Reading has always been an important part of my life. With no television and only rare trips to the cinema, books were how we fed our imagination.
As a child, I lived among girls who were strong and capable, who quietly shaped my sense of what it meant to be brave. They fed my dreams of being indomitable.
I wanted to be those girls with all my heart.
Perhaps that is where it all began – the search for a way to turn feelings into words.
The Railway Children - E. Nesbit
Roberta stayed with me for her steadiness. She was thoughtful, observant, and quietly strong in a way that didn’t need to be announced.
There was something about her resilience that felt real. Something I recognised, even if I didn’t yet have the words for it.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
Alice fascinated me because she didn’t question the strangeness she encountered. She simply stepped into it.
She was curious, bold, and completely unafraid to follow things through, whether that meant eating the cake, drinking the drink, or talking to a cat that might disappear.
There was a freedom in her, which I loved.
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Mary was different from the others. She was sharp, difficult, and not especially likeable at first. But that was part of what made her compelling.
I remember the quiet transformation most of all. The sense that change could happen slowly, almost unnoticed, and yet alter everything.
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”
— Jo March, Little Women
And last, but not least, above all, I wanted to be Jo.
Not just because she wrote, but because she felt things so deeply and refused to ignore them. She took her inner world seriously, and believed it mattered.
I recognised something in her long before I understood it. The intensity, the restlessness, the need to express something that even she did not really understand yet.
There are so many books and authors I could include here, the list is endless.
Every Christmas, a Rupert the Bear annual under the tree.
Beatrix Potter and A.A. Milne – stories I now read to my grandson.
Charles Dickens – I have inherited a complete set of Dickens, and have been studying him on my degree course this year.
C.S. Lewis – more escapism, through the wardrobe to Narnia.
Mary Norton – taking me under the floorboards with The Borrowers.
One of my dearest memories is reading J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings with my dad, when I was about 8 or 9, and have read repeatedly over the years.
When we moved to Morecambe in 2017, I joined a book club to make friends. But my real friends are all the books I have read and will read. So let’s close with a quote from another of my favourite authors.