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

Jocelyn’s Reading Journey

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Val Hewson

Jocelyn Wilson was born in Sheffield in 1926. She was educated, in wartime, at boarding school in Kent and was evacuated to Cornwall. In 1948 Jocelyn married and in time had children. In the 1970s and ‘80s she was a social worker.

‘Did your parents ever say, “Don’t waste your time reading a novel”?’ ‘Oh no, never. Nobody ever said that.’

How do we choose books? How do we decide what to read? And how do we judge our choices?

Looking at her interview, you feel that Jocelyn W, who read widely and had excellent recall, was confident in her opinions and happy to defend them. The quality of books, her own and others’ perceptions and the value of reading all lie just beneath the surface of her story.

Jocelyn was born into a comfortable, middle-class family in Sheffield in 1926. Her first books were typical for that background and period – Alice in Wonderland, The Enchanted Forest, Cecily M Barker’s Flower Fairies and other fairy stories. Predictably, they were chosen by her mother and a ‘very dear nanny who was into reading herself’. Later, Jocelyn’s older sister helped her find books too. Nanny and Jocelyn’s parents all read aloud to the children. Jocelyn didn’t say so directly, but her first books seemed to have all the impact any parent could have hoped for: Jocelyn described them as stories ‘that made your imagination race’ and remembered them clearly 80 years later. The Flower Fairies for example, she said, were ‘part of one’s history’.

After this promising start, things went less well. Books were in short supply in Jocelyn’s life. At first this was because her family lived ‘on the fringes’ of Sheffield and ‘it was quite a journey to go anywhere where there were books to be lent’. Then World War II intervened and Jocelyn, by now at boarding school, found herself being evacuated to remote Cornwall.

And I remember after a birthday having a book token and having great difficulty in going to a bookshop in Newquay, Cornwall, to find something to buy. And in the end The Heir of Redclyffe. I can’t remember who wrote it but it was a pretty frantic book, I remember. But there was so little choice. And I think that’s one of the things we forget now ‘cos there are so many books of every kind, good and bad. And then there were very, very few.

This early experience seems to have had a lasting effect. Jocelyn said:

But of course it’s difficult for people nowadays to realise how few books came out and they were rare beasts and you waited for your birthday to get a copy. Now there’s so much; you go to a bookshop and I’m overwhelmed. I can hardly ever choose anything ‘cos there’s too much to choose from and it’s difficult to find what you really want.

Another effect of this shortage was that Jocelyn ended up reading what was available – the books on the family bookshelves – just because they were there. She considered herself lucky. ‘I think people forget now that it was like that. You could be in a situation where you hadn’t anything new to read. It seems incredible now, doesn’t it?’

Jocelyn’s family continued to influence her choices and judgments. Her mother was ‘interested in books. And so there was a good wide variety of classics’. Jocelyn remembered reading, for example, Precious Bane and Mary Webb’s other novels. ‘My mother was very sensible; she never said, ‘Don’t’. She was very good; she was highly intelligent and we valued what she thought.’ (Jocelyn’s father tried too, but was rather less successful: suggestions like G A Henty were rejected as ‘boy’s own stuff’.)

School was the next big influence on Jocelyn, and it was there that her own judgment began to emerge.

… I did a project on keeping a notebook of all the things I’d read … I know that it was criticised by the person who taught English at school, saying, ‘I can’t think why you read all this rubbish when you’re capable of reading something so much better.’ You see, it had gone through the whole range. But that was important in order to learn what was rubbish and what wasn’t.

