Sunday 29 October 2017

Which childhood books did you love enough to keep?

Last week a local plea went out online for a copy of Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War. I immediately pictured my Puffin version from 1974 with the cover photo from the BBC teatime series, and sure enough, there it was in the little collection of books I have treasured since childhood.


I sank into a reverie of book lover’s nostalgia. There was no need to ponder a list of my favourites –here were twenty-seven browned paperbacks that I had loved enough to keep. Fascinated, I searched through them...

Classics




Perhaps keen to discover that I was a precocious intellectual, I preened myself over these: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Remember relishing a book so much that you didn’t want to be out of it? I continued on to The Silver Chair and The Magician’s Nephew, searching for – but not finding – a repeat of that first high. Then there was Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s enchantingly sad The Little Prince, and E.B. White’s heart-rending Charlotte’s Web.


Books Off the Telly



I was surprised to find that this was such a large category – but then I come from a telly-devoted generation, brought up in front of an array of brilliant 1970s children’s series – and clearly they encouraged my reading. Carrie’s War was one of these – I have fond memories of the TV version from when I was nine

I also found A Pair of Jesus-Boots, a 1974 Puffin that I bought after seeing the series Rocky O’Rourke, about a slum-dwelling Liverpool lad. Already I liked my fiction on the gritty side. I discovered The Secret Garden through a teatime adaptation, and Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians, written in 1894, was brought to life for me by the BBC in 1973. 

In 1979 I found the TV version of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy funny, if a bit irritating, but I enjoyed Douglas Adams’ book much more.

A haunting BBC series of Tom’s Midnight Garden was the taster that led me to the book. A few years later, Philippa Pearce did a talk at our school. She said that being a writer was like having English homework every night of the week. ‘Don’t do it if you don’t have to,’ she said. ‘But if you have to – good luck.’ I already knew that I had to. I never forgot.

Nina Bawden




At around the time of Carrie’s War, our teacher, Mrs Skett, read The White Horse Gang aloud to us, and I became hooked on Nina Bawden. She was the kind of writer I wanted to be: her child characters were vivid and believable, their adventures rooted in the real world. My collection includes The Peppermint Pig, The Runaway Summer, On the Run, The Secret Passage, Squib and The White Horse Gang. I read others from the library.

Children’s Favourites




Stig of the Dump appealed to my fascination with the idea of the primitive within us, and of a life ‘in the wild’. I must have overcome my fear of dogs to love The Incredible Journey – though there was also the cat character to draw me in.

Magical




I had forgotten Barbara Sleigh’s Carbonel and The Kingdom of Carbonel, but memories rushed back of these wonderful tales of a night-time world of cats on the rooftops. There was a potion that allowed a little girl to understand the cats’ language, found in those oversized bottles that used to advertise chemist’s shops. I remember peering at the one in Boots... The Winter of Enchantment by Victoria Walker had a similar theme of a child escaping an unpleasant reality to discover a world of magic.

A Mixed Bag



The final four show how my taste was varied, then as now – there’s I am David, about a Jewish boy who escapes from a concentration camp. I am still willing to be challenged and disturbed by what I read. But there’s also Flicka, the story of a Wyoming ranch boy and his beloved horse – I remember relishing the horsey sentimentality and scenes of Mom making doughnuts. There’s early teen fare: Freaky Friday, about a thirteen-year-old who swaps places with her mother, but also Eleanor Atkinson’s Greyfriars Bobby which was hard work, but worth it, with a lot of pages spent in a graveyard and a Scottish dialect to grapple with, which may have prepared me for A Clockwork Orange.

But now we’re getting onto teenage reading, which is a whole other subject…

I’d love to hear from you if you remember any of these books or series, or if you have a treasured collection of your own? What books were landmarks in your childhood reading journey?



6 comments:

  1. E Nesbit. Some Famous Five- on Kirrin Island. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. Lucy Boston books : The Children of Green Knowe. Roger Lancelyn Green' s tales of the Greek Heroes and The Tale of Troy. Elizabeth Goodge - Linnets and Valerians.

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  2. Forgot the The Ruby Ferguson books : Jill's gymkhana etc. I read them again and again. And Pat Smythe and the Pullein-Thompsons- All during my extended horsey phase. Malory Towers and the Chalet School.

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  3. And I devoured the Sword in the Stone - funny, sad, complicated, thoughtful, fun.

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  4. Lovely, thanks for commenting! We loved Enid Blyton too - all the 'of Adventure' ones in particular. My Dad used to read them to us at bedtime - but they haven't made the cut in my collection. At some point I must have got snobby about them!

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  5. Classics for me. The Little Women, Good Wives etc series, the Katy Books and the Heidi books were all much loved and read time and again. I remember as a child making a ‘bed’ on the shelf above my toy cupboard and playing as Heidi, eating bread and cheese and drinking milk in my hideaway - no straw bedding though.

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  6. I also loved Little Women, and do you mean the What Katy Did books? They were great too. I think often my Dad would read a book to us at bedtime and I'd be inspired to find more in the same series. I'm afraid I never read Heidi although I did love a TV version of it!

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