Monthly Archives: March 2024

The joys of being read to – Margaret B’s reading journey

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Margaret B, who was born in 1960, came to Sheffield in the mid-1990s because of her job. Reading has long been a love, and here, in the second post for our new Next Generation project, she reflects on being read to as a child.

Margaret and her twin brother in the back row, left and right respectively. Their younger brother and sister, also twins, sit in the front.

My parents read to us from when we were tiny. There were four of us children born within 27 months (two sets of twins!) and our bedtime ritual was always bath, story, prayers and bed. We loved having a story read to us even when we could read ourselves. We all had the same story as we shared a bedroom (two sets of bunks) and took it in turns to choose which book our parents should read.

The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, by Beatrix Potter. First edition (1905) (public domain)

I remember hearing all the Beatrix Potter books regularly in rotation. My brothers liked Jeremy Fisher and Peter Rabbit while I liked Mrs Tiggy-Winkle and my sister liked The Tale of Two Bad Mice. These were interspersed with the Thomas the Tank Engine books and again we had our own favourites. Both my parents were excellent readers (one was a literature teacher and the other a clergyman); they loved books and words. So they also read poetry and rhymes to us – When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six by A A Milne and soon we were reciting them. I can still recite many of them today, 60 years later, and have strong visual memories of the illustrations – especially Christopher Robin and Alice at Buckingham Palace.

They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace –
Christopher Robin went down with Alice.
Alice is marrying one of the guard.
‘A soldier’s life is terrible hard,’
Says Alice.

Buckingham Palace, by A A Milne

When I was about three my mother taught my twin and me to recite the whole of the ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ speech from Macbeth to keep us entertained. I hadn’t a clue what it was about but the rhythm and the words were wonderful.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Macbeth by William Shakespeare (Act V, scene 5, lines 16-27)

Even once we could read, the bedtime story was still a family ritual. We progressed to many other books including Swallows and Amazons and the Narnia books.

Two of the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome (image by Reading Sheffield)

As a family, we were given some beautifully illustrated books as presents. It was the 1960s so they were often quite ‘modern’ illustrations. I remember a stunning, huge, hardback book of Greek and Roman myths with wonderful stylised illustrations of the gods. Double joy – great stories being read to us and a wonderful picture on every page to look at. I also remember the Oxford Illustrated Book of Nursery Rhymes – no cute pictures but vibrant semi-abstract paintings. I am sure that is why I have always loved modern art. I also remember the colourful if more traditional illustrations of Kathleen Hale’s Orlando the Marmalade Cat. This was my sister’s book and I was very jealous of it.

Listen with Mother on the radio was a must-listen every lunchtime and then when we got a bit older, we raced home from school to watch Jackanory. This BBC TV programme, which ran from the 1960s to the 1990s, introduced me to so many wonderful books which I went on to borrow from the library and read myself. It is hard to imagine these days, that they would make a whole TV programme with someone just reading a story from a book with the occasional illustration if there were any in the book. So many memorable books: Michael Bond’s Paddington series, The Owl Service by Alan Garner, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and the Mary Plain books by Gwynedd Rae, to mention just a few of the ones I remember so fondly. We also always watched the BBC classic serial on a Sunday afternoon which introduced me to the classics. I can still recall so many scenes from Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield. And when I was older I avidly watched both The Pallisers and the Barchester Towers chronicles. I did go on to read a couple of Trollope books after that but much preferred the TV version.

And of course we had books read to us every afternoon all the way through primary school. They were undoubtedly my favourite times at school, sitting quietly while being read to from excellent books. The stories read to us at school often overlapped with Jackanory books but I didn’t mind hearing them again. Two I remember very clearly from our later years in primary school were The Weird Stone of Brisingamen, also by Alan Garner, and The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliffe. One male teacher read us She by H Rider Haggard, which I found exciting if somewhat terrifying.

When I was eight, we moved house and no longer all shared a bedroom so my parents stopped reading to us every night and we all read our own books. But whenever we went on holiday, my parents would read to us again in the evenings. Holidays were always in a tent and I have such strong memories of us four being wrapped up safe and warm in our sleeping bags top to tail (to stop us from squabbling) while my parents took it in turn to read under the popping Calor Gas light, often to the sounds of wind and rain outside! This would be for about an hour every evening and they would always stop just before the ten o’clock news on the radio. We would doze off to the sound of Big Ben striking. I remember all of the Borrowers series by Mary Norton and as teenagers we got through the R L Stevenson books and Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome. Eventually we graduated to Moby Dick by Herman Melville, though I don’t think we ever finished it!

When family camping holidays stopped, we still occasionally read aloud, this time taking it in turns to read a chapter. I discovered that I also enjoyed reading aloud as well as being read to. There was a memorable holiday in France with three generations of our family and we took it in turns to read from Great Expectations. Even my 12 year-old son took his turn and read his chapter fluently which surprised his proud mother! Dickens is a great author to read out loud.

Pip’s first encounter with Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. Illustration by John McLenan (public domain)

It was when I stood before her, avoiding her eyes, that I took note of the surrounding objects in detail, and saw that her watch had stopped at twenty minutes to nine, and that a clock in the room had stopped at twenty minutes to nine. ‘Look at me,’ said Miss Havisham. ‘You are not afraid of a woman who has never seen the sun since you were born?’

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (chapter 8)

For many years, my mother would read to her friend Jo who had severe cerebral palsy and could not physically hold a book or turn the pages. But Jo loved literature so my mother would read classics and Booker prize winners to her every week. Around Christmas, my mother would invite Jo, her husband, my partner and me for dinner followed by a communal book reading. One year we read A Christmas Carol by Dickens and the next year we all took different parts in Twelfth Night.

