Jean A’s reading journey

Posted on July 29, 2016 by Val Hewson

Sometimes we meet a Sheffield reader who has pin-bright memories of particular books, events, people. Jean A, who was born in 1930, is one of those readers. As she talks, we see the individual pictures painted with her words.

When she was very small, in the early 1930s, and lived in rural Lincolnshire, Jean went to a ‘dame school’, run by the wonderfully-named Mrs Storm:

My mother got tired of me sort of fidgeting about so she popped me in a pram and took me round to a kind of dame school. Sat round the table, there were about eight of us, writing, spelling, dancing, arithmetic.

On family visits to Sheffield:

… this was my father’s home town. Used to come up to Sheffield to see his father and all my aunts, and they read to me. They were maiden aunts so they had the time to read to me.

Later, when the family moved to Sheffield, Jean’s schooling at Greystones Infants was disrupted by World War II:

… the roof was damaged so we had to have one or two lessons in the secondary modern school next door for a short time, then we did home service when we used to congregate in other people’s houses. We had some children living in our attic, only a few of them … a family, if they could, they used to provide a room so we didn’t lose out on our teaching. So my mum offered our attic. It was a nice room up there, plenty of light. I think we had about four or five. … There would be different children in each house. … I could stay at home but we also had to go to the fishmonger’s up the road; he had a room to spare and I think Peak’s the Butcher’s had. So we didn’t just stay in my house.

There were Arthur Mee’s Children’s Newspaper and magazines every week:

Every Saturday we used to go to Greystones Rd. On [the] right hand side as you go up there are these fairly new houses. Well before they were built there was a little row of cottages. In one of them Mrs Dabbs, she used to sell papers and comics from a little house. I can remember getting Chick’s Own. Rainbow as well. She was a huge lady. She would sit on the table and it was covered with papers and comics and things. You had to pay for them of course. Oh Mrs Dabbs!

As Jean was growing up, she recalls doing ‘more reading because, the dark nights, you couldn’t go out to play. And no box. We listened a lot to the radio. It was a family thing.’ A case in point was The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy, read when she was about 15:

We went to the Children’s Library in the Central. I can remember going there … It was fine, lovely. I was a great reader. I can remember reading The Forsyte Saga when I was about 15, late at night. I was engrossed in it. … Oh I did [enjoy it]. I didn’t enjoy the latter end of it, the 1920s. I didn’t think it had the same gusto as the Victorian part.

When she left school, Jean wanted to do social work. She worked for a year for Sheffield Council Social Service, visiting families all over the city. Then she did a two-year social sciences course at the University of Sheffield. After qualifying, she worked with older people. In March 1953, Jean joined the Wrens, where she trained as a driver and ‘enjoyed the freedom’. Later, she married, had two children and returned to Sheffield.

You can read and listen to Jean’s full interview here.

Dorothy Norbury’s reading journey

Posted on July 18, 2016 by Val Hewson

The daughter of a newsagent, Dorothy Bagshaw was born on 11 January 1934 in Dinnington, near Sheffield. She married Malcolm Norbury in 1954 and had three children. The family lived in Dinnington until Malcolm joined the police force and the family had to move to Sheffield. Dorothy worked in her parents’ shop, then as a child care assistant in a school and, when she was 40, trained as a nursery nurse.

And we had to, obviously we had to read books for exams and things like that, but I never ever finished them. I found out in later years that I’m dyslexic. I didn’t know at the time, I mean it was a thing that was unheard of.

Dorothy might be described as a reader against the odds. Now she reads in bed, ‘probably for an hour every night’. She enjoys Catherine Cookson – she has read every one of her books – and similar writers of historical fiction:

I read, I like to read books that make you realise how lucky you are to be living at this time in life and not at the turn of the century when there was so much hardship. … Like, I didn’t realise that children used to run about without shoes and socks on. And they used to go gleaning in the coal, in the slag heaps and things like that. I didn’t realise anything like that until I actually read about it in novels. And I was just amazed, yeah.

As you listen, you realise that Dorothy’s reading journey has not been an easy one. She clearly liked stories from an early age:

I had a girlfriend that lived next door and we were born four days between each other. We grew up like sisters and we used to have sleepovers, and one of my greatest joys was to lay in bed with her while she read to me.

But her mother – ‘a very practical person … always busy doing something’ – made her feel that reading was a waste of time. When Dorothy was a child, her parents were ‘always very busy’, working long hours in their newsagent shop, and so they never read to their daughter. Dorothy describes herself as a ‘very poor reader’:

When I was in the junior school, the teacher used to pick out people to stand up and read from a book. And I used to stand and die if you picked me. Absolutely, because I was just … Apart from not being able to read very well, I just lost it, you know, my nerves.

This doesn’t mean that she never read. Dorothy liked comics like Girls’ Crystal and, when she was older, women’s magazines like Woman and Woman’s Own. She could get all of these from her parents’ shop. And there were some books:

The books that I got were from family. My favourite book which is going to be … is Christmas morning, I used to wake up and I used to have a Rupert book in my sack and it was the first thing I went for and I wasn’t bothered about anything else. I used to take a torch upstairs with me so I could read it in bed. And I used to read Rupert.

