Betty’s Reading Journey

Posted on November 4, 2015 by Mary Grover

Betty’s reading journey begins with the savour of the words Aesop’s Fables on her tongue and the beauty of its pictures as her mother read to her from the book. There were singing and nursery rhymes too, and the gorgeous colours of the pictures in an illustrated Stories from the Bible, and the remembered motion of being lifted onto her mother’s knee.

Betty’s experience of her early reading seems a sensory delight which flooded her play and her early education – she took her baby sister from her pram and put her in her garden irises in imitation of Moses, and practised beautiful curls on her letters, helped by her older cousin.

At her first school her teacher read from a lectern to the class at the end of lessons, and in this way Anne of Green Gables, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Jim Hawkins of Treasure Island (who frightened her) entered her life. Her mother supplemented the school stories with Mowgli and more Anne of Green Gables, her childhood favourite.

Born in 1925, Betty says there wasn’t much money for books in her house, although ‘we used to always get a book at Christmas’.

… we didn’t have a lot of choice. We wanted books. ‘There is a new book for you.’ You’d always want it.

As a teenager at school she read Dickens, who she didn’t like, but loved Wuthering Heights, a story so vivid for her that she relived it on a family walk on the moors.

And I can remember … we went on the moors, my Paula and Cecily, mum and dad and myself and … there was a stone where you sat and I said, ‘I’m going to walk up further up, keep turning and when you can’t see me, turn round and come back.’ I went running up, and I crouched behind something, I don’t know what it was, and I was calling to Heathcliff, I was calling ‘Heathcliff, Cathy’, and two people were walking past as I was calling, and ran down past my mother and father and they said, ‘There’s voices up there! We’re so frightened.’ And my father said, ‘No, I think I know who is making the noises,’ and my father came up and I was crouched down and he said, ‘Betty!’ He grabbed me like this.

Betty remembers the 12 volumes of encyclopaedias the family owned, their purchase financed by a friend of the family.

All sorts of information you could find, and I can remember everybody from the village used to be coming up, ‘Can we look in your encyclopaedias?’

With the coming of the Second World War – ‘you couldn’t really buy books in the wartime’ – the Paper Salvage scheme took some of Betty’s store of books for paper recycling.

A lot of these things you had to give to the war effort, and they wanted paper. Paper was in great demand. I can remember mum and dad … thinking which books should go. They said, ‘That is for Betty, Paula and Cecily to decide. If they want them they won’t go, they should decide, but we’ll tell them it’s needed for the country.’

And when she started her training at the Royal Hospital the nursing books she bought were ‘very small and on roughish paper’. These were supplemented by books borrowed from the patients’ library, organised by Toc H, a Christian charitable organisation. From the Toc H trolley she picked The Snow Goose, now her favourite book which she has read many times. She also borrowed from wealthier nurses who ‘could afford to buy books and share’. When her training finished and she finally got a salary, she bought The History of the English Speaking Peoples – ‘you got one book at a time. I got one book as a present … you went to the shop and bought each one.’

During her career Betty came to read books she had ‘never read at home – Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, Dylan Thomas. In the hospital where Betty nursed for the greater part of her working life – the Royal Hospital Annexe, a specialist burns and plastic surgery unit – she remembers reading Richard Hillary’s The Last Enemy, which recounts his experiences as a Spitfire pilot who suffered terrible burns in 1940 and endured months of plastic surgery. ‘The medical staff would discuss things and what they read in the paper that was interesting. They included you and they had their books and they’d let you borrow if you wanted.’ She also read Anna Karenina and War and Peace – ‘That took a lot of time, you read little things‘ – Lady Chatterley’s Lover (in brown paper covers), Daughter of Time, books on Field Marshal Montgomery and Mary Queen of Scots.

Later, in her retirement, Betty has continued with her reading in another lively community of older friends, and latterly, as an avid reader from the city’s mobile library:

I don’t pick, I let them decide and they get me some good books. One about Marco Polo, I couldn’t put it down!

She is still as enthusiastic and engaged a reader as ever.

by Loveday Herridge

Access Betty’s transcript and audio here.

Sheila Edwards’ Reading Journey

Posted on October 14, 2015 by Mary Grover

Sheila was born in 1937.

She was interviewed by Alice Seed.

Sheila age 16 years.

Sheila cannot remember being read to and says her family had little interest in reading. She puts down her own love of reading to her position in the family.

It was company for me because my sister was quite a lot younger than me so she wasn’t really a companion … Perhaps I was a little bit of a loner anyway you know, so I just used to wrap myself up in books.

Sheila’s family had a subscription to Boots Library in the centre of town (‘there were a lot to choose from’) only a few hundred yards from the magnificent new Central Library which contained, as it still does, a vast Children’s Library in the basement.

So every Saturday she travelled down from the hills of Sheffield’s western suburbs to explore both libraries in the centre of town.

… in those days you used to go down on the bus and spend all Saturday there. I don’t remember Boots Library having tables where you could sit down but the Children’s Library did, so you know, it was somewhere to go and thoroughly enjoyable.

Sheila borrowed novels by Noel Streatfeild and Kathleen Fidler but has no memory of getting adult books from the Boots library so thinks that her subscription probably finished when she got to about fifteen years old.

