This piece was first published in issue twenty-eight. You can buy the issue here or subscribe here.

When I was six years old, I saved up my fifty pences to buy a copy of George’s Marvellous Medicine. I can still see the front cover on the shelf in Waterstones, with the illustration of George with his Swiss-roll eyes and his vat of blue smoke, tantalisingly out of reach of my chubby fingers. Who was this Dahl person, and why was his first name Roald? I couldn’t even say ‘Roald.’ I called him ‘Roll,’ instead: Roll Doll. The tiny flame of my imagination had been fired.

Walking up the garden path, holding Dad’s hand that night, he told me that if I really wanted the book I should save up my pocket money, and then he would take me to buy it. Even as a kid I could be frivolous with money—a habit I never did quite manage to shake—but, somehow, for George and his gigantic grandma and the chickens, I did it. It could only have been a few weeks, but it seemed a lifetime later that I proudly handed over my fistful of coins to the lady in the bookshop. I held onto my prize tightly as we walked back to the car through the shopping centre with the Christmas lights twinkling overhead. Santa brought me more Dahls that year. The roots of my love of books sank down.

When I was seven, I scrawled in purple crayon that when I grew up I really, really wanted to be an author. I kept lists of my favourite books in tatty notebooks of recycled paper, the pages covered in grubby fingerprints and biro doodles of snails and flowers and stars. Happy afternoons were lost in front of the bookcase, delving into Enid Blyton and Frances Hodgson Burnett. Later, it was Orwell and Burgess and Plath. I coveted faded Penguin editions that smelled faintly of tea and biscuits and leather-bound books with the pages roughly cut. I fell in love with characters from books. I fell in love with boys who read books. I fell in love with bands who read books, like Belle and Sebastian, and The Smiths. Nineteen years old and an undergrad student in English literature, I’d set up camp in coffeeshops with piles of Yeats and Joyce and Eliot and lose myself in literary worlds less mundane than the one rolling by outside the window. So much of it came naturally, straight from the pen of the six-year-old girl in Waterstones, who had saved up her fifty pence pieces for a book that she wanted, desperately, to read.

At twelve, I had inherited an old poetry book called Poetry of the English Romantics from a distant uncle. At 21 I was awarded a full scholarship to begin my PhD on Romanticism. I didn’t know too much about doctoral research in literature, beyond a basic understanding of the programme and the vague notion that to work with books was somehow to do something noble with my life. I had listened, so often, to the tones of elegant lecturers who had devoted their lives to literature. And I wanted to be like them. How hard could it be? It was all a matter of reading, after all. And if there was one thing I could do, I could read. I’d been doing that obsessively since I was five years old.

But then, for a long time, I didn’t read anything.

I walked past a plaque on the wall every morning: Centre for International Research in the Arts and Humanities. For the first few months of study, I was elated. But then something changed. It was like a light had been ever so slowly dimmed, until it was barely visible. Call it a breakdown, if you will: the pressure and lack of structure began to slowly suffocate me. The books on my bookshelf remained shut. Each day in the office, I stared at the gradually increasing pile of articles and monographs on my desk. Something that had come as naturally to me as that old familiar brag of my heart was gone. It seemed absurd that I could no longer muster up the enthusiasm to read, when for me it was as vital as breathing.

I sat at the computer and looked blindly at the Word document that I needed to fill with 85,000 words. The cursor flickered. I was paralysed. Did anyone else feel this way? It didn’t seem like it. My life became a kaleidoscope of drinking wine, drinking coffee. I couldn’t get up in the morning. The alarm would go off and I’d lie in the half light staring at the ceiling as the sun bloomed over the ceiling rose and over the shelves of books above my desk. Instead of going to the office provided for me by the university, I would wander by the river Tyne instead, listening to the industrial sounds of university accommodation being thrown up all over the city and the Big Issue sellers calling in the street.

“You’re so lucky,” said the man who ran the meditation classes, “spending all day reading.”

“You want to get a proper job,” said the taxi driver. “Do something useful with yourself.”

I was sick with guilt (“Thousands of pounds to read books!” the taxi driver, incredulous, blasted down the bus lane at night as I slumped on the back seat) and the only thing I could do was to bury my head further in the sand. The pile of unfiled papers, boxes of tea and coffee and academic books jammed into my locker grew ever larger. But I didn’t want to be an academic. The thought of presenting at conferences made me feel sick and I wondered why I had even started the PhD in the first place. A staff member found me crying into a polystyrene cup of tea one afternoon outside the library. Things were spiralling out of control.

It all reached breaking point very quietly and very suddenly as the summer wound to a close. Walking down the cinematic curve of Newcastle’s Grey Street one humid September night, I watched the green man illuminate and turn back to red and then green again. I couldn’t cross the road. I was frozen and I knew that something had to change. I had been a captive character for too long in the pages of a story that was making me downright miserable. The next day I packed up my books in the office into boxes and I told my supervisor that I had decided to suspend my PhD. I filled out the forms, cleared out my locker and I walked away from the opportunity that, two years previously, I’d felt so lucky to have been given. Once I’d made the decision to leave, walking away was easy: the hardest part was telling my family and friends. Many weren’t even aware that I’d been so unhappy. My parents were incredulous. “But Lyndsey,” they said, “we thought you loved reading?”

Moving back home two weeks later, Dad and I made trip after trip from the peeling grey front door to the parked car carrying boxes of books. The bottom of one box gave way, and I watched my Penguins skitter into the gutter. “Why can’t you just throw them away?” Dad asked, disgruntled. I set the old volumes out carefully on the bookcase in my old bedroom back at home: Keats, Hardy, Tennyson, Browning, Waugh, Wilde. They turned their cracked spines to me on the bookshelves, their pages stuck together.

Away from the daily pressure of the PhD, I started scribbling thoughts down in my journal, writing up pieces for magazines and working on the novel that I’d been gradually writing over the course of my studies. If I couldn’t yet return to consuming words, I could produce them, and I lost myself in the clatter of the keyboard. I started, slowly, to see things more clearly. I’d stopped reading for pleasure and so, I realised, I’d reduced literature to a series of twenty-minute conference papers and book reviews. I’d been squeezing the pleasure and passion out of something that I considered sacred, turning books into a nine-to-five job that, ultimately, I just didn’t want to do.

I looked guiltily at Poetry of the English Romantics, the book that I’d been given from Uncle Joe all those years ago. Keats, Coleridge, Blake, Byron. I had looked on them almost as old friends, and now I had abandoned them. What would the six-year-old saving up her fifty pences say if she could see me now? I spent several hours ransacking the house, and eventually dug out George’s Marvellous Medicine from a box of children’s books under my bed. There he was, with his Swiss-roll eyes and his vat of blue smoke, smiling up at me from the pink paperback cover. The pages were creased and yellow and stained with chocolate and sugar. I opened it up, closed the door and settled myself on my bedroom floor, cup of tea in one hand and Roll Doll in the other.

For a long time, I didn’t read anything, but then some things never leave you. I turned the page, and the next page, and the page after that. I laughed out loud as Grandma’s head burst through the roof of the house after a dose of the medicine. “Terrific medicine,” she yelled. “Wowee! Just watch me go!” George’s medicine was marvellous, indeed.

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