My top childhood stories would include some other LM Mongtomery stories
Pat of Silver Bush and
Miss Pat. I delved into these at the same time I first read (and fell in love with) the Anne books. They all helped create a picture of a time and a place very far away from my own.
The first story I remember reading was
Pip and Pippita, a tale of two mice who lived in a hollow tree. It is the sweetest little story, and I was very taken with the tiny house – chairs made out of cotton reels, big buttons for dinner plates and so on. It all looked so cosy.
Miss Happiness and Miss Flower by Rumer Godden. The little girl in this story was shy, quiet, and very carefully and determinedly created something of delicate beauty. She was the first child character I’d read about who sounded as shy as I was.
One Australia favourite is
Seven Little Australians by Ethel Turner, written about 100 years ago, about a family living by the Parramatta River in Sydney. Children who are not ‘paragons of virtue’, but who challenge what they were told and aren’t afraid of the world.
I also read as many of the Chalet School books as I found in the library and in book shops. I loved the books, even though the school was the polar opposite of the boarding school I went too! (No Alps, for starters…)
Speaking of school stories, I also waded through the St Clare and Malory Towers books of Enid Blyton. As with the Secret Seven and Famous Five, there was a lot of mention of ‘hard boiled eggs, potted ham and lashings of ginger beer’. Just super.
I can’t forget to mention
Jennie and
Thomasina by Paul Gallico. About cats. Of course.
I first read
The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe when I was seven, and sick with pneumonia. I was ill for weeks, and driving my mother crazy. She went to the library in town and borrowed LWW, and I was just enraptured. We kept renewing the loan so I could read it again and again. I copied the pictures – including the map – but in the end we just had to give the book back. Eventually I read the remaining books in the series. My favourite is probably
Dawn Treader, but I think all of them are favourites in their own way.
I read
The Hobbit when I first went away to boarding school. I was so thrilled by the fact that there was a relatively well-stocked library there, plus the book store for school books, that I read the set English texts (of which the Hobbit was one) for all the years, not just my own. I was in book lover’s heaven.
LoTR followed shortly afterwards, thanks to my brother who recommended it to me.