I can still remember the feeling of standing there for hours, head on one side, reading the spines, deciding which treasures to take home with me. Leon Garfield wasn’t shelved in R-Z, obviously, but his books dwell in a special shelf of their own in my library heaven. Ivan Southall’s gripping adventures about kids like me in places like mine.
Vikings and Shakespearean actors and knights and Romans. Rosemary Sutcliff, Geoffrey Trease, Ronald Welch, Henry Treece. It was there that I discovered the glory that was the Children’s Fiction, R-Z shelf.
Until the magical day, when I was around eight, when the brand-new Nunawading Public Library opened, and Mum got to drive us there every