Someone, who I respect enormously, suggested that perhaps as I had enjoyed her "A Year in Books" I should do one of my own. I didn't feel organised enough to do that but thought that doing somethingsimilar with my current pile of books might be a useful exercise. Here, as a preamble, is some of the background to my relationshipwith books.
Books at my bedside have been an enduring feature of my life for as long as I can remember. My first school report said that I liked best sitting in the book corner looking at picture books.
From the printed edition of "The Lord's Prayer", illustrated with beautifully composed none twee pictures of hands, on paper even then I could recognise as good quality by its sheen and weight, to the tattered edition of "The Kittens Who Lost Their Mittens" that my mother and father read to me with, what for them, must have been monotonous regularity, onto "Milly Molly Mandy".
Having regular bouts of tonsilitis (my mother wouldn't let me join the throng, in the 50s, of children having tonsils and adenoids routinely removed as she believed they were a safety mechanism and unless I developed quinsy the tonsils were staying) to the weeks spent with plaster casts on my legs while a fracture healed, books were my constant companions.
My grandmother through her second hand business kept me supplied with piles of comics,magazines and a very eclectic range of books.
Absolute security and comfort was being tucked up on a sofa,in front of an open fire, and entering the different worlds within all this reading matter.
Dan Dare in the "Eagle",the world of London/county society in "The Illustrated London News", the womens' magazines with their make do and mend or making co-ordinating accessories such as hats, belts and summer shoes.
Strangely, one of my favourites was a book in landscape format full of photographs of "our brave boys" exercising and training prior to going into the carnage of World War 1.
I realised later that if each of the pictures had been presented differently they would have made a "flick" book and become a moving film.
Eventually, I moved onto the classics, reading Dickens, Stevenson, Jules Verne and Rider Haggard along with the "Empire Youth Annual" (a relic of the strange bedfellows war throws up), Film annuals and, now and again, "Bunty" with the "Four Marys" and the world of hockey and boarding school.
All these other worlds beyond my own experience - I craved to be taken out of my self - and all provided by Grandma, who eventually handed over some really old books - bound copies of the"London Art Magazine", "The Church Times", gazeteers and "The Wandering Jew".
The day she gave me "The Master of Bank Dam" it was with an injunction not to let on to my parents.
Why? Because unlike most dynastic novels of the Victorian/Edwardian era, it made reference to bodily functions, albeit vaguely, of embraces down alleyways, and most particularly to the "petty" - the toilet.
The Brontes, Mrs Gaskill, not even Dickens did that!
I read anything and everything so that by the time I was at secondary modern school I had a head stuffed with general knowledge and was allowed to pick what I liked from the reading shelves,rather than that prescribed, only mindful that new words had to be recorded in my vocabulary book with its dictionary definition.
At that point I loved "Susannah of The Mounties" for the adventure and freedom it described, of a young girl travelling across Canada and up into the Yukon with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I don't ever remember even thinking about any question of authenticity - I was in the story, part of it.
At 13 I was given a scholarship to the new Comprehensive that had been formed from the old local grammar school and a new world of books was available to me.
The local library was also a vital source when books cost too much for my parents budget and became a constant haunt.
Only when I did my degree did I analyse and look for hidden agendas.
Many people say an English Degree spoils your ability to read and enjoy a book but, as usual, perversely, I run counter to the tide and enjoy the analysis, looking for the omnipotent narrator, wondering what was left out, asking what slant/axe the author is trying to produce/grind. Perhaps the fact that I was a very mature student meant that my ability to enjoy a story for its own sake wasn't subverted.
