On Reading

I can't remember what first books I owned, or borrowed from the public library, or rather, the books my mother helped me choose from the library when I was three years old. 
I can’t remember when I first realised that, although the bedroom light was switched off, I could read by moving the mirrored door on the wardrobe so the landing light was reflected on whatever book had currently captured my attention.
I remember one Christmas I got ‘Huckleberry Finn’ in my stocking. My brother got ‘Tom Sawyer’, which I loved when I read it and much preferred. I especially loved the chapter about Tom and the whitewashing of the fence. Masterly.
I devoured Enid Blyton’s stories of the Famous Five, the Secret Seven, all the ‘Adventure’ series and the boarding school series about ‘St Clare’s’ and ‘Mallory Towers’. I read the boys’ boarding school stories about Tom Merry and Harry Wharton, and Billy Bunter and Huree Jamset Ram Singh.  
I loved ‘The Wind in the Willows’ and can summon up  its opening sentence: ‘The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs…….’
I hated ‘Alice in Wonderland’. 
I read the ‘Biggles’ and ‘Worralls’ books by W.E. Johns. I remember my first Agatha Christie was ‘And Then There Were None’ when it had its original, now rightly unacceptable, title. I was on a family holiday in Portstewart. My younger sister was still in a stroller, so I must have been about nine years old. But as to my age when all the other books and characters captured my attention, I can’t be sure.
I only know they made a book-lover out of me. A lover of a good story, well told.