Free Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! by Dr Maryanne Wolf & Dr Mirit Barzillai Jeanette Winterson Zadie Smith Michael Rosen Tim Parks Blake Morrison Mark Haddon Jane Davis Nicholas Carr Carmen Callil Page B

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    My father, back in the tent, packs a lot of power into the moment when Miss Havisham tells Estella to ‘beggar’ the boy when they play ‘Beggar My Neighbour’. He seems to especially love Jaggers; the way Jaggers toys with Pip, clearly knowing more than he lets on about Pip’s mysterious benefactor. He relishes the descriptions of Wemmick’s peculiar house in Walworth – coincidentally , where my father taught at one of the new inner-city comprehensives. These characters have a life beyond the tent. They are quoted and referred to as we go about the campsite. If I’m sent off to buy some eggs in the village, my father puts on a Jaggers voice and says, ‘How much do you want? Forty pounds? Thruppence?’ When we get up in the morning, my parents are scurrying around looking for the bread or pulling the milk out from under the eaves of the tent, saying, ‘Vittles, gimme vittles, boy!’ It doesn’t have to be an accurate quote. My father’s performance had given such life to the characters that their vocabulary became ours, and they could now live with us on the campsite and, it turned out, beyond, for years after. Quite out of the blue, my father or mother would transform themselves into Pumblechook, calling out: ‘And three! And nine!’ as if I was Pip and they were calling after me through the railings of Miss Havisham’s house.
    The character that my father brought most vividly to life was Trabb’s boy, a young chap who works for the local tailor and who is the first to spot Pip’s efforts to distinguish himself from his lowly background, mocking him for his apparent snobbery. To be honest, at the time I didn’t understand the significance of Trabb’s boy. I couldn’t really see the humour in this little chap walking down the street with a pretend cape over his shoulders, calling out, ‘Don’t know yer!’ For my father, this seemed both incredibly funny and especially poignant in ways that I couldn’t see or reach. Why, when he was quiet, prodding the fire, or if we were walking on the moors, would he suddenly say, ‘Don’t know yer!’?
    Years later he gave a hint as to why this might have been. He said that there was a boy at school called Rosenberg – David Rosenberg, I think. He showed him to us on his class photo. Rosenberg was, he said, his best friend. But the Rosenbergs were poor. Quite how you could be even poorer than my father, his sister and his mother, I could never understand. After all, Rose had on occasions taken my father to various charities in order to ask for school boots. Both my mother and father talked of the tenements and flats that surrounded them while growing up as being full of bedbugs and grime. My mother hated dirt and could spot it a mile off, whether it was under a table, along the top of a cupboard door or on my face. So I thought, listening to my father, that maybe the Rosenbergs had bedbugs and dirt. Even on their faces. Rosenberg, it seems, had been my father’s friend, but then at some point someone else became his best friend, Moishe Kaufman. Indeed, not only did Moishe Kaufman become his best friend, but Moishe Kaufman’s girlfriend, Rene Roder, became the best friend of my father’s girlfriend, Connie Isakofsky. They were a four-some and David Rosenberg wasn’t part of it. In the shuffling of the pack of these East End boys, each in their different ways got what they needed to leave this place, to move northwards or eastwards to get out of this poverty and foreignness, to become less ‘heimish,’ as it was called – the ‘heim’ being the mythical far-away place in Eastern Europe where everyone looked and talked like their grandparents, lived in tiny houses and kept chickens. At some point David Rosenberg got frozen out. But something went deeper than that. There was some moment, some event, some incident, which I never fully heard about or understood, where it seems as if, to my father’s great regret and shame, he did something or said