Sheila read constantly and sought variety. She cannot remember returning to a favourite or re-reading with pleasure.

I had these certain authors and I used to wade through everything that they’d written and if I couldn’t find it on the library shelves then I would order it.

Enid Blyton and the magazine, Sunny Stories, were superseded by Georgette Heyer when Sheila was in her teens. Lately she did try reading Georgette Heyer but found they had lost their charm.

Sheila’s family also subscribed to a book club where she thinks she may have found the Nevil Shutes she remembers. Though Sheila has a sense of herself as the only passionate reader in the house, her family must have valued access to books by joining a book club and accepting the fact that on Saturdays their child found her way to two libraries that were not that near home.

Her taste is mainly for fiction and once she has exhausted an author goes on to another.

I do write down what I read now ‘cause, you know I’ve read so many, sometimes I forget how much I’ve read so I have a quick look through to see if I’ve read it before, so I’ve got a little book which I take out when I go to the library [just to prompt me] .

For much of her life reading was a solitary activity. It is still associated with delight, privacy and comfort. Bed is a natural place to read. Books give

hours of pleasure, puts me to sleep sometimes. I’m reading and I’ll suddenly find the book starts going down and I’ve nodded off, but yeah it’s good.

But once Sheila had her three children she and her husband, Geoff, created their own reading community.

There were three of them and [they] all had to have separate stories read every night so we started with the youngest and worked up, and then of course since then, I’ve had grandchildren and I get a lot of pleasure out of reading to them – there’s something very special I think about reading to children, … they all love books now probably because, you know, we started off like that. … I got rather disappointed when they began to get older and they used to say they would read the stories. I lost my job.

Reading Journey by Mary Grover

Access Sheila’s transcript and audio here.

Three friends from Wadsley

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Mary Grover

Joan, Winnie and Jean at the first Reading Sheffield Celebration 2012

There was an afternoon when I wanted to turn my back on the Reading Sheffield project and spend the rest of my life exploring the history of Wadsley. It was the afternoon that I spent squashed, in Winnie Lincoln’s front room, under the coffee table where I had sited my recorder hoping to capture the voices of the five of us: me, Winnie, Winnie’s daughter Kathryn, Joan and Jean.

I had met Winnie through the Slightly Spritely exercise group that meets in Wadsley Church Hall. She wanted to share her interview with her two friends, Jean and Joan, who lived nearby. Kathryn was on hand to fetch the books that Winnie summoned and to help me field the tape recorder when it fell off the table.

Winnie, Jean and Joan had all made friends on the shopping bus.

We were all widows and decided to have Saturdays together playing cards or Scrabble or whatever. And we’d all be sat round, there were seven of us then, and it would start up quoting a bit of poetry. And everybody would pick it up, what they could remember, or else they’d remember a song. And we’d all start singing until we couldn’t remember whose turn it were to play a card.

Jean dived into the middle of Hiawatha: ‘Hidden in the elder bushes, there they waited until the deer came’ … I could go on and on.’

The three women shared memories of schools they had attended. Learning poetry off by heart had obviously been a key part of the curriculum, as it had been for Hazel, one of our other Wadsley readers. They still remembered the girls who, like Jean, had excelled at learning and reciting poetry:

Winnie: … particularly Audrey. You remember Audrey?

Jean: Oh yes.

Winnie: Audrey , she were very good. And Joyce of course, Joyce Strater.

Jean: Oh Joyce.

Joan: I can remember Joyce.

Though this poetry is still part of their shared life today, Jean, Winnie and Joan rarely share books. An exception is a rhyming history of Britain by James Muirden that Joan had lent Winnie.

Both Joan and Winnie are principally interested in the factual and neither of them seem to care for novels much. Their history books are kept as reference books, too precious to pass around.

Winnie treasures, in particular, local history books. All three women recall with respect an earlier vicar of Wadsley, Dr Harold Kirk-Smith, who in 1957 had published an excellent short history of Wadsley. Not only had Winnie got a copy of this short history, she and her daughter Kathryn found out that Kirk-Smith had written another book, about William Brewster, the father of New England.

So we went and got this book and it was lovely. It’s really nice. It was nice because it was Kirk’s book’

Winnie and Kathryn also bought a book about Wadsley from an antiquarian bookseller. Winnie recalls that it was quite expensive. Kathryn brought it down from upstairs, a beautifully bound, gilt-edged book, published in 1852: A Gazetteer and General Directory of Sheffield for Twenty Miles Around. Winnie observed, ‘My ancestors are in there’.

Joan, also interested in history, was more curious about fourteenth century Europe. She is an artist and is fascinated not only by the artists of the fourteenth century but the process of handing on knowledge, the great Renaissance project of recovery.

I think it’s just because they kept translating new things and adding things on that weren’t normally known.

However, Jean, unlike her two friends, did not register any interest in bookish history. Her chief delight as a young woman had been to go to the theatre in town, usually by herself.

Diverse though they were, all three friends had nothing but respect for the literary tastes of the others.They all agreed that books were precious objects. One of Winnie’s treasures was a book in French that had belonged to her grandfather.

MG: So your granddad could read French?

Winnie: Oh no, he couldn’t read French. He were a Lincolnshire man, he couldn’t talk Sheffield. [Laughs]

MG: So how come he’s got this French book?