There were books at school too. ‘I did read books when I went to Maltby Grammar School.’ But Dorothy remembers not finishing them, with occasional exceptions like The Count of Monte Cristo. ‘Absolutely fascinated me, that did. I really loved that book.’ But Dorothy left school without qualifications. Although she passed the mock exam, a family illness prevented her taking the final School Certificate.

Dorothy did go to the local library, but with mixed results:

I started going to Dinnington library with that girlfriend of mine, Ena, when I was in my very early teens. But the books, I never read them because I found it so difficult to keep reading them. And when I came to live in Sheffield and I used to take the children to the library, my children to the library, and I took out … And the books I used to get then were gardening books or cookery books, or anything that was practical. I was not interested in novels then.

It was not until Dorothy was about 40 years old that she really began to read. This was when she enrolled at college to become a nursery nurse and had course books to study. She had been working at a school for ten years as an unqualified child care assistant, until ‘they would only employ people with qualifications, not that anybody said anything to me, but I decided to go back to college’.

It was her training that gave Dorothy the clue to her problem:

But going back to work at school with the children and seeing the people coming in and testing children, and I think, “Oh, that’s me. I do that and I do that.” And it made me realise that I was dyslexic, just slightly. Yeah.

‘Somebody should have picked up on this,’ Dorothy says, but no-one did.

You see, all those classics, I love the stories, but I haven’t got the patience to read them, even now. I have to read every word. I can’t skip read like other people do, you know. I have to go through it all. It takes me a while to go through a book.

You can read and listen to Dorothy’s interview here.

Frank Burgin’s reading journey

Posted on July 10, 2016 by Val Hewson

The only son of a miner and a onetime housemaid, Frank Burgin was born in 1938 in Mosborough, then a small pit village outside Sheffield. After leaving school, he worked in engineering, a job interrupted by two years of National Service. Later, when his work at Laycock Engineering became less satisfying, he worked as a technician at the University of Sheffield and, in time, taught in further and higher education in Sheffield. In recent years, Frank got his PhD.

The book was by Hemingway and Frank had not warmed to Hemingway, but it was no good. He still had to stand up and talk about it.

You were given a book you had to read before you went and then as part of the course you’d got to talk about it to the rest of the group.

Frank was not, as you might suppose, a student of literature in a tutorial, but a teenage apprentice at the Sheffield firm of Laycock Engineering in the 1950s. Laycocks is famous in automobile design for the Laycock de Normanville Overdrive, which Frank described as ‘what we had before they invented 5th gears in cars … quite a sophisticated piece of engineering’.

I started work at 15 as an apprentice at Laycock Engineering which of course is now Sainsbury’s at Millhouses. I still get a funny feeling when I go in there, when I see a bit of wall… that was the fitters… That was the tool room where I used to work. I still get the feeling that people must get when they walk down the street and find out that the house that they were born in has been knocked down… it’s become flats. You know, there’s a part of your life gone, and I’m a bit like that with Laycocks.

By the 1950s, the firm was part of the Birfield Industries group, and it seemed to be Birfield policy to bring together their apprentices at Goldicoates, a country house owned by the company.

It was a course. You had to go and learn how to talk to Brummies and people like that without fighting! It was all very posh catering, sort of thing, you went to breakfast with your jacket on.

And the Hemingway? Frank couldn’t remember the title but:

I talked about it. I presented it, I can remember doing it. I’m sure very, very hesitantly, and I wasn’t as articulate then as I am now but at least I didn’t sort of stand there tongue-tied and say aye, well it were crap, like some did.

Perhaps the reason Frank coped with the task was that he had long been a reader, enjoying ‘fairly escapist fiction … not particularly literary but they certainly had something’. (He still reads enthusiastically by the way – ‘bits of physics’ and sci fi and fantasy that is ‘totally and utterly zany’– and these days uses a Kindle.) Frank’s parents, who had only an elementary school education, were ‘habitual readers’ and saw books as a way for their young son to avoid the hardship they’d known during the ‘terrible economic times of the 1930s’.

Oh, I used to get all the time – look, lad, you’ve got to have some book larnin else you’ll get nowhere. He [Frank’s father] didn’t know what I’d got to learn, he knew that I’d got to be learning it from books … somewhere. And I was pushed and encouraged to do at well at school which I didn’t particularly.

In fact, Frank failed the important exam which in those days determined the type of secondary education he would get:

I failed part 1 of the 11 plus exam absolutely miserably of course, but nobody had ever done anything about preparing us for the 11 plus exam or even telling us that it was important.

This led, however, to his joining Laycocks, and one day finding himself talking about Hemingway to his fellow apprentices. The incident seemed to have a big – perhaps even life-changing – impact on Frank. Why, after all, did Birfield go to all the trouble?

… to get us away from the back page of the Star and things like that … No, it was all done to make us think. Some of us did think. It certainly woke up things in me that I didn’t know was [sic] there. I think it also made me think that perhaps there might be life beyond knocking very precise spots off big lumps of metal which I’d gone into engineering to do and was quite happy doing.

You can read and listen to Frank’s interview in full here.

