"My earliest reading memory Sitting on the sofa with my mum reading Mabel the Whale by Patricia King, with beautiful colour illustrations by Katherine Evans. I think it was pre-school. My mother was not always a patient teacher, and I was often a slow learner, but the scene, the tableaux, in memory, has the serenity of an icon. My favourite book growing up Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth."
"One of the places I remember reading it is in bed with my dad. On Sunday mornings my brother and I would climb into the big bed. My parents had long since split up. There was a picture on the wall, a modest reproduction of Velazquez's Rokeby Venus. To me, this voluptuous woman gazing at herself in a mirror was my mother. It's interesting to me how the setting in which you read is such an integral part of the reading experience."
"The end of the summer term at school, there was an outdoor production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. I was Cobweb, one of Titania's fairy servants. The play was performed at dusk. All around us, Wiltshire fields and Wiltshire woodland. The atmosphere poured into me: two worlds touching; the overwhelming richness of the language. No doubt the feeling was partly shaped by anticipation of the long holiday."
Earliest reading memory: sitting on the sofa with my mum reading Mabel the Whale by Patricia King, illustrated by Katherine Evans, probably pre-school. My mother was often an impatient teacher and I was a slow learner, but the scene retains a serene, iconic quality. Favourite childhood book was Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth, often read in bed with my father after my parents split, with a reproduction of Velazquez's Rokeby Venus on the wall. A theatrical experience at age twelve performing as Cobweb in A Midsummer Night's Dream at dusk in Wiltshire produced an intoxicating sense of language and atmosphere. Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus influenced thinking at eighteen.
#childhood-reading #family-and-memory #roman-britain-fiction #theatre-experience #existential-philosophy
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