Books, Reading and First School Days

To begin this subject properly and start from my very earliest memories we have to travel back a few years from where I left it yesterday.
When I was still a tiny child, I vaguely remember my mother musing to herself, as she was apt to do, 'I think she's old enough for Grimm's Fairy Tales now'. And sure enough, soon afterwards, the book in question appeared in my life. Very quickly it became quite indispensible to my emotional well-being in the evenings. In fact, without at least being read two stories before going to bed, I would feel absolutely cheated.
It is just as well that my mother enjoyed reading aloud as much as I liked listening. Sometimes, however, she would be impatient to get on with something else or just be plain worn out, so I would be handed over, complete with long flannelette nightie, slippers, teddy bear and very often a crumbly biscuit or jam sandwich, to my grandmother's lap. She had a softer voice than my mother - my mother's could shatter windows at fifty paces if she put her mind to it, and somehow the stories sounded gentler too.
Grimm's fairy Tales took me into a different world. Jung, the 19th century psychologist called it our collective unconsciousness, and likened it to an immense, underground cellar that stretched below all the insividual houses which represented our individual, conscious thoughts. This world was inhabited by witches, dwarfs. fairies and dragons, who played out their stories against wide, wild tapestries of, dark, impenetrable forests, enchanted houses, vast subterranean palaces and magic, mysterious mountains.
How colourless and mundane the modern equivalents of television and early computer games, seem by comparison, that are dished up so frequently to today's young children. But I must admit, at this point, the only woodland I knew back then, was Kenwood, and that somehow didn't quite live up to how I expected a forest to be. As for witches, Mrs Brown downstairs, was not a bad substitute, and I always regarded her rare gifts to me with great suspicion.
Our particular edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales, by Dent and Dutton, was filled with the most wonderful illustrations. I eventually became so familiar with the contents of the book that just by looking at the pictures, I was be able to recount the story they illustrated. Even now, in my mind's eye, I can see the evil old witch beckoning Hansel and Grethel into her house made of bread, cake and barley sugar, or the prince climbing up to Rapunzel's tower with the fearful thorns below.
Choices of stories were rarely left entirely up to me as I would invariably choose the longest ones. But as soon as we had agreed on a compromise, I would settle down, gazing at the flickering fire behind the bars of the kitchen range, and be prepared to be transported to another world.
It was no wonder that, afterwards, when I had been finally put to bed, that I made hobgoblins out of the patterns in the curtains of my bedroom and believed the dark cupboard in the corner housed all sorts of malevolent beings after dark. No matter how many times my mother opened that innocuous cupboard for me during the day to show its innocent, mundane contents, I did not feel reassured when I was alone once more, in the semi-darkness with a head full of fairy tales.
Following hot on the heels of Grimm's came a small volume of some of Hans Christian Anderson's best known Fairy Tales. They were somehow more realistic. I instinctively snuggled closer to the warm fire as we read about the unhappy 'Little Match Girl', or the wicked snow Queen, and I could hardly bear to listen when the little Mermaid had her tongue cut out by the old sea witch in payment for her human legs, or when Karen, who couldn't stop dancing in her new red shoes, had her feet cut off by the old woodcutter in the forest.
Other books that I remember enjoying in my early childhood was a volume about Winnie the Pooh and his friends and Milly Molly Mandy stories, a girl who lived in a little cottage in the country and had little friend Susan and Billy Blunt as her friends. That was the first book that I borrowed from St Pancras public library.
Reading was a part of family life. Both my Mother and my Grandmother borrowed books from the library on a regular basis, and were often to be found reading when they were not knitting or sewing, or cooking or cleaning or ironing or reading me stories. So I suppose it was inevitable that I would take to the world of books too, like a duck to water.
I remember the reading scheme we had at infant's school, it was all about two children called Dick and Dora. They had a dog too, but I have forgotten his name. The first step up the ladder of this particular reading scheme was to master twenty reading cards of increasing difficulty. I remember being stuck on card four and not being able to decipher the word 'There' for absolutely ages. Then suddenly it all fell into place and I raced through all the remaining cards, finishing first in the class. They all gave me a clap as I returned to my seat.
I enjoyed Infants School from day one. In the nursery class I remember that we all had to wear floral button-down overalls nearly all the time, and that it was sent home on Friday's to be washed and ironed during the weekend ready for Monday. I remember doing rather a lot of painting too, outside, if the weather was nice, on upright easels with extremely watery paint. Paint, which no matter how careful you were, always ran down the picture in vertical ribbons of colour. We all loved making aeroplanes in that class, out of two bits of wood fixed at right angles to one another with a big nail knocked in the middle. Both girls and boys would run around the asphalt playground, providing what they considered were the fitting sound effects for their aeroplanes as they swooped, dived and engaged in the Infant equivalent of dogfights.
The most tiresome bit of the day was our afternoon rest. It was all right if you were a rising five who was still used to an afternoon nap, but I wasn't and never had been, and I just used to lie there, bored stiff, in my canvas, metal-framed bed, looking at the picture by my clothes peg, which was an engine, and wishing with all my heart that nap time was over.
It was in the next class that we had a lovely teacher who I still remember with affection. She took a group of us out once to Trafalgar Square, and we all had drinks and iced buns in a Lyon's Teahouse, which was a wonderful treat.
It was in her class that I made such a good start with my Beacon Readers, and we did such delightful things in the afternoon such as draw with pastels on sugar paper and play with plasticine. I became the class expert at fashioning plasticine sheep on a small board. I would dig the elbows of my home-knitted cardigan into them until they had an extremely realistic-looking woolly fleece, but I never did get round to telling my mother what I had been up to.
Apart from the percussion perfomance and learning a couple of words of French, which I have already written about, that is practically all I can remember about Brecknock Infant's School. I do recall actually while in the class of the French lady, having to spend a morning on the bottom table 'The Snowdrops' rather than my usual top table 'The Roses' and how 'The Daffodils', 'The Primroses' and 'The Buttercups' all thought that my mishap was screamingly funny. Teachers - think twice before you humiliate even a small child, because the chances are that they will remember the incident all their lives.