Ted L’s Reading Journey

Posted on July 2, 2016 by Val Hewson

Ted L, born in 1919, was one of our oldest interviewees. He lived in the Norfolk Park area of Sheffield most of his life, apart from his war service as a fitter and machinist in the Ordnance Corps. He took part in the retreat from Dunkirk (he and three others were stranded for six days, with only a pot of marmalade and some cubed beetroot to eat) and then was stationed in East Africa for two and a half years. In peacetime, he worked in engineering, and the ‘only one romance [he] was ever interested in’ was with his wife, Nellie, whom he met at work and married in 1948.

All sorts of pictures in there, not just ordinary paintings, some of them extraordinary … We went to look at Leonardo … it was only dull light and there was two whacking great pictures, best paintings I have ever seen.

This was Ted, talking about a visit to the National Gallery. For him, books meant art rather than anything else. His flat was full of books, and they were mostly about art, noted the interviewer, although he also enjoyed history, architecture and music. His neighbour Gillian, who sat in on the interview, described how Ted ‘devour[ed]’ all the book she lent him, and Ted himself said:

Oh yes, I used to go to the library and get books out, not reading books, technical books. I don’t read fiction books. Never have done … I have always been interested in a subject … I can learn something.

There were books in his childhood, with Ted’s mother going to the library every week to borrow, among other, P G Wodehouse, and his father (‘He wasn’t educated. He was a working class man, he was a plumber’) enjoying detective stories. And Ted himself did read fiction as a boy – ‘ripping yarns’ from authors like John Buchan and Rider Haggard, who were so popular in his youth. He remembers studying Buchan’s Prester John at Duchess Road School and also reading Blanket of the Dark, She, The Thirty-Nine Steps and King Solomon’s Mines:

… that’s a brilliant thing, that. They made a film of it. I read a lot of them … I don’t think I would ever have imagined I would have been in Africa when I read a Rider Haggard book.

At school, Ted was a clever boy, particularly interested in history and once coming ‘top in English’:

Always in the top of form. I wasn’t an idiot like some of them. … We had a good teacher called Mr Cross. He was a Londoner with a broad accent. I didn’t know what a Londoner was in those days. He had posters all over the place, Cunard Liners stuck round [and brought in books]. He was the best teacher we ever had, Mr Cross. He didn’t spare you, I liked him for all that.

As with many boys of his background, Ted’s formal education ended at the age of 14 when he became an engineering apprentice. But by then it had opened that important door to art, as for two days a week he used to go to the art school in the centre of the city.

This art school was close to the site of the new Central Library and Graves Art Gallery which opened in 1934. Ted had a ringside seat at the building:

Thursday and Friday I used to go to an art school. And when we used to go out in the afternoon we used to watch them building the new library. … Then when I was at the art school and we used to watch the cranes, the big stones. Very interesting that was. I was with that library right from the beginning.

Ted, who liked architecture as well as art, was interested in the new library, which he describes as a ‘fine building’.

Well, I think, [the old library] was an old music hall and there was a little chapel next to it … and then the other side was the art school. … The old one was cramped. There were smaller rooms and these lines of shelves up all close together. Quite a lot of people all mugged up sort of thing. When this new one opened everything was beautiful and spacious, art gallery upstairs, and I think they’ve got a theatre underneath though I’ve never been in it.

Now, when he went to the public library, ‘I didn’t get reading [fiction] books. I used to get out books about art. ‘ He also enjoyed visiting the Graves:

I like the art gallery. I have been up there for all sorts of things. In fact there was a programme the other day about Lowry, the painter. Well he came there once, after it was built. I went one day and up in one of the galleries, there were lots of rows of little seats. There was a restaurant there and it was right next to that. … and I said to this girl, ‘What’s all this for?‘ She said, ‘It’s Mr Lowry coming to give a lecture for the children’. ‘Well I never stopped for that ‘cos I never knew when it was going to be, next morning I think. But that gallery next to it was full of his pictures. That was when I first got to know about Lowry, you know. I admired his work. There were these funny little characters in it. I think they’re fantastic. I’ve got one up there now. That’s Lowry up there [on the wall of his flat].

You can read and listen to Ted’s interview in full here.

The Reading Journey of Florence Cowood

Posted on June 28, 2016 by lizz

Florence was born in Huddersfield in 1923 and moved to Sheffield when her father got an engineering job there. Later her parents ran a greengrocer’s shop. The family lived in the Abbey Lane area; initially she attended a private school and then Abbey Lane Primary when it opened. She passed the eleven plus examination at the age of 10, and went to Abbeydale Girls’ Grammar School. At sixteen, after passing the School Certificate in English and Botany, she went to the Commercial College on Psalter Lane. In 1939 she left school aged 16 and got a job with the LNER, the London and North Eastern Railway. At the end of the war she married and gave up work.

Florence was always passionate about reading:

In fact, if I was ever naughty and I was sent to my room, my mother always made sure I hadn’t got a book because she knew it was no punishment if I had a book.

One of her earliest recollections is reading one of her grandmother’s books, Little Folks:

I read all sorts of bits out of it: school stories, adventure stories, little poems, letters from children who were stationed in India, letters to the editor.

Florence’s family encouraged her reading: her grandfather was a headmaster and bought her the books for grammar school. Her godmother was a teacher and gave her books for Christmas presents: ‘she once gave me a whole lot of Enid Blyton’.

