The Haunted Wood
A History of Childhood Reading
I have vivid memories of lying in bed on high summer nights, blinded by hay fever, the light still bright outside, a book on the bedspread beside me (it’s always a hardback in plain green boards for some reason), pleading with my eyes to clear for long enough to read one more chapter.
Looking back, I was an avid reader, but didn’t particularly think of myself as such. Given a choice between playing outside and sitting indoors with a book I would always choose the former. But weather, hay fever, poor circulation on snowy days, and dark winter evenings often took that choice away.
I never saw my parents read anything other than the daily paper, but I knew they did. They read in bed. My mother read crime novels in green Penguin editions (these being just about the only books in our house), my dad popular fiction from the library.
They didn’t read to me, or at least not in ways that I remember, and made no efforts to encourage me to read particular books. My mother took me to the library regularly where I was given free rein.
At the school I attended, a small semi-detached corner house prep school in Wembley, with a room layout very similar to the house I live in now, the library, such as it was, consisted of a couple of shelves of titles in the equivalent of what…