Winnie: I don’t know, I don’t know. They were a family who collected things.

Joan: A book is a book is a book.

Winnie suspects that such objects were purchased when a neighbour died.

if anybody died, it was open house. And they’d then ask people to, you know, come in and buy what they fancied. To get rid of the stuff. There was no fetching somebody to empty the house, like these dealers. They’d go to local people with what they wanted. And that was done regularly and it was very useful.

Joan added, ‘I don’t throw books out, no’ and Winnie, by this stage surrounded by towers of books that Kathryn had brought downstairs to show us, concludes

I think it’s important because it’s lovely to have them there and, you know, suddenly it comes back to you and you can search through and find what you’re looking for, can’t you? Come back to things. And you read them very often afresh, each time.

by Mary Grover

Access Joan T’s audio and transcript here.

The Reading Journey of Norman Adsetts

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Mary Grover

Norman was born in 1931.

He was interviewed by Mary Grover on the 17th April 2014.

Though Norman was born in Manchester his father was from Sheffield and returned when Norman was four years old. In 1935 he left his job in London as a highly successful salesman of office equipment to open a sweet shop at the bottom of Derbyshire Lane. Attached to the sweet shop was Abbetts’ Library, the kind of of library of popular fiction, often known as a ‘twopenny library’.

Ronald Batty’s superb guide, How to Run a Twopenny Library, was to come out three years later, in 1938, but Norman’s father would have endorsed Batty’s advice that a twopenny library seldom paid its way except as a ‘sideline to another business’. And shrewd salesman that he was, Mr Adsetts had found a perfect pitch for the library attached to his sweetshop. The terraced houses of Meersbook, with their modest gardens, were the other end of town from the mammoth steel works which had created the industrial city of Sheffield. The families that lived in Meersbrook probably had a little more income to spare than those who lived in the more densely packed and smokier areas on the east and north of Sheffield. Enough to cover a weekly payment of 2d (53p in today’s money) to ensure a constant supply of the kind of popular fiction insufficiently improving to pass muster on the shelves of the municipal libraries. W. H. Smith filled the shelves of Mr Adsetts’ library changing the stock regularly.

It was in this library, surrounded by delectably long runs of Nat Gould, Zane Grey and Ethel Boileau (a favourite of his mother’s), that the four year old Norman learned to read and to acquire his life-long passion for reading of every kind. He cannot remember reading any children’s books or indeed being taught to read.

We lived over the shop and so I would be able to go down to the shop and the shelves were in the corner of the shop and I would simply take whatever was available. I read everything. I had a completely untutored and uncritical choice of reading and I have still got a few books which have the frontispiece of the library. The ones that I have, the ones I remember reading first were by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

These were the Martian series by Burroughs, science fiction that would have been written for the young. But Norman read indiscriminately amongst much more serious authors as well. Norman is unique amongst our readers in having sought out early editions of the novels he read as a child recreating the shelves which towered above him as a child. Norman’s study is today lined with 1930s editions of Sexton Blake, Edgar Rice Burroughs and other treasures. He holds out one with particular care.

The book that had the most impact on me was this one; it is called Cities of Refuge. I notice from this copy which I bought later that it first came out in 1937 so it must have been one of the first books to be put into the library; Cities of Refuge is by a man called Sir Phillip Gibbs who had been a famous war correspondent and a pretty prolific writer of romance and adventure stories built around the conditions of the time. And I didn’t know from Adam what it was all about but I read it with fascination. It was all about the lives of a group of aristocrats from Russia who were displaced by the revolution and then wandered across the world living in various ‘cities of refuge’ where they were welcomed or thrown out, found work or starved.

Though the book was in many ways ‘beyond’ the little seven year old who read it, it shaped him and brought home the fragility of the world which was, in 1938, about to be plunged into another apocalyptic struggle.

That was a grown up book. It was grown up in all kinds of ways. There was sex in it, there was murder and killing in it. There was everything in it, most of which I didn’t understand but I read it and shared in the sadness of it all.

But there were yards of less harrowing tales. Though Norman’s father had had to leave school at eleven and had not had as much schooling as his mother, he obviously had an infectious delight in narrative and the power of the word which served him well as a salesman of every sort. He put these gifts to work in entertaining his two children, making up stories at bedtime which derived probably from the films of westerns that he had seen rather than the volumes of Zane Grey that his son was discovering on his shelves. However, Norman’s passion for reading was a solitary one.

My father had some understanding but he didn’t share my obsession. He was not a big reader at all. He had difficulty in reading a book because he hadn’t had either the training or the opportunity.

Because of the solitary nature of his reading adventures, Norman often heard in his head words that were quite different from those the author intended.

I would read words that I didn’t know how to pronounce but I would gradually work out what they meant. There was a word ‘avalanche’ which I never, not till five or six years later, knew how to pronounce. In my mind I used to call it ‘avahlahis’

By the time Norman had won his scholarship place at King Edward VII School, he had already galloped through most of the English novels that the school introduced him to. However, the Latin and Greek classics were a revelation.

When he left school in 1949, having gained a place to study biochemistry at Oxford, Norman had a ten week stretch of time in which he thought he would extend his reading further and revisit old favourites. He read out the list of the twenty five books he had read in those ten weeks.

