Newcastle University

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

A lot. […] I think when I was very young, the great excitement was … you know, memory’s a little unreliable, but I associate it with a Friday evening and my father on his way home, knowing that I liked Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven, bringing home library books for me on a Friday night. My mother was not a great reader, but she encouraged me to read. My father was a great reader. We didn’t have a lot of books, and I had a lot of books, because obviously just something switched in my brain once I learned to read. So I had a lot of contact with books – always, wherever we moved, because we moved around a lot, it was about getting me enrolled in the library.