Love of AR in the Potteries


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Posted by Peter H on December 04, 2004 at 21:44:33 from 81.135.121.8 user Peter_H.

As Tarboard is a bit quiet at present, I thought the following extract might be of interest. It is from a recently published childhood autobiography by the British journalist Paul Johnson, who grew up in the Potteries area of Staffordshire in the 1930s (The Vanished Landscape, Weidenfeld & Nicolson):

‘. . .on fine days we took books into the park and read then there, often aloud. When Clare [one of his elder sisters] discovered Arthur Ransome’s stories about the Lake District, we tried to re-enact episodes in the wilderness, imagining it to be Westmorland scenery, and took boats out on the lower lake, imagining they had sails. The girls loved Swallows and Amazons so much that they bought it second-hand; and when Swallowdale came out, not having enough cash, they borrowed the Tunstall library copy and transcribed the entire text, taking turns, in school exercise books. This almost incredible labour, or so it seems to me now, was accomplished in a fortnight, at the end of which the book had to be returned, and involved midnight sessions, unknown to my parents. Then the text was available for repeated readings and large sections were learned by heart. The effort reflected the passion and dedication my sisters brought to books they loved, which they imparted to me.’

So Ed K is not the first to transcribe an AR book! However, Paul Johnson and his sisters only did one book, whereas Ed’s done them all. But it's good to think that their enthusiasm for AR is still shared today.



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