Falling in Love with Paper and Pages

The first books I remember were books made of brown paper and string by my father who cut out the comic strips from the children’s page of the News Chronicle and stick them in sequence to make a permanent book. I would compete with my sister and brother to sit on his long knee (he was very tall) and we would read it together.I think we all must have learned to read this way before any of us we went to school. The magic of the words on the page conjured up places people and adventures which lived and thrived in my mind’s eye. Come to think of it that’s when I learned I had a mind’s eye, a mind’s place – a place of colour and action, a sanctuary in a family where things were not always easy.