World Book Day special: On reading

Something a little different this week.

I want to share a piece of writing I submitted for a wonderful course I took back in 2019. The course was called The Quiet Words (you can immediately see why it appealed) and was run by none other than Huma Qureshi. In the intervening years, it has been inspirational to watch Huma’s star rise, publishing both a warm and heart-led memoir (How We Met) and an acclaimed short story collection (Things We Do Not Tell The People We Love), with a new novel on the way.

Taking Huma’s course marked a turning point for me—the start of a long, stretchy journey to finally letting myself be the writer I wanted to be, one who actually wrote things.

The course invited participants in the gentlest way to explore various aspects of writing creatively week by week, culminating in submitting a piece of work to Huma for feedback. I really enjoyed the early weeks. Huma is also an avid reader, so there was an emphasis on leaning into the detail of our favourite books and authors, which appealed to me hugely. But the notion of having to write something for submission sat heavily on my shoulder, fear pulling its usual trick of convincing me I had no ideas. I’d aspired to write a beautifully crafted short story, but of course ‘couldn’t think what to write’.

In the end, I knew the only way I could change the pattern of not submitting work, of not writing, was to do the opposite and just write something, anything. At that time, I was a volunteer reader at our village primary school, and I came home from a morning with the children and wrote about it. Not a beautifully crafted short story after all, but a small piece of me and my world rendered into words, the things I notice and the things that light me up.

So this has a special place in my heart both because it marks an important step on my journey as a writer and because it’s a wonderful reminder of a volunteer role I loved—watching children practise and develop the life skill that has meant the world to me.

There seems no better way to mark World Book Day than to share On reading with you.

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On Thursday mornings you will find me sitting curled up, knees nearing my armpits, on a tiny green plastic chair at a small table from which I have hastily cleared the detritus of children’s play. I have stepped over a basket of tiddlywinks upended on the floor, shifted a pile of recently abandoned, garishly coloured dinosaurs onto the windowsill. On the table I place a printed list of names and a pile of books and reading records beside it. A small child comes to sit in the tiny green plastic chair next to mine and our reading adventure begins.

Reading and childhood are absolutely intertwined for me. So many of my memories involve books, libraries, stories—stories about me reading books in libraries. Reading has always been my thing. Shelves of books, my badge of honour. Words, my inspiration, my comfort, my escape. As I morphed from child to adult, little changed in this respect. Then came a lull in my usual reading turnover during the early years of motherhood. These were ‘the kindle years’, for ease of one-handed page turning when settled in for long periods of feeding my daughter and subsequently being trapped beneath her milk-drunk sleeping warmth.

The arrival of my beautiful girl created new reading opportunities—I’ve joyfully amassed a collection of picture books and more recently chapter books for us to enjoy together and increasingly (be still my bookish heart) for her to nestle into her beanbag and read alone. All too quickly the years of full-time motherhood came to an end. When my daughter started school, I started to think about how I wanted to shape this newfound time to myself, this time without her—and I followed her into the classroom as a volunteer reader. 

And so, on Thursday mornings I read to and am read to, helping to sow the seeds and nurturing the first tiny shoots. I read stories to the Nursery children, trying to engage them in the words, the pictures, the power of storytelling. With the Reception children, I’m there to listen, to support them in taking their first hesitant, faltering steps on one of the most vital, vibrant and valuable journeys they will ever make. I feel the weight of that. The privilege of my position.

The sensations and emotions of a morning in the classroom are a lot to take in and eye-opening for a parent used to kissing goodbye to a bundled-up little one at the door, then heading home to the joy-inducing morning triumvirate of peace, quiet and good coffee. The noise of more than forty children at play is overwhelming. After my first morning, I came home with a serious headache and sat simply stunned, staring out of the window for an hour to readjust. The children’s different reactions to reading also took a little getting used to. Some of the littlest Nursery children stare up at me with enormous eyes filled with utter bewilderment and fright. The Reception children often become uncomfortable, squirming and writhing around in the seat while their brains work overtime decrypting the mass of black symbols into letter sounds, before finally blending them together into words.

