Newcastle University

Can you talk a bit more about your mum reading to you – what was that like?

It was lovely. I presume that we just got books out of the library, well, it was the standard fare – Peter Rabbit, the Ladybird books, all of them … well, I say all of them, all lovely middle-class children’s books! But it didn’t seem to matter, really. I suppose I was middle class, but I didn’t have a pony or anything like that! And then, I guess at about, I don’t know, what age do mummies stop reading? I can’t remember with Kay … I mean really, as soon as she could swim by herself, because then I think you have to … what Wendy my wife and I would do was we’d provide books, and say ‘oh, I’ve got this great book, why don’t you try that?’ And guide her, I suppose, as much as you can, and before eleven she was discovering, well, Black Beauty, perhaps, a sort of lovely story for […] it’s sort of on the threshold of adult literature. And then I think she was launched, and she read the Brontës in her teens and loved that, and then she got very interested in Russian literature, you know, Tolstoy, Gogol, people that I should have read much more than I have.