What was this ‘whole range’ that formed Jocelyn’s taste? Over the years, there were:

classics like Jane Austen (‘she writes with such a deft touch’)
literary fiction, as we might say today, with authors like Marghanita Laski (Little Boy Lost ‘tore everybody’s heart to pieces’) and Rumer Godden (‘very delicate in her writing, sensitive and she touched one’s heart’)
popular, middlebrow authors of the day: Nevil Shute (‘wonderfully good stories’); Daphne du Maurier (‘anything she wrote was grist to the mill’); Queens of Crime like Dorothy L Sayers and adventure writers like John Buchan; Mazo de la Roche (whose Jalna books were the ‘original soap opera’)
‘rubbish’ like ‘Oh Baroness Orczy and that sort of thing, The Scarlet Pimpernel. Oh good old rubbish, that’.

Rubbish was not, however, as clear-cut as it might seem. For one thing, Jocelyn was becoming confident enough to reject other people’s opinions:

Oh yes, but I don’t count [Georgette Heyer] as rubbish … Of course she was a great storyteller, wasn’t she? And of course historically very accurate. There were things to praise about her. Even though the stories were romantic fiction in the very highest level.

And sometimes rubbish could be the thing: ‘And if you’re not feeling very well, rubbish is what you want!’ If it was what you needed, could it be rubbish?

What Jocelyn would not accept was the badly or carelessly written.

I think that now I can only read things that aren’t badly written. Sloppiness is what really gets me; and I think a lot of writers nowadays are very sloppy; they don’t do their research properly.

So Jocelyn developed her approach: reading widely; making her own assessments but open to influence; seeking out high quality but understanding the worth and pleasure in lower quality. This seemed to stand Jocelyn in good stead throughout her life.

… I didn’t read George Eliot until much later on; I came to ‘Middlemarch’ as a grown-up person. It’s a wonderful book, isn’t it? They’re very raw, some of those books by George Eliot.

…I still can read Arthur Ransome books. When I was laid low with a back injury two years ago. the thing I chose to read was Winter Holiday and I loved it and it took me back. It’s well-written and that’s the key, isn’t it?

I [chose Dracula for book group] and the men sort of withdrew in horror. A lot of them wouldn’t read it. It was quite interesting. The women mostly did. But I think it’s a marvelous book. I keep turning the pages to find out what’s next. I can’t believe it … It’s not even particularly well-written; it’s a most ridiculous story. So why are we fascinated with Dracula? I’m jolly glad I read it. [But the men] weren’t going to waste their time reading ‘rubbish’ … I said, ‘I know it’s rubbish.’

by Val Hewson

Read or listen to Jocelyn’s interview in full 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

Madeleine Doherty’s Reading Journey

Posted on September 19, 2015 by lizz

Madeleine was born in Sheffield in 1940 and grew up near the Botanical Gardens. She lived with her parents and her brother, who was four years older. Her father was an engineer. Her mother was French and Madeleine’s French grandmother also lived with them. After leaving school, Madeleine trained as a teacher. She married and had a family; her husband taught engineering.

Madeleine says of the house she grew up in:

…it was a house full of books,..a lot of them were my father’s engineering books, then there’d be my mother’s French books, and then there were my brother’s books.

Her early memories of books are of being read to but by the time she was eleven she was choosing books and reading them. From this time she remembers the Milly Molly Mandy stories, a French book called Les Malheurs de Sophie about a naughty girl, a weekly comic called Sunny Stories which came out on a Friday and a series of books, The Twins, about twins in different countries. Her favourite book was a beautifully illustrated edition of The Water Babies, which was a present from her father’s mother. Although she understood French and had French books read to her, she didn’t read any herself.

She used to go to the Children’s Library in Sheffield, first with her mother and later with her brother. He would also take her to the Saturday morning film shows at the Library Theatre. When she was a bit older, she would sometimes get the tram to Ecclesall Library but she always preferred the Central Library. She loved Enid Blyton and probably read them all. She read some of her brother’s books, for example, historical stories by G.A. Henty.

Later on school became important for Madeleine’s development as a reader. She went to grammar school and when she was about 14 had a form teacher who was also Head of English. She had a cupboard full of books which anyone could borrow. Madeleine identifies this as the point at which she became an avid reader.

