Such a little book

I have talked to people who told me they have never read a book and are apparently quite happy to boast of it.  One of my friends at TAFE was not a reader until I lent her my copy of "The Wind in the Willows".  She said she had never realized what a joy reading could be.  (I do believe that she didn't give it back but no matter I had introduced her to reading and reading engaged her for the rest of her days.)

As a child my favourite presents were books.  Mum read them to me and while I could not read them myself I looked at the pictures and tried to imagine what the words meant.  I actually couldn't read myself until I was about eight.  After that I read everything from the News to the Reader's Digest and the Chronicle.

When my mother was working in Port Augusta she became very ill and was out of work.  We literally had no money.  We lived in a leaky caravan and dined on Weeties every day.  Once Mum got some kind of compensation from the Government I suppose, we had the money to pay for the rental of the van and some for actual food and most wonderfully threepence to buy me a book.  It was Henny Penny and the Sky is Falling.  It was a little book with a soft cover and inside it lived not only the said Henny Penny but Goosey Lucy and Ducky Lucky and all their friends.  Mum read the book to me many times and eventually I began to read it to myself.  I could not have been given anything that would mean so much to me as that small book. Even after all these years I remember how I loved that story from a threepenny book that meant the world to me.