Newcastle University

How much contact did you have with books when you were younger?

Quite a lot. I was the first child of two. I was born in 1939, so that meant immediately it was wartime. So by the time I was three and a half, four, we were well into wartime. Prior to that, my father, who was largely self-educated, would buy a monthly subscription to magazines, of which there were a series every month. One was The Wonderful Story of the Sea, and he then sent them away – because they were all on nice art paper, and they were bound up into quite a thick volume. Two books which I found absolutely fascinating when I was very, very small, were The Popular Science Educator. That was another series of monthly magazines which he sent to be bound up. I don’t know whether that happens today, does it? Probably not. But these were on beautiful paper, and were bound up into a hardback with tooled covers – beautiful. And in there were so many facts – fascinating things. And I think that’s what first attracted me to fact. The story of electricity, and how it was first discovered. All sorts of things – canals, the start of railways. Popular science, illustrated with beautiful line drawings. Animals, zoology, meteorology – all sorts of different topics, and I was fascinated. They were too heavy for me to hold on my knee, I used to put them on the kitchen table and I’d spend hours looking at these things, hours. And if I found something that was really interesting, the books were so bloody thick that I’d have awful trouble wading through to find it again, so I used to tear little bits of paper off and put them inside so I could find it. And then I discovered that if I pushed the paper in too far it disappeared [laughs]! That’s where I started.