I used to stay up reading half the night, you know. I’d not turn my light out but I read them too fast…

She read many classic novels at this time: Thackeray, Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, Mrs Gaskell. She read what was there and didn’t necessarily seek out other books by writers she liked; in fact she thinks that even now there are Dickens’ novels she hasn’t read. She remembers C.S. Forester and E.M. Forster from that time as well.

Another powerful memory for Madeleine comes from when she was about 17 or 18 and she was introduced to the novels of Charles Williams by the curate at her church. He ran a youth club after church on a Sunday evening which she went to with friends, though she was the only one who borrowed books. Madeleine doesn’t recall the titles of these books but she remembers clearly their compelling quality. She has sometimes looked for them since but has never found them.

…I was absolutely hooked on those books…I just read them one after the other. I probably had one a week, something like that.

Madeleine talks more about Williams than about any other writer and his books clearly had a great impact on her. He was one of the Inklings group of writers, along with Tolkein and C.S. Lewis. His novels are very difficult to categorize but are usually described as religious or supernatural thrillers. Each one features a conflict between good and evil, with powerfully drawn characters on either side. This conflict is played out in a world where the boundary between the everyday world and the spiritual world is porous, with certain characters able to move between the two. The atmosphere of the novels is uncanny and quite unmistakable.

During the 1950s, Madeleine’s family didn’t have a television though she used to watch it at friends’ houses. She remembers seeing Quatermass at a schoolfriend’s and thinking that she wanted to read it. Later on she got the book.

Madeleine went to Notts County Teacher Training College in Retford. She used to come home at weekends and collect books to read. She mentions 1984, Animal Farm and Brave New World and also the novels of Nevil Shute. Madeleine’s husband wasn’t a reader and after she was married and had children, she read less. Television had a big effect. She thinks that having one meant she read less, although sometimes it would lead her to read something, as with Quatermass. Watching a television version of a book is different from reading,

…television actually spoilt people’s reading. I still believe it now. I watch things and that’s giving you a picture…and it might not be what you would have thought if you had read it yourself.

Or if you have read the book first, ‘I watch it and I think, “That’s not what I read”.’

Madeleine also enjoyed reading poetry and ‘years and years ago’ had a hardback book into which she used to copy poems. She also learned some off by heart.

She does read more now, mostly books given to her by her daughter.

Read or listen to Madeleine’s interview in full here.

Note: reviews of three of Charles Williams’ novels can be found on Reading 1900-1950 and further information about his life and work from the Charles Williams Society.

Access Madeline’s transcript and audio here

The Enduring Appeal of Anne of Green Gables and L M Montgomery

Posted on September 16, 2015 by Val Hewson

Anne had brought her slate down on Gilbert’s head and cracked it – slate not head – clear across.

Gilbert Blythe was my first literary crush. I said this recently to a group of women, and got more than one nod of agreement. I first read Anne of Green Gables (1908) by L M Montgomery (1874-1942) because it was my mother’s favourite childhood book – she described her best times at school as the rare afternoons of ‘quiet reading’. When at about the age of ten, I found the ‘Anne book’ in my local library, I fell upon it. Over the next few years I probably borrowed it more than any other book. (It helped that, like Anne, I had red hair. I hated geometry too, although my mother suspected, unfairly, that I was just imitating Anne and could learn to love it if I tried. And then, of course, there was Gilbert.)

Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne Of Green Gables (Credit: Library and Archives Canada / C-011299)

I am not alone in my fondness for this book. Some of the Reading Sheffield interviewees remember it well. Dorothy (b. 1931) recalled:

My absolute passion was Anne of Green Gables…I adored all the series. If I had had a daughter…she would have been called Anne.

