Childhood Books - The Early Years!

The earliest books I remember (apart from Peter & Jane/Janet & John) were Ladybird's (and here) Ned the Lonely Donkey and The Discontented Pony and Enid Blyton's Brer Rabbit, Tales of Long Ago and The Adventures of Pip (an elf's adventures with British wildlife). Another was The Runaway Pony, published by Teddington Lock. I had several Jackanory books, but can only recall one about a rag-and-bone-man and his horse-drawn cart. I also had a couple of books about a family who had a poodle whom they took to have a lion-clip not a lamb-clip or puppy-clip so it could be entered in a show. I mostly remember this because I thought the dog was wearing some sort of hair-clip like the ones in mum's box of hair curlers, not having a haircut!

Later favourites included Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine series about a group of children (including twins Mary and Dickie and a girl called Petronella aka Peter) who investigated sinister events. These were more grown up than Blyton's "Famous Five" and "Secret Seven." I loved Blyton's The Enchanted Wood, The Magic Faraway Tree and The Friends of the Faraway Tree. I read the wonderful original versions with Bessie, Fanny and Dick, not the recent Americanised versions with Joe, Beth, Franny and Rick and Dame Slap no longer smacks pupils, she is Dame Snap who yells at them. Bah! I read Mary O'Hara's My Friend Flicka, Thunderhead and The Green Grass of Wyoming books. Since the USAnians are mauling Blyton, let's have Britishised versions of these, because over here, "move your fanny" means something much, much ruder than "move your rump".

There was also a fun Irish storybook called Timothy and Mr Murphy about a talking donkey and his owner; the donkey's favourite pastime was to sing The Mountains of Mourne backwards and he had a bad trip on red and white toadstools and hallucinated leprechauns. I also had Black Beauty free in a Sugar Puffs offer and The Green Fairy Book as well as some hardback storybooks with lavish illustrations from my parents' childhood (one had Hans Christien Anderson stories). The Narnia books were firm favourites. I started with The Horse and His Boy (because it involved horses) at school, then bought the whole set with my pocket money (I still have them, much read and with notes on the inside covers). I also read poetry and had 2 different editions of Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses.

In those days, the children in the books (and the real life readers of those books) cycled or travelled unsupervised on public transport. They had adventures in the woods and countryside without their parents fearing abduction.