The title page from the first edition of A Christmas Carol (1843)

Surprisingly, I am now not that keen on audiobooks or TV and film adaptations. I do listen to or watch them occasionally but I usually prefer to read them myself. Maybe it’s because I tend to listen to an audiobook while I’m doing housework, cooking or clearing my email inbox. But I also wonder if it is because, as a child, being read to was a communal activity with my parents, brothers and sister or classmates. We enjoyed the stories together and could talk about them afterwards. It was also a legitimate time in our days when we were allowed and indeed encouraged, to stop doing anything else, to sit down as a family or class and listen to wonderful stories instead of worrying about the to-do list and the undone laundry!

A whistle-stop tour of my bookshelves

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by Stephen McClarence

Journalist Stephen McClarence’s articles in the Sheffield Telegraph and Yorkshire Post helped promote our original oral history project over a decade ago. We are delighted that, with his reading journey, we are launching a follow-up: Steel City Readers – the Next Generation, 1955-1975. We are collecting new reading journeys based on experiences of reading in Sheffield starting in the years 1955 to 1975. If you’d like to contribute a reading journey, you’ll find more information here. And many thanks to Stephen.

On my first morning as a journalist – more than 40 years ago, when newspapers were still thriving – the news editor of the Yorkshire paper I’d joined as a ‘graduate trainee’ handed me a book. He reckoned it had ‘local interest’.

‘Do me a 250-word review of this,’ he said, and went back to his desk to allocate reporters to cover police conference, magistrates court and the day’s quota of Golden Weddings.

Fresh from ‘uni’, as no-one then called it, I set about reading the book. It was pretty dull, but I ploughed on. Half an hour later, the news editor came over again, looking puzzled. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

‘Reading the book, like you told me to,’ I said.

‘I didn’t tell you to read it,’ he said tetchily. ‘I told you to review it.’

So that put reading into perspective.

The young Stephen already with a book in his hands

I grew up in Sheffield in the 1950s and 1960s. The front room of our terraced house in Sharrow had a bookcase featuring a blue-bound set of Odhams editions of Dickens. Below it was a shelf of popular Book Club issues – Nevil Shute, H B Kaye, Stella Gibbons – with their sometimes surreal dust-jacket illustrations and proud boast that they published books for 2/6d (13p) that would otherwise cost up to 12/6d (63p).

From the family bookshelves

Across the room was a bureau whose glass-fronted bookcase housed several feet of World Books, an imprint with more serious literary ambitions than the Book Club – Graham Greene, Winifred Holtby, Somerset Maugham – and more sober dust-jackets.

I’m not sure how much my parents had read these books but, well, as Anthony Powell puts in his epic A Dance to the Music of Time, ‘Books do furnish a room.’

As a child, I naturally ignored this adult fare and read the regular children’s (actually boys’) books: Just William, Bunter, Jennings, all inhabiting a world remote from my own working-class experience. We didn’t, for instance, have ‘beaks’ at my grammar school.

The book that most resonated with my own upbringing was The Family from One End Street, Eve Garnett’s enchanting depiction of the working-class life of the Ruggles family. And every Christmas brought another Rupert Bear annual. All these years later, the illustrations seem almost psychedelically weird: just what was that little bear on?

All these books – apart from Rupert Bear – were available just down the road, shelves of them, in Highfield library.

What a wonder this imposing Victorian building was, what a massive ‘enabler’. Year after year, I climbed its stone steps up to a doorway topped by a quotation from Thomas Carlyle: ‘That there should be one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.’

Highfield Library today

Inside, in an atmosphere of sepulchral silence, were sturdy, highly polished tables where retired men in gabardine macs read the newspapers. A flight of alarmingly steep stairs led to the children’s library, with its seemingly endless shelves of Collins Classics and True Books (I longed for Untrue Books), all protected from careless young hands by sturdy transparent plastic jackets.

In school holidays, particularly on rainy days when there was no incentive to ‘play out’, I would sometimes visit the library twice a day: in the morning to choose a couple of books to last me until the afternoon, when I went back to exchange them for a couple more.

The newsagent across the road from us sold me comics (Beano, Dandy, Beezer, Topper). Plus the wonderfully engaging and informative Look and Learn. I duly looked and learned – about Arthur and Excalibur, The Story of a Seed and The History of the A4 (the road not the paper size).

Later, doing A Levels and grappling with Chaucer, Molière and the Thirty Years War, I had plenty of ‘free periods’ in the afternoons. Suddenly enthused by classical music, I regularly took a bus into the city centre to sit for hours reading The Stereo Record Guide in the Central Library. On reflection this seems a curious way to have spent my late adolescence.

Years before, my parents had bought me The Book of Knowledge, eight heavy red-and-cream-bound volumes (A to Bon, announced the spines, Boo to Cro, Crue to Gera…). Published ‘to provide the inquiring mind with accurate information told in an interesting style’, the series ranged wide.

The photographs on one double-page spread offered not merely a ‘Model of a Proposed German Monorail System’ but also ‘Haddock, Relation of the Cod’ (as though that was the haddock’s only claim to fame).

I’ve just flicked through one of the volumes (still on my shelves) and recognised many of the illustrations – ‘Humming birds on the wing’ on the left-hand page, ‘Hull Docks and wharves seen from the air’ on the right.

And there was Walt Disney’s Worlds of Nature, with its saturatedly coloured photographs of ‘the alert, intelligent raccoon’, a few pages after a gladiatorial photograph showing how ‘two queen bees, piping shrilly, battle fiercely to the death’ and the invaluable tip that ‘the bullfrog’s voice is the biggest part of him’.

On the flyleaf, I see I wrote my name rather hesitantly in ballpoint pen on my eighth birthday. And I’m afraid I subsequently committed my old news editor’s cardinal sin: I read the book.