The hold of this remarkable book is as strong as ever. It is easily Maud Montgomery’s most popular story and remains in print after a century, with millions of copies sold in many languages. Prince Edward Island has a healthy Anne/L M Montgomery tourism industry. There have been around 20 film and television adaptations and related productions (the star of the 1934 movie, Dawn O’Day, even changed her name to Anne Shirley) and a new version is due in 2016, with no less than Martin Sheen playing the role of Matthew Cuthbert. The adventures of an orphan in rural, late 19c Canada apparently remain as enjoyable as ever, and Anne has retained her gift for friendship over the years.

For those who don’t know, Anne of Green Gables is the story of a young girl given a home by a brother and sister living on a farm on Prince Edward Island. What no-one knows as she arrives on the Island is that the orphanage made a mistake. The request was for a strong boy to help with farmwork, not an imaginative, sensitive, lonely chatterbox of a girl. Miss Marilla Cuthbert, who does not like her plans overset, intends to return her but is persuaded not to, and so Anne gets the home she needs and spinster Marilla and bachelor Matthew the child neither expected. Her adventures last for a further five books, well into adulthood, and include the incident quoted above, in which Gilbert, on first meeting Anne, unwisely pulls her hair and calls her ‘Carrots!’ She is, you see, very sensitive about the colour and longs for it to be a ‘handsome auburn’:

Oh I could endure anything if only I thought my hair would be a handsome auburn when I grew up. It would be so much easier to be good if one’s hair was a handsome auburn, don’t you think?

L M Montgomery, it is said, based her novel in part on a newspaper story about an orphan girl sent in error to a couple who wanted a boy. (Does anyone know what happened to the girl? I long to know.) But she also clearly drew on her own difficult childhood and later life. Unlike Anne, she was not orphaned as a baby, but did lose her mother very early and afterwards saw little of her father. She was brought up in a community like Avonlea by her maternal grandparents in an austere household. The Cuthberts and their Green Gables farmhouse were probably based on relatives living nearby (you can visit their house still). Maud had little money and worked as a teacher to fund university, although unlike Anne she did not complete her studies. Both married and lost children.

The real Green Gables (copyright Pam Gibson)

On the strength of this, it is easy to over-estimate the autobiographical element of Anne of Green Gables. I certainly assumed this as a child. But Anne Shirley and Maud Montgomery are not the same. Anne knows sadness but has, through Gilbert and her family, the security to help her overcome tragedy. Maud’s journals, published long after her death but with her permission, apparently show a troubled woman who had a difficult marriage with a depressive man, who lost a child and did not always get along with her surviving sons, all while living a very public life. It comes as a huge shock to the reader of the Anne books to learn that their author may have committed suicide in despair and weariness.

Anne is then not so much the real as the might-have-been-Maud, just as her other characters like Emily of New Moon and Jane of Lantern Hill appear to explore aspects of Maud’s life. Emily develops her writing talents and Jane eventually re-unites her estranged parents in a way Maud never could and is secure in their love.

Maud’s bedroom (copyright Pam Gibson)

For Maud, there was a long period in the critical wilderness (all those happy endings, all that folksiness and whimsy, all those adjectives…) but ordinary readers apparently always appreciated her. She created a secure, rural world based on the one in which she grew up (and possibly warmer and funnier than the real thing), which is enormously attractive. As are her spirited heroines, who are unusual, as heroines should be, but not so much so that we cannot identify with them. Thousands of girls probably wanted to be Anne and/or one of the others. I certainly did.

Maud Montgomery is not alone in this type of literature: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Jo March and her sisters, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Pollyanna and Katy Carr are all cousins of Anne (some more distant than others). But I think Anne has the edge over these others, even Jo and Laura. Through Anne, Maud remains more popular than other writers of her period and type, no matter what the critics thought or think. If you read them in childhood, there seems a good chance that you will remember them with affection in adulthood. As Reading Sheffield interviewee Florence Cowood (b. 1923) said: ‘I just liked the story and the struggle in [it].’

Did you read Anne of Green Gables or other books by L M Montgomery? Why do you think they remain popular?

