“Perhaps,” reflects the novelist Graham Greene, “it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives.” He lists in his essay many that are now long-forgotten, but credits Marjorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan with making him aware that he was to become a writer himself. My mother never forgot the formative influence on her life of her reading, at the age of eight, Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth, a formidable Victorian historical romance based in part on the life of the fifteenth-century scholar Erasmus, heavy going even for an adult reader. My own childhood reading likewise turned me into a ‘traveller in the realms of gold.’ In a very real sense, it opened up the world to me and turned me into an enthusiast, perhaps even an evangelist, on behalf of reading for life. This all began for me before television, even before Michael Bond’s Paddington and certainly long before J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter.
I came to silent independent reading relatively late. An alert elementary teacher at St. George’s School in London, England drew my parents’ attention to the lamentable fact that, at the age of six, I could not read very well, if at all. I blamed this on my exposure to text in Spanish, as we lived in Venezuela at the time, but I suspect that the real culprit was my dreamy and lazy disposition. To make up for my deficiency, I was lent a series of school readers, all from the same publisher, from Level Two in a red cover through levels of increasing difficulty in vocabulary and complexity in Levels Three, Four, and Five to Level Six in blue. Flattered by such personal attention and by my status as the only pupil allowed to borrow school readers, and further motivated by the evidence of my own success, I read through them all, belatedly but triumphantly, in our month-long sojourn in London, fascinated by the story of the gullible Henny Penny (alias ‘Chicken Little’ in North America) who was convinced the sky was falling, and even more so by Washington Irving’s ‘Rip Van Winkle’ who fell asleep in the Catskills and only woke up twenty years later, perplexed by the changes wrought during his hibernation. It was all so strangely satisfying to finish each volume. I was now ready to read in earnest, and began with Rev. W. Awdry’s railway stories of Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends, borrowed from the public library near the school. These have since found universal favour with children, albeit in an animated television series and commercial exploitation in children’s toys that bear only a superficial resemblance to the books I revered from the age of six on.