Her mother also loved reading:

I’ve got some of my mother’s books that she had as a young woman … [Mary] Anerley, two volumes of The Count of Monte Cristo. Little Women and Good Wives, yes. That was my mother’s book.

Gone With the Wind was a present from her mother for her nineteenth birthday.

As a result of family circumstances, Florence spent a lot of time in libraries as she got older, especially in the Central Library :

‘That’s why I used to go to the library and that, because I think I was rather a solitary child, in that your parents are busy working. And I used, on a Saturday morning, I used to go down to the [Library]. Have a little trot around Woolworths by myself, get myself some sweeties. And I used to go to Central Library, get my library books, go up to the Art Gallery. I used to like to go up there to look at the pictures. And then I used to go down to the Reading Room. You could read all sorts of magazines down there, and I used to spend the whole day, you know, really, and then come home on the tram you know, and read my library books.

Probably another reason Florence spent so much time in libraries was that she did not see much of her school friends:

I had loads of friends, but in those days, when you went to a grammar school … People came from all over the city …So my best friend lived at Pitsmoor … another one lived out in Grindleford.

Reading was a private thing – Florence didn’t discuss her choice of books with anyone.

At school she read the familiar titles: Anne of Green Gables (she liked the struggle of the little girl); What Katy Did; Black Beauty (she loved horses); but as she got older, she graduated to more adult books. Elizabeth Goudge’s Green Dolphin Country was a present for Christmas 1944 and Florence still has her copy, which she bought herself, of Daphne du Maurier’s The King’s General. Others she borrowed from the library, like A Tree Grew in Brooklyn and all Nevil Shute’s books (except Requiem for a Wren).

She read Jane Eyre but

some of the older books, you know, like Jane Eyre, they can be a bit fulsome, if you know what I mean.

Florence had what would be considered a modern view of education – not one recognisable to Mr Squeers or Mr Gradgrind!

Knowledge and education isn’t knowing a whole load of facts. It’s knowing where to find the information you want. And I think a book is, to open a book and you find things out that you never knew before.

She read for pleasure not for self-improvement or because she thought she ought to read them:

I’ve got a full set of Dickens, but I haven’t read much of him. My godmother used to send me two or three every birthday, so I’ve got the full set. I didn’t really appreciate it… quite frankly, a lot of them bore me to death.

After school, as a girl, her opportunities were limited:

Well, you had a choice. You either went in a shop, or a hairdresser’s, or you went in an office. No, there wasn’t this business about going to university and this, that and the other.

She wanted to be a reporter and got a job on the local newspaper :

I worked in the publicity department with Gloops* and all that sort, you know. And then the war broke and … they closed the paper down … And my father said, ‘You have to get a job’ and I went to work for the North Eastern Railway.

Florence stayed there throughout the war as it was a reserved occupation and then married in 1946.

I worked there until I got married. And then I left, of course, when I got married.

However she still managed to keep on reading.

I did go on reading, but … I was occupied other ways then, you know, with cooking and all the rest of it you do when you’re married.

In some senses reading changed Florence’s life: she enjoyed reading about foreign places and travel which led to:

a love of wanting to explore, wanting to find out about things. I’m always interested in people, how people live…

Different books stimulated interest in different parts of the world:

Green Dolphin Country, gave me a yen for Australia -…You know, the other side of the world. I didn’t go to New Zealand, but I have been to Australia. … I used to like the Sundowners and all stories.

Her visit to South Africa was also stimulated by what she read.

The Valley of the Vines one gave me a yen for South Africa. I eventually went to South Africa and saw the Valley of the Vines… I always was interested in [South Africa], in particular around the Cape, the Cape district, and of course I went there, but it’s a long time ago now. Well, Nelson Mandela was still on Robbin Island and there was still apartheid. That was just after Sharpeville, I think

Florence was also a poet and painter – self-taught.

I went to the local art class … Well, my husband used to go fishing and I didn’t know what to do. And I didn’t particularly want to knit, and I decided I’d try and paint a picture and it went from there.

She was interested in books about shipwrecks and painted the wreck of the Royal Charter ‘… and that is mentioned in Dickens, in Uncommercial Traveler’. She used books for reference for both her painting and gardening.

The following is a fitting tribute to the power of books and to the zest for life which Florence showed so clearly:

This is my own bit of things, and I found it, I saw it in the library van once.

I’ve travelled the world twice over,

And met the famous saints and sinners,

Poets and artists, kings and queens,

All stars and hopeful beginners.

I’ve been where no one’s been before,

Drawn secrets from writers and cooks,

Always with a library ticket

To the wonderful world of books.

I would like to say that books have been me life, all me life, and without them, my life would be nothing like as good as it has been. Because books have been there.

Gloops was a cartoon cat who appeared from 1928 until the 1980s in the Sheffield Star. There was a Gloops club for children. Gloops was hugely popular.

Written by Sue Roe

Access Florence’s audio and transcript here

The Reading Journey of Edna B

Posted on May 30, 2016 by lizz

By Mary Grover

Edna was born in 1928. When she was a child her family were moved to a new estate, the Flower Estate, built in 1923 on High Wincobank. Billed as ‘dainty villas for well-paid artisans’, the houses had their own toilets and hot water – ‘it was’quite something’.