By Val Hewson

Note: Anyone wanting to know more about L M Montgomery should read Mary H Rubio’s excellent biography, Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings (Anchor Canada, 2008), which made me think about the woman who created Anne Shirley. And the Lucy Maud Montgomery Research Centre at the University of Guelph is well worth visiting.

Dorothy Latham’s Reading Journey

Posted on September 16, 2015 by Val Hewson

Dorothy was born in 1931 in Catcliffe, between Rotherham and Sheffield, and grew up there, attending Woodhouse Grammar School. Dorothy became a civil servant, working in careers guidance and employment. She married Derek, who ran his own plumbing and heating business and they had two sons.

Even now I’m always reading, you know…

Always a passionate reader, Dorothy talked of reading in bed from childhood, on the bus to and from work and in the evenings while her husband pursued practical hobbies like joinery and repairing machinery.

I’d often, to be quite honest, read on the buses. I mean you had a long journey sometimes…I still try half an hour in the evenings before I go to sleep in bed. It relaxes me.

But she was conscious of her reading tastes and interests changing over time. ‘I think you alter as you get older on what you like.’

Dorothy’s reading habit was inherited from her mother. She recalled being told Rupert the Bear bedtime stories and then reading for herself: ‘…once I could read, you know, I just didn’t put them down’. This included, you sense, reading to cope with the disruption of the Second World War, when Dorothy remembered standing in her garden and watching Sheffield being bombed in the middle of the night.

The first book Dorothy really loved was the ever-popular Anne of Green Gables by L M Montgomery.

My absolute passion was Anne of Green Gables…I adored all the series. If I’d have had a daughter – which I didn’t. I had two sons – she would have been called Anne…I adored it, and I – I was just absorbed with it.

Within her family, books seemed to be a means of both enjoyment and self-improvement. ‘You know my mother was always encouraging me…in that kind of life.’ Dorothy was unusual in her village in winning a scholarship to Woodhouse Grammar School. There she was introduced, as children usually are, to Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and other classics. ‘It was always the English that I was good at.’ Meanwhile the war made buying books and much else difficult, and so Dorothy and her mother often borrowed from the private Red Circle library: ‘…I was brought up in an ordinary household but somehow I got the best’.

As she grew older, the reading habit grew stronger. Dorothy’s father was very protective of her, and she spent many evenings reading at home rather than going out.

It may sound strange but I was encouraged in…erm…I mean I never went out. I suppose I was too young in the war but I’d meet some people and they were out dancing and doing all that. Well my father wouldn’t have, he – he was very protective. You could say I missed it really.

Marriage did not stop Dorothy’s reading: ‘…when I got married I had to limit myself to what I did but I’ve always, always loved the reading’. Her husband and mother-in-law were not much interested in books (indeed she thinks her husband was dyslexic), but her father-in-law was, to borrow a phrase from Anne of Green Gables, a ‘kindred spirit’. He told her, for example, about finding a ‘wonderful book’ which she must read: Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca.

And you know, I’d discuss books with him and all sorts and you see my eldest son, his first memory of being taken to a library was being taken by his grandpa.

Dorothy sometimes made compromises between reading and looking after home and family:

…you know I thought I could just be a bit of a monkey and sit down and read and not get on with what I was doing. I mean my husband never bothered, I could have done what I wanted really. I mean you have to look after the children and things and I tried to look after my parents. So you’ve got to fit things in, haven’t you?’

Warwick Deeping’s Sorrell and Son was an example: ‘Oh, yes! Oh I thought that was fantastic. I found it…it absorbed me, yes it did. I didn’t want to put it down.’

