Wynne’s reading journey

Posted on February 25, 2016 by Val Hewson

Wynne was born in 1919, making her one of our oldest interviewees. She lived all her life around Sheffield’s Ecclesall Road area. She married a man from Newcastle and they had two daughters, Joan and Anne, and a son, Richard. With the exception of Richard, who was ‘more for enjoying the outdoor life’, everyone in the family loved books.

Wynne’s niece Diane Haswell, who sat in on the interview, said later:

[Auntie Wynne] says throughout the interview how little she could remember especially of authors’ names and titles, which is to be expected. However, as my dear godmother, she never missed a birthday or Christmas gift for me, and it was always books or book tokens and [she] always wanted to know what the books had been about and discuss them with me. Hugely supportive too when I was a student and started teaching in the ‘60s. She was very interested to know what I’d been reading to the children and later to my own.

Wynne, interviewed at the age of 92, had forgotten lots of the books and authors she had read. But it didn’t bother her. What she did remember was the pleasure reading had given, and was still giving, her (by 2011, she had taken happily to reading in bed). ‘Oh I always say I’d hate to go blind and can’t read,’ she said.

Wynne supposed that she learned to read at school, but had no clear memory of that, or of anyone reading aloud to her. But no-one ever seemed to suggest that reading was a waste of time and so somehow the habit developed, and got stronger over time. The first type of material that came to mind during the interview was not in fact a book, but a popular magazine. The stalwart People’s Friend was a favourite for both its ‘proper stories’ and its strong roots in Scotland, in which Wynne was interested. Wynne recalled enjoying the serials and short stories in such magazines in the early years of her marriage, reading them at the table, which was ‘naughty’:

I think probably it might have been a case of enjoying that more because they were short stories, not a full story or book.

The People’s Friend today, not so very different from the days when Wynne enjoyed it.

Is this evidence of how much work was involved in looking after a home and young children when washer-driers, dishwashers and ready meals were pretty much unknown? Perhaps.

Wynne used to take her children to the Ecclesall branch library, then called Weetwood, when they were small, ‘because both Joan and Anne loved reading, wanted to read all the time’. She didn’t remember getting books for herself, but the library building made a lasting impression on her, as it did on others. It was a rather grand house in beautiful gardens, which had been sold to the Council and converted to library use in 1949, as part of a major post-war programme to extend library services in Sheffield.

This early investment in Joan’s and Anne’s reading paid long-term benefits. In time, they came to support their mother’s reading, just as she had supported theirs.

It might have been my daughters who eventually said, “We’ve been reading a book, you might enjoy it. We’ll give it you and if you like it fair enough and if you don’t, don’t bother.”

Joan would take charge of Wynne’s birthday and Christmas lists, ensuring that she got presents of books she would like, and Wynne, Joan and Anne shared books and chatted about them:

No, more or less we have the same [taste in books], apart from Anne … I can’t think of the author, there’s one book and she says, ‘I don’t read hers’ but Joan and I love them and Anne says, ‘Oh, I can’t read hers,’ and I can’t think of who it is.

One result of this little family book group was that Wynne’s tastes developed. She recalled a series of books about early settlers in Australia, where she had relatives, and another book about the horrors of workhouses:

[At school] I hated history, but since reading some of these books which are historical so there [is] a bit of truth in a lot [of] them, I have really enjoyed them and enjoyed historical things more.

Books beat television, in Wynne’s opinion:

… television’s all right but it seems to have taken over with the children. Sit them in a chair and put in front of the television. I don’t agree with a lot of that. I mean I know you say, ‘You can’t stop progress,’ but a lot of it’s not for the good.

Whereas reading:

sinks more, sinks more in my mind. The only problem is that after a while I forget even it. But I can’t do anything about that.

By way of example, there was Jung Chang’s 1991 memoir, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China:

I can’t remember the years when it happened but when I read it, I said, ‘But this was in my lifetime and I don’t remember a thing about that happening’ – this book just astounded me. … I still think about it, that book.

