World Book Day, 2023

I can’t remember when exactly I learned to read, nor the 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’, and 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. And I remember my first Agatha Christie was ‘And Then There Were None‘ when it had its original, 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. And a writer too.