My earliest reading memory
The page-turning, heart-stopping danger when Peter, Jane, the Dog and the Red Wagon combined, so that either Dog or Jane was out of control, and racing away from Peter down a hill. “STOP!” shouted Peter. “STOP!” shouted Jane. Honestly, it was thrilling. Ten minutes’ reading practice with the teacher, every day a cliffhanger. I’m not sure if it came before or after Ant and Bee, with their zany personalities and surreal scrapes. As an adult I found out both sets of books are seen as famously uninteresting and an insult to intelligent children. Who knew?
My favourite book growing up
The Narnia books, all of them. It was fashionable in the 70s for the cool and liberal to despise their heavy-handed Christian message, but I wouldn’t have known a Jesus metaphor from a lion coming back to life again, and they were as transporting as books can be. One of the hardest sorrows of my childhood was that I could never really step into Narnia as the Pevensie children step into the salty painted waves and swim to the Dawn Treader.
