My mother taught me to read from a book she borrowed from the St Johns, Antigua public library. It was a biography of Louis Pasteur, I suppose to make me understand something about him. She told me the milk I drank was boiled, and the whole process was because of him. I must have been three then; by the time I was three and a half, I could read anything.
But the one I liked most was the King James version of the Bible. I read it from beginning to end and had so many quarrels with it. That story of the prophet who was going up to heaven in a Chariot of Fire was pretty amazing, but then when his bereft servant, having witnessed this terrifying event, was returning home, some children made fun of him and called him a bald-headed man. He was so offended that he summoned a bear to eat them up.
For my seventh birthday, my mother gave me a concise Oxford English Dictionary. I read it all the way through, from A to Z.
I remember that DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned and someone who had been to England and returned home with a copy passed it round. All of us kept looking for the exciting parts. The writer who changed my mind Elizabeth Bishop didn't so much change my mind as transform my life as a writer.
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