A WORM'S EYE VIEW

Lowly Worm, a character in the Richard Scarry children's books of the 1970s, gave me my first, ever, real joy when reading children's books. If these books had been around when I was a child in the late 40s and into the 50s I wonder if I would have been more of a 'reader'?

Basically, I am not a reader. As a child you would never find me curled up with a book transported into some Fairyland Otherworld.

Nevertheless, I was read to as a child. A A Milne's Winnie the Pooh with its black and white drawings by E H Shepherd comes to mind. My mother loved this book. She was an avid reader and there were always books in the house. As an older primary school child I recall having Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames books but I am afraid Anne of Green Gables, for example, never quickened my pulse. Libraries were available both at school and in the community but I was never one to be drawn into them except, perhaps, for some project that had to be researched.

I know that I cannot be bothered with recipe books that do not have coloured pictures so I think one reason - apart from the fact that I prefer to be busy 'doing' things than sitting down - that I am not a book-y person is that I need colour. Full stop. That means that the book has to really engage me if it is a novel or similar sort of book. Many times I will lay a book aside having tried my best to get into it.

So I am re-discovering the Richard Scarry books that I read to my own children in the 1970s. I now read them to my grandchildren. And it is great fun! We spend as much time trying to locate Lowly Worm in the drawings as we do following the storyline.

They are so imaginative! I pour over the drawings laughing at the nonsense activities that Huckle, Gorilla Bananas, Sergeant Murphy and the rest get up to.

Here is Lowly Worm helping Alastair scrape out a pumpkin in readiness for the guisers coming to our door at Hallowe'en.

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Richard Scarry, What Do People Do All Day?, HarperCollins Children's Books, 2005. First published 1968. ISBN 13: 978 0 00 718949 6