Do you remember your favorite book from childhood?
I was late to reading compared to many children. I struggled with speech early on and had speech therapy around the age of seven, so perhaps that had something to do with it. I couldn’t get my tongue or brain around words. My parents weren’t especially bookish either – not when rheybwere together at lease.
When I think about “favourite childhood books,” I also realise I need to define childhood carefully. For me, I’d say twelve and under, certainly no older than a young teen, say fourteen, later teen reading became an entirely different and adult-infused and enthused world.
The books that first left deep impressions weren’t always novels. I had an enquiring mind and was often more fascinated by diagrams, maps, cross-sections, illustrations as by stories themselves. I could spend hours copying diagrams of the human heart or staring at encyclopaedias. In fact, one of my favourite places as a child was Gosforth Library, right beside Gosforth Swimming Baths. We’d go swimming and then wander into the library afterwards. Oddly enough, my favourite “books” there were often the reference books I wasn’t allowed to borrow — especially the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I liked ranging widely across subjects rather than disappearing into a single fictional universe.
That said, The Chronicles of Narnia almost certainly counts among my true childhood favourites. The idea that children could step through into another world, grow up there, and then return home still children again — that stayed with me. There was something both magical and melancholy in it. We also had Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on a set of records, which I played obsessively until I discovered that holding a wax crayon against the spinning grooves created strange spirals on the vinyl. After that I could only play bits of it at a time.
Some books are inseparable from particular moments in life. When I was thirteen, I broke my leg badly and spent six months at home in a non-walking plaster. My school sent a box of worthy books which I almost completely ignored. Instead, I became absorbed by gardening. Reader’s Digest Gardening Year became something like a bible to me during that period.
Certain birthday presents became milestones, too. I still have my copy of The ABC of Space by Peter Fairky and Fun with Science by Mae Freeman and Ira Freeman, inscribed “From Daddy and Mummy, Xmas 1970.” I suspect that was our last Christmas together before my parents separated, which gives the books an emotional charge beyond their contents. Later came the wonderful hardback science books of Nigel Calder — The Weather Machine, Violent Universe, The Life Game and Spaceships of the Mind. Beautifully illustrated, intelligent, and ambitious, they fed my fascination with science, systems, weather, medicine, exploration, and the future.
By twelve or thirteen I was moving into books that felt thrillingly older than me. I vividly remember seeing an older boy at prep school utterly engrossed in The Lord of the Rings, which immediately gave it an aura. Around the same time, while recovering from my broken leg in 1975, I read Watership Down between April and May. My father, who loved wildlife and conservation, probably passed the book on to me after reading it himself. He had even intended to call me Peregrine at one point, which tells you something about his passions.
The writer who perhaps echoes most strongly through my imagination, though, is H. G. Wells. The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine genuinely haunted and excited me. Wells opened the door to science fiction not simply as adventure, but as social speculation and warning. Later I moved into Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Aldous Huxley and others, but Wells was probably the starting gun.
I also remember books that carried emotional weight far beyond my years. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich gave me one of my first real experiences of melancholy and endurance. Meanwhile, gruesome illustrated histories of the Second World War filled my head with unforgettable images of executions and firing squads.
Boarding school changed reading too. I didn’t particularly enjoy some of the books we were required to study — Silas Marner left me cold — but I adored Shakespeare. Among boys, books also carried social charge and secrecy. Emmanuelle circulated with almost mythical status: both social currency and forbidden object.
If I walked back into my childhood bedroom or my boarding-school cube now, there probably wouldn’t be one defining book lying there. Between the ages of nine and fourteen, the “essential” book changed every six months. What united them was curiosity. Exploration. Science fiction. Medical diagrams. History. Weather systems. Maps. Human anatomy. Fantasy worlds. Survival. I wasn’t looking for one world to escape into so much as trying to understand how all worlds worked.
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