Edna passed the 11 plus and won a place at the City Grammar in the centre of town. She stayed till she was 16. Though her headmaster wanted her to stay on and encouraged her ambition to go into teaching, her parents could not afford it. She could have got a grant from the old pupils’ association, the Holly Guild, but she would have had to pay it back. When female teachers got married they lost their jobs. It was ‘a deterrent’ to taking on such a large debt.

Edna was conscious of how hard both her parents worked to support the children. On Saturday afternoons her father used to walk her down through the allotments to Firth Park Library. The first book she remembers reading, probably when she was about six, was Little Anne of Canada.

It was illustrated, this book, and this girl must’ve lived in Alaska, probably, and I was fascinated by this story and we seemed to get it out several times ‘cos I liked it.

Edna’s father’s mother couldn’t read and write and he was always conscious of what an education would do.

Well, to even read. I mean, he could read and write, but I don’t think he ever sat down and read books.

Edna’s mother’s family had had both money and educational opportunities. Though her mother was unable to pursue her own education she loved reading and came from a family who talked about politics.

They’d got smatterings of culture I’d say. I remember I went to me father’s mother’s and they read these trashy magazines and me mother said, ‘Don’t be reading those’. Now Woman’s Weekly and Woman’s Illustrated were a little bit more posh.

It was from her mother that Edna developed her taste for the novels of Ethel M Dell – ‘They were all tragedies, weren’t they?’

Yes, and I remember standing at Firth Park bus stop waiting for a bus from school and I was reading this Ethel M Dell stood at the bus stop. He said, “Do you like those?” I said, “Oh, I love them”, but I’d only be about 12 or 13 and he was an elderly man. And when I look back I think well there was a tragedy on every page!

Edna thinks her mother would have been lent these books by a friend. The only books Edna’ parents owned were her father’s Sunday School prizes. Though her mother read, she never had time to go to the library. In the depression Edna’s mother went out cleaning and then in the Second World War she got some office work. Indoors she was always knitting and sewing. ‘She was ever so industrious.’

When I was at Junior school I had a very far-seeing teacher and she had a little library and we used to borrow those books from her bookshelf. We were supposed to write a little commentary about what we thought but I can’t remember doing it. But they’d have Swallows and Amazons, William books and those sorts of books … Anne of Green Gables and the Dimsie books.

When she won a place at the Central Grammar School, Edna became conscious of the opportunities she and her family had not had. Her friend’s father was a policeman.

They seemed to live in luxury compared to us. They got their rent paid and things like that. Her mother had got time to go to the library and things like that. But, I mean, we had standards, and me mother was a bit [pause] she liked us to speak properly and we always said Grace, you know, and we went to Sunday school, and er, she was a believer, but she, we weren’t, well, she hadn’t time, but they did go on High Days and Holidays.

Edna’s grammar school was round the corner from the Central Library at the top of which was the Graves Art Gallery. ‘We took our sandwiches in there! Well, you got away from school, you see.’

Then, when Edna was married, in her twenties, she found herself in the Derbyshire countryside, a mile from the nearest bus-stop so her reading became dependent on the mobile library: James Thurber, books on antiques – ‘I hadn’t a hope of having an antique!’ Then her sister joined a book club and passed on the thrillers she had bought. She immersed herself in whatever she read. One day her husband came home and found her in tears.

And he said “Who’s upset you? Who’s upset you?” I said, “That little dog’s died”. You know I really lived it! I lived it!

One of the books that has remained with her all her life is Thomas Armstrong’s Crowthers of Bankdam set in the wool mills of West Yorkshire.

You can’t call it trashy, but a bit earthy. The boys played rugby. I mean, as opposed to football. They were middle class people, you know. The girls would have a reasonable education and perhaps went to boarding school but they were, hierarchy, and it was a series. You could follow them on.

Though she enjoyed J.B. Priestley and Arnold Bennett in the early fifties, it was in the sixties, when the family returned to Sheffield, that Edna went to Richmond College and developed reading tastes for some of the authors on her A level literature course: Graham Greene, Gorky and Steinbeck – ‘The Grapes of Wrath, I adored that’. Less to her taste was James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist: ‘it was so repressed’. This was the only time in Edna’s life that she regularly bought books for herself. When she was a girl she might buy secondhand books from a stall in Norfolk Market or the Girls’ Crystal from the local newsagent, but apart from her college days Edna relied either on libraries or friends for her books. Her college courses changed more than her book-buying habits. When Edna enrolled for her social science course her mother ‘went mad’.

‘ You’ve had three children and there you are going to college!’ I thought mother, ‘I’m nearly going out of my head here’. It was a life saver going up there.

You can access Edna’s audio and transcript here

Peter Mason’s Reading Journey

Posted on May 1, 2016 by Mary Grover

Peter Mason was born on the 29^th September, 1929 and grew up in Handsworth, on the east side of Sheffield. He spent his adult life as an educational administrator. He went to High Storrs Grammar School and Sheffield University where he studied politics and administration. He did two years National Service between 1947 and 1949. His father was a mining engineer who had worked in India in the early 1920s.

