ALL THAT READIN'

ALL THAT READIN’

One May afternoon on Davisville Avenue in Toronto in 1938 I sat in the sunlight on the steps of our back porch, opened a book from our grade one library and read it from cover to cover. I can still feel the sun on my back and the thrill of being able to follow a whole story for the first time, all on my own.

Mom and Dad were still reading at bedtime to my brother Peter, three years younger than I. He soon caught up with me, as I ploughed happily through books we had already heard over and over at bedtime, books like A. A. Milnes’s The House at Pooh Corners, When We Were Very Young and Now We are Six.

Within short years we landed on the same pages, devouring British author Arthur Ransome’s adventures about children who, like us, lived our summer holidays on islands in lakes and rivers. Unlike us, they went to sea and had adventures with real pirates and hidden treasure, giving our imaginations plenty of scope.

My brother and I had to make two half-hour trips by streetcar three times a week to slake our thirst for reading. The St. Clair Public Library, a friendly place, was firm about allowing only three books at a time per child. I vaguely remember that we an unspoken agreement to take out at least one book each that both of us would enjoy, like E. Nesbitt’s tales of time travel, The Amulet and Five Children and It.

Peter had read at least once every book that interested him in the children’s section, long before he reached the age for the adult room, or even the small collection for youth. I fought such a determined campaign for him that eventually the librarians for adults and children put their heads together and agreed he was entitled to include one book from the adult section in his limit of three per visit.

As for me, when I was not among the novels, I spent hours at the library table, poring over large, heavy picture books on ballet, memorizing the career and repertoire of every ballerina and first male dancer on both sides of the Atlantic. In time I would watch many of them perform at the Royal Alexandra Theatre.

Once Dad and Peter made a foray to Balliol Street, one block south of us, to buy a guinea pig from one of Peter’s friends at Hodgson Public School. The classmate’s father confided to Dad in a stage whisper his reservations about Peter as a playmate for his son: “Nice kid, but,” he shook his head, “All that readin’.

Books cannot have done much harm. The classmate became an engineer and Peter a professor of English at the University of Toronto. My bookshelves are still overflowing with books that I got to know first at the Public Library - a home away from home.