Anne here, introducing the topic for this month's AAW (Ask A Wench): In your childhood reading was there a place you fell in love with?
Pat: England, hands down. I read tons of Brit lit in elementary school. They used to sell Austen and Bronte in the Scholastic Library book fairs, the only time my parents gave me money for books. So I went for the great big fat books, and they were all about the white cliffs of Dover and the misty fog over the Thames and the thatched cottages in the Cotswolds. I had no idea where any of those places were, but I wanted to see them all.
And then there were all the books about the kings and queens in the library that I had to research to figure out their relationships, because they were obviously all related, right? So then I wanted to see all their grand castles, the Tower of London, the towns and. . . I suspect I expected to see horses and carriages as well, but the cottage gardens would have sufficed!
Susan: The favorite books of my childhood reading took me to so many special places--I was a kid, so each story opened up new places, new experiences, new adventures. England probably caught my imagination the most often--the windswept moors of the Bronte novels, for example, and absolutely anything with a castle. Yet there's one place I truly fell in love with at a very young age, and still love to this day: Fairyland. I adored fairy tales, stories set in a world of magic and mysticism, mystery and heroics and danger. Princesses and princes, kings and queens, knights and brave girls, fairies, witches, goblins, loyal friends and tricksters ... all running about in medieval-like settings of castles, forests, caves, and misty magical places. Sometimes the settings were Georgian or Regency or Tudor-like--and I absorbed all of it, developing a taste for historical settings while I immersed myself in every fairy tale I could get my little hands on, from Brothers Grimm to Andrew Lang to Little Golden Books, and more.
The illustrations sparked my imagination as much as the stories: Arthur Rackham, Sheilah Beckett, Edmund Dulac, Kay Nielsen and so on brought Fairyland to vivid visual life. This place was real to me. I read the stories, I wrote a few of my own in crayon and pencil, and I drew fairy princesses (once, notoriously, a spectacular princess on a flyleaf in the family Bible...). Looking back, that beautiful, elusive, glittering place, Fairyland, led me to historical settings, and to a love of romance, adventure, and magic.
Mary Jo: As soon as I learned how to read, I became addicted, and one of the joys of reading was that it took me to places very different from the quiet farm country where I grew up. Faraway places with strange sounding names….
Places I fell in love with? I had a deep attachment to the space ship Polaris that was home base for Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, but in the real world, it will surprise no one that I loved stories set in Britain. Castles! Craggy coasts! Highlands! Lots and lots of richly flavored history! I read Thomas Costain's Plantagenet Chronicles, four fat volumes, just for fun. (And I still remember a lot of those kings, too.)
I think I liked that Britain is similar enough to the US to be accessible, but different enough to be interesting. If I had to name one book that totally blew me away with its brilliant story and vivid sense of place, it would be The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett.
First of the magnificent six volume Lymond Chronicles, it made Scotland come alive in wondrous ways. If you haven't read The Game of Kings, it's currently available in an e-book edition for $1.99. But given the complex cast of characters, there's a lot to be said for a print copy!
I'm not sure if Britain imprinted on my soul from early reading, or that I was born loving it and drawn to stories set there. Whatever the reason, "Oh, to be in England now that April (June!) is here…."
Nicola: Like so many other readers, I loved travelling via books to distant and exotic places. When I was a child we lived in the city and the countryside was a bit of a mystery to me. As a family we couldn't afford to travel much so places like Norfolk or Scotland seemed far away and like another world to me! Oh to camp out on the wild mountains or go sailing on the Norfolk Broads! I think that my childhood reading did instil in me a deep love of the English countryside which, as an adult, I've been lucky enough to get to know well.
Then there were the really exotic places, like America and Australia, which I don't think I ever expected to visit in real life. I read the entire series of Little House on the Prairie and all the Brumby books by Elyne Mitchell and probably extrapolated from those that life in far flung parts of the globe was exactly like it was described in those books!