The first was The Red Prussian, which was a remaindered biography of Karl Marx which I picked up from Boots: wonderful book, I have still got it; then Pattern of Soviet Domination, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, whatever. Introduction to Comparative Biochemistry; The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism by Bertrand Russell; for a school trip to Denmark I read a guidebook; Half a Million Tramps by W.A. Gape; The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck; The Man who was Thursday by Chesterton; The Loved Ones by Evelyn Waugh; Ship of the Line by C. S. Forester; Chad Hannah by Edmunds; The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald; Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan; The Great Impersonation by E. Phillips Oppenheim; Prester John by John Buchan; Happy Return by C. S. Forester; They Found Atlantis by Dennis Wheatley; The Commodore by C. S. Forester; Prince of the Captivity by John Buchan; The Saint in Miami by Leslie Charteris; Good Companions by J. B. Priestley; Jenny Villiers by J. B. Priestley; Let the People Sing by J. B. Priestley; All Quiet on the Western Front by Eric Maria Remarque; The Story of St. Michel by Axel Munthe and Behind the Curtain by Phillip Gibbs.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that once the boy arrived in Oxford he decided to change from bio-chemistry to Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Nor is it surprising that he became one of the city’s leading business men, endowing the university library in the centre of Sheffield that now bears his name.

by Mary Grover

Access Sir Norman Adsetts’ transcript and audio here

Shirley Ellins’ Reading Journey

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Mary Grover

One of Shirley’s first memories of books begins at floor level – with the small, wooden bookshelf in the dining room which contained her mother’s library books. There were just 4 or 5 novels, whose titles she spelled out when she had learned to read (before she was 6 in 1942), but whose contents she ignored. These library books ‘came and went’, and Shirley didn’t open them. Much more to her taste was The House at Pooh Corner which she remembers – again from the floor – where she fell, helpless with laughter, from her miniature chair as her mother read to her.

But there are many bookshelves in Shirley’s reading journey. The three shelves of the bookcase in the family living room contained books belonging to both her parents, ‘our personal books’, some of which she read – reference works like Arthur Mee’s Thousand Heroes, biography like Robert Southey’s Life of Nelson, Charles Kingsley’s Water-Babies, her mother’s complete Shakespeare, won from Crookesmoor School for ‘Progress’, and her parents’ tune books from the Methodist church. As she grew older, her own books – given to her by family and friends at birthdays and Christmas – were added to these shelves, for reading was a downstairs activity, not allowed in her bedroom, which was for sleeping – ‘lights off’.

‘Half a recollection of a bookshelf in a classroom’ in Shirley’s junior school reveals The Pigeons of Leyden, a historical novel about the siege of Leiden, a book which inspired her at a very young age to become a history teacher. Then there were trips every Saturday by the ‘ladies of the household’ – Shirley, her mother and grandmother – to Sheffield’s Central Library, where the children’s and adult libraries provided Shirley with shelves of Biggles, Arthur Ransome and John Buchan, and the historical novels of G. K. Henty, D. K. Broster, and the huge output of Baroness Orczy.

At the same time, a whole room of bookshelves gave her pleasure at her secondary school – High Storrs School – where she would go to the school library and ‘sit and read there, a bit for pleasure, before I had to go down to the classroom’. There she read the Greek myths, and pursued an interest in poetry, Kipling in particular. Her taste was shaped by exposure to the school’s set texts, some of which she ‘mercifully seem[s] to have forgotten’, while some, like Paradise Lost, offered her rewards she would have missed had they not been required reading. But also chance played its part in moulding her preferences – catching chicken pox, for example, meant she had the leisure to read ‘the whole of Jane Austen, one after the other, to take my mind off the itching’.

At Bedford College, where Shirley read History, she managed to keep borrowing novels from the library and buying poetry – Donne, Kipling and Betjeman were favourites. And as a teacher of history, she filled her bookshelves with history books, and also history and guidebooks related to the holidays abroad she started to take now she could afford it.

Later, Shirley’s marriage was ‘a marriage of two minds and the marriage of two libraries too when we got together’. So her bookshelves, like those of her parents, continued to tell the story of interests pursued, preferences arrived at, and choices made. And there will be many of her students, in Sheffield and elsewhere, whose own bookshelves now bear the imprint and influence of Shirley’s voracious reading and her generous life as a teacher.

by Loveday Herridge

Hazel’s Reading Journey

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Mary Grover

Hazel was born in Sheffield in 1929, one of four children. Her father died when Hazel was very young and her mother brought the family up. Hazel worked as a seamstress at a shirtmaker’s. She married in the 1950s and had two daughters.

Hazel has no memories of being read to and certainly had no books in the house. ‘There were no books, no. No money for anything.’ Hazel’s father had died when Hazel was two leaving her mother with two young children and another on the way. Her mother struggled to feed the four of them so there were no extras. The generosity of two relatives in particular kept the family fed. ‘But we had a good childhood, friendly, good neighbours; they weren’t intrusive at all.’

School too was a happy experience. At the Junior School there was Enid Blyton in abundance. ‘We loved school. It wasn’t a bit strict and things like that, it was lovely. Everybody wanted to go to school.’

