I was sold from the very beginning on the idea of a door into a secret world from your very own house. Last thing on a Friday afternoon, our primary school teacher would bring the week to a close by reading to us from the Narnia books, before sending us peacefully on our way. I would get on the 154 bus and dream out of the window.

If I couldn’t wait to pay for it myself out of sixpence a week pocket money, then this was reading matter that mattered.
 
You could get a lot for a tanner, including fat pink rectangles of Bazooka Joe bubble gum, wrapped in mini comic strips: brief funnies, chances to win free trashy merchandise and a phrase always of advice or fortune-telling. If you preferred mint chewing gum, then better than Wrigley’s strips were Beechnut bite size pieces, sugar-coated and peppermint. You put a penny in the machine on the street, turned the black knob and a little pack dropped out. Every fourth penny produced an extra free packet.
 
Sweets and comics were a realm of commerce where children held natural rule and our hunger produced an imaginative plenty. In the pages of comics, the delight in being silly, the desire to be nimble-witted and naughty, the yearning to be valiant and heroic, were validated and given free rein. Every week there were fresh new comics at the newsagent’s, or a friend had ones you could do swaps for.
 
My favourite titles and characters were:
 
The Beano
The Topper
The Dandy
Batman
Superman
Eagle
Valiant
Buster
Whizzer & Chips
 
Dennis the Menace
Roger the Dodge
Minnie the Minx
Beryl the Peril
Desperate Dan
Charlie Peace
Andy Capp
Roy of the Rovers
Dan Dare
Captain Hurricane
Keyhole Kate
The Bash Street Kids
 

Where my love affair with story books started for real.

For the first time, I was reading whole books and they were about the adventures of children in a real, recognizable England, which for me was my world. If I were just a little older and more grown-up, as well as more privileged — which I was taught to understand as worthier — it could almost be me.

Here were children going about with scant adult supervision, making investigations off their own bat, treated seriously and being of importance in the adult world, to which they thus laid a claim. By dint of reading the books by myself, I felt as well a private protagonism. Just going on their own by train to Cornwall was enough to grab my attention. Getting away from parents! But of course it then delivered on smugglers, travelling performers, a ragamuffin, flashing light signals, secret caves and tunnels... Cornwall was one of the very few places I had been, visiting cousins on a summer holiday. To think that this coast could hold secrets waiting to be discovered turned on all kinds of lights in me.

 Of course, the series format meant that the adventures were potentially never-ending.

The magical space that children call play develops naturally with age, from pure imagination to engagement with the real world about them. For the child, the fiction is of the order of reality, insofar as it is a vision of a more interesting version of it. One that adults seem to ignore. As  adults, we desire this also from books, but have largely forgotten how to read imaginatively and open the mind to creative living.

Children love rude characters and there are splendid ones here: the Red Queen, Tweedledum & Tweedledee and Humpty Dumpty.
 
A perfectly wacky story which also gave us Jabberwocky, whose first stanza is the best made-up verse I have ever come across, lyrical and darkly hinting, conjuring up the mood of the scene with enigmatic suggestibility and rhythmic foreboding. The sound pattern is balanced just right and there is not a weak word or a syllable out of place. A satisfaction of nonsense.
 
“Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don't exactly know what they are!” said Alice.

In 19th century England, when books for children were meant to teach them to be good little girls and boys, Carroll wrote a story to amaze and delight them.

To follow Alice down the rabbit hole was to enter a fictional world of magical fantasy for the first time and I loved her adventures with such wildly inventive characters as the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and the Red Queen, in a secret world where the absurd, the hallucinatory and the ridiculous are centre stage.

The book in which we learned how to play Poohsticks brought a bear and his friends to life via bucolic scenes and E.H. Shepard’s endearing illustrations.
 
More than Toad or Ratty in The Wind in the Willows, more even than  Paddington Bear, it was A. A. Milne’s whimsical characters of Pooh, Eeyore, Piglet and Tigger that did it for me.

“They’re changing the guard at Buckingham Palace--
Christopher Robin went down with Alice.
We saw a guard in a sentry-box.
‘One of the sergeants looks after their socks,’
                                                            Says Alice.”
 
The fun and safeness of rhyme and silliness in a child’s own world — and an introduction to a furry friend whom you felt protective of, called Winnie-the-Pooh. A Bear of Very Little Brain who made you feel that it was alright not to understand Long Words.

Bohemian fairytale in Parker Fillmore’s translation of Czechoslovak Fairy Tales

This tale grabbed me with its lapidary style and heavy, dark images, and for being resolved not by the ranking prince but commoners with bizarre talents.

The black magician lives in an iron castle where nothing lives and his adversaries have all been turned to stone. The prince and his serving men must overcome seemingly impossible challenges or share the same fate. Each of the eponymous companions has a fabulous and redoubtable ability that  is put to the test. The third and final challenge is surely too much, even for them, yet Longshanks, Keen and Girth combine to do their mostest and the rule of three prevails.

In the critical scene, in images that stamped a stark impression on me, the last of the iron bands around the magician’s waist breaks and falls away, upon which the magician is turned into a black crow and flies away through the window, never to be seen again. Strong stuff.