Dust. Dust lingers everywhere in our house. I keep thinking shortly I will resemble Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. However I'm not dressed in an aging mildewed wedding-dress, neither do I have an decaying wedding-cake on the dining table, but cobwebs abound however. Funnily enough I've read Great Expectations more than a few times. In my growing-up it seemed to follow me. At the age of ten it was the first Charles Dickens novel we read in class in our last year at Primary school, it was exciting and spooky; I was
there in the Kentish graveyard with orphaned Pip and Magwitch the scary, scary convict. We read on,each picturing the grim and dilapidated ruins of Satis House and the ghostly visage of Miss Havisham, bitter almost to the last, cruelly taunting Pip to fall in love with Estelle. A Gothic novel of twists and turns, peppered with those marvelous names Dickens was a master at inventing. Mr Jaggers the lawyer, Bentley Drummie, Pip's rival in love,Startop, Dolge Orlick and the churlish Compeyson, Magwitch's nemisis. I took it all in and loved it. However upon reaching High school what should be the set book for the next three years... you guessed it, Great Expectations and they even screened the film to us all as an end of school treat at the end of third year. Fourth year loomed and we had to choose Options, I chose English Literature, and what do you think was the set book?
Aggh! By this time I was well over it. You'd have thought I would have passed with flying colours. I ought to have been able to ramble verbatim practically, not so, on reflection I think only two of us from a class of thirty-two scraped through. I wonder what went wrong? We were probably just so sick of it that we'd long ago switched off, preferring to focus on the latest Jilly Cooper novel or Lord of the Flies. Actually I understand Lord of the Flies has actually been a set book on the curriculum in some schools these days. How times change?