Hazel’s older sister, Cynthia, probably helped Hazel find her way down from Wadsley to Hillsborough Library, but after she was eight Hazel made her way there herself. Hillsborough is one of the most elegant of Sheffield’s Libraries, a late eighteenth century house set in parkland. In his autobiography, A Yorkshire Boyhood, the MP, Roy Hattersley, who also grew up in the Hillsborough area in the 1930s, described it as ‘our constant joy. It was part of our lives, a home from home’,

During her teens the one book that Hazel recalls as a constant favourite was Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind – not the film because the family had no money to go to films, but the book. But by the time Hazel was a teenager her mother had enough money to buy a few books.

Somebody came round to the door and she ordered these books and she paid for ‘em weekly. She did do well ’cus she didn’t have cash in them days. We had these books and there was a collection.

Hazel obviously admired her mother’s ambition for her family and her success in supporting them, alone. However she wasn’t so keen when her mother mapped out her future when she was 14.

We had an interview at school and they asked us what we liked doing and of course I was shy and didn’t like saying anything. So mum chipped in. She always did because I were always backward at coming forward. “Well she likes sewing”. So they said, “Oh well, they want somebody at the shirt factory.” Well I came home furious. I didn’t want to make shirts! Oh I came home and I were angry, you know, “I’m not going there”.

However Hazel soon started work in a dressmaker’s in the affluent suburb of Broomhill, the workshop having being bombed out of the centre of town, and she never regretted the trade her mother had chosen for her.

With dressmaking came dancing which left little time for reading. Though Hazel read to her own children, personal reading became a pleasant memory rather than a present resource. However, the words that have remained her for ever are the poems that she learned at her secondary school, Wisewood. I met Hazel at the Wadsley exercise club, Slightly Sprightly, and interviewed a group of women from the club who had all been to Wisewood School. As children they had all lived within walking distance of Wadsley Common, still known for the richness of its dawn chorus and the wildness of the undergrowth that only half conceals the spoils from the ganister mines worked there until the 1940s. Independently of Hazel, her three contemporaries did exactly the what Hazel did when I asked them if they had read any poetry at school. ‘Meg Merrilies,’ they exclaimed and embarked on a word-perfect performance of Keats’ poem.

Old Meg she was a gipsy;
And liv’d upon the moors:
Her bed it was the brown heath turf,
And her house was out of doors.

Her apples were swart blackberries,
Her currants, pods o’ broom;
Her wine was dew of the wild white rose,
Her book a church-yard tomb.

Her brothers were the craggy hills,
Her sisters larchen trees;
Alone with her great family
She liv’d as she did please.

No breakfast had she many a morn,
No dinner many a noon,
And ‘stead of supper she would stare
Full hard against the moon.

But every morn, of woodbine fresh
She made her garlanding,
And every night the dark glen yew
She wove, and she would sing.

And with her fingers old and brown
She plaited mats o’ rushes,
And gave them to the cottagers
She met among the bushes.

Old Meg was brave as Margaret Queen,
And tall as Amazon:
An old red blanket cloak she wore,
A chip hat had she on.
God rest her aged bones somewhere–
She died full long agone!

By Mary Grover

Mavis’s Reading Journey

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Mary Grover

Mavis, born 18 January 1937.

Mavis is well travelled. From the age of five she walked, on her own, three quarters of a mile to school, sometimes getting a lift on one of the coal lorries as it left the weigh station where her father was manager. The weigh station was deliberately set apart from Tinsley colliery to guard against pilfering. Mavis could have taken the bus to school but because of her father’s job she was thought of as ‘posh’ and walked to avoid the bullying.

When Mavis got to nursery school at three or four she could already read. Yet, her parents being more on the maths side probably didn’t read to her much and they didn’t have any books in the house.

Well, they had three: the Bible; a book called Vigil which I thought was Virgil till I thought he couldn’t have been that bad and it turned out to be a book of prayers; and a Dorothy L Sayers murder mystery, and those were the only three books, with a dictionary, that they had in the house.

But a friend of the family, Auntie Vera, was a primary school teacher. She borrowed books from the school library for Mavis and left them with her for the week. The girl soon learned to decipher the words with the help of the pictures.

Between the ages of five and eleven Mavis went on regular visits to her father’s brother who was a headmaster two train rides away at Barnby Dunn, a village near Doncaster. With her mother working Mavis would often spend the holiday in the library of her uncle’s school.

And there were picture books, children’s books. And he used to buy me books, often books which were much older than the age I was, and because I thought he knew what he was doing, if he bought it me and I found it hard, it must be my fault and I better make sure I could read it [laughing] because he would ask me about it when I saw him again ….His was the one book which triggered off lots of others. He bought me, when I was about seven, he bought me a book of Greek myths.

Other relatives introduced her to other delights:

If went to my auntie’s I’d pick up her magazines. What was it? The People’s Friend. And I would be as engrossed in The People’s Friend, I’m ashamed to say. I was a bit omnivorous and unselective.

Mavis read everything, whatever she could get her hands on. When she got one of the highest 11+ passes in the city she attended Sheffield High School, another two stage journey. Her school friends came from all over the city and sometimes beyond the city boundaries so Mavis had few friends out of school. From 11 onwards her reading was extraordinarily varied.

