It's Always More Complicated

Milly Molly Mandy, because it was the book I remember learning to read from.

To be fair, I wouldn't call it a favourite. In fact, I didn't like it at all. But it was pretty important.

School was full when my turn came at age 5. I'm sure my mother turned the air blue, but as she had two daughters younger than me, she was still pretty tied to the home anyway -- this was 1963. Yet, she rolled up her sleeves and set to, to teach me to read herself. Aided by the fact that my sister (who had successfully bagged a school place) was two years older but a slow reader and needed practice in the evenings. I took to it like a duck to water, blew through the childhood classics of the time and had a library ticket at age 6, reading books for 8-9 year olds (supposedly).

As an aside, I suspect my mother would have been an superb teacher -- she had to leave her grammar school in the Welsh Valleys at 14, in 1939, because her grandparents who were raising her could not afford to keep her in school. And World War II happened, and an unplanned preganancy, and all her dreams turned to dust, except the ones she lived though her daughters, of whom she was fiercely proud. When she was sober.

By the time the school fitted me in, aged 6 and a half, I was a nightmare for them. They quicly realised that keeping me in the classroom during reading lessons was counterproductive for everyone, and so I would get dispatched to the school library to read unsupervised. Once I'd rearranged that several times in a futile search to find anything new to read, they prescribed extra maths lesson with Mr Lewis who had a brilliant classroom full of practical maths experiments. I learned to love maths (which Mum hadn't taught me) but novelty wears off, and everybody involved was delighted to wave me off to the junior school after 9 months.

Where they had to learn once again how to manage me... I got to rearrange their library as well; spent most of my time running errands for teachers; spent a lot of time in two local libraries. Hey, we lived halfway between them - they didn't cross-check registration - they both allowed me to take out 6 books every week and one of them allowed me into the adult section occasionally, if I presented a case for a particular factual book -- mostly maths and science books. (I didn't get unfettered access including fiction until I was in my early teens -- and then they still double checked what I borrowed, although they had a blind spot for SF, so I read some very unsuitable Heinlein but also learned to love Delany).

Come the 11-plus, nobody bothered coaching me for it -- I was just handed booklets of previous questions and told to sit in a corner and practice them. The teachers marked them and returned them without comment, and didn't care if I vanished to the library to read privately afterwards. It came as something as a surprise to them that (working class, recently widowed) mother had entered me in the Admission Exam for the local Direct Grant School and not asked them for a reference. The headmaster was delighted to be tipped the wink that one of 'his girls' had won the top scholarship. He publicly and prematurely pronounced that Jane B (proper posh family, she came from) had won the honour. Even sat her on his lap (poor girl). Imagine the embarrassment to everyone involved when the truth came out... [Jane B did get a place, and never spoke to me in our entire time there, poor lamb].