But my first love was always the past. I fell in love with Tudor England when I read A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley when I was about eleven years old. I so wanted to be that girl who steps through a time portal and finds herself caught up in all the intrigue of Elizabethan England! It was books like that that fostered my love of history and eventually led to me becoming a writer. The past really was a different country and one I have never fallen out of love with.
Cara/Andrea: Books have always been magical for me. I was one of those kids who would sneak a flashlight into bed so I could read under the covers way past my bedtime. I had a very active imagination, so I think storytelling just struck a chord with me–the idea that I could suddenly be swept away to all sorts of wonderful places, meet intrepid companions and have fabulous adventures was something very special. Tales of quests appealed to me–I loved anything with knights in shining armor. I vividly remember The Once and Future King, Ivanhoe, Robin Hood stories, Otto of the Silver Hand, which had gorgeous illustrations by Howard Pyle. The Wind in the Willows, the Winnie the Pooh stories and The Fabulous Flight also were great favorites, as animal friends also struck a chord. (The family dog and I had grand adventures in the woods behind my house, some of which involved a bow and arrow. Happily we both survived!)
As I sit looking back at the list of memorable reads, I realize they tended to take me to England. Castles, forests, legends, kings and grand battles—yes, that’s the stuff that captivated my fancy. Stories set in England always seemed to have a richness, a sense of history and tradition, of codes of honor, courage and friendship. These things that appealed to me as child have shaped my own storytelling now, and my love of the rich tapestry of history. But I also think that along with falling in love with a specific place, I fell in love with the elemental act of reading. I learned to appreciate the art of language and description, of voice and characterization. I realized how powerful words are, and loved how they could make me laugh or cry. Most of all I loved that words taught me to dream that anything’s possible. That’s a real gift for a lifetime.
Jo Bourne: Narnia. This was such a rich, fully realized world. I grew up to find it full of Historical references and symbolism that I kind of missed the first time through, as a child. It only made me love the books more.
Why did I respond to these books? I wanted to go live where a child's actions could have significance for good or evil. Where anyone, (even a girl,) could be a hero. Where animals talked and had their own wise and kindly virtues and surprising agendas. (I loved Reepicheep.) Where the days were full of derring-do and sword fighting and bravery and sometimes hunger and sometimes splendid food and also, always magic. And the Good Guys won.
I read these books to my own kids. I think they liked them.
Anne: Like most of the other wenches, my fantasy land was England as well, the land of magical woods — the Faraway Tree, the Hundred Acre Wood, Sherwood Forest — and ancient castles, mysterious mansions, old thatched cottages, stone towers and cosy farmhouses. Probably the author most responsible for these imaginings was Enid Blyton, a hugely prolific English writer well known to all our English, Australian and NZ readers, but not so much the the US ones, I suspect.
She had the knack of writing stories that were total kids' fantasies — adventurous holidays in which unsupervised children roamed the country, and few adults appeared; schools where midnight feasts were common; a world in which clever children could defeat criminal gangs. And then there were all the magical places and people, rabbits with wings, magical worlds at the top of trees, and more.
When I looked at the topic for today's Ask a Wench, an image popped into my head of a brightly painted gypsy caravan pulled by a horse, ambling through an idyllic green countryside.
It could have been from the Wind in the Willows, or from any one of a number of stories, but I think it's from an Enid Blyton book called The Caravan Family, that I'd read when I was five or six. Wherever the source, it's still an appealing fantasy for me, wandering at an easy pace through beautiful countryside, lulled by the rhythmic clip-clopping of the horse's hooves, stopping by a stream for a picnic lunch and perhaps a swim, dinner cooked over a fire under the stars, and then sleeping in a brilliantly painted cosy wooden caravan. It's pure wish-fulfillment, of course, but Enid Blyton was very good at that
And so, now over to you, wenchly readers: In your childhood reading was there a place you fell in love with?