By now L M Montgomery had been replaced in Dorothy’s favour by Emily and Charlotte Bronte. She liked Jane Eyre but her favourite was Wuthering Heights. ‘Soooo romantic and now I just think: “oh, not so much”.’ The past was always interesting. Dorothy liked history and so looked for classics like Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope and also lighter, historical novels by writers like Georgette Heyer, Margaret Irwin, Baroness Orczy and Jean Plaidy. But her reading was very wide. She happily quoted: Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, Margaret Mitchell, Catherine Cookson, Rosamund Pilcher, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, P D James, Ellis Peters, Edgar Wallace, Anthony Hope, Nicholas Monsarrat, Dennis Wheatley, Betty Neels, Arnold Bennett, A J Cronin, Nevil Shute, J B Priestley, Somerset Maugham and Howard Spring.

When it came to books vs television and/or film, Dorothy preferred books:

If I’ve read a book and it’s made into a film, I’m disappointed because your mind works with the book and when I read them, they don’t, they’re not the same…I’ve always felt let down… [Filmmakers] don’t go into the detail and I don’t think they realise that when you read your brain is working out and in your brain visually you are imagining the positions and the circumstances…

(Not that Dorothy disliked all adaptations: Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice and The Forsyte Saga all gave her a lot of enjoyment.)

Dorothy’s sight, hearing and mobility deteriorated as she got older and over time she relied more and more on the home library service and audiobooks. ‘I’ve been very grateful for that, very grateful.’ She let others choose her books but she would give feedback: ‘…sometimes I say “oh I did like that” and then they send me a lot, you know. Because I’m, I’m very choosey and they know exactly what I like’. This did get her into trouble once when a friend picked up a book from the library, which turned out to be more explicit than she usually read. ‘Phft do you like this stuff then?’ he said. Dorothy had to explain how the book had been chosen without her looking at it. Sadly she couldn’t recall the title or author, but she remembered it as ‘very, very embarrassing’.

This reliance on libraries throughout her life gave Dorothy strong views about their value.

‘I was so annoyed when I came here that they sold the library… I thought it was disgusting…and they said “Well, you can go into town” and I thought I’d come here because I was disabled and I thought no library! I thought that was a shame. I hope we don’t lose the libraries.’

After years and years of reading, did Dorothy re-read the favourite books of her youth?

I don’t know about Anne of Green Gables. I absolutely was besotted with it…and I mean now I don’t want to read it. Also I though Wuthering Heights was so romantic, I don’t anymore now, I don’t know, I think it’s a bit over the top. It doesn’t seem quite real. But as young person I was telling everyone that’s my favourite book. I must have been about 20, I don’t know. Yeah, that was my favourite and I don’t think it is anymore. I think you alter as you get older on what you like.

Asked if reading changed her life, Dorothy agreed.

…as I’ve got disabled, I have to say I’d be quite lost without my books because I have to fight against getting depressed. I’m not but…because of how I am, I’m not one for just needlessly sitting about like this. I like to be occupied…I’ve switched off from what I can’t do because I’m filling my life with things that I can and that may sound strange but it’s no good…I’ve reached a good age. I’m 80 in a month and, and I think “well, I’ve done quite well really”.

By Val Hewson

Access Dorothy’s transcript and audio here

Margaret’s Reading Journey

Posted on September 14, 2015 by Val Hewson

Margaret was born in Sheffield in 1936 and grew up during the Second World War and the late 1940s. She became a librarian in the town, married John and had three children.

The men in Margaret’s early life were both readers. During the Second World War, with her father in Egypt, Margaret and her mother moved in with her father’s parents in Walkley, a hillside of terraced houses that largely escaped the bombing of Sheffield city centre below.

When we lived with grandma and granddad, it was mainly granddad who encouraged me to read. He was an avid reader and anything that was printed, he always asked me to [read] even before I started school. Grandma also read books and granny had a collection of bound – you know, the classics …Dickens and so on. And he took the Daily Express and I was encouraged to read all the headlines to do with the war, you know, the advance of the Eighth Army and so on. Yes, at a young age I knew more names of towns in Egypt than in this country!

Margaret’s grandfather had had a variety of occupations.

