I grew up in bookshops.
One specific bookshop, really – The Sevenoaks Bookshop, still remarkably one of the few independents left. I remember the friendly tolerance of the staff with affection, but mainly I’m afraid I just remember the atmosphere of the place, how content I was wandering up and down the shelves, or sitting on a library stool, almost invisible behind the big square display table as I tried to work out how to spend my pocket money. Michelle Magorian. Diana Wynne Jones. Dodie Smith. Robert Westall. Anything, frankly, with unicorns on the cover. I can’t actually have been in there for hours at a time, can I? Or maybe I was. Time moved slowly there – not dragging, but with leisurely, unfretted dignity. I went to the bookshop every week. I know I did, because my school worked out that books were the thing I cared about most in the world, while I did not particularly care about maths. And so they made me a little card that I had to present to the maths teacher every day to be ticked. If I did not get a tick representing an acceptable standard of mathematic achievement every day – if I scored lower than five ticks — I was not allowed to buy a book that week. In retrospect I’m grudgingly impressed by their commitment to making me learn, but I still resent the additional anxiety they piled on an already stressy kid.
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