my life in books 1 from deirdre newton

MY LIFE IN BOOKS

Question #1 When did you first learn to read, what were your first books, and how did reading affect you?

I learned to read for real when I was seven. At the age of six I walked around trying to read a little book called Hosanna to the King, a children’s life of Jesus, and I pestered everyone in the house to tell me what each word meant. Finally I had conquered the whole book, and the grizzly fate of Jesus caused me terrible anguish. But you will agree that I was not really reading or understanding the words.

During that year (1941 to 1942) my sister Rosie and I did not go to school. We lived in a cottage far out on the Scottish moors, my older sister Elgiva in boarding school in England, my mother pregnant with little brother John, my father in a ship on the north Atlantic fighting German submarines. We had almost no gasolene, and the nearest school was three miles away. Although my sister Rosie was only a year older, she had mastered reading in the first grade before we moved north in 1941. I realized that reading was definitely something I needed to do in order to remain competitive in the family structure. It was also something that our mother did all the time when she wasn’t cooking on a coal burning stove, hauling coal into the house, cleaning and lighting kerosene lamps and otherwise managing a quite primitive existence. We did have flush toilets.

In June 1942 we moved to a more substantial house near Dunfermline in the county of Fife. My mother had walked into the bank and asked the manager to lend her the money to buy the house and said her husband would pay it back just as soon as he came home from the war. Or something like that! She got the money, and we moved in. She also got an Aga stove, and we had an electric generator in the barn. However it was usually broken down so the same old lamps were always on hand. My brother John was born June 30 of that year, my father came home on leave for the event; he was bursting with pride over the boldness of his wife in negotiating with the bank on her own.

In August, 1942, the inevitable happened. We were sent off to school, one mile walk (no gasoline at all anymore) into the village to the local elementary school. This was my first encounter close up with the poverty of our neighbors (the miners’ children often came to school ragged and barefoot), with the terror of school, and with the absolute knowledge that I could not read. The teacher wielded a thick strap with thongs on it. At the slightest misdemeanor (often the loss of the penny for milk) a small child would be called up to the front of the class, told to hold out her hand palm up, and the teacher would give her several hard whacks. The little child would scream with pain and rush back to her seat holding her injured hand while the teacher Miss McLean continued to scream at the whole class in a high pitched voice. I was frozen with terror. The realization that bothers me most today is there must have been factories that actually manufactured those instruments specially to torture children. The practice of hand beating was called “the taws”. I made no progress in reading during the three months we were at that school.

In the fall my mother discovered a better school, actually a famous school called Dollar Academy in the town of Dollar about seven miles away, where they did not give the taws to girls, only to those rough bad boys, and we stayed there for the next four years. It was a school that to a large extent formed my life. I was placed with my age group in class 3, but at the dumb table because of course all the other 7 year olds could read. I was acutely aware of the class structure based on academic ability and became so determined to read that I did achieve the smart side of the room very soon. Our first books were the Beacon Readers, graded up to number 9. I don’t remember much of the content—mostly about children, their pets, their parents, their gardens, nothing of great interest.

But at home my life in books began in earnest. My mother always gave us books for birthdays and Christmas; for some reason the war had not interfered with books--until the firebombing of the area around St. Paul’s Cathedral in London destroyed one of the largest publishing houses of children’s books. After that there were no more stories about Little Grey Rabbit. My favorite books of those years were the Greek, Roman, and Nordic myths, the Enid Blytton adventure books about the five children detectives, the Books of E.E. Nesbitt, also the Village Children, The Blue Coated Heron, Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stores from the Jungle Books, the books about our natural world by “BB”, especially The Little Grey Men and Brendon Chase. Those last gave deep expression and inspiration to the countryside in which we lived, the dark mysterious woods, huge trees, and little rivers. And of course the colored Fairy Books, especially the blue one. My imagination was inspired by mysteries beyond the world of school and other children; my life was in books that took me to places of larger meaning; I looked out on daily life from inside that imagination, removed from reality. I had a fantasy that a great black winged horse would come along with a little house strapped to his back full of books, and he would carry me away around the world.