After I received some responses to my blog about books that
inspired people to read, I decided to ask my family the same question. The
answers from family and friends were many and varied. I hope that they will
interest you as much as they have me.
My eldest brother responded: “I can't remember any books that I
read as a child. The only books I remember at home was the set of encyclopedias
that we used as a table tennis net. When we lived at Swinburne Road [our first
family home], I was friendly with Michael Peachey and his family owned the
newsagents in Meredith Road and I could read the comics before they were
delivered!”
My youngest brother and I recall a comic that we read regularly, The
Victor, a creature of its time that reflected British class and national
attitudes. There was The Tough of the Track (working class), Gorgeous Gus (an
aristocrat), “not forgetting of course the comic's educational value in
teaching German: Donner und Blitzen, Hande hoch and the rest.” German’, of
course, were sinister figures. My brother still has several Victor Annuals.
The book which most inspired him was The Little Grey Men by BB (1942), a
tale of “the adventures of the last gnomes in England, it is a beautiful
evocation of the English countryside. I read it again a few years ago, and
still enjoyed it.”
Neither of my brothers mentioned books from the public library,
although I remember quite clearly borrowing from Ipswich’s central library,
particularly the section of biographies of historical figures for children.
My sister’s account of her youthful reading was particularly
detailed and brought back memories of our childhood in Ipswich. The first
children’s book she remembers is Enid Blyton’s Noddy. She recalls most
vividly that, because the bus fare to the public library in central Ipswich was
expensive, most of her reading came from the commercial lending library at the
newsagent and sweet shop of Mr & Mrs Boreham; this was a shelf of books at
the counter where we spent our pocket money on sweets. My sister still has some
of the books that she read most avidly – indeed one still has the lending label
from Mr & Mrs Boreham’s shop marked with her name, so it seems that she
forgot to return it. There are children’s/young readers’ classics (Anne of
Green Gables, Huckleberry Finn, Little Men). She also read
books, popular in their day, but now faded from memory. Jane Shaw’s The
Tall Man, one of a series of tales of the adventures of four children in
Switzerland. Fiction for Girl Guides was a flourishing market for publishers,
including Diana Pares’ Hawthorn Patrol, a source in fictional form of
advice about how to be a good Girl Guide. Reading eventually included adult classics
such as Jane Eyre. My sister says that she read avidly two to three
books a week sometimes staying up late to finish.
My sister-in-law (married to my eldest brother) recalled: “I
can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t reading, although I do remember
getting exasperated with children in my class that were slow! A group of us
stood around the teacher’s desk and read a sentence each from the same book! As
for my own books, I loved Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh
Corner. I remember having two Listen with Mother [a BBC radio
programme] storybooks which I read and re-read, and from when I was a little
older, The Secret Garden was a firm favourite. I was brought up on Enid
Blyton, of course, and had all the ‘… of Adventure‘ books [eight books about
the adventures of two girls and two boys who solve mysteries]. One thing of
which I am certain is that a child who is read to develops a love of books for
themselves. My mother read to me every night until we were able to share books
together, and I feel so pleased that all our three children read avidly and
have a great regard for books of all types.”
Our own sons had relatively little exposure to the public
library, mostly because we had lots of books at home, particularly any
published by Macmillan that I picked up at work. Our eldest remembers C. S.
Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia books, Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings books
and Richmal Crompton’s Just William titles, both long-running tales of
schoolboy escapades. Both are well-written humorous and very much idealized
portraits of well-to-do English small-town or rural society. They are also decidedly
old-fashioned and reflect class attitudes of their day, but their writing and
humour still appeals. Jan and I also remember that our son adored Humphrey
Carpenter’s Mr Majeka tales of a teacher with magical powers, Gillian
Cross’ The Demon Headmaster, featuring a megalomaniac hypnotist out to
rule the world. Clearly, school humour appealed. Robin Jarvis’s rather dark
books for early teens were a great favourite, his Deptford Mice books,
in which a young girl mouse called Audrey battles the sewer rats, the Whitby
Witches series and others. Jack London’s Canadian Call of the Wild,
was another favourite (as it had been of his father).
Our middle son (a dyslexic reader) recalls fondly Russell
Hoban’s The Mouse and his Child, an endearing tale of clockwork toys who
long to become self-winding, a quest that proves unsuccessful. Like his elder
brother, he had a Canadian wilderness favourite, Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet,
a story of a 13-year-old boy’s survival in the Canadian wilderness.
Our youngest son’s bedtime reading included one or two Harry
Potter books, until we both decided that the were stories well told, but lacked
something to tempt us to read more. We changed to all of Philip Pullman’s His
Dark Materials series, a much more satisfying read for both son and father.
Another beautifully written favourite was Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising,
a gripping story of the battle of the Light against the Dark. I can still
visualize some of the episodes.
