A Treasured Book from my Childhood
I was always a voracious reader from a very early age. I seem to remember my dad – who was then a school teacher – teaching me to read to give some respite to my mum who by the time I was three had two more babies to contend with. I raced through the entire canon of Janet and John books and soon graduated onto fairy tales, Heidi and What Katy Did.
Few of my childhood books remain. With me being the eldest of five, my books were usually purloined by younger siblings – one of my sisters secretly writing her name in the front of them to assert inherited ownership.
But one that I still possess is Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, gifted to me for my seventh birthday by my mum.
At the time we were living in the middle of nowhere in Yorkshire and it was a very lonely time for me and a period when I was bullied (including physically) at school. I sought comfort in reading and my favourite books were this one as well as Milly Molly Mandy, the Flower Fairy series and history books given to me by one of my aunts. My aunts usually wore hats and suits to go to church on Sunday and smoked enthusiastically – but they looked nothing like the aunt depicted in Stevenson’s book.
The edition my mum gave me is beautiful. Packed with fabulous line drawings by Hilda Goldwag and with an introduction by Elizabeth Goudge (a former Chair of the Romantic Novelists Association for which I’m now a board member). Hilda Goldwag was a refugee from Hitler’s Austria in 1939.
I evidently didn’t know how to spell my name back in those days as I have missed off the second N. And I wrote in cursive style – I was taught italic when we moved to Surrey the following year. The book has a faux leather cover and is marked as costing 6 shillings – 30 p today! Mum inscribed it and I defaced it by colouring-in the end papers. I would never have defaced the actual pages though – that was left to one of my sisters – I suspect the youngest who has always had artistic tendencies!
I loved these poems with a passion. The child inside seemed to suffer many of the problems I did: having to go to bed when it was still light, escaping into dreams and made-up stories, loneliness – there’s a whole section titled The Child Alone. There were many aspects of the poems that I couldn’t relate to – having a nurse, streetlighting by gas lamps, going to bed with a candle. Looking at the verses now I find it hard to stomach some of the sentiments:
The child that is not clean and neat,
With lots of toys and things to eat,
He is a naughty child, I’m sure–
Or else his dear papa is poor.
But I’m absolutely sure my favourite poem as a seven-year-old was From a Railway Carriage.
What I loved was the way the poem perfectly captured the rhythm and speed of a railway train.
I loved it – even though at that age I hadn’t as far as I know ever been on a railway train.
The main London to Scotland East Coast line thundered past at the end of the road so I was “the child who clambers and scrambles, All by (her)self and gathering brambles”, rather than the passenger watching it all pass by. I did a lot of clambering and scrambling – playing in the woods, haymaking with the gypsies, collecting wildflowers, and sitting on the wooden fence watching the bullocks in the field behind our house.
I hate to get all dewy-eyed and nostalgic about the past – there are so many things that are better today – but I did learn a lot from being allowed to be bored and making my own games, fuelled by my imagination.
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