My First Love.

I was about 2 years old when I fell in love. No, I'm not talking about romance. At that age, it would have been ridiculous. My first love wasn't a boy or Barbie dolls(never liked them). It was a book. Books amazed me and I used to stare in wonder at my mother's books, kept in a high shelf so my itchy fingers would not reach them. I wondered what adults saw in them. Did they have pictures inside? Was there something I wasn't allowed to know? The very first book I read was Town Mouse and Country Mouse. I was 3 years old and it had an audio cassette. I sat in mom's lap while she read aloud from the storybook, slowly, allowing my eyes to follow her finger on the pages. She read aloud with the voice on the stereo. When she had finished, my brown eyes were huge. 'More,' I said. And she read the story again. My mother taught me to read, taught me phonetics, taught me how to pause and stretch the word when I saw a 'comma' and to finalise the word before the 'period'.  As I got older, I learned to join the words and make a visual connection in my mind. The words painted a story and I was amazed. How could alphabets do that? It was magic. Same alphabets, switched up, meant something else. Wow.

As soon as I was old enough to start borrowing books from the school library, I was an addict. Years ago, I went to my  school library and checked out the books that had coloured my childhood world. My name was still on most of them.  The librarian, greying now, remembered my name. Growing up hadn't been easy for me. Books and reading saved me. I befriended the characters and couldn't wait to dive into a book whenever I was done with home lessons or my house chores. Oh, and how my Mom encouraged me. The first book I had, bought for me personally was an Enid Blyton titled The Famous Five. It was about 5 boisterous kids who had so much adventure camping, solving mysteries, catching bad guys. I was gripped and begged Mom to allow me go camping. She asked me where. I said our backyard because I knew she would not allow me go far. She agreed. (She was fun!). That night, camped close to our water tank, and under the watchful eye of our aged security man, I had a blanket, a water bottle, a radio just in-case I needed to place an SOS, a pillow, a torch light, biscuits and a plastic Swiss army knife. Where were the baddies? Hours later after I must have dozed off, my mother came and carried my sleeping self back to the comfort of my bed.

Enid Blyton was and is to me, an angel in disguise. She wove so many wonderful, magical stories. I was in secondary school and I discovered she had a range of books with characters in secondary school too! Who were even having it tough as boarders. I begged my Mom to send me to boarding school. She was having none of it!

I read anything and everything I could lay my hands on:dictionaries, encyclopaedias, magazines, my father's accounting books from his university days (didn't make an iota of sense to me, but hey, it had words!), love letters my parents exchanged when they were courting (blush, lol). Maybe that was why I didn't develop good interpersonal communication skills. I spent all my time reading, it was boring having a proper conversation with people. By 13, I started writing short stories. Mom turned editor overnight. God bless that woman. I hated going to bed because  it meant she would come into my room and turn the lights off. Guess who discovered reading under the sheets with the aid of a torch light? I subsequently worsened my sight and had to start wearing glasses, cementing my place in 'nerd-dom'. 

Funny, sometime ago on Facebook, I came across a picture I had been tagged in. In the picture was a group of people. They were all having a good time, as full of energy as only young people can. Aside the fact that I was incredibly skinny in the picture, I noticed I was in the middle of the group, sitting down, legs crossed, with a book in my hand.  I was about 10 or 11. How I laughed when I saw that picture. That was a classic picture of myself

Call me nostalgic. Whatever. But right now, I yearn for the books I read when I was a kid. I am currently compiling and downloading my favourite books, stories and poems so that I can gift them to my own children when they come. I only hope they won't be too swept away by pop culture and trends and think reading is so old fashioned. Let me share just a few I hope they will like:

1. Chike and The River.

2. An African Night's Entertainment.

3. Passport of Mallam Ilya.

4. All the children's books written by Enid Blyton

5.Time Changes Yesterday

6. Eze Goes To School. 

7. Nancy Drew(for the girls) and The Hardy Boys for the boys. Obviously.

Like most teenage girls then, I also had my phase of Mills & Boon (had to use newspaper sheets to camouflage the cover), Harlequin and books by Barbara Cartland. James Hadly Chase got me hooked. Which 16 year old wasn't reading Hadley Chase? Reading is fun. Please let us not let the culture die. In the meantime, I'm off to hunt for some great books on the internet. Happy Valentine's day.

XO
'Rene.