"A love of reading: the golden key that opens the enchanted door."

Reading was an enormous part of my childhood.  My parents correctly predicted my future would be about books and writing.

First blood was the wondrous work of Enid Blyton in The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage.  I immediately squirreled away pocket money to buy the rest of the series (all the while wondering why such a great crime-solving unit would name itself “The Five Find-Outers and Dog”), then graduated to the Famous Five.  Blyton could write a ripping yarn, complete with  lashings of teacake and ginger beer. 

Almost every child I knew read The Enchanted Wood  trilogy with utter joy.  My children loved this series too; the Faraway Tree may well delight a future generation.  I must say I had no time for Silky (the token submissive female) or The Saucepan Man (why?) but longed for Blyton to explore the psyche of Dame Washalot (one serious case of OCD) and the Angry Pixie.  We were never told why the Pixie was in such a state: was it psychosis, I wondered, or just haemorrhoids?

I enjoyed Blyton’s three school series (The Naughtiest Girl, St. Clair’s and Mallory Towers) despite the repeated themes.  Each featured wild lacrosse games, colicky horses and batty French teachers. I found further succour in the gripping Adventure series, but sorry, Enid - the Secret Seven never did it for me.

American authors also brought much joy into my life, notably Betty Smith's beautiful coming-of-age tale A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Madeleine L’Engle (A Wrinkle In Time), Elizabeth Enright (The Four Storey Mistake), Norton Juster (The Phantom Tollbooth) and the Trixie Belden series.

So wash my mouth out, but Australian authors held slightly less appeal, excepting two stand-out tales: Alan Marshall’s moving I Can Jump Puddles (to this day, just hearing the title makes me emotional) and Colin Thiele’s February Dragon - quintessential Australian fiction that I read as quickly as the bushfire ripped through the chapters.

It's a Hard Knocks Life ... Not.

Aged 9, I almost considered running away from home to join an orphanage, such were the adventures of the orphans central to many of my favourite childhood stories.  Being parentless, or being adopted by abusive parents (or better still, parents who ‘collected ashtrays and art’) seemed loaded with possibilities.  My friend Giselle and I spent a great deal of time plotting to run away from home, making lists of ‘provisions’ and one time even packing my Cathay Pacific travel bag with clothes, books and a packet of Arnott’s  Assorted Biscuits that we somehow imagined would sustain us for days.

I wonder how many children had these fantasies?   If not for books and films that glamorised the whole notion, the idea would not have crossed our minds.  When we visited a circus, the caravans  dotting  the field around the tent, seemed like exciting cubby-houses-on-wheels, ripe with the promise of travels.  More likely they were stuffy, miserable pods, but it would take another decade for us to realise that. 

Giselle and I knew nothing of the hardships of street life of course, and had decent families – a fact more or less confirmed by the fact that the Running Away Caper could be endlessly postponed (“I can’t go this week, we’re going to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” … “Not Friday, we're meeting Grandma at the Redapple Restaurant” etc. )

Despite being planned to the ‘nth’ degree, the venture never did go ahead.

The Sizzling Seventies

Summer in Adelaide BAC (Before Air Conditioning) was oppressively hot.   At school, we'd struggle to focus on our studies as the temperature climbed into the 90s Farenheit.  Although most public primary schools had an austere red brick building on the streetfront, you could not enter its hallowed corridors until you'd done years of  'porridge' in the de-mountables  flanking the school oval.  Every school had rows of them: teetering on struts, yet somehow surviving years of marauding students

None of the buildings was air-conditioned; the de-mountables (aka "pre-fabs") were hottest of all.  Ceiling fans would shwp shwp uselessly above us.  We girls,  in our very short skirts, left embarrassing sweaty thigh-marks on our chairs whenever we stood up.

Lunchtime offered no respite.  "Play on the oval" teachers would say, pointing to the shadeless expanse.  A mere sprinkle of gum trees was eked along the perimeter.  Gums?   You might as well stand under an empty  clothes line.  Were Gums cheaper than exotics, or were schools - even then - being botanically correct?

To intensify the heat experience, schools provided acres of asphalt.

Hardly any students came or went by car: we walked or cycled home when the sun was at its most fierce.

No events were ever cancelled due to heat.  During sport, one or two heatstroke victims was pretty much obligatory.  Excursions went ahead even when the road was a sweltering mirage and the packed bus felt like a furnace.  You did as you were told.  Your parents didn't intervene.  These were the days when students and parents feared teachers, not the other way around.