I cannot remember not being able to read. I know that I could read by the time I started school (I went a term early so this would have been while I was still only four), the reason I know this is that one of my first memories of school is of being told to stop reading ahead and to churn through the page everyone else was struggling on with them. I think the book in question may well have been a Janet and John. My schooling went downhill from then on.
I can remember being given A Christmas Carol and Treasure Island to read when I was eight. I think I was quite liked Christmas Carol, but really enjoyed Tresure Island.
We had the good fortune to live in a tiny village called Pettistree next door to Wickham Market the village where the primary school was. Wickham Market is quite small but had all sorts of basic shops and services, doctors, grocers, chemists, a hardware store, my father’s office and a small library.
Well before I was 11 I had exhausted the library’s children’s section, but I remember reading and enjoying the Famous Five, Secret Seven, Swallows and Amazons and Biggles, and then I moved on to the adult section.
After a little while I realised that taking books out at random meant that I kept getting confused about what I had and hadn’t read, so I went back to A and worked through from there (skipping over Cartland, Barbara 🙂 ). I can still remember the look of shock on the librarian’s face when I collected Mein Kampf by Hitler, Adolf, which I had ordered specially. By the time I was sixteen and discovered girls I had reached Y for Yates, Dornford and we moved to a different village. So I have never read any books by authors whose surnames begin with Z.
Early on I encountered Aldiss, Brian and Asimov, Isaac and science fiction has been my genre of choice ever since.
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