In between feeds, I read to my babies. I like to read. It is the thing I do — I like to read more than I like to write or eat or sleep. Reading has been my go to method for getting through every-day life since I was bout three. My cutting-edge English teacher mother borrowed a book from the University of London library when I was two, which told her how to teach very young children to read. Mum made flashcards and pinned them up around the house: breadbin, door, shoes, floor, Dad. I read the TV pages. I read cartoons, like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird (she called them the ‘funny pages’). Since I read from such a young age, reading has seemed as necessary as breathing.
When I was twenty-three, my husband and I came home drunk from a party on a Friday and he said ‘shall we have a baby?’ and I said ‘go on then’ — and boom shakalaka, as they say. I turned twenty-four two weeks after Ed’s arrival. It still makes me wonder how they let me out of the hospital with him. Tom and I knew how to change a nappy because we went to the antenatal classes once or twice, and a midwife came to visit us in the first week and showed us the rest. We took him for walks, then to museums and parks. And we read to him. At first, aloud from whatever book we were reading at the time, then books we happened upon in the children’s section of the bookshop.
When the three daughters arrived over the next ten years, we had honed our love of children’s books, and also our collection. The Ahlbergs are heroes, as are Helen Oxenbury, Quentin Blake, Shirley Hughes, Herge, Goscinny and Uderzo. As they got older, I continued to read to them: the novels of Roald Dahl, Eva Ibbotson, Nina Bawden and Tolkien. We owe them all a huge debt of gratitude.
When I got my PhD last year, I realised that these children’s writers had played a part: the two hour sessions on the red sofa cuddled under a crocheted blanket with a thumb-sucking, teddy hugging child, caused words to be in my home, in my mouth, in my head, every day for years and years. And the derision that has come from some quarters about writing for children is so ridiculously pompous: it is harder. It must be. Children will sigh, play with their toes, do anything but listen if a book bores.
I write around the children’s routines, and their school days. It may account for my use of the short story as a device. While writing my collection Homesick, I was juggling with UCAS forms, grammar school entrance papers, History AS level essays, and speeches for Macbeth. Homesick is a book with its foundations buried deep in the literature of Britain, and no small part of that literature is the literature I read to my children.
Homesick by Roshi Fernando is published by Bloomsbury 15th March 2012 £16.99
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