a book first published in that year – 1956 – and blog about it. Lots to choose from!
Loved the game although only knew about half – had chosen Fifteen as one of my books. I was not quite around in 1956 but my parents met that year, so at least I was a possibility!
If my library had limited me to three books it would have been very annoying. Both my elementary school and my city had great libraries and let us borrow armfuls at a time. My big challenge was keeping track and returning them on time.
It wasn’t such a bad policy really. It did keep books in circulation rather than being hoarded. I read
“Fifteen” a very long time ago. I don’t think it resonated much with me. I’ll be interested to see what you make of it.
1956 was a big year for me too, Josie, as we moved from my country ‘paradise’ – a dilapidated rented cottage in Timsbury, surrounded by fields – to a new semi on a housing estate in Bath. Done for the sake of my education my parents said. I don’t think I ever really forgave them. I read most of the ‘Famous Five’ books and planned to run away from home after reading ‘Mr Galliano’s Circus’ …
… and it was Malcolm Saville’s book – ‘The Fourth Key’ – which really got me into birdwatching!
Owls. I seem to remember a lot of owls. I was never a big fan of Saville although I think a remember a moorland or marsh scene with curlews which I had not heard at the time and he made them sound almost magical. He always seemed to edge a bit close to being “good for me”. I just read that the club had a motto “From Loyalty to Love” which would have definitely put me off. But those kids did have some good adventures.
From paradise to the prison house!
Loved the little matching game. Had definitely read “Dead Man’s Folly,” “The Silver Sword,” and “Night,” but had to do some real guessing on the other ones.
Don’t think Ashbery wrote novels but he won a prize for that 1956 collection. And he did make really interesting collages.
And all those series books some folks frowned on sure made a whole lot of people into lifelong readers.
1956 was also a big year for movies. I was more into movies than books at that time; here are some of the films I saw, including the director and star(s):
FRIENDLY PERSUASION (Wm. Wyler, Gary Cooper)
LUST FOR LIFE (Vincente Minnelli, Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn)
CAROUSEL (Henry King, Gordon MacRae, Shirley Jones)
INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (Don Siegel, Kevin McCarthy)
AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS (Michael Anderson, David Niven, Shirley MacLaine)
THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (David Lean, Wm. Holden, Alec Guinness)
FUNNY FACE (Stanley Donen, Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn)
12 ANGRY MEN (Sidney Lumet, Henry Fonda)
WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION (Billy Wilder, Marlene Dietrich, Charles Laughton)
1956: It was a very good year!
Not a bad list! In 1956 I doubt I was at the “pictures” more than two or three times at the very most but now I’m going to check British releases and see what I come up with.
And of course – a whole lot of the 1956 books have been made into films and TV serials.
We went en famille to see ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ (-the father of one of my classmates was the manager of the Pinehurst cinema and I got free tickets-)
Wow! And I have no memory of that. That was a useful classmate to have. I do remember going with you to “The Desert Rats” at that cinema on Cricklade Road that showed second runs. A very generous act on your part. No doubt there was another film too – they always came in twos back in the day. But I don’t remember what it was.
Brilliant post, Josie! I’m sure I was on my granny’s knee having Rupert stories read to me, the rhyming couplets always my favourite! I remember being ‘in love’ with Tiger Lily! Still am!
I remember Rupert. But he was rather disapproved of in my house because he appeared in The Daily Express – aka that Tory rag!
This is an absolutely brilliant post. I think I was reading “Little Women” and the Oz books in/around 1956, but next it was a multi-year journey with Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. Soon I was deep into the Reader’s Digest Condensed (oh, horror!) books of the people next door. Of those, I most remember Edna Ferber’s “Giant.” And then a year or two after that, a library card (you had to be 13) and “The Agony and the Ecstasy” and “Gone With the Wind.” What a beautiful, enlightening expedition a lifetime of reading is. Thanks for the great memories. PS Did John Ashberry write novels, too?????