Jacqueline Day

I guess it’s the fundamental bardic thing, the telling of stories from the year dot to entertain, educate and comfort the clan around the fire, and we still love it so much today. Just look at the size of the publishing industry, and the hoards of souls (me included) eagerly trying to make their stories heard.

Where do you start? When I had my son, I was determined he would enjoy some of the early reading experiences that I did. We therefore began with A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six. When I was a small reception class child at Rodborough County Primary School, we used to go home for lunch, and Mum always read to me for fifteen minutes before going back to school. I adored Winnie the Pooh, like millions of others. See that there, in the photo below, that manky old sheaf of browning pages tied up with string? That’s my childhood copy, the one Mum read to me. When I was a bit older we progressed to the poetry of When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six. Mum used these as reading primers (and was told off by my headmaster for putting me ahead of the rest of the class with reading; it “messed things up” apparently. Silly old Mr Gill!) The glorious rhythm of poems like King Hilary and the Beggarman and the sublime Disobedience (I can recite it in my sleep… James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree…) are a delight in the mouth, and the head, and the soul.

I think I became bogged down in Janet and John reading scheme books at school for a while, thanks to Mr. Gill warning Mum off. It was the early days of children’s television dramas, but two fine examples in Richard Carpenter’s Catweazle and Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War had me dragging Mum back to the bookshop. That’s my original copy of Catweazle below, but a new edition of Carrie’s War, having wanted to read it again a couple of years ago. Mum was evacuated from Portsmouth to Blackpool during the war, so she had many stories of her own to back up Carrie’s War. I worshipped Catweazle; what a heady mix of history, fantasy, the occult and good old fun! There were other enjoyable reads inspired by TV, such as Rumer Godden’s The Diddikoi, Helen Cresswell’s Lizzie Dripping and the somewhat disturbing The Changes, a series based on a trilogy by Peter Dickinson involving Sikhs and pylons.

The next books to hit me hard were The Dark is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper. Again, it was this mix of reality, fantasy, history and magic that knocked my socks off. The first book, Over Sea, Under Stone was a joy, especially as we’d been camping in Cornwall that summer. But The Dark is Rising was, and is, magnificent! I had built a sort of tee-pee style den with branches reaching up to a central point in the woods about two miles up the hill from home, there was a foot of snow on the ground, and I took my book off into the trees, thinking to sit and read for an hour. I stayed there all day. No food, no drink, completely locked inside the story, which I finished in that one day. It was getting dark, about four o’ clock, when I realised the time and ran home (fortunately it was all downhill). Mum wasn’t worried as to my whereabouts as this is what kids did in the 1970s; I guess I was about thirteen. Reading that book, completely alone in the snow, in the woods, has stayed with me forever. I re-read the whole sequence over Christmas 2025. It still takes me back to that day, still makes my spine tingle and my fingers freeze.

Then, as often happens, we start this growing up thing. An aunt gave me the stupendous gift of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Oh my goodness!! I found it a bit hard-going at first but when I got into its stride, there was no stopping me. I read everything I could find by Mr. Hardy. My favourites to this day are Under the Greenwood Tree and Far From the Madding Crowd. This was my ‘bucolic phase’! One of those books and XTC on the tape player, blaring out Love on a Farmboy’s Wages , wearing a baggy white poet shirt from Dorothy Perkins – bliss!

Then – then, right – Mum told me about Laurie Lee, who lived about four miles away in the Slad Valley. Cider with Rosie was duly acquired and read with relish. Such beautiful, lyrical writing. One Sunday I said I was going for a walk, walked the four miles, sat in a field for half an hour below Laurie’s favourite pub, The Woolpack, then walked home again. I may not have met him, or even seen him, but I had been in a field breathing air near him, I was convinced! This is again something I re-read every now and then, it’s still an absolute joy.

The final author in my ‘growing up’ trio is H.E. Bates. A Moment in Time is a gorgeous, desperate study of passion, love and loss, heart-rending and bitter-sweet. An economical tale, but deep at the same time. Poor Elizabeth. Poor Splodge. A story played out so many times during war.

The last book here, Victoria Holt’s Secret Woman, is a curiosity on my favourites list. Mum bought it for me to read when we went camping in Norway for three weeks. I read it four times before we got home as it was the only book I had with me. I can remember thinking of it as my first grown-up read, which is odd considering all the Hardy, Dickens and Bronte epics I’d consumed by this point. (Of course Kate Bush inspired a delve into Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre et al! Wasn’t bothered, to be honest. Sacrilege!! I still worship the goddess Kate, naturally, she is a master story teller! But I actually preferred Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea to Jane Eyre.) Mum read a lot of Jean Plaidy, the history writer (and I read them all when she finished with them), who also wrote different genres under the names Victoria Holt and Philippa Carr. I wrote to her and she kindly sent me her autograph using all three names – that was awesome! Anyway, I still have my ‘first grown-up read’ although I can’t remember what it’s about, but I just can’t part with the book. It’s a bit of my history! (And being elderly now, it smells wonderful!)

All photos © Jack Day unless otherwise credited.