An Irishwoman's Diary

RECENTLY, someone asked me what was the highlight of my childhood. It was not a question I had ever thought about before, but when asked, I had an immediate, instinctive answer. It was the transformative day I learned to read, a memory that remains utterly clear, and is the closest experience of magic I’ve ever had.

There were always books in our house, and someone or other in my family always had their head bowed over one. But for the only person in the house who could not read – me – these books were mysterious and frustrating entities.

At the little Montessori school I went to in a church hall, our enlightened and marvellous teacher encouraged children to teach each other in turn what they had learned. She matched one child who knew how to read or write with one who could not yet do so. Thus it was a boy who had already learned to read who patiently sat with me at intervals as we worked through our “A is for Apple” primer. I don’t know what age either of us were then, but the school took only children from three to five, so my literacy teacher can have been no more than five. I longed to read. I stared at pictures and desperately tried to connect the images with the words and lines that went with them. They wouldn’t fuse.

My older siblings belonged to the local library and let me trail along with them sometimes. My sister chose my books; all pictures, with no text. One day, I took down a small hardback with a picture of a boy, a cardboard box and a pet white mouse on the cover. It was called One White Mouse. I knew this because my sister told me. It was a proper story book, mostly text, with only a few black and white illustrations scattered over the pages inside.

She protested my inability to read the book, but checked it out for me anyway. I sat with the book all afternoon, turning the pages, looking at the cover, looking inside again. And then, suddenly, miraculously, incredibly – the words untangled from their opaque knots and became clear, distinct, legible. I understood what they meant. I read a sentence, and then a page. I put the book down and ran round the house shouting, “I can read!” with a fierce joy. I will never forget that euphoria, that catalyst into another world.

One White Mousewent back to the library, but since then, there have been many, many other books. I started in childhood to keep the books I loved best, and ever since, have continued to do so. They have followed me around the world and through my many moves, they have waited in attics and in spare rooms to be retrieved, and last year, 38 boxes of them spent eight months in storage in a Dublin warehouse while my new home was being renovated.

Collectively, my books contain my past. I've never had a camera, and loathe being photographed, and thus have no pictures of any life events, but my books are my aide-memoir. Nothing evokes life under 10 to me like the old yellow Puffin editions of Edith Nesbit's Five Children and It, and The Phoenix and the Carpet, Philippa Pearce's Minnow on the Sayand Tom's Midnight Garden, Laura Ingalls Wilder's pioneering stories (written, I now know, with help from her daughter) and my battered box set of Narnia chronicles, inherited from my brother.

Every book has a history. In most of them, I have written the date and place of purchase, and to open the flyleaf is to be carried back in time. I hate lending books, and the only people I will now loan to are my mother and sister. I still regret loaning to a friend my beloved copy of Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, which never came back. Replacement copies are not the same. They don't have your history layered into them, the imprint of your fingers on their pages.

I missed my books terribly when they were in storage. I would automatically reach out to refer to something and then remember they were boxed in crates on the other side of the M50. I missed their familiar spines, their touchstone quality, their heft in my hand. When I started opening the boxes last week, it was like meeting friends I had literally been collecting all my life. I felt inexplicably happy when they were installed on shelves again.

I don’t have an iPod, an eReader, or an iPhone.

Some day I’ll replace my netbook with an iPad, and I never want to cut myself off from new experiences, so I’m sure I will read books in digital format in some situations – when travelling, probably. Meanwhile, my real, three-dimensional books will always have a space on my shelves.

The one book I have not found again in all my years of scouring secondhand shops, and latterly, the internet, is the first book I ever read, One White Mouse. I keep looking for it, but I have not yet rediscovered that book. It appeared in my life, did its transformative magic, and perhaps appropriately, vanished again – but some day, I hope to find a copy.