It would be George Eliot one week [and] The Island of Adventure the next, or The Adventures of Scamp. … I had a horse phase, like all little girls, but I was reading quite a lot of adult fiction at the same time. Especially as the stuff that I got lead on to was always available. You didn’t get a big queue for the next George Eliot whereas you did for the Enid Blytons.

Later on at the High School, she managed to take Friday afternoons off during the optional games periods and she would make her way, usually alone, to the Central Library. She remembers her first visit.

As I walked in – didn’t know quite know where to start – and started at the Ws. I found Hugh Walpole, Leo Walmsley and … I think accidentally someone had filed Warwick Deeping in the Ws and I read him and I just read others by those authors.

Perhaps the ease with which Mavis approached any kind of book, without fear or favour, made her a natural story-teller.

Funnily enough there was a little girl who used to read a lot who was on my dinner table when I was a third year. … She used to read quite widely for a little girl, I thought, and we used to play making up stories at the table, to while away the time when you’d eaten the first course and had got to wait till everybody finished to go and get the second, and you’d tell a story and stop, and the next one … And it was Margaret Drabble. I’ve often thought, my goodness, no wonder she was a good storyteller, good at that game!

However, Mavis’s careless and carefree appetite for any kind of literature nearly cost her the chance to become the English teacher to whom so many children owe their delight in reading. When Mavis went up to Leeds University she had to make a train journey that she was anxious about. Would she miss her stop and end up in Scotland? To avoid getting lost in a book that might absorb her too fully, she snatched her mother’s copy of The Reader’s Digest magazine. When she got to Leeds, the interviewer asked

“What did you read on the train?” So I said “Readers’ Digest” and I saw this expression and I thought “Ah”.

Mavis quickly explained her the reasons for her reading choice and persuaded her interviewer that she was a serious enough student to do a degree in English Literature but after that I was aware that there were things you didn’t own up to but apart from magazines I don’t think it would have ever occurred to me.

Mavis’s copy of Wordsworth

Listening to Mavis describe the lessons she taught all over the country: Harlow, Bolton, Kersley and Carlisle, I wished she could have been my English teacher. She created groups in which every member read a different book and shared her opinions with her friends. Alongside the necessary detailed analysis of a “set-book” these students absorbed Mavis’s delight in the range of literary journeys available to us all, her readiness to recognise the unknown and explore it.

When, at university, Mavis was temporarily abashed by how little she had learned at school about the Metaphysical poets, her response was characteristically matter of fact and entirely positive: “I realised that I had very large gaps which was a good thing to know”.

by Mary Grover

Access Mavis’s transcript and audio here

The Reading Journey of Doreen Gill

Posted on October 6, 2015 by Mary Grover

Doreen grew up in Darnall, before the Sheffield Blitz, a hillside of terraced houses which served the workers in the steel works on the eastern side of Sheffield. In December of 1940, when Doreen was six years old, the family was bombed out of their home and they moved down, nearer the great corridor of steelworks in the Don Valley to Brightside. This was the first of many relocations.

When she was nine, Doreen’s mother died. Her father was fighting in Africa and was left with three children and no one to care for them.

They wouldn’t let him home, even for the funeral.

The three children were separated, Doreen going to live in a Children’s Home in Ripon, Yorkshire and her two brothers to one in Diss, Norfolk. When after three and a half years her father returned, with a Belgian wife, he gathered the family together again.

Doreen aged 17, this is a passport photograph taken for a visit to see her stepbrother in Belgium.

Throughout these early years, books were a constant. Doreen’s much younger brothers were twins so her mother did not have time to read to her but she “doesn’t ever remember not reading”. A great aunt lived near and her support for her mother enabled Doreen to find time to read. She thinks she might have read before she went to school because her father was a great reader and they did have books in the house.

But not children’s books of course, so consequently I picked everything up, whether it was suitable or whether it wasn’t!

Before her mother died she used the library at Attercliffe, walking up the hill on her own to Attercliffe Common.

I used to go there and just work me way along the shelves. Anything and everything. ‘Cept I’m not too keen on history. I read anything else but. I will read if I’m desperate. I will read history but I’ve got to be desperate.

Courtesy Picture Sheffield

No-one guided her choices.

They just left us to it, you know. You were only allowed two books at a time then so I used to go to the library two or three times a week and change me books.

Milly, Molly, Mandy, Anne of Green Gables and Edgar Allen Poe come to mind (‘not at five, though’). Her main reading time was a Sunday when she and her brothers weren’t allowed to play out. She can’t remember sharing her reading pleasures but her father approved her habit. Not so her mother.

If I picked a book up to read she’d say, “Put that down and come and help me do so-and-so. You’re wasting your time and my time”. You know. So she’d always find me a job to do.

So her bedroom became her reading space

I used to go to bed and read until it was really dark. And me dad used to say, “Switch that light off”. So I used to stand in front of the window and read as long as I could!

Doreen can’t remember reading in the children’s home but while she was there she started at Ripon Grammar School and they were very keen on reading. She loved the school and went on to City Grammar in the centre of Sheffield when she returned home. There she read Shakespeare and poetry, learning lots by heart. Wordsworth’s On Westminster Bridge and Milton’s ‘When I consider how my light is spent’ still echo in her mind.

