My earliest reading memory
In her memoir Giving Up the Ghost, Hilary Mantel remembers learning to read at school as a “wearisome uphill trail in the company of Dick and Dora”. My mother had taught me to identify some words before I started school but it was in the classroom, in one of the “readers” that had bored young Hilary senseless, that letters and spaces and full stops left the page as code and reassembled in my head to make a story. Exhilarating.
My favourite book growing up
Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War was the book of my childhood. Carrie Willow and I shared an overactive imagination, an eldest child’s sense of responsibility and a dependence on hair slides.
