On Being an Only Child

Geoff Dyer has a great essay in the Threepenny Review about his childhood and discovering reading and writing.

From the piece...

It was natural, since I didn’t have to share my toys with any siblings, that I became a collector. I collected all sorts of cards, Airfix soldiers, and comics. I loved arranging my things—whatever they were—and putting them into some kind of order. I still love doing this. I spent much of my time making model airplanes and doing jigsaws: things that you can do on your own. (My mother had a particular way of doing jigsaws: we sorted out the side pieces and made a hollow, unstable frame, then filled in the middle. Our approach to jigsaws was, in other words, methodical, rigorous. Work had entered into every facet of my parents’ lives; even leisure activities had about them some of the qualities of labor.) I would like to say that I displayed the single child’s customary ability to develop a rich imaginative life, but I don’t think I did—unless finding ways to play games intended for two or more players on your own counts as imaginative. In my late thirties I bought a flat in Brighton, on the south coast of England. It was a big place, big enough to accommodate something I’d long wanted: a ping-pong table. The problem was that I knew almost no one in Brighton, and except on weekends when friends from London visited, I had no one to play with. It took me right back to my childhood, that table. In its immense, folded uselessness it symbolized all the afternoons I spent playing games on my own. I played Subbuteo on my own—almost impossible, since you have to flick both the attacking players and control the opposing goalkeeper simultaneously. I played Monopoly on my own. I played Cluedo on my own. When I eventually got round to it, masturbation seemed the natural outcome of my childhood.

A few years after hitting upon this solitary activity, I discovered another: reading. I had passed the Eleven-plus and gone to Cheltenham Grammar School, where for the first four years I was an indifferent student. Then, at the age of about fifteen, under the influence of my English teacher, I started to do well at school and began to spend more and more time reading. I passed all my O-levels and stayed on for A-levels. During my first year at grammar school we had moved from a terraced house to a semi-detached with three bedrooms. I wonder if I would have had the peace and space to study if I had had brothers and sisters. It’s impossible to say, but reading and study filled the vacuum of boredom that had been there for as long as I could remember. But reading created a gap as well as filling one.

When I was trying to decide which A-levels to do, my father said not to bother with history because it was all in the past. He also gave me another piece of advice that I have come particularly to cherish: “Never put anything in writing.”