posted on 18 Feb 2016

Finding an old friend in a charity shop

One rainy day last week as I was browsing the shelves of a charity book shop with my mother I heard her exclaim ' Yes!' behind me and turned to see her face shining with delight. She had  stumbled on a lovely old book in very good condition published in 1933 that she recognised from her childhood and so happily paid £4 to capture it. Later, settling down with a cup of tea and a large piece of cake back at home she exuded a palpable pleasure that made me keen to share her memories.

She explained that reading this ' Wonder Gift Book for Children' and other anthologies like it was something that she remembered doing from a very young age, sitting at the end of the day in the quiet of the Norfolk rented house where her family lived at the time. It was an early evening ritual to go with a book to sit on her own special child sized blue painted wicker chair while her mother tidied away the tea things and her father read the newspaper. So this was never a shared reading experience with an adult, in fact she treasured the permission to explore and enjoy the book all by herself. She loved these anthologies because they presented a feast of varied reading which she could flip through at leisure, enjoy as much as she could manage knowing that there would be plenty more for another day.

She remembered being thrilled by the different layout of the pages which contained lengthy school stories and quite difficult extracts from classic texts by Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and George Eliot that she would one day return to as an adult reader. There were always quite a few pictures to break up the text, mostly in black and white but what she loved most were the different styles of illustrations that added such variety to the reading experience. She particularly remembered one vividly depicting 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree', and at this point in our conversation she looked into the middle distance musing whether she was now living in her 'small cabin of clay and wattles made' or the nearest she could ever get to it.

The many poems that were always threaded through such anthologies seemed to be what she remembered best. She still loves poetry and assured me that tracing her little finger over some these lines day after day and reciting them as a child helped her to learn and to remember them. She was fascinated by all of them with their different shapes and styles, first she tackled the shorter poems with emotions harnessed from humour to adventure. Sometimes she would feel pathos and nostalgia and occasionally all of these, as in the wonderful nonsense rhymes by Edward Lear - the witty illustrations were seared in her memory. The longer narrative poems were best read aloud on rainy days and patriotic poems like 'For the Fallen' and 'Song for England' moved her even as a child. The morality of Aesop's Fables, the wildly exotic world of The Arabian Nights and tales of derring do all fired her imagination in different ways and everything would be consumed and relished in due time.

I can see her carefully turning the pages with a serious expression on her face sitting comfortably in her little blue chair. What intense joy and happy memories from just one old book - worth so much more than £4!

Karen Argent

17th February 2016