PWAC Victoria: Peter Grant, Writing Sample

The Reading Room

My Journeys through Bookland

by Peter Grant ©

An essay on the significance of reading to children. Published in Victoria Times-Colonist, Feb. 26, 2000.

Mum read to me every night before sleep. Journeys through Bookland was a multi-volume anthology with embossed maroon binding. Volume 1 was nursery rhymes and fairy tales. I loved Hans Christian Andersen's story of the ugly duckling, returning a full-grown swan to the pond where his nasty adoptive duck siblings gaze in awe.

Another favourite early book was Slovenly Peter, with gruesomely graphic Victorian illustrations of various dooms that follow misbehaviour. I especially relished the man who flies in through the window with long-handled shears to cut off the offending digits of suck-a-thumbs. I treasured the narrow Tall Book of Make Believe with its illustration of friendly ghosts and gnomes who live in tree houses. I loved Dr. Seuss's To Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street and The 500 Hats of Bartholemew Cubbins. These stories and pictures mirrored my deeper concerns and helped me make sense of my emotional turmoils.

The title Journeys through Bookland captures my conscious attitude to books. Storybooks had the power to transport. I can still see vividly Dorothy shipwrecked on a beach (in Ozma of Oz) reading a warning in the sand while clouds scudded along the horizon. I remember because I was there.

Thornton W. Burgess's Old Mother West Wind's Why Stories . . . The Wind in the Willows . . . The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle . . . Their very names have the power to evoke whole worlds.

One of my fondest of all childhood memories was of Mum reading The Snow Owl's Secret, a romance about Ojibwa children and their friend, a Hudson's Bay Company factor's son. Snuggling under the covers in a little cabin backed by young Douglas firs at Ackland's Guest House on Salt Spring Island as my mother read, I was transported to the snowy deep north woods.

Another favourite was Stuart Little, the utterly believable mouse-person in the New York City of the 40s. By the time we visited New York, I knew that city.

When I took to reading myself, the printed word maintained its power to transport. There was the The Story of Rome, with its deep blue cover and edifying tales of pre-Imperial integrity. Five Children and It and its sequels involving the strange time-travelling Psammead. I devoured Richard Halliburton's travels in The Royal Road to Romance. I loved olden-time tales like Stevenson's Black Arrow, Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, and the pirate tale Moonfleet. I read dozens of Hardy Boys mysteries, and Richmal Crompton's William series, about a deliciously naughty and irreverent English schoolboy. When I became a baseball fan, I cherished the Faustian tale The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant.

At some point I began carting my childhood books to Fort Street by the box and selling them. Then I'd dash over to Russell's Stamps. Later I grieved the loss. Now it doesn't seem to matter much. When in turn I read bedtime stories to our daughter Molly, my favourites were not the stories she wanted. New generations of children's books have taken their place--Goodnight Moon, The Runaway Bunny, fabulously-illustrated editions of Beauty and the Beast (Jan Brett, Clarion Books, 1989) and Thorn Rose (Errol Le Cain, Puffin Books, 1975). She actually preferred (and still does) fresh-minted stories of my own invention.

In fulfilling my role as parental reader, one story stands out above the rest, a story that my mother read to me in her time. It was The Happy Prince, Oscar Wilde's tale of a statue that surveys human suffering from a prominence. Grieving for the hardships of people of whose existence he was unaware while alive, the Happy Prince enlists the aid of a swallow in stripping the jewels and gold that ornament the statue to give to them. I never could get through a reading of the story without completely losing my composure. The story's deep irony and profound message--"more marvellous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery"--furnishes an imperative to me: to look, to see, to care, to intervene where possible. In that moral dimension is, I think, the true value of reading. I inherited it, and I hope I've done a little to pass it on.

Peter Grant is the author of Victoria from Sidney to Sooke, Victoria: A History in Photographs, and The Story of Sidney. He also reads nonfiction.

Peter Grant
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Last updated: October 19, 2000 http://www.islandnet.com/pwacvic/grantp02.html