…it’s high time for this ol’ Jurassic to dispel the urban myth that I was such a child prodigy that my first ever three WURDS were, ‘Mama’, ‘Dada’, and ‘hexachlorophenation’… however, my interest in books and reading began well before the age of three… Docklands Govan in Glasgow, although p’raps not the absolute centre of the literary arts in the early 1950s, did boast a wunnerful public library, opened in 1903, and still going strong…
…it was housed in an impressive grey granite building at the entrance of the Elder Park, which also contained a (thankfully shallow) pond in which could be seen swans, and sum’times assorted ‘he-fell-in-Mister,-honest-I-didn’t-shove-him children when their ‘minders’ let their charges run too loose… when I reached the ripe old age of five, I was enrolled in the children’s section of the aforesaid Elder Park Library, and given my own wee buff-coloured card… permitted to take away up to a trio of books at any time… the nice lassie who tended the desk must have thought I lived in the place… thus began a lifelong LUV affair with the written WURD… early reading-under-the-blankets-with-a-battery-torch included anything by Enid Blyton… the Billy Bunter escapades… The Scarlet Pimpernel… Robert Louis Stevenson classics… Sir Walter Scott and umpteen other scribblers of the day… rich pickings were to be found in the ‘returns’ shelves… these books that others had read and recently brought back to the library…
…there were also big leathery, blue-bound tomes, not unlike encyclopaedias, which contained one-page black-and-white-only-pictured descriptions of all sorts of marvellous facts—history, musicians, planets, wondrous lands, strange animals… and I devoured them all… around the same time sumb’dy gave me a little pocket money and I promptly went to the newsagents, where a newly-introduced Junior Newspaper was on sale for one penny… it had prob’ly about eight pages… I read it cover to cover, then sped back to the shop and bought another… imagine the dismay of this five-year-old to discover its contents were precisely the same as the one I had bought earlier!… we live and learn, eh, Mabel?… ah, to be that kid again, delving into that brand new wondrous reading universe… oh, and by the way, the first three WURDS were actually, ‘Mama’, ‘Dada’, and’ ‘pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism’... see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…
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How marvelous you can remember your first three words, Seumas, especially the long one. 😀 I loved libraries also. My dad was a reader and took me the first time. However, he used to read comic books to me from the time I was very young. He enjoyed them as much as I did. 🙂
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LUV IT! :):)
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Seumas, you take me back! – I remember that library very well, since it was the one I was taken to on Saturday mornings, by my aunt and Grampa, who lived on Craigton Road. The Elder Park Library was just around the corner from their close and about three blocks down Elderpark St(?) – I think that was the name of it. The Elder Park was the place to go on good sunny days to sit on the perimeter wall of the pool, paddle your feet and cool down. The streets between my Grampa and the park, like Crossloan Rd(?), were great to roller skate on since they had almost no traffic and were of a very flat kind of tar. I stayed with my Grampa nearly every weekend so I didn’t qualify for a ticket for the Elder but Grampa was able to get me a book to read for the weekend on his ticket. I lived in Maryhill and went to the Library off Maryhill Road with my dad.
Lovely post.
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…great stuff to remember, m’Lady, Nancy… :):)
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…indeed it was on the corner of Elderpark Street which was flanked on one side by Uist Street and on the other by Greenfield Street , in which I lived until I was 12 :):)
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Fancy that! My mother was born in 85 Greenfield St, back in 1918. They stayed there for a good while then moved to 28 Rigmuir Road near the ‘Fifty Pitches then Grampa moved to Craigton Rd about 1951.
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..it truly is a very small world… even if Govan is the centre of it!
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Seumas, just a heads up that I have moved my blog address to a cheaper, more migraine-friendly address. You are very welcome to stalk me there. http://cateartios.net/CommuniCATE_Blog/
Have an awesome week.
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..will be there, m’Lady, cate … don’t wanna lose track of you!! :):)
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Awwww, shucks!
(stalker)
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Lovely memories. I used to exchange books with the other children at school and the more writerly types also exchanged the stories we were writing…
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…marvellous fun, m’Lady. Olga:)
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