She got her O levels but had to leave school when she was 15. She would like to have stayed on; instead she went to work at Firth Brown Steels and continued reading during her lunch hour: ‘Very unsociable but I used to do it’: Nevil Shute, Edgar Allen Poe and Terence Rattigan plays.

Sometimes her father would take his family to the Palace in Attercliffe.

I don’t know if you remember it. It was open then as a review place but on Saturdays they had things that were suitable for families, you know.

Courtesy Picture Sheffield

Once she won some tickets to go to the Empire, probably from entering a competition from The Gloops Club, run by the local papers, The Telegraph and Star.

The Gloops Club had a badge, a little teddy, fat teddy. And, I used to belong to it.

Courtesy Picture Sheffield

When Doreen got to City Grammar after the war, Sheffield Central Library was round the corner.

Well they used to have the Children’s down the stairs, you know. I don’t know if you remember that. There wasn’t quite as much choice as you might think. But by the time I was twelve I was going upstairs anyway to the adults’ part, so I’d got as much choice as I wanted up there.

But she constantly returned to Anne of Green Gables, never owning a copy but repeatedly taking it out of the library.

I mean, you realise that there’s more than you orphaned; she was orphaned, and how good this lady was to her, you know, and how things work out.

Finding new authors she enjoyed was a matter of chance. Once she made a favourite, Dennis Wheatley, Shute or Allen Poe for example, she would read everything they wrote. Occasionally she would meet an author that seemed too difficult or too rubbishy but her instinct was to finish whatever she had started whether she liked the book or not.

Doreen’s church life has been thoroughly ecumenical. Her father was a Unitarian originally, her stepmother was a Catholic and Doreen was sent with her brothers to Attercliffe Methodist church on a Sunday. We recruited her to Reading Sheffield through an Anglican church on the south side of Sheffield. When I asked her if any of the books of the Bible was a favourite, she immediately replied.

Ruth, it’s homely and it’s like, well, our life really, isn’t it?

Later on in her life Doreen’s reading life was shared, first with her children and now with a group of friends. The friends buy their books in charity shops and pass them round: Rebecca Tope, Danielle Steel, Josephine Cox and Maureen Lee are all current favourites.

Doreen age 19 on a day out at Bridlington with Frank, her future husband.

Doreen age 19. A day out in Bridlington with Frank, her future husband.

Doreen has always been quietly persistent in finding time to read and light to read by. Neither of her two mothers encouraged her but she accepted that and outflanked them. After I had finished recording her memories I mentioned that one of our Sheffield readers had told us that she stopped reading when she started dancing. I asked Doreen whether that had been her experience. “Oh no,” she said, “You can read AND dance.”

by Mary Grover

Access Doreen’s transcript and audio here

The Reading Journey of Mary S

Posted on August 21, 2015 by Mary Grover

Mary didn’t have to travel far to find the magazines and books she loved. They came to her and surround her in the house that she has lived in since she was a girl: her first book, Chuckles, a book of little poems with drawings to be coloured in, and given to her by ‘Father Christmas’; her copies of Girl’s Own Paper delivered to the door; her mother’s Woman’s Pictorial magazines, one containing the coupon for a cut-price set of Dickens that was never ordered, and the volumes from The Travel Book Club subscribed to by her father.

Mary treasures all the family’s books, not always for the reading pleasures they brought. Mary’s daughter Frances ponders how Mary’s mother could have delighted in the pious A Peep Behind the Scenes, ‘absolutely ghastly’. But each book, loved or not, had been shared or handed on. She reflects that the only things she has given away, and that comparatively recently, are her piles of Magnet comics.

Both Mary’s parents worked in the book trade. Her father was a master printer who built up his own printing press. He did well and was able to move the family to the outer suburb of Bents Green and sent Mary to a little private school in the early 1930s. Before she was married, Mary’s mother worked in the market on a family stall selling ‘books and things’, which was subsequently bought by Mary’s in-laws and renamed L. and A. Wilkinson.

So she was encouraged to read bits of the books so that she could discuss them with customers, you know … and they used to sell books and stationery and all that kind of thing, and when gramophones first came in they sold those too.

In the 1920s Mary became a member of the Sheffield Star ’s Gloop Club which offered outings to the theatre and other sorts of entertainment for children. Then came the Depression. The printing business, like many other small printing businesses, struggled and in 1935 Mary left school at 14 to train as a secretary. By 16 she was typist for a tax expert in town.

Mary and her mother would set out together to find books: first from the Green Circle tuppenny library half way into town at Hunters Bar, and then the municipal libraries – two of them, the local down the Ecclesall Rd and the Central Library near Mary’s work. There, she found a new borrowing companion. After work, two or three times a week, she and the office boy used to make a joint expedition to the Central Library to borrow books to read on the tram on the way home. ‘You got through quite a few books that way. When the buses came in it was a bit bumpy!’ But she never took one of her own books on the journey to work: ‘If they’re your books you keep them at home, don’t you?’ You only read Penguins and library books on the tram.

