The Reading Experience

Reading has always been important to me. I learned to read in 1971 at primary school in Glasgow. In those days they used ITA for the first one and a half years, and then we made the transition to traditional orthography, using only the normal alphabet by the time we reached Primary 3. The first books at school were Paul and Sally, followed by Janet and John. At home the first thing I ever recall reading was the Fun Section in the Sunday Post, with Oor Wullie and The Broons. Then it was the Beano and the Dandy. I don’t remember any difficulty making the transition from ITA to regular text; nor do I recall reading anything but comics, annuals and school readers until I was nine. Then things changed radically. In the early 1970s, my mum had a part-time job at Henderson’s Tobacconist and Newsagent. Mr. Henderson had three shops: one in Yoker, another in Kingsway and the third in Scotstoun. But in 1974 he retired and my mother found another job as a cleaner in Yarrow’s shipyard. One of the women she talked about was Julie. I think her surname was MacDonald. They probably got on well because they had children of roughly the same age. In late 1975, Julie announced that she was emigrating to Australia. Around August 1976, not long before her friend’s departure, my mum brought home a box of children’s books; not annuals but actual books. Obviously, Julie would have to leave a lot of things behind and she’d given the books to my mum. One of the books was While the Clock Ticked, a Hardy Boys adventure. There was another called The Secret of the Gorge, by Malcolm Saville. I think there were a couple of titles by Enid Blyton. And there were three tall Collins hardback books that particularly caught my eye. The first one was a red book with three boys on the cover shining a torch on a skeleton. The title was Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators in The Mystery of the Moaning Cave. The second was green, with the title The Mystery of the Fiery Eye. The third was blue, The Mystery of the Vanishing Treasure. Fiery Eye sounded so exciting and mysterious and I decided to read that one first, but my brother bagged it. So, on the next Saturday afternoon, I sat down on my bed and opened The Mystery of the Moaning Cave. There was a blue endpaper showing the three boys walking through a graveyard, with Alfred Hitchcock waiting for them. It all looked so exciting and mysterious. There was an introduction by Alfred Hitchcock. Then I turned to Chapter One, The Valley Moans. The story began with the following words: “Aaaaaahhhhhh-ooooooooooooo-ooooo-oo!” The eerie moan rolled out across the valley in the twilight. At that moment my life changed forever. This was my first real reading experience. I was reading a real book, not a comic strip or annual. And I was reading it because I wanted to, not because I was being forced to at school. I read on, devouring the story about the three boys who lived in California and solved mysteries. They were on a ranch, they went scuba diving, they explored a mysterious cave. I finished the story. I was hooked. I then read Fiery Eye and Vanishing Treasure. Then I read them again. And again. I noticed the books were numbers 5, 7 and 10. So what about the other numbers? But maybe the books could only be bought in America; after all, the Three Investigators were Americans. However, the books were printed by Collins, London and Glasgow. I asked my mum where I could get more. Next day she told me that Julie said you could buy them at Woolworth’s. The next Saturday, my mum and I went to Paisley, and when I saw a Woolworth store, I rushed in. I searched through all the books and was really disappointed that I couldn’t find those tall Collins hardbacks. But then my mum said: “Is it Alfred Hitchcock?” and pointed to the very bottom shelf of a little bookcase. There I saw not the tall Collins books, but small paperback Armada books. The Mystery of the Laughing Shadow and The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot, both priced 35p. I think there was another title, but I was only allowed to take those two. There was a list of the other stories at the front of each book, informing me that at that time twenty 3I titles had been published in the UK. I learned the titles by heart. Some sounded great: Terror Castle, Skeleton Island, Green Ghost, Whispering Mummy. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on them. I began to make regular pilgrimages to Woolworth’s and it didn’t take me long to work out that the titles were rotated in threes on a monthly basis. As the weeks passed, I discovered the books on the shelves of other shops like John Menzies, and my collection steadily grew. That was my introduction to the exciting world of reading and collecting books.

And what about the rest of the books in Julie’s box? I wanted to read the Hardy Boys but the reading level was a bit too high above mine. There was a Nancy Drew story called The Whispering Statue. I read it and it was all right. I think I meant to read the Malcolm Saville book, but never did. I don’t know why. By the time I started to collect the 3I, Julie had left Glasgow for the land down under. It’s funny that I never even met her, and yet she opened up a new world for me. I wonder if she’s still alive. If she is, she must be well into her seventies.

My life changed a lot after I took up reading. At school, I had been just an average pupil, not very bright and considered a bit dreamy and easily distracted. Now I began to excel. My report cards got better, I learned more quickly, improved my vocabulary and could reason more clearly. I joined the library and began to read more and more. I started to check out the seemingly endless Hardy Boys series and a load of other stories. Then I moved on to other authors. Ever since those heady days of the mid-1970s, reading has remained a passion. I’ve always seemed to enjoy books in batches. I could read eight stories in a row by Roald Dahl, then five or six Hercule Poirot mysteries, followed by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and then the complete works of Jane Austen. Now, after almost forty years of constant reading, I’ve read hundreds of books. I could have read more, but if I have a habit that I can’t break it’s reading my favourite stories over and over again. In the early 1980s, I fell in love with Middle-earth and read practically nothing but Tolkien for the next eight years. I must have read the Lord of the Rings at least fifty times, and some chapters of it many more times than that. But then again, reading should be for pleasure. I’m not interested in building an impressive list, and I don’t make a point of reading classics. I tend to agree with Mark Twain that a classic is a book that everybody wants to have read, but nobody wants to read. I read what takes my fancy. Now it’s time to get my notes in order and look back at the works that I’ve enjoyed (and also those that I've disliked) over the past four decades.