You can read Wynne’s full interview or listen to it here.

A very local library

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Val Hewson

When she sat in on the interview of her aunt Wynne Wilson, Diane Haswell contributed an interesting story about an unusual private library in Sheffield in the 1950s. You can read Wynne’s story here.

Diane Haswell was born in 1947. As a small child she lived off Rustlings Road near Endcliffe Park in Sheffield. She remembers unusual competition for the public library service – a very local library run by a man called Smith, from a back room in his house which was, she thought, somewhere around Louth, Peveril or Ranby Roads.

Well, I can remember … going to a man’s house and I think he was called Mr Smith and in one back room there was a treasure trove of books and I could pick three books as a young child and my mother picked three books and she also picked three books for her husband, my father.

And he stocked all the Enid Blyton books and things like that. I think that was why it was so popular in the ‘50s so we had that for about ten years so we didn’t go to another library apart from school.

Diane’s memory is pretty good. Kelly’s Directories between 1951 and 1965 record ‘Frederick R. Smith, library’, based at 30 Blair Athol Road, near Rustlings Road.

Here is the house from which Mr Smith ran his library.

How did Frederick R Smith’s enterprising library work? Although Diane doesn’t remember money changing hands, she thinks there was a subscription fee – ‘my mother must have paid’. The loan period was a fortnight. Subscribers had their own codes which were written in the front of each book they borrowed, with the result that there was a record of what they had read. Even though it is over 60 years ago, Diane still remembers that her family code was 33 S, because they lived at 33 Stainton Road. Presumably the ‘librarian’ kept a list of who had borrowed what and when. Reading this, you wonder how often, and with what, Mr Smith refreshed his stock.

At all events, the library was well-used for years.

… we sometimes had to stand in a queue before we got to the living room, taking the old books back and pick[ing] up the new and sometime there were queues of people outside the front door so it must have been a popular venue and a source of books.

Just like the public library, Mr Smith developed his own mobile service. When Diane’s family moved seven miles away to the Handsworth district in 1952, Mr Smith’s son, Eric, used to come round in a small van, ‘which [Diane] can picture now’. He would open this up to reveal a selection of books. Despite the change of address, the family kept their 33 S code, which Diane ‘thought was strange’. Soon the library ‘took off in [our] little neighbourhood and [my] mother’s neighbours used to borrow these books’.

Mr Smith’s home-made library seems to have been popular despite Ecclesall branch library and the Central Library, both of which were nearby and free to use. Ecclesall had opened in October 1949 at the bottom of Knowle Lane (about a mile away from Diane’s childhood home) and became one of the busiest branches. The Central Library was less than three miles away in Surrey Street, on a good tram route. Of course, at this remove, we have no notion of the scale of Mr Smith’s library, but perhaps it was popular because it was so very local and therefore easy for busy families. Maybe its casual nature was also attractive, although Sheffield Libraries was informal in terms of layout, rules etc, especially in its children’s libraries.

Sheffield Central Library, Junior Library

In fact, in time, Diane did use the Central Library with its comparatively vast resources:

As soon as I was eight, I was allowed to catch a bus into town and go to the Central Library which I thought was wonderful, just to have a thousand books rather than perhaps fifty to choose from. But I think that it was significant, the Central Library in Sheffield. I know a lot of people went to that rather than a local library.

But the start of Diane’s reading journey was in a small, private enterprise patronised by her whole family:

… in one back room there was a treasure trove of books and I could pick three books as a young child … those three books were so important to me.

[Mr Smith’s library] really did set me and my parents on the path to avid reading. If my father read authors such as Nevil Shute and Nicholas Monsarrat then so did I and I was still at primary school. But then of course my father and I could discuss the stories afterwards, which I loved.

Perhaps this sort of amateur library will come back into being, as public libraries are forced to close, or at best reduce their opening hours.

Does anyone else remember Mr Smith’s library, or anything similar? Please let us know.

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.’