10 years old

When I was 10 years old, I used to read 12 library books a week.

You were allowed four library tickets then. So, armed with my own four, my little brother’s four, and four each from my parents, plus my mother’s wicker shopping basket, I could cart home twelve books every week.

The librarian argued with me once, saying I couldn’t borrow adult books using my parents’ tickets. I told her a lie. I said they weren’t for me, that my parents had asked me to get them. I still remember that moment of hesitation before she said, “Okay.”

The children’s books I borrowed were mostly picture books, because I loved them, things like Orlando the Marmalade Cat and the Madeleine series. But it was the adult books I truly loved. I read authors like Nevil Shute, Josephine Tey, Ralph Ellison, Ray Bradbury (and loads of other science fiction writers), Joseph Heller, Robert Heinlein, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, John Buchan, Dennis Wheatley, and of course, all the Agatha Christie novels… and many more.

I must have been a speed reader, even then. I couldn’t read slowly. The words would run in rivers down the page, dance all over the place, or leave strange gaps. My parents tried to make me slow down, but that only made the words lose all sense. I’m still like that today, I need to read fast to understand anything.

Now I have prescription green-tinted glasses for reading. They help hold the words together a bit more, especially when I try to read slowly or work through a document, which I often still can’t make head or tail of.

I did ask my optician recently if I could have Irlen lenses in my glasses. He said they were expensive and advised waiting until I’d seen the hospital cataract specialist, in case I decide to have the cataract in my other eye done. Only then would he consider it. Fair enough.

So that’s a bit of my reading history. As a child, I read many authors from the 1920s and ’30s, because those were the books stored in my attic bedroom at the farm. There were many words I didn’t understand at the time, but if you read something often enough, you begin to get the gist. Some of those books were from the 19th century. I used to read them by candlelight all night, we didn’t have electricity on the farm.

My drawing today is a sketch of me getting my library books from a mobile library, when I lived in town.

It’s far too hot today, and I struggled to draw...it’s not my best effort.

I hope it’s not too hot for you…