Peter’s reading was, from the very beginning, a family affair:

My brother used to encourage me to read because he was six years older than I was so the books he finished he passed to me, but my parents were avid readers … and my uncle and aunt. … Later on in life as my uncle was blind and my aunt used to have Braille books that she read to him. I was encouraged to read to him; I would read the newspaper to him or something like that.

Once he got going, Peter quickly graduated from Enid Blyton, Just William and Biggles to C.S. Forester’s naval adventures and Rider Haggard’s African fantasies.

During the Blitz, in 1941, many of Sheffield’s schools were closed for a time and pupils were sent to a teacher’s home to learn. Pupils were given books to take away and read on their own. Though this only lasted a few months it helped Peter become a confident and independent reader.

During the war, while Peter was at High Storrs Grammar School, he was using the school library as well as the Central Library intown. He studied Joseph Conrad and G. B. Shaw at school, read most of Charles Dickens and particularly enjoyed Thomas Hardy. His aunt supplied some of the twentieth century bestsellers, including James Hilton’s Lost Horizon and A.E.W. Mason’s cautionary tale about manliness The Four Feathers.

As a teenager Peter read partly to understand his place in the world: first, books about Yorkshire in particular, followed by histories of the United Kingdom then, encouraged by his uncle, books connected with the International Labour Party, frowned on by his parents. In his teens his interest in the current political situation was obviously fuelled by the fact that his country was at war. Peter still seeks to understand the world through reading histories, biographies and political autobiographies.

Many of the volumes in Peter’s extensive library were given to him as presents. During his two years in the forces, he was sent books and magazines, chosen to distract him from rather than engage him with the present. No doubt the ‘rather blue’ novels that circulated in the NAAFI served the same purpose. While Peter was on his military service in his late teens, he found many of his fellow conscripts could neither read nor write. One young man had been faced with a choice of prison or military service; Peter helped him write letters home and read the replies. Peter was full of praise for the military education service.

The forces not only introduced Peter to men for whom books were unavailable; it also introduced him to a new kind of recreational fiction: American genre fiction by Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Eric Williams’ The Wooden Horse was a great favourite with his fellow soldiers. After the war he admired The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat. He links the satisfaction such stories give him, the sense that good will triumph over evil, to his religious faith. However, Peter’s curiosity compels him to keep looking for a book that will overturn his expectations: ‘I’ve always been waiting to read a really good book where evil triumphs over good but I’ve not got that far yet.’

He is sensitive to the unsettling qualities he perceives in Jane Austen’s novels:

I thought she was great, but to me there was always a darkness about Jane Austen. In a way, I was being drawn into her world, which was fair enough and what she should do as an author, but I wasn’t happy about it if you know what I mean. There was a bit of misery attached to her work but, don’t get me wrong, she was a great author.

But Peter’s first choice has always been fact rather than fiction. Both his father and his uncle urged him to read newspapers, which he still ‘devours’ and which offer him models for his own writing. Reading is what he does to relax: on holiday, in bed and while his wife watched television he would move to another room to concentrate on his book (sometimes one of his wife’s Georgette Heyers that he ‘sneaked’ a look at).

Peter’s reading has made him ‘an inveterate letter writer’. ‘The only way you can write correctly is if you are expressing your feelings.’ It has also made him an inveterate book buyer: Penguin books ‘by the bucket-load’ from W.H. Smith, a few from newsagents

I did like to go around antiquarian bookshops and see what they’d got. Old books used to fascinate me; if nothing else the writing used to get me but I never kept any of those I must admit, I used to part with them.

Though Peter describes himself ‘disappearing into a book’, whether it be detective novels or P. G. Wodehouse’s comedies about that ‘lovable idiot’, it is clear that he also reads to connect with others (his grandchildren for example) and with new developments in the world (computer technology being a recent interest). ‘I like to read about the new things that are coming on the block’.

I like to read about life in general because I think it’s important that I know how the other half live, whether it’s the other half that are extremely wealthy or the other which are extremely poor, because I think it’s part of my duty to know exactly where they are.

Though Peter usually reads for a purpose he is adamant that he never reads a book because someone tells him that he should.

I’m not led. I’m not led by convention. I read what I want to read. If somebody tells me I’ve got to read it then my instant attitude is, ‘No, I don’t want to read it’. I want to read because I want to read and I choose what I want to read. I don’t now read anything because I consider that it’s not my views because I feel that I should embrace everybody’s views so I know what they’re thinking as well as what I’m thinking.

You can read and listen to Peter’s interview in full here.

Judith G’s reading journey

Posted on April 19, 2016 by Val Hewson

The third of five children, Judith was born in May 1939. As a child, she lived off Ecclesall Road in Sheffield. Although she passed the 11 plus, her parents could not afford grammar school, and so she went to Greystones Secondary School and left after O Levels. Judith tells two stories in her interview: her own and her mother’s. Judith’s mother loved reading and shared this with her daughter. ‘I just took to it because my mother read a lot.’

The first library in Judith’s life was the private Red Circle at the bottom of the Moor. Her mum used to borrow ‘what they called “bodice-rippers”, romantic novels and stuff’ every week. ‘I think it cost tuppence a week, or every time you took a book out or fourpence – something like that.’* Then her mum joined the public library and Judith went along too, to the imposing Central Library in Surrey Street. ‘I thought at first she wouldn’t be allowed in that one, you know, and then of course once she got there, there were more books than she could … and it was free as well.’ In those days, the public library service in Sheffield, under City Librarian Joseph Lamb, was rapidly becoming one of the best in the country, with a reputation for responding to the interests and needs of its members.

