In Depth
Let’s swot again
06.06.08 Benedicte Page
Maybe schooldays weren’t the happiest days of your life, but they were certainly the time when you knew the most about such disparate topics as photosynthesis, isosceles triangles, the Tudors and Stuarts and how to calculate percentages.
Sadly, the minute we passed or failed GCSEs and O-levels these crucial nuggets of knowledge began to slip disregarded from our brains, and by the time we got into adulthood, our ability to summarise the plot of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men or calculate the area of a rectangle had gone distinctly fuzzy round the edges.
Vintage editors Liz Foley and Beth Coates were in the Union club in Soho one night, having a drink with agent Lucy Luck and talking about exactly this, when the idea of their book Homework for Grown-ups (the August launch title for new CCV imprint Square Peg) arose.
“We were talking about how clever we used to be, and how we used to know loads of different things about different subjects,” says Foley. Coates elaborates: “When you were at school, you were a sort of Renaissance man, with this amazing knowledge of maths, geography, history and languages. Then you specialise and lose all that.”
“We thought, how useful it would be to have that written down somewhere so you could just turn to it and find out who Henry VIII’s wives were,” Foley adds.
So the idea of a revision guide for grown-ups was born, and when Rosemary Davidson joined CCV to set up Square Peg, an eclectic list of quirky non-fiction, it fitted with her remit and she was keen to publish. The idea of going back to one’s schooldays also matched Davidson’s experience of handling titles with a nostalgic edge (she published Schott’s Miscellany while at Bloomsbury and is co-author of The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls). Consequently Homework for Grown-ups has a nicely retro package featuring a 1940s-ish woodcut image of a baffled adult chewing his pencil, and the text is gently nostalgia-infused.
“We’ve done things like use ‘Hal’ and ‘Roger’, the names of the boys in Willard Price’s Adventure series, in our examples, and we looked back over Mallory Towers and Grange Hill and used some of those names too,” explains Coates.
A lot of swotting over GCSE syllabuses and old-fashioned textbooks down at Pimlico library was involved in compiling the book, with Coates and Foley canvassing friends and colleagues of different age ranges to get a good input.
“We sent out emails, and everyone had different areas they’d learned at school and wished they could remember,” says Coates. “Rosemary and Rachel [Cugnoni, Vintage publishing director], who are 10 years older than us had theirs, and Tom Drake-Lee, our sales director, so there’s a breadth of stuff in there.”
When they had compiled their chapters on maths, geography, home economics et al, they added a handy test section so competitive types can check just how well they rate.
Despite being an arts graduate, Foley professes herself unfazed by having to deal with the maths chaper. “I got an A for my GCSE and a merit for my maths extension,” she says, obviously still proud. “Did you? Well done!” exclaims Coates, impressed. “I got a B. I was awful at maths, so I had to work really hard with that chapter. But it was rewarding. Do you remember when we did that long division? We both really struggled with it and then, when we checked it on a calculator and we’d got it right, we were (gasp), ‘We can do this!’”
“I remember feeling the same about the laws of thermodynamics,” says Foley. “I thought, ‘Wow! Amazing.’ Because I don’t think I ever did properly learn that. The most amazing part of it is the first law, that nothing in the universe is ever lost.”
A long-forgotten phrase emerges from the depths of my memory: “Energy is neither created nor destroyed but only changed into other forms of energy,” I recite tentatively.
“Exactly!” cry Coates and Foley in triumph. We are clever again.
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