“I Was Very Much a Library Child” – Author Anne Fine Learned to Read at 3 and Never Looked Back
Anne Fine started reading when she was three years old – and hasn’t stopped since…
- by Anne Fine
I learned to read very, very early, for the most practical of reasons. When my sister was five and I was three, my dad fancied ‘trying one more time for a boy’, and as a result my mother had triplet girls.
We had no washing machine. Disposable nappies hadn’t yet been invented. So the district nurse suggested I should go with my elder sister to the nearby infant school to ease the chaos. (Not so many rules and ‘guidelines’ in those days.)
No one thought to explain to me that I was considerably younger than my classmates, and there only for babysitting purposes. So I learned to read alongside the others.
We were taught through phonics. There were about 35 of us in the class.
We’d sit in front of the alphabet, pointing to the thick, black letters and making the appropriate sounds: ‘guh-guh-guh’, huhhuh- huh’. I dreaded ‘vuh-vuh-vuh’, which made my bottom lip buzz uncomfortably, but before long I was reading happily and I’ve never stopped since.
I was very much a library child. My parents were well educated, with a perfectly good respect for reading, but clearly my mother had no time to sit with novels. Besides, books were expensive.
I’d get one for Christmas and birthday each year (Enid Blyton, then Jennings and William books, which I adored). Otherwise, stories were to be found at the library and in school.
When I was seven, I had a sabbatical reading year – by which I mean that I’d reached the top of the infants, but the junior school wouldn’t accept me. I was too young.
So for the next three terms I had to redo arithmetic as I was flaky with numbers, but otherwise I was left to read, allowed into the headteacher Miss Alexander’s office to choose books from her glass-fronted book case.
My enjoyment of the privilege was very much dampened by constant terror that the glass doors, which juddered horribly as I slid them open, would shatter on the carpet.
I don’t think the range of reading was inspiring – The King of the Golden River was memorable, but nothing else much stood out.
By junior school age I had the run of the local library: more Blyton, Henry Treece, Geoffrey Trease, Lucy Fitch Perkins’ Twins series, set in different countries and Willard Price’s Adventure series.
In school, for one glorious term, Mr Simpson read us The Hobbit on Friday afternoons. We all loved the calm of it. We had to fold our arms and shut up, and we did, and not just for fear of the consequences of not doing so.
We did vast amounts of writing in school. Teachers would say, ‘I’ve lots of marking, so you sit quietly and write an essay’. We’d get a choice of typically 1950s titles: ‘A Day at the Seaside’, ‘A Description of Grandma’, ‘The Ghost in the Castle’.
I adored it, and think that’s how I learned to arch my stories. We always had the same length of time in which to write, so I got really good at knowing how long to spend unravelling a tale, then wrapping it up properly.
And the stories would always be marked. I hear so many children now complain because their work isn’t marked, or takes an age to come back to them, or there’s almost no feedback.
We’d get a stark score out of 20. Spelling mistakes were ringed in red to be written out ten times underneath (‘doing corrections’).
But often we’d be called up to the teacher’s desk, and he or she would talk in detail about our work, explaining how we could improve it.
Not by adding more ‘fronted adverbials’, or ‘wow words’ (oh, misery!) but, for example, by not mentioning some character in the first paragraph who’d disappeared for the rest of the story.
I’ve yet to meet the teacher in the last few years who truly believes the way they’re expected to teach English (or maths, for that matter) is the best way to do it. And if teachers are close to striking about anything, I don’t understand why it wouldn’t be about that.
That said, I do realise that authors tend to flatter themselves that they know a lot more about classrooms and the education system than they actually do. When I go into schools, I understand full well that the whole day is built around me, me and a side order of me.
But I’m not a teacher, so I don’t have a clue as to what goes on, really.
