Today is World Book Day and it would also have been my mum's 97th birthday had she still been alive. Sadly she died a few weeks after her 70th but still, these two commemorations coincide nicely. My mum adored books, worked in bookshops for years and even met a man who fell in love with her - although never got to be with her - in the antiquarian bookshop which he ran. Thanks to her I grew up in a house full of reading matter of all kinds and trips to the library were a regular treat. If I was off school, in bed with some lurgy or other, she'd bring me a little pile of picture books from there and later, lovely Puffin paperbacks - Moomintrolls and Borrowers to soothe an itchy throat or aching stomach.
I still recall vividly from childhood the main bookshelves in the living room - about shoulder high to an adult - crammed full. Non-fiction publications on all manner of topics: fossils, ballet, pondlife, Henry Moore; maps, the Oxford English Dictionary and Roget's Thesaurus, plus well-known works: 'Under Milk Wood', 'The L Shaped Room' and 'Moby Dick', for instance. You can tell what kind of a house it was!
Some of the novels held a special kind of intrigue. I gathered - not quite sure how, perhaps I'd overheard a whispered conversation? - that they were a bit rude. I furtively flicked through their pages in the hope of stumbling across some titillating treasures. 'Fanny Hill' was one, and 'Women In Love' and 'Sons and Lovers' were there too - but I never did discover their saucy secrets then; I think it's simply because in my pre-adolescent innocence I really didn't know what I was looking for, or at.
At one end of the uppermost shelf was a broad glass jar, perennially filled with toffees. Sometimes just cellophane-wrapped plain caramels, sometimes the ones with a little strip of chocolate through their centres to give the exquisite pleasure of a melt-in-the-mouth cocoa reward for all that chewing. I believed for years that reading and eating toffee always had to be experienced together; I'm sure my mum already did.
At sixteen I got a holiday job in the same little bookshop where she worked and where I had to unpack the new deliveries. Ooh, the smell of fresh books! The joy of revealing what was inside those boxes - heavy tomes with shiny dustjackets and multiple copies of bestsellers-to-be, some not-so-goods too, but always interesting, and the anticipation - like a child's Christmas.
Anyway - although we should honour books every day, surely! - today's date has at least prompted this post and a few words in memory of my late mum, who instilled such a love of reading in me. I could say the same about toffee, but my teeth would never forgive me.
...What are you reading today?
