Bookends
Yesterday evening I suddenly started thinking about Mary Poppins. I loved the film and still do. I even had cardboard dolls with clothes that you could cut out. I wonder where they went? We also owned the first Mary Poppins book. There were several, I can’t tell you how many because I thought I knew where the book was, but someone’s moved it. The book is better than the film and there is more in it, like the two ladies who go out to clean the stars at night and the cow who jumped over the moon and why she jumped.

I also liked ‘Hazel and the Well Dressing’ which was about a group of friends who revived the old English tradition of dressing wells with flowers in spring the say thank you for the gift of water. Another was ‘The Key to Rose cottage’ in which three teenagers almost starve to death because they go to the wrong Rose cottage. They smell a rat at the beginning when they find a store cupboard full of cans. This is odd because their Aunt, who owns the cottage, is a cookery teacher and wound NEVER use canned food. Remember in the early sixties, girls were encouraged to aspire to keeping their heads above canned food.

From my Grandmother’s house I still have ‘Jeremy’ by Hugh Walpole and ‘Esther Reid’, a Sunday School prize. We also had and loved ‘Mary Plain’, my Mum leant it to a neighbour who never returned it. I remember Mum reading ‘Peter Pan’ to us and a ‘Christmas Carol’ which was a Christmas present she had been given during the war.

I still go back and read my favourite books from time to time and some of them I’ve read to my children. I think it is interesting anyway to go back to certain books at different times and see how the perception of the book changes as I age.

What were your favourite books as a child and have you reread them as an adult?