From before she left junior school, Judith was allowed to go alone to the central children’s library. She recalls joining with her friend Sheila:

… she wanted to join the library and we ran up all the way up there after school and my mother played pop with me because she didn’t know where we were. Her name was Sheila Thompson … and I said, “If you come with me, we can come and join.” … They gave you a little round ticket which you kept and slotted the book’s name in that, God, I remember that.

Judith spent a lot of time in the children’s library. For her, it meant not only interesting books, but also warmth and peace ‘until they closed at five o’clock’:

I used to bring books home, but on a Saturday afternoon I’m afraid I spent a lot of time in that children’s library because you could sit there with any book you liked, encyclopaedias, because at home it was, you know, hustle and bustle, we didn’t have much because we had no money and there weren’t a television in those days, this is the ’50s, coming up to the ’50s, and I just used to go to the library for a bit of peace on my own. Because there was four of us and my grandmother and father and mother all rattling round one house …

The children’s librarian was Mrs Scott, who sounds formidable. Young borrowers’ behaviour was expected to meet the standards of the day.

She was really nice, you know, because in those days you couldn’t run around like they do nowadays, you had to sit reading quietly … she was quite stern, you know, you couldn’t racket round – mind you, nobody did in those days.

Having joined, Judith ‘read and read’.

I think it was my Aunty Marjorie, she used to say, “Doesn’t that child do anything? She’s always got her nose in a book.” And “What’s the matter with you, child, why don’t you go out to play?”

A book which made a lasting impression was Joey and the Greenwings#, ‘about this young boy and these things that came from outer space or something’. Almost 70 years later, the memory is strong:

Dear Lord, how your memory comes back! There was a little song in it about this little lost chick. What was it? Little lost chick sang cheep in the night, cheep in the night, and the moon stretched her arms out shiny and bright, to the little lost chick that sang cheep in the night!

In time Judith moved up to the adult library. ‘ … you’d go in there and think, you know, posh.’ Books by popular authors of the day like Georgette Heyer, Mazo de la Roche, Rider Haggard, Mary Webb, Conan Doyle and John Buchan drew her in, although she got into trouble with Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber. Her mum used to ‘keep an eye on what I read’ and ‘made me take it back – she thought it was a bit racy! And it wasn’t.’ (Judith has less happy memories, as many of us do, of her set texts, like Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth, ‘the most dreary book I’ve ever read’.)

Over 60 years later, Judith remains a keen member of the public library. In this, she is like her mother, who in old age ‘used to come in with four or five books’ from Highfield Branch Library. In her turn, Judith has influenced her daughter, Lindsey, who works in a bookshop and has #enough books to start a library’. In fact, you can trace reading through four generations: from Lindsey, through Judith and her sister who talk together about books, to their mother and even their grandmother who was ‘always on about books and that, she’d been well educated’.

Two readers – Judith and her mum

‘It’s interesting, isn’t it, how libraries are places where people feel comfortable,’ says our interviewer. Judith agrees. These days she goes to the Ecclesall branch, but still occasionally visits the Central Library:

It still is the biggest library, isn’t it? And plus, the fact it has all the other things, you know, the reference library and the art gallery and whatnot. Because we used to go and have a cup of tea up there and look around the art things, and I used to think, “This is fantastic, it’s free, it’s a public library …” that was the whole point of going there. And … when they have an open day, and I’ve been down in the bowels where all the old books are – you might find my Joey and the Greenwings down in that bottom bit!

Sheffield Central Library, opened in 1934, not long after the establishment of SINTO

* Tuppence (2d) and fourpence (4d) are roughly equivalent to 1p and 2p, but worth about £1 to £2 today.

# Joey and the Greenwings (1943), by Augustus Muir

Judith’s mum’s reading journey

Posted on March 1, 2016 by Val Hewson

Our interviewee Judith G was born on 5 May 1939. In her interview (which you can read here), Judith reveals not only her own reading journey but also, at one remove, her mother’s. It was while she accompanied her mother on her reading journey that Judith started her own: ‘I just took to it because my mother read a lot.’

Here is Judith’s mum’s story.

Judith’s mother was born in Sheffield around 1906. She married a much older, ‘aloof’ husband who had been married twice before and who worked as a joiner at Chesterman’s Bow Works off Ecclesall Road*. They had five children, one of whom died as a baby. In time, Judith’s ‘demanding’ grandmother came to live with the family. There was little money for luxuries in a working-class area during the war and the austerity that followed. ‘I think she took to the libraries as an escape from looking after us and, you know, not having much.’ There were some books and newspapers at home, and when Judith’s grandmother came to stay, she ‘was always on about books and that, she’d been well educated’.

Judith’s mother ‘started with the private Red Circle Library’ between Ecclesall Road and the Moor, with its books ‘written for somebody who didn’t want … you know, stir your brain kind of thing’. We have no titles or authors, but she liked ‘what they called “bodice-rippers”, romantic novels and stuff’ and used to go to the Red Circle every week:

… my mother used to walk me down there I think just to get me out of the house and give her a break from four kids and my father … I can still see it with the red circle on the front and it was just like two shop windows with books in. Circulating library they called it, which I think is a lovely name. I always used to think it might revolve! … I think it cost tuppence a week, or every time you took a book out or fourpence – something like that.