Gradually Mary’s social circle widened and her friends were all required to help her create her own book. In Mary’s Confessions, compiled in the late 1930s, each friend had their own page on which they answered the questions Mary proposed, in particular, ‘Who is your favourite author?’ A lot could hang on the answer. John Lee, with his ‘nice writing’, liked Oswald Mosley. Edward Bedford enjoyed the swashbuckling romances of Raphael Sabatini. William Olivant was more up-to-date with his taste for Leslie Charteris. Kenneth Hutton must have been into scouting because his favourite author was F. Haydn Dimmock. However it was Philip who won Mary’s heart, with his admiration of ‘David Hulme’ unknown to any library catalogue we have consulted. When war was declared Mary and Philip went separate ways but the husband who found his way to Mary’s door also arrived with books.

Mary, who just before the outbreak of war was the major wage earner in the family, had been looking out for a lodger to supplement the family income when she spotted an advertisement in the paper, ‘Respectable young man requires lodgings’. Maurice was a young engineer at Firth Brown Tools.

and I remember him coming I think it was one Saturday morning, and my friend and I who lived across the road, was across the road, and we saw him pull up in his little Morris 8 that he had in those days, you could get petrol before the war. And we looked at him, and he decided that he’d stay and so he almost became one of the family. He taught us to play bridge. Mother and father were quite keen on whist, they used to go to a lot of whist drives, and he taught us to play bridge and we used to do that in the evenings. And he was quite good company. And we used to do the Telegraph crossword sitting on that settee.

A few years after his arrival, Maurice bought Mary a complete set of Kipling for her 21^st birthday because he knew Kipling was one of her favourite authors.

Throughout her life Mary compiled a list of all the books she read. Her teenage favourites, Anne of Green Gables and Daddy-Long-Legs, were not in her grandmother’s glass bookcase behind her because they had been borrowed and reborrowed from the public libraries throughout her life.

It was Mary’s daughter, Frances, who, at a Reading Sheffield talk told us about her mother’s book-filled life, her precious booklist and her book of Confessions. Thank you Frances.

Reading Journey by Mary Grover

Access Mary S’s transcript and audio here

Josie Hall’s Reading Journey

Posted on August 6, 2015 by Mary Grover

Born in 1942 Josie remembers her home as a place full of curiosity and knowledge about the world, but no books. ‘Because there couldn’t be. It was just after the war, and working class people, they just didn’t have books in the house. I don’t remember anybody, ever, reading to me.’

After the war Josie’s father returned home from two years in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp and worked as a crane driver in the steel works. He had passed his 11+ and went to the grammar school ‘but he had to be fetched out because he was the eldest of six and he had to go to work … he was really cheated.’ A remarkably able man who never found a job to match his talents, he brought what reading matter he could into the house: Reader’s Digest magazines, and then, one day ‘a pile of second-hand comics, manna from heaven; I just used to fall on them. And it wasn’t particularly because it was the comics. It was the written word, I suppose.’

The shelves of books surrounding Josie today are the legacy of her father’s encouragement of her reading and her own natural curiosity. She is open to every kind of book, fact and fiction. The written word helped her get to know her husband because soon after she married at 18, he too was sent to the Far East, one of the last men to do their National Service. She remembers writing to him every day and receiving his letters as often as he could find an opportunity to post them.

The notebooks that record Josie’s reading show a great surge of reading in her early twenties, then in 1965, after her son was born, nothing. So when the twin girls came along in 1967 she said ‘they’re not doing that to me again’ and determined to keep reading which she did, as her notebook testifies.

Diana Gabaldon books, Tess of the D’Urbeyvilles, biographies of Charles II and Martin Luther, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Doctor Zhivago, Tale of Two Cities, Forever Amber, Catherine Cookson, Howard’s End, Crime and Punishment, Dennis Wheatley’s science fiction, Gone with the Wind, George Orwell, Michael Bentine ‘oh and Utopia’s in there, Thomas More. I don’t know how I got my hands on all these.’

She reflects that many were borrowed from Attercliffe library. A few were given as Christmas presents and Sunday School prizes. Later Josie also bought paperbacks from second-hand stalls, newsagents and booksellers: they are all listed in her compendious notebooks. Only detective novels and horror fail to figure.

One book she particularly goes back to: Jane Eyre. ‘I can see Jane sat in the window seat hiding from her cousin, reading the book and I presume maybe I was a bit like that … hiding away, reading a book. Not wanting anybody to find you.’ This absorption in what she reads is sometimes overwhelming. She had to keep putting down Black Diamonds because she was so upset. ‘It took so much out of you.’ And ‘Lady of Hey: that one spoilt a holiday for me.’ She left her companions playing Bingo downstairs in the hotel lounge and didn’t come down again till the next morning. Fortunately her husband shared her addiction so they could be anti-social together.

Josie has only recently realised that she doesn’t have to read all the books she is given. People just give her their books when they have finished with them, ‘piles and piles. So nowadays if anyone gives me a ton of Mills and Boon I just shove them to the Salvation Army. I don’t have to read them.’ This ability to leave a book unread has obviously been dearly bought. Josie’s instinct is to treasure every book. She was horrified to learn that someone she knew had burned her books when they moved house. ‘You do not burn books.’ So even ‘silly Mills and Boon’ would not be consigned to the flames.

When the children were older she did A levels and then a degree. For a while the scope of her reading narrowed so that she could focus on her studies. But now she has returned to her omnivorous habits and has a different book on the go in every room in the house.

‘Where other people have to have a cigarette, I have to have a book.’

Reading Journey by Mary Grover

Access Josie’s transcript and audio here.