Sometimes I see my reading time on a Thursday morning as simply parenting on a larger scale, relying as it does on bucketsful of patience. This is especially the case in the early days when readers are tentative, attention spans short and books often incredibly boring, by necessity featuring only a limited number of words made up of a limited number of letters. I do not give in to the temptation to bash my head on the tiny table (a feat of contortion in itself) when a succession of tired children fail to recognise ‘the’ on a succession of pages. ‘Seriously?!!’ I silently scream in frustration. ‘We just looked at this word on the last page, do you remember? One of your tricky words …’ is thankfully the gentler response I actually make. Reading with the children also helps me cultivate the skill of being present, the ability to give myself totally to them for the three hours I’m there. Motherhood has shown me that above all else (except maybe snacks and Hey Duggee), children want to feel that you’re there for them, listening, hearing, caring. Applying that in the classroom has been invaluable to gaining the trust and often best efforts of these fledgling readers.

Through this experience I gain as much as I give, perhaps more. I’m learning how to relate to different children. I’m a mother of a fairly quiet girl, so getting the attention of boisterous boys was new to me. I realised that there were a particular pair of boys that I would avoid choosing to read with week after week and had to face up to the fact that I was actually a bit scared of them—two five-year-old boys. So I made a point of choosing them the next week; they read beautifully. I have laughed out loud at the statements of the children seemingly possessing no sense of filter at all—one minute deeply engrossed in her book, a girl looked up at me and with equal seriousness asked ‘why is your nose so big?’

The opportunity to spend time with the teaching staff has provided a window into how tirelessly they work and how much of that work does not actually involve teaching. They are warm, welcoming, funny. They appreciate my time and my willingness to join in with all the mayhem a morning in class brings. I’ve chatted and laughed with them while snipping up egg boxes with blunt scissors, while dressed as a giant crayon for World Book Day, while trying to snap poppadoms into perfect halves at Diwali. They fill me with hope for our children, and despair at our education system.

As the school year progresses, so does the confidence and ability of the readers. There are weeks when my emotions run high as child after child sitting in the seat next to mine makes me so proud I could cry. The recalcitrant (and goodness that is diplomatically put) child, who on slowly, carefully reaching the final sentence of her book asks if she can read me a second. The child who after weeks and weeks of telling me she can’t do it and trying to divert and deflect our reading sessions by purposefully and repeatedly falling off her chair or taking her shoes on and off, on and off, reads a book from start to finish with ease—and then goes away and copies out the entire thing onto a sheet of paper for me to take home. The boy who is flying with his reading despite the fact that his parents never read with him at home, tells me that he and his older brother have started reading their school books to each other.

It’s certainly not always so heartliftingly worthy though. I have had two weeing incidents (the child sat next to me, I should perhaps clarify), which in two years of Thursdays, I actually consider quite a reasonable rate of return. Experiencing that immediate floundering feeling I recognise from my daughter’s illnesses or accidents, I looked at the wee-sodden child, their wee-soden clothing, the wee-sodden floor and all the wee-sodden things surrounding them on the wee-sodden floor, and froze with ‘where on earth do I start?’ looping in my head. Embarrassingly the first course of action my brain settled on was to shout for the Nursery Nurse, calling her name in the same plaintive tone employed by the youngest children sitting on the toilet urgently needing assistance. I then bustled about brandishing paper towels semi-usefully, while internally ruing the decision to bring my water bottle and notebook in my new lovely canvas tote.

A teacher blows the whistle to indicate the end of the morning session, and the five-year-old responsible for tidying the area of the classroom where I’m sitting, will, in an action that belies his years, put his hands on his hips, sigh and shake his head in disbelief that children can create such mess—every week the same adult gesture, every week simultaneously melting my heart and making me want to laugh out loud. I unfurl from my tiny green plastic chair, file the list, books and reading records back where they belong. I put on my coat and wave goodbye to my little friends, heading home to peace, quiet and good coffee with my heart and head full from a morning of reading.

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As a little World Book Day endnote, my daughter wanted to recommend some of her favourite books, which might be useful if you have a middle-grade reader to buy for.

The Awesomely Austen series—(As an adult Austen lover, I have to say these are brilliantly adapted, still sharp and intelligent and leaving lots for discussion. Great to enable children to read her work from an earlier age, which will probably lead to them picking up the originals sooner rather than later.)

The Dragonfly Pool by Eva Ibbotson

The Cookie series by Konnie Huq

The Pages & Co series by Anna James

The Murder Most Unladylike series by Robin Stevens

Honourable mentions for The Nowhere Emporium by Ross Mackensie, Cogheart by Peter Bunzl and its sequel, Moonlocket, and Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly (the excellent young reader edition appears to be out of print, but we found one on eBay).

Harry Potter goes without saying.

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(Includes affiliate links to Bookshop.org, an excellent bookselling website supporting indie bookshops)