I’ve been wondering how I became such a keen reader. I didn’t come from a literary - or even particularly literate home. It was a book desert. A nursery rhyme book with pictures of Polly Put(ting) The Kettle On, and Wee Willie Winkie in His Nightgown, and alphabet books with letters and pictures – Aa is for Apple, Zz is for Zebra – are all I remember. There was no home bookshelf full of favourites.
Exploring the spidery and damp cupboard under the stairs - where the electric meter lived - I remember finding two books amongst the old photo albums and jigsaws. I assumed they belonged to my mother - an unconfirmed assumption as I never saw her reading them. One was Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, a thin hardback with a home-made cover of wallpaper, and the other was Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex. I don’t think the latter had ever been opened, as it was pristine with no dog-eared pages, or crinkles on the spine. I didn’t read either of them at the time. ‘Too grown-up for you’, my mother said. There was no being read to either - going to bed meant going to sleep.
At primary school, when the squiggles on the paper magically became words and sentences, I whizzed past my contemporaries in reading age, left Blue Books One to Four in my wake, powered through Ladybird fairy stories (oh, the pictures!), and was soon considered suitable for Library Club. Library Club was a Wednesday afternoon of complete absorption, where I walked into a thousand different worlds: Alice; Toad and Mole and Ratty; Dickon; Lottie and Lisa; the Moomins; Bilbo Baggins; Aslan; Heidi; What Katy Did; and what she did next... it was heaven. I developed a reading habit that was as intense as it was compulsive. I would search every high wall for a door to a secret garden, every wardrobe for snow and fur coats, every crack in the floorboards for a borrower.
At age ten I was keeping a notebook listing books I wanted to borrow next from the library. Restricted to three books a week the list grew longer and longer. I kept a second notebook where I gave stars to the books I had read, starting my penchant for criticism early. My outer life at home a drudge of helping with housework or minding younger siblings, my inner life a silent whirl of adventure, fairies, discovering lost adopted sisters, and talking animals. Whenever I could, I was reading. Curled in a chair, under a table, squashed on a window sill with the curtain drawn across; any quiet corner would allow me to escape from reality. “Where’s June?” I would hear. “Wasting her time reading, I suppose.”
I eschewed Enid Blyton’s Five and Seven for her stories of the Greek myths, all love and war and shape-shifting. I didn’t understand why Apollo was chasing Daphne, but I loved that she was turned into a laurel tree. It seemed perfectly reasonable that the hundred eyes of Argos became the peacock’s tail because of Hera’s jealousy. These were real stories, not children solving mysteries or catching thieves and crooks.
Erich Kastner’s Lotte and Lisa gave me an everlasting fondness for any story about lost and found siblings, including the ghostly and the criminal, while Catherine Storr scared the wits out of me with Marianne Dreams, and gave me a lifelong curiosity about standing stones and the frisson of strangeness accompanying them.
Some books came to me later in life. I was in my fifties before I discovered Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising books, but it was worth the wait. All my things were there - myth and magic, folklore, King Arthur, romance of the best possible kind.
These are some of the books that have stayed with me into adulthood, with stained and wrinkled copies still on my shelves. And yes, they are still regularly re-read. There is no better use of time than ‘wasting’ it, reading.
This is great, June, really enjoyed reading it! Libraries are absolutely places of magic and it's so lovely that your love of reading found a place to grow and flourish. The most magical of ways to spend time and definitely never a waste. 🥰
This brought back some memories! The limits of the library, and family members wondering where I was hiding when lost in a book. Thanks for sharing :)