My A-Z of Reading: S is for School

School was where I met the joys of reading. There was the alphabet frieze around the walls in class one, as we chanted our letter sounds, building them up into words. There were Miss Marvel’s bonkers flashcards which we chanted aloud: Mother, Mother, see Kitty! Even then I thought, but who talks like that? Why can’t we have real speech to chant? Janet and John readers, late 1950s gender role stereotypes.

Teachers read stories to us, as a reward for good work, and at the end of the day, when we were tired from all that school work. It was a treat; I don’t remember it happening at home. Certainly we didn’t get sent home with readers. There were small class libraries: I worked my way through everything. I remember a series of a couple of dozen books about a bear and her adventures – Mary Plain, she was called. Long before Paddington was ever invented. Eventually I moved onto the boys’ books – Biggles, and Jennings, and the earliest science fiction I could remember, the Secret Planet series.

There were factual books, too, to feed my quest for knowledge. The vast and even then ancient Children’s Encyclopaedia by Arthur Mee, patriotic, imperialist and I don’t know how many other kinds of ideological unsoundness, but a huge reservoir of information which I greedily hoovered up.

There was Stamford Public Library, with a children’s section which I soon exhausted – the vast Young Traveller series, where two white, British, middle-class children visited countries all over the world and I learned about them, sparked my interest in geography and travel. My mum persuaded the librarians to allow me to join the adult library several years early…

School, of course, brought more than just reading: there was understanding and interpreting what I read, right from the very earliest days of comprehension exercises. And eventually it would bring other languages, too: Latin and French for starters.

In my later years, I have realised just how much of my early schooling was focused on that key skill of learning to read, and developing an enjoyment of reading. Yes, there were lots of other subjects, too, but the ability to read fluently was vital in all of them. Books were a natural part of the surroundings, and the treat when one finished a task successfully before the rest of the class – choose a book to read. My teachers fostered my love of books and reading, and, along with the town library, provided what a financially poor home could not; when people run down our education system and public services, I remember what they provided for me.