Diana Grant Book Collector

I was seldom without a book - I would even carry one into morning assembly and sneak a few pages whilst everyone else was singing hymns.

I discovered Noel Streatfield and Lorna Hill - wonderful books about ballet school and families who lived in huge houses with a fleet of servants. I remember one family who fell on such hard times that they had to sack all their domestic staff except the cook. I read the Little Women series by Louisa May Alcott, and What Katy Did and What Katy Did Next - and I drank in their lives and all their earnest endeavours and misfortunes. Even being bedridden like Katy taught me what it must be like to be confined to bed for months. I loved Just William and the lithping Violet Elizabeth and collected and read much of the series. Then there was Jennings the naughty schoolboy and his cohorts. They came out a lot later than the Richmall Crompton's William books, and were therefore more modern, and caught the spirit of the era - my era.

Image above: Two Jennings books by Anthony Buckridge

You'll find a real trip down memory lane

I started boarding school in 1952 and I became an even more voracious reader - by the time I left school I had read most of the fiction in the library.

We read most of the Dickens books and Shakespearean plays as set books, two or more a term. We also had to read Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. I really enjoyed them, sometimes with help from our excellent teachers.

Not only did we have two or three set books a term, but we were also expected to read classics during the school holidays. It was a bit of a chore at the time, but I am grateful now.

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I also studied Latin books (in Latin, I'm afraid), like Caesar's Gallic Wars (and there were a lot, I can tell you), the poetry of Ovid and the speeches and poetry of Catullus (who was a famous Roman lawyer). Homer'sThe Odyssey and The Illiad. Some of Ovid's poetry was considered too rude for innocent schoolgirls, but, having learnt Latin for five years, I grabbed a copy of his Ars Amatiae (The Art of Love) as soon as I had left school. The school was right!

[I have written a web page about my Vintage Poetry Books and you can buy the books mentioned using Paypal]

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I loved Neville Shute who was very popular at that time - The Far Country, On the Beach, A Town Like Alice.

Then there was Richard Gordon's iconoclastic series about doctors - Doctor in the House, Doctor at Sea, and on and on. He was a doctor himself, so the stories had a ring of truth. Then there was Nicholas Montsarrat - the Cruel Sea and The Ship That Died of Shame - again writing from his own wartime experiences.

Our school library was impressive, but although there was every kind of encyclopaedia and novel, we didn't do blatant sex. Gone with the Wind was passed round surreptitiously when I was about 15, and I read The Sheikh when I was 16 - all fluttering eyelashes and being swept off her feet in a tent - hot stuff for a teenager with a protected upbringing. I expect it would be considered very tame nowdays, when you see humping people on the cinema screen as a matter of course in many films. It was all more tastefully done when I was a girl - just a meaningful look and a boudoir door closing.

By the time I left school at the age of sixteen, I had quite an extensive vocabulary.

Then there were all the popular true stories arising from the War, like The Great Escape, The Dam Busters, Stalag Lufft, and The Wooden Horse.

I was inspired, and have remained so today, by Reach for the Sky, the rivetting story of Douglas Bader, the ace pilot who lost his legs in a flying accident and overcame his disability by learning to walk again and later to fly aircraft).

Then there was The Diary of Anne Frank, another inspirational story, and numerous books about very brave spies. such as Odette, some of whom were caught and tortured, and stories of separation and loss.

My Mother encouraged me, nay, insisted that I should read these books, so that I would know what happened and understand - "Lest we Forget", she would say. And quite right too.

In later years, the 1960's, I read Leon Uris's Mila 18 about the Warsaw uprising, QBII a court trial about about the role of a Polish doctor in a German concentration camp, and Exodus, a fictional account of the persecution of the Jews and how and why Israel was set up. I also read many other books about the consequences of the war and about war criminals, Indeed, when I was studying International Law, I was fascinated by the legal complexities involved in the hunting down and kidnap of the war criminal Eichmann, and his trial and execution in Israel.

By the time I had finished reading all those books, and more, I had some feel for what people had suffered. They were harrowing, but a necessary part of my education.

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Just to round things off, this design comes on a Tee-shirt for
book lovers - You can buy it on Zazzle:









Books Forever! - T-Shirt by GloriousConfusion
Browse zazzle for a different t-shirt.zazzle