What BOOKS DID I read as a child?

by admin | Apr 1, 2022 | Blog

For someone like me, whose early childhood in Indonesia was one without television or even radio programmes for children, books were my only window to other worlds and adventures.

The books that I read in my early childhood were books in Dutch and somewhat later in Indonesian.

I was particularly enthralled by books that described the adventures of the Dutch as they sailed from Holland to Dutch East India (Indonesia).

One such book was about Captain Bontekoe and his ship which sailed around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean and was shipwrecked on the island of Sumatra. The ship’s crew then continued their journey overland through the length of Sumatra to eventually end up in Batavia (Jakarta) which had been their destination. Along the way, through Sumatra, they had to evade hostile locals and ferocious animals such as the Sumatran tiger.

Another one was the book “Vuuren op de Bergen” (Fires on the Mountains) which was a story about how some Dutch seamen who had deserted their ship had turned against the Dutch colonial authorities and had teamed up with some local Indonesians. Warfare ensued between the two sides. The rebels communicated with each other by lighting fires on the mountains, hence the title of the book.

There were numerous other books, the types that appealed to young boys like myself. Books such as “Around the World in 80 days”, “Seven men in the Polar Night”, “Adventurous trips with Vasco de Gama”, “Ketelbinkie” (a story about a young boy working on a cargo ship that sailed between Holland and South America – and how there was a murder on board during one of the trips).

I liked nothing better than to lie in bed and read a book whilst eating bread (no butter or anything else on it). I could read for hours like that and eat a loaf of bread at the same time. 

Of course, there were many other books such as “Don Quixote”, “The Three Musketeers” – all in Dutch of course.

Towards the end of our time in Jakarta the Dutch influence had waned and the Dutch schools, including mine, had been closed and most of the Dutch had left. 

It was around these last few years that I started reading Indonesian books because by then I had read and re-read my Dutch ones and could not get hold of any other ones.

The Indonesian books that I read varied from World War II books to books about Indonesian tales and mysteries and even Chinese dragon slaying.

These books were low-cost productions and could be read in one session. They were good entertainment.

Once I arrived in Brisbane, my book reading habits were challenged!

I did not speak English, so I could not read any available books. Luckily for me, my English teacher at Cavendish Road State High School advised me to start reading comic books and proceed on to bigger and better things as my knowledge of English picked up.

So, off to the council library at Stones Corner, I went and using mainly sign language borrowed a few of the comic books. This went on for a little while until I felt that I could plunge into some deeper water and try to read more complex books. However, I used to find that having a few pictures or maps in a book made a welcome change from endless pages of just typescript. 

The books that fitted this formula were usually biographies of famous people. Needless to say that these types of books were my stepping stone to being fully conversant with the English language as well as expanding my general knowledge.

It also enabled me to substantially bypass learning the English grammar rules since the reading of numerous books gave me an instinctive feel for the language without the more regimented and stilted way that people speak a language purely based on knowing the grammatical rules.

When I think about it, although I do not have a deep understanding of the grammatical rules of any of the languages that I know, I write and speak using correct grammar.

That brings us inevitably to Russian books.

Well, when I lived in Jakarta my grandmother had taught me how to read and write in Russian and we spoke Russian at home. My parents had many Russian books, mainly the classics.

In my defense I must say that as a boy I had no inclination to sit and read through “War and Peace”, or “And Quiet flows the Don”.

I used to read some articles from a Russian magazine called “Around the World” which was somewhat similar to National Geographic.

Then when I arrived in Brisbane it was full steam ahead learning English and little or no time to read any Russian books. The classics were too large a project to take on and there were no lighter novels available.

It has only been during my working life that I started reading books in Russian. One of the first was Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago”.

Since then and especially as part of my writing about my father’s history, I have read numerous books in Russian as part of the research for my book, not to mention Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita”, “The Heart of a Dog”, “The White Guard”.

But still not the great classics by Chekov and Tolstoy – my next big task. Maybe childhood and book reading never ends!