In this edited compilation of extracts from the oral history recordings, Brian Alderson recalls his childhood reading in the 1930s, when he lived in Enfield.

1. [00.00.00]

What’s your earliest memory of a book?

I suspect that it was the Edwardian children’s encyclopaedia in eight volumes bound in red cloth. It was edited by a man called Arthur Mee. My mother had been given this as a child and it had come out serially, so the late volumes were in much better shape than the earlier ones – she’d obviously read it a lot. It was so full of stuff [and] it didn’t dwell too long on anything. If it was a long story, not only was it abridged, but it was always serialised through the encyclopaedias, so you were constantly having to chase from page 232 to page 303. It was the sort of book which would absorb a child, just turning the pages.

2. [00.50.00]

One had one’s Saturday penny, which one usually spent on a comic. One I tended to buy myself was Film Fun, but I also read the Knockout in particular. And I remember, I went round to my friend Peter Baines’ house: ‘Hey come round, I’ve got a new comic. It’s called Dandy.’ And he’d got number one of Dandy. If only he’d kept it, he could sell it for half a million now. And we sat under his dining room table, reading the first Dandy.

3. [01.23.00]

One of my favourite books when I was about eight or nine was The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s by Talbot Baines Reed. Have you heard of Talbot Baines Reed? He was writing in the 1890s. He did a whole series of school stories, which were all bestsellers. I have the copy still. I did an essay for the Osborne Collection which has a copy of the title page, where I inscribed my name and drew a very, very bad picture of a fighter plane because I was reading it at the beginning of the war. I read that book dozens of times. It’s full of comedy as well – it was just a totally enjoyable read. But it set me off reading school stories.

I would borrow school stories from the library. I read quite a few of the other Talbot Baines Reeds, without buying them. And there were a series of books by one of the followers of Read, called John Finnemore, who was writing in the Edwardian period – books about a schoolboy called Teddy Lester. Unlike Reed, who wrote books about separate schools, the Teddy Lester books were all about the goings-on in one particular school – Slapton school – so you met the same characters all the way through. I collected those. They were still being printed, by a firm called Latimer House. I loved cricket, you see. And there were always good cricket matches going on in these books.

4. [02.52.00]

Miss Swinburne at Keble House was something big in women’s cricket. She was very keen that the boys should learn to play cricket, and she knew how to teach cricket. She had us each end of the playground, bowling over-arm to each other, and she would keep an eye on how you were doing it. I wanted to be a professional cricketer in these days, I think – but I would have been a hopeless one.

Also, we did the occasional school play and I was always very keen on that. There was a great ambition in 1939 that we should do an oriental play, and I was to play some kind of emperor. My father, who had access to all kinds of fabrics because of making lampshades, had manufactured during the summer holidays a most wonderful oriental costume for me, for this play. But it was to follow September 1939, when the school was closed, so I never got to play in that play.

Slightly associated with this, the school organised some kind of concert for the parents. Some of the senior boys were doing a sort of choral reading of Macaulay’s Horatius, and we were allowed to attend rehearsals. I was absolutely bowled over by this poem. I went home after hearing it and said to my mother, ‘Have you ever heard of a poem called ‘How Horatius held the bridge’? And she said, ‘Why, I think we’ve got a copy of it in the Children’s Encyclopaedia.’ And there it was. It was actually abridged – it’s a hell of a long poem. But that was the first time I was really knocked backwards by poetry. I more or less knew the poem off by heart, or at least the abridged version of it, for years.

5. [04.53.00]

You mentioned the library. Which library did you go to?

When we were at home I’d go to the public library. This was the Enfield public library, which had very good holdings of children’s books, but they were all in library bindings. In those days there was a firm that specialised in binding up books for libraries – it was a sort of either a mock leather or mock morocco – so libraries always had these long runs of very dreary-looking books. But you didn’t give a damn. You went up there, looking for the book you wanted, and you didn’t care whether it looked smart or had a dust jacket on or anything – you wanted to get to the innards of the thing.