![]() ![]() ![]() In later life I found that the one thing I could always get him to buy me was a book. All these I had read or had read to me at home. I needed no introduction to Beatrix Potter (I had learned to read on those), nor to Winnie-the-Pooh, The Wind in the Willows or Alice. She discerned at once that I was a reader and that my father was too and set about educating us both. All my life it is voice rather than appearance that has drawn me to people and Miss Blackwell’s was the voice of a highly cultivated and benign siren beckoning me to steep myself in untried waters. Middle-aged, unmarried, with a neat grey perm, a straight tweed skirt and classic sensible shoes, she had the Delft blue eyes of a mystic and a voice that I can hear to this day: gentle, tuneful, tactful. ![]() The children’s librarian there was a Miss Blackwell. We lived in rented accommodation in a drab block of London flats and the highlight of my week was the regular Saturday trip I made with my father to the children’s library. I think anyway I would have spent a lot of time at the local library. They were a bookish couple, my parents, well-educated but poor. When I was a very small child, my father lost his job for being a communist activist. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |