Your series “What home means to me” will have resonated with many readers, as shown by the responses to Michael Rosen’s reflections (Letters, 3 January). I was particularly struck by the significance of stories to Elif Shafak (Strasbourg, Ankara, Madrid: none felt like home, but in books I discovered my people, 2 January), and the specificity of the local library to Joanne Harris (I was snowed in at Barnsley library and a policeman came to fetch me. I told him I was already home, 5 January) as the place for locating them. I recall the excitement of joining the children’s section of Leytonstone library in east London at seven or eight and regularly choosing my four books to take home.
One Saturday, I read them all in the morning and returned them in the afternoon in the hope of borrowing a further four, only to be admonished by the librarian, who insisted that I was limited to four per day. I later graduated to the adult section, becoming, at 10, a devotee of PG Wodehouse and his old Etonian socialist creation Psmith.