He joined the army at a young age and he was a professional soldier. I think he was really self-educated all round. He was a professional musician; he played in the army band. And he was also a [fitness] instructor in the army. But he was always reading, and he had loads of books. The Conan Doyle books I went through, again, by the age of nine I’d read Sherlock Holmes and so on. And he had a couple of encyclopaedias, which absolutely I loved, and I still love to this day encyclopaedias and the knowledge you can get from them.

The desire to understand the unknown world of her absent father had a strong influence on the little girl.

I remember in the encyclopaedias there was a section on Arabic, writing the alphabet and so on, which I thought might come in useful with my father being out in Egypt and the Middle East. Of course, I didn’t see him from the age of four until he came back in 1946. And I can remember trying to teach myself to write Arabic. I guess I would have only about eight or nine, I think.

The encyclopaedias and the Conan Doyles were perhaps all the more important because during the war only one new book came into the house. But before and after the war Margaret got books as Sunday School prizes, for birthdays and at Christmas: for example, Milly, Molly, Mandy and Richmal Compton’s Just William – ‘I could laugh out loud with those’. A special visit would be from Margaret’s father’s sister to Walkley from Sheffield. ‘She was a maiden aunt and she encouraged reading.’

Margaret probably ran through Enid Blyton from Walkley Library, the only municipal library in Sheffield endowed by the Carnegie Foundation (Tinsley Library was also a Carnegie library, but was opened before Tinsley became part of Sheffield).

And we were allowed a comic each, my brother – I had a younger brother – and I. My brother had either the Beano or the Dandy and I had either Film Fun or Radio Fun. And when we finished with comics we used to swap them with friends and get something different.

When her father came home from Egypt, the family were rehoused in a house of their own but the library provision was a bit of a comedown.

When we moved onto the new estate at Parson Cross [a new Sheffield housing estate], there was nothing except houses. We had no shops, no schools. And eventually, when the school was built, we had – they opened a couple of evenings a week, I think – a couple of cupboards in the school room. And as far as I can remember, there were only adult books there.

However those adult books included copies of her father’s favourite, Zane Grey. Together she and her father devoured these tales of derring-do in the Wild West and Margaret went through ‘every possible Zane Grey book printed, at the age of eleven’.

When Margaret got a place at Ecclesfield Grammar School, she looked forward to new authors to explore but the school library always seemed to be locked.

There was a library, but for some reason we were never allowed in it! Only for occasional English lessons. So I still had to rely on the locked-up cupboards and the Zane Greys.

At school Margaret did come across Winifred Holtby and J B Priestley who both reflected a Yorkshire she recognised.

I think the two of them were sort of life as I knew it in Yorkshire at that time. A gritty existence, I think, true to life, realists.

Margaret became a librarian, one of the first at the state-of-the-art library opened in 1953 on the edge of another one of Sheffield’s enormous new council estates, the Manor. She had found her vocation.

I think in the branch library it was more of a family. … We were very, very efficient, we were well-taught and we were all very proud of what we did.

Librarianship, like her own personal reading, was all about discovery and opening doors to new worlds for other people to enter.

I think during the ‘50s I read things I would not read again. It’s like the Jacques Cousteau underwater books – I can’t even swim. But of course, in those days it was like going into space, it was something – the world under the sea was something all new and those fascinated me. I’ve never read romance books and historical novels and I still don’t read them, I’ve no interest in them.

When she and husband John had their family, they passed on their version of space travel. When their two sons were small, they bought them a secondhand set of Encyclopaedia Britannicas.

And we had to pay on a weekly subscription for these, we couldn’t afford to pay them outright. And my son, who’s now aged fifty, our second son, still has these Britannicas, [in a] proud place in his home, in his own library at home.

When I asked Margaret whether she ever tried to set limits on her sons’ reading, to steer them away from certain books, she quickly replied that nothing was off-limits.