As a bedtime reader, I found the Peter Rabbit books
insufferably dull. Later, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books were
tedious (as were the films). A brilliant series for younger years was the Church
Mice books. Written and illustrated by Graham Oakley, these books combined
visual humour and witty dialogue that were endearingly funny for both child and
adult.
The partners of two of our sons also contributed memories of
books that inspired them: our eldest son’s American partner recalls the Dr
Seuss books, and our youngest’s Japanese lady read her aunt’s Grimms’
Fairy Tales book when she visited her grandmother’s home in Yokohama.
Jan tells me that she and her siblings were taken every week
to the public library in Beaconsfield (this was a family expedition since her
mother did not drive at the time). The children were free to choose whatever
books they liked. Although she adds that the teachers at her convent school
discourage reading Enid Blyton.
Jan’s brother told me: “My first recollections are of
Beatrix Potter I suppose, I remember Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One
Dalmatians, Nicholas Monsarrat’s Three Corvettes and The Cruel
Sea [Monsarrat was a notable author of books of naval heroism in World War
II] came along later. I soon became more interested in non-fiction in our local
library and also the encyclopaedias in Dad’s workroom which at that time became
a great way to dip in and discover subjects and people I didn’t know existed, I
found it fascinating.” Jan remembers that all three Waddams children enjoyed
dipping into Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia, first published in
magazine form in 1908.
My brother-in-law’s wife said: “The books that I loved as a
child were “The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland and Through
the Looking Glass, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Enid
Blyton’s Famous Five books and her Malory Towers series [set
in a girls’ boarding school], pony books by Christine Pullein-Thompson [who
wrote more than 100 pony books for children; her mother, two sisters and her
daughter wrote another 100 or so], Black Beauty, Jill books by Ruby
Ferguson [a writer of popular romance and mystery books for adults, and of
nine pony books for children].” As you might guess from this selection, my
sister-in-law is a keen horsewoman.
A number of friends responded to the item on my blog. One
comment was: “Re: Jan's interest in biographies at a young age. I vividly
remember reading Amelia Earhart: Girl Aviatrix as a child. I was
thrilled to realize girls could do such things!”
A friend in the USA, who is a nurse noted: “I loved dog
books —- Travels with Charlie, Lad, a Dog, Lassie Come Home,
Old Yeller and the Incredible Journey. Also Heidi, all the Cherry
Ames books (of course, she’s a nurse) [27 mystery novels set in hospitals,
written by Ames and later Julie Campbell Tatham] and all the Nancy Drew books [possibly
not literally all, since some 620 have been published; Nancy Drew, the
principal character is a teenage sleuth]. I also liked horse books: Black
Beauty, Black Stallion and Misty of Chincoteague. Let’s
just say I was all about animals until I found boys.”
Her husband, who shares with me a great admiration of Joseph
Conrad, had a different story to tell: “I did not grow up in a house of
readers. And I don’t recall any books I fell in love with as a child ... What
eventually caught my interest was when I was a preteen, comics. Archie, Superman
and especially Mad Magazine, a caustic, subversive hilarious publication
[that] American boys in the early 60s were devoted to. In my all-boys
Catholic prep high school, I remember falling for Fahrenheit 451, by Ray
Bradbury, Animal Farm by George Orwell and Brave New World by
Aldous Huxley. The main limitation on my education was the emphasis on finding
the moral of the story, at the complete expense of how the author told the
tale. Then I read Joyce’s Dubliners my first year in college. Then Saint
Augustine’s Confessions. And then the same year A Hundred Years of
Solitude. All under the guiding hand of a terrific professor. I’ve been
hooked ever since.”
A friend who is a college professor in Indianapolis recalled
a Christmas present from 1961, The Golden Book of America: Stories from our
Country’s Past Adapted for Young Readers From American Heritage. He told
me: “I was the in third grade. I read it cover to cover during the next few
years. Most memorably two years later, I was home sick from school reading it
in my back hall bedroom on a particular November Friday. Hearing some commotion
in our front hall, I paused from reading the article titled "The Proud
Fighting Firemen." Entering the living room, I heard my grandmother
calling down the front stairs to my mother. It was the tragic news from Dallas,
Texas. By the way, I kept a copy of the book proudly on display in
the college office you visited, once upon a time. In the classroom I'd show it
to spark student interest in what I labeled for them as 'the fascinating story
of the American people."”
To sum up, some of the early childhood favourites were
well-established classics, and are therefore hardly surprising. Some reflected
childhood passions (ponies, horses, dogs) that became part of adult life. Some
authors were enormously popular in their day, but are much less celebrated
today. Some were prolific and ploughed a particular furrow: Christine Pullein-Thompson
and her family for example. Still well-known today, Enid Blyton authored some
762 books according to Wikipedia. As to how people start to read, the public
library was the key for some, but many routes can read to a love of reading.
