BIBLIOPHILE NOTES FOR THE MARCH ARTS MARATHON

Page 26 – Books? You’ve Got Books

I learned to read before I went to school and I’ve always been surrounded by books. I remember the pictures in ‘A is For Apple’, and my nursery rhyme book with Wee Willie Winkie. I had a little leather case full of books which I lent to a family up the road. They never returned them and my mum warned me never to lend books again. For Christmas and birthdays I always asked for a pony, but knowing that wasn’t likely I also asked for books. “Books?” said my mum, “you’ve got books…” But there was always a pile of new books at the bottom of the bed on Christmas morning.

My first great passion when I was about seven was the Famous Five series by Enid Blyton and I collected most of the set. When I started a new school in London, halfway through the term and in the middle of the day, knowing no-one, the teacher told me to get a book from the shelves and read till the end of the lesson. When I found Five go to Smuggler’s Top I nearly cried with relief to find that my friends Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy the dog had come with me. Then there was the Deans Classics series bought at the paper shop, with Treasure Island, Heidi and What Katy Did.

Soon I became horse mad and read every pony book I could find. The best ones were always the stories where the pony-mad girl overcame all odds and got the pony of her dreams in the end. For me that was to come much later, when I was in my forties. These dreams never really go away, they are suppressed for years but yearn to be fulfilled and books fan the flames.

In my teens I discovered science fiction and eventually read every book in the library’s fantasy section. There were hundreds of books with yellow Gollancz covers and so many writers I can’t list them all, but Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Kurt Vonnegut and

E E Doc Smith all spring to mind. I discovered historical fiction when a school friend introduced me to Mary Renault – I read all her books and Mary Stewart’s, especially the Merlin series.

Then by chance I started working in a library and my reading tastes widened. The huge choice available meant I took lots of books home and devoured Orwell, Kafka, Golding, Herman Hesse, Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, Steinbeck, Burroughs and others. I discovered poetry and read Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and the Liverpool Poets. When I worked for a while in the library of a mental hospital I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Then I took to my bed for three weeks having caught jaundice from my soon-to-be husband, and my boss at the library brought me The Lord of The Rings trilogy to read, which was positively life-changing. Ever since, I’ve claimed I need three weeks in bed every year to read it again!

When horses came back into my life I acquired hundreds of volumes about horsemanship and often turned back to my pony books. Inexplicably, my mum had got rid of all my Famous Five Books but somehow my pony books had survived and I still have them all, tatty from much reading and no doubt destined for shredding when I finally part with them.

So in later years I started to enjoy the company of female authors and read all the titles by each one as I discovered them – Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields, Annie Proulx, Barbara Trapido, Kate Atkinson, Joanne Harris, Sarah Waters, Hilary Mantel, and more recently Maggie O’Farrell. There have been so many other memorable books like The Life of Pi, The Kite Runner, The Dice Man, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and everything by Ian McEwan, Bill Bryson and Alexander McCall Smith, I can’t possibly list them all and I haven’t even mentioned any biographies!

Well, how many books are enough for a lifetime? I wish I had kept count so I could say how many I’ve read in at least 70 years of reading. I would like to read them all again and lots of new ones too!