By: Marcia King-Gamble
www.lovemarcia.com
I don’t remember ever not being able to read. It was my mother,
a teacher, who told me I read at age three. The funny thing is she never
officially taught me. What she did do, was having no babysitter, and hers being
an easier, child-friendly island lifestyle, she’d take me to classes with her.
While she was teaching, I apparently was taking it all in. To this day, I am grateful for that early
indoctrination because even now I am seldom without a book. The print kind.
My dentist finds this particularly amusing. In a COVID
environment she was forced to remove all the magazines from her waiting room, but
she saved magazines in a special drawer for me, because she knows reading distracts
me from whatever procedure I’m being subjected to.
I digress. This month is all about favorite children’s books
and I'm not sure where to begin. Some of you may have heard this story before
but I will tell it anyway. I grew up on
a tiny British island with maybe three book stores, when a new shipment of
books came in, they were more valuable than gold. My other resource for getting books was an
aunt who lived in the United States. She’d send me what she could get her hands
on, and I looked forward to her monthly package as eagerly as I looked forward
to the Sunday ice cream treat. It was through this aunt I got a taste of books
such as Rebecca of Sunny Brook Farms, Little Women, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys,
and Bobbsey Twins.
Books were my great escape and my entire world. I found
solitude from a busy household by burying my nose in a book. My favorite reading nook was under the
bathroom sink, until I outgrew that spot. When things got tough, I escaped to
my imaginary world. Reading was a great
way to experience a new world.
Most importantly, when you live on a British island with limited T.V.
channels if any, your reading material
is typically British, and so is your humor. New books at the time were hard to
come by, so you read anything you could get your hands on.
That said, my
introduction to Children’s books weren’t the usual. No Dick and Jane for me. I may have read those when I turned eight, or was
it ten and then out of sheer curiosity.
Charles Dickens, exposed me to a whole new world, and the
Oxford dictionary became my best friend. Books like: Great Expectations, Oliver
Twist, A Christmas Carol and A Tale of Two Cities, though rather advanced
reading for a child, kept me busy, and focused in a house where air conditioning
didn’t exist.
As an aside, and probably why I am a romance writer today, I
read Mills and Boon at age six and hid them under the covers. Back then there
was no sex. Not even a hint of it.
One of my favorite pieces of reading material growing up were
the misadventures of Bessie and Billy Bunter. They were overweight British
siblings who attended Greyfriars boarding school in England. Billy was
constantly being bullied because he was overweight and was sly, sneaky and
slothful. Billy’s boarding school was this
generations Hogwarts and Billy was our Harry Potter. His popularity produced
his sister Bessie.
Mind you, today, these books and cartoons would have been pulled
from the shelves. Billy was
constantly being whipped (caned,) by the masters. He stole money orders, made bigoted comments, and he and
Bessie lived to eat. Because of their size, (corpulent is being kind,) they
were constantly made fun of. They were definitely not politically correct figures by anyone's standards. But back then these were amazingly popular books, if you weren't overly sensitive and had a
sense of humor.
Books like The Wind in the Willows and Wuthering
Heights left an indelible mark. As a result, my perspective on life was far more
advanced than most, and perhaps a wee bit too cynical. But reading was a world I loved, and books helped
shape me. Without books I wouldn’t be the person that I am today: fanciful,
whimsical, and very much a child at heart.
All this to say, whether you’re four, five, or fifty-five,
put your heart in a book. The best gift you can give a young one is reading material. You’ll never regret it. Books feed the heart.
Soon to be released!
About
Marcia King-Gamble
Romance writer,
Marcia King-Gamble originally hails from a sunny Caribbean island where the sky
and ocean are the same mesmerizing shade of blue. This travel industry
executive and current world traveler has spent most of life in the United
States. A National Bestselling author, Marcia has penned over 34 books and 8
novellas. Her free time is spent at the gym, traveling to exotic locales, and
caring for her animal family.
Be sure to join
her mailing list.
