My earliest reading memory
The first book I read by myself, rather than at my mother’s proverbial knee, was The Coral Island by RM Ballantyne. I was around six and I’m fairly sure it was on loan from my teacher, Miss Meade, as our house contained no books other than the Bible. I remember nothing of the plot, but I do recall the vivid sense of a Pacific landscape that it brought to our little prefab in Cowdenbeath, the sense of a wonderful elsewhere, untainted by coal dust or smoke.
My favourite book growing up
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Naturally, Alice herself bored me, but the other characters felt like the friends and neighbours I should have had, rather than the people I did know. It took me some time to realise that, secretly, some of the dull folk in my workaday world were actually members of that divine cast of lunatics, and were doing their damnedest to hide it. My music teacher was definitely a White Knight, one of our priests was a Mock Turtle and, for a while there, the love of my life bore a striking resemblance to the Cheshire Cat.
