Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories, Puck of Pook’s Hill Here is the list of ‘Recommended reading from East Mole Library’ in full:Įrnest Thomas Seton, The Trail of the Sandhill Stag For Vickers’ part, she enjoyed them, though her parents wouldn’t have them in the house so she associates them with chocolate spread sandwiches on sliced white bread, another contraband treat that was served up at the friend’s where she read about the Famous Five.
She learnt to read before she started school using The Tale of Peter Rabbit and others by Beatrix Potter, in whose debt she’ll forever be ‘for so enhancing my vocabulary at a very young age and for her salutary example in the use of cadence’, she confides.Īs for Enid Blyton… The real and the fictional Miss Blackwell both scorn her. It is, she says, ‘one of the greatest children’s books of all time’. She is Miss Blackwell, a name borrowed from the ‘remarkable’ Children’s Librarian at Vickers’ own local library when she was growing up.Īs Vickers explains, ‘It is to Miss Blackwell that I owe many of the books and characters that have informed not only my writing life but probably my whole take on life, what seems to me to matter most, how I brought up my children and how I like to be now with my grandchildren’.Īmong those books is Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, which Vickers bought with a birthday book token when it first came out in 1958. Which is apt since The Librarian traces the impact an idealistic young Children’s Librarian has on East Mole, the Wiltshire market town she moves to in 1959. So when I flipped to the back of Salley Vickers’ latest novel, I was in for a pleasant surprise because she lists not people but books. To the well-trained eye, these thank-you lists – sometimes spare, sometimes gushing – position their author with merciless precision in the literary ecosystem. No, I’m talking about the acknowledgements.
And I don’t mean turning directly to the last page to find out what happens, either. You know you’ve been a literary critic for too long when you start a book at the end.
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