Although she is pretty sure that her mother never borrowed it, Judith vividly remembers one particular book cover:

… there was a skull and there were pearls rolling down its face – I must have been a macabre child! – and it was called Devil’s Tears and that’s stuck in my mind for 60-odd years.#

Then Judith’s mother

decided to join the library, the big library in town, the main library. Because my mother was quite timid and I thought at first she wouldn’t be allowed in that one, you know, and then of course once she got there, there were more books than she could … and it was free as well.

Sheffield Central Library, opened in 1934, not long after the establishment of SINTO

This was Sheffield’s Central Library on Surrey Street, opened about 15 years earlier and then recovering from wartime privations.

Judith’s mum found pleasure in reading all her life. When she was older and lived in Sharrow Vale, she used to go to local Highfield Library.

I can still see her, she used to come in with four or five books, and … she still used to toddle up and down to the library, which was not far from her in those days, with those books. Because she used to say, “Oh, they were ever so nice at Highfield Library.” At Christmas they used to give them a cup of tea and a mince pie.

Highfield Branch Library

Looking back, Judith understands her mother. She never talked much about how she met her much older husband, but ‘no, I don’t think that mum, bless her, had a good marriage’. Books were:

… the only sort of rest she got from the lot of us. Don’t forget, my grandmother lived with us, she died when I was fifteen, and she was always demanding, my poor old mother was easily … cowed, shall we say?

Oh yes, [escape’s] what I think it was. She’d not much in her home, kind of thing, apart from keeping us four in check, and I think that’s it, she sort of buried her face in books.

* The splendid Bow Works are now occupied by Aviva Insurance.

# We think that this book might have been Edgar Hale’s Devil’s Tears (1946), although the cover shows a face rather than a skull. You can see the cover here.

Jean W’s Reading Journey

Posted on February 26, 2016 by lizz

Jean was born in 1933 and grew up in Sheffield. After leaving High Storrs School she married and had a family. Later on she trained as a teacher of English and French.

Jean’s recollection is that when she was small her parents were very busy and therefore didn’t read to her much. However, she still became an enthusiastic reader.

I learnt to read when I was… I think five, almost as soon as I started school, and got very bored because there wasn’t any stimulation in school.

So at the age of seven she joined the Children’s Library in Sheffield and from then on made weekly trips in search of suitable books. In addition her parents bought her Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia, ‘all twelve volumes which I devoured.’Also from that time Jean remembers Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Hans Christian Anderson.

The library trip was very important. Jean and a friend would go into town for music lessons and then go to the library and also to Andrew’s, a shop in Holly Street which had a lot of children’s books. They saved their pocket money and bought books which they shared.

Jean Wolfendale at High Storrs School 1950

Once at High Storrs School she began to read classics like Walter Scott and Jane Austen as well as lighter books, such as The Forsyte Saga, Little Women, W.E Johns’ Biggles books and Malcolm Saville. She remembers getting from the library all Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna novels,

I absolutely loved them. I couldn’t wait to find the next one in the series from the library.

She also read Hugh Walpole and some Dickens and began to move towards adult books. She recalls enjoying the novels of Frances Parkinson Keyes, ‘very meaty, very long novels’. Also Dornford Yates whose books she found ‘screamingly funny’.

I shouldn’t find them funny now but I did then…I used to annoy my parents by sitting in the corner and laughing at the books and they couldn’t understand why. They were fascinating.

Jean’s parents always encouraged her reading and as she puts it

The only other thing to do in the evenings,apart from school work,was to listen to the radio, which obviously we did as a family, but, yes reading was very much encouraged.

The Red Circle Library on Snig Hill,which Jean’s mother belonged to was another important source of books. This stocked popular fiction,such as crime fiction and westerns, not found in the public libraries. By contrast Jean described the latter as ‘very much more erudite’. She read widely and was aware of reading both high- and low-brow books. School was a

very, very strong influence and it was very much, ‘Children, girls, you must read uplifting books’..we were very much discouraged from having, for instance, comics or anything like that. I had something called Girl’s Crystal which was quite a decent comic but you couldn’t possibly have mentioned that in school because that wasn’t the done thing as it were.

She remembers Geoffrey Thorne for light reading and John Buchan, who was seen as ‘more approved of,much more literary’.She and her father shared a liking for Nevil Shute’s books. He also liked Denis Wheatley’s novels but didn’t think they were suitable for Jean; however, she read them on the quiet.

She enjoyed historical fiction, for example, Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, D.K.Broster and Anya Seton.She tried Georgette Heyer and Jean Plaidy but didn’t particularly enjoy them.She has fond memories of A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley, ‘That was one that absolutely fascinated me as an early teenager.’

But she devoured all kinds of literature. She belongs now to a group of ex-teachers who swap and talk about books. Of the importance of reading to her, she says,

I can’t imagine a life without it and in fact at the moment I’m beginning to have some trouble with my eyes and I can’t read for long and that is a real hurt, you know.