Book World Day

What books did you love as a child?


Never mind that, what books did I love? I feel I should write something in tribute to World Book Day*, even though the idea for me is slightly incongruous. Books are part of my life. Not to get too Disney, but they are part of – most of – my World.

It is nice to see them celebrated in the wider world, though. Discussed, they sometimes are – debated, perhaps. But these things can be cold, and books for me are warmth. They warm up the muscles of the mind and help it move into new, athletic shapes. They warm up the heart and make it friendly and forgiving. They breathe warm life into frozen images of the past, they make body warmth, pulses race, laughs rise up, eyes blink, hot tears. If it’s raining sideways, taking shelter in a library is much less lonely than in a music store or a shoe shop. You don’t need to pay, if you don’t want to. You can saunter through those words and worlds and voices. You can write your own and build your own worlds.

Well, when I have my chats with people in the garden, I always ask the same questions about books. This morning, sitting alone on the bus as I do, thinking about the day as we curled around the corner at Camberwell Green, I thought – I’ll answer one my own questions. Perhaps we’ll get through them all before the blog ends and the leaves are scattered.

What books did you love as a child, Nick?

How can you ask me such an impossible question? It might be easier for some people, admittedly, who telescope their childhood into a manageable bundle of memories. When we asked this question in our first seminar of term, people pulled faces, as if we’d asked them what their favourite brand of nappy had been. It takes a person like me, who constantly raked their childhood over almost from the second it was gone, trying to recollect each detail, to remember what it was like to be wordless, or what the womb was like (these things exercised my mind when I was not yet ten years old), trying to follow the formation of my own mind, perhaps to work out where I went wrong...

Most of my early reading experiences involve my Mum. I’m sure there are proper psychological reasons for this, or maybe, being a primary school teacher, she just knew how to read picture books better than my Dad. Mrs Mopple’s Washing Line is still quoted (‘A pig in a nightshirt? A cow in a muffler?’), and the love for Sally’s Secret (by Shirley Hughes) runs so deep I bought it for Jon’s niece, Tilly. I was going to buy something different, but my sister was there and stayed my hand: ‘No, you have to give her Sally’s Secret.’ Tilly then became obsessed with it. We mentioned this to Mum, and she remembered exactly the book we were talking about – the den in among the leaves, the little sweets on a dock leaf...

What books did you love...

If you really want to look about love, let’s do Oz. When I saw The Wizard of Oz, aged five, an obsession was born. I slowly built a little library of Oz books, which I treasured. It was an early realisation that books pre-dated the people you loved, connecting you with their parents and so on, generations back – to the black and white days, and the age of Garland and Culver City, and even before then. Books had their own lives – and at the same time, they had their own associations. There may also have been some fundamental engagement with textuality – because book covers changed, illustrations changed (I collected various versions of the first Baum books) but something remained essentially the same – the words on the audio cassettes: ‘Suddenly there came a great shriek from the wind, and the house shook so hard that she sat down suddenly on the floor...’

I think if you anatomised that love, it might have been more about those other worlds in time, not the land of Oz. I found it fascinating and beautiful and strange – the very mannered 1900s illustrations, the things that happened to Dorothy and her family that nobody else knew, the secrets that were hidden in books. I loved the idea of fantasy. But if I think of a book I absolutely loved for itself, as a child, perhaps I would have to say the Narnia books. I felt a weird sympathy with the land of Narnia, a melancholy attraction to Uncle Andrew’s paraphenalia and the terrifying White Witch, which didn’t belong to other readers or writers.

You're going on a bit now. And these are not very surprising choices.

It's not my fault! There are more childhood book loves than I could possibly bore you with here today. The interesting thing, perhaps, is that the children’s books I am most interested in today, I never (or barely) read as a child: Joan Aiken, Alan Garner, John Gordon, Diana Wynne-Jones. I still love the worlds, the associations of these books, their readers as well as their readings, and you never know what is waiting there for you. There are exceptions, of course – I carried The Borrowers Omnibus around like a Bible, and I remember vividly the experience of reading Children of Green Knowe and disappearing into that garden, waking to the chat between my Mum and her Mum that had been going on all that time. And that is a formative book love that is harder than anything to recapture – the ability to disappear entirely into that world, body and soul into the brimming, mysterious World of the Book...


*N.B.: Yes, I clocked it too, eventually. World Book Day's not till next week! More evidence of my poor grasp of reality. However, I have decided that next week I will answer this question again - and none of your Baum's, your C.S. Lewis's, I'm going to talk about the books I loved as a child that nobody remembers - the ones that weren't even children's books...