My Aunt died last month.
She never married and myself and my brother were her only younger relatives. As I was clearing her things, last week, I came across this short piece she had written. When and why, I’ll probably never know.
As children, myself and my brother would ocassionally visit my aunt’s house to stay for a week. These visits were always magical. This is what she wrote:
“The small girl was very small when, in 1970, she went with her big 7 year-old brother to stay with her aunt. It was an ordinary house to look at but rather extraordinary inside.
There was a lovely room in the attic. It was the YES room and you were allowed to do all the things you were not usually allowed to at home. Like drawing on the walls and painting pictures by throwing paint and it did not matter if you spilt the paint or water. It was the YES room.
Downstairs there was a magic box which played a tune when a grown-up turned a key. And drawers with odds and ends and funny key-rings.
The children enjoyed themselves but there was something missing. Books.
Well, there were books but they were all very dull. They had very small print and no sign of any pictures at all. This, however, did not stop the small girl from studying the bookcase.
Suddenly she noticed a very small book. It looked different, so it had to be inspected and out it came. She gasped with delight, as not only was it full of pictures but such colourful pictures adorned every page she turned. The small girl’s face was a picture in itself with her eyes open so wide. She had come across a wonderful illustration.
Masses of crimson flames with silver-grey smoke filling a dark sky. This became the favourite picture of the book: ‘Ladybird Adventures from History: The story of Charles II’ and the picture was an illustration of the Great Fire of London.
When the children went home, the small girl took the treasured book with her. The music box and the a key-ring with a red barrel also joined it.
The music box lasted about a week before it was broken with over-enthusiastic winding. The key ring was soon lost or forgotten.
But the Ladybird book!
Well, it probably wore out, but I imagine it has a number of counterparts amonth the many hundreds of Ladybird books in the small girl’s (now grown-up of course) collection.”
Oh, how lovely!
How wonderful.
She obviously loved you very much and was pleased to be the pebble that started the avalanche of your obsession.
How very clever to ‘hide’ that first one. It would make so much more of an impression when it was ‘found’. In my childless aut’s house, we played with the button box.: colour, size, materials… Anne
What a delightful memory, and so tidy to know when, where and how it all began. My Ladybird history is more haphazard and not as neat, with much retrospective applied thought. I believe my wee collection began with the seasonal series of “What to Look For” Ladybird books. First came Spring and Autumn, followed by Summer and Winter. Growing up in the countryside as the only baby boomer child of townie parents, I needed help learning about the natural environment which I delighted in exploring for hours on end. They took over the role well-served by the Flower Fairies up to the age of nine or ten. They duely took their place on my embryonic “Reference Book” bedside bookshelf alongside the Collins Pocket Guide to The Sea Shore in its distinctive yellow dust cover and a row of the 1920s edition of The Children’s Encyclopedia with blue bindings I’d “inherited” from neighbours making space for their first television set. The Ladybird Book of British Birds and British Wild Flowers soon followed, as did others in the Ladybird naturalist book series. They were soon dwarfed by weightier volumes published by AA, Pears, Reader’s Digest and Shell, but they were the start of a library since made practically obsolete by the advent of the internet search engines.
Lovely to hear your Ladybird journey, Janet. As for so many of us, they formed the first step to reading and finding out about the world – and which bit of it most interested us. I started off gravitating to the history books and only came to the nature books later on. The nature books have now gained a new, unintended use as something of an ecological record of their day. In a way, the history books have a similar new function: we can read so much about the ideas and assumptions of the 1950s, 60s and 70s by looking at the way they then recounted historical stories for children.
Yes, I started with the history books too! Mum bought middle brother & I one each. I gave him first choice and daggnabbit he picked what looked like the far more obviously exciting choice! Henry V in armour leading his troops and storming a castle!!! That left me with… Charles II!!! I needn’t have worried, middle brother was more than happy to keep swapping the books after we’d read them for the umpteenth time!!! I’m certain we didn’t actually purchase anymore Ladybird books; we didn’t need to because our middle school library was packed with a whole range of them! I still have our first two, pride of place on the book shelf!