World Book Day was aimed at giving children a taste of the magic, so I thought it might be appropriate to examine what got me started.
It is often said that the magic of books starts with the pictures. If you couple that with your mother's voice reading to you, then you have the best start of all. But is that really correct? My Mum told us stories without the books, always starting with "Once upon a time......" so it was the stories that came first for us, then the pictures and the books.As I learned to read I remember that I always read things that I was not totally ready for, so I often missed the point. One day, after reading several Rupert Annuals, I finally realised that the captions under the pictures were always written in rhyme. Of course, Rupert was a cartoon strip, but you had a choice to read the captions under each cell, or the longer version at the foot of the page. From Rupert I progressed to Toby Twirl, Sam Pig and Beatrix Potter. In Primary school, the teachers would read to us and the Enid Blyton Adventure books were a big hit.
I spent a huge amount of time with my Grandmother in the Yorkshire Dales. Her cottage had no electricity so we listened to a huge, wooden, battery-powered radio that glowed, whistled and hummed in the corner whiled we played dominoes. She had some magnificent books on natural history that she had collected in serial form and then had bound. I have them now. On rainy days, I copied the pictures and read about the creatures that fascinated me.
My Gran read a lot and we would sit up in adjacent beds late into the night. The books came from a library-van that somehow made it up the rough rocky track to her house. At first I just picked up one of her books and read it, then she gave me a ticket and I could chose four books of my own. We binged on crime and science fiction.
Half a crown would be the equivalent of 25p today but it was a decent amount of pocket money in the late 1950s. It would buy you an Airfix kit and some paint, or a Dinky car, or a book. I soon had quite a collection of a plastic aircraft hanging on fishing line from the bedroom ceiling. My brother and I would target them in our flashlight beams, wailing like sirens and shooting them down, "Ak-ak-ak-ak-ak!"The Observer's Book of Birds was a sort of bible for me, but I don't remember buying it myself, so I guess it was from my Dad. They cost 5 shillings each at the time so I needed to forgo the kits and the Dinky cars to start collecting Observer's Books. I won't list them all, but if you know them yourself you will appreciate how it felt to have a collection of books with matching spines on your own shelf; your own, personal library. Some of them made very dull reading and I probably never finished reading half of them, but I learned a lot along the way. My entire knowledge of aeroplanes comes from the 1968 "Observer's Book of Aircraft."
Around 1960 in Southampton, my weekly ritual became a walk down to Portswood to the Saturday morning cinema club (the ABC Minors), then a visit to Woolworths or WH Smiths and finally the Library. I chose big books, some of which I would renew over and over again. One was "Tidelines" by Keith Shackleton about life on an estuary. I don't think I ever read the whole thing but it had full-page paintings of mud, water, birds and huge skies. Another book was about Native Americans and a third was about a whaling ship on which a crew member carved a seagull from whalebone; an ivory gull in fact.
Reading and writing go together and the books I read inspired me to write. As a schoolboy I would send letters to the Southern Evening Echo and a team of us produced our own school fishing magazine. I wrote dozens of stories about the Yorkshire Dales but they are all lost now due to the ritual burning of exercise books when we left our primary school. The highlight of my writing career was to win the BBC Wildlife Magazine "Nature Writer of the Year" award for a story about bullheads and sticklebacks. To be any good at writing you have to be a good reader too.Second-hand bookshops were a happy hunting ground. I bought a few classic children's books like Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Kidnapped, Coral Island and Uncle Tom's Cabin. One of my treasures is the "1984 Empire Youth Annual" which contains stories of travel and adventure across the world to Africa, India and beyond. I wonder if that drove me towards the wander-lust that developed later.
On the day of my interview for the RSPB warden's job at Kinross, I spent the evening in St Andrews where I found a wonderful second-hand bookshop, but it was closed. In the window was a book that I just had to have, but I didn't know when I would be back that way so I wrote a note and put it through the letterbox. By the time I had driven back to Sussex the book was waiting for me. I still treasure it because it was a compendium of all the best nature writing at the time, from both sides of the Atlantic. The editor was Roger Tory Peterson, it was published in 1957 and it was called "The Birdwatcher's Anthology."There's another book that I often show to people. "The Birds of the West Indies" is way out of date now, but it is special for one reason and that is the author's name on the spine. When Ian Fleming was in Jamaica he was trying to find a good name for the hero of his first spy novel. He looked along the bookshelves in his bungalow and one name jumped out at him, Bond. James Bond.
After I left teaching, I worked for the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, the RSPB and BirdLife International all of which gave me a discount on buying books. I had yards of expensive bird and wildlife books that I spent a fortune on, most of them signed by the authors and illustrators. I can now buy the same books for a couple of pounds from Paxton Pits Nature Reserve. It's all very tempting but I've had to make a rule that no book comes into my house without another going out. There's a good reason for this......
I have a friend called Iain who recently retired from the Foreign Office. His hobby is writing encyclopaedias and he is almost never seen without a carrier bag full of old books. One evening his family was gathered on sofas around the living-room fire while entertaining Iain's head of department when they heard an ominous deep rumbling sound followed by an avalanche of books. The attic floor had collapsed under the weight of all the books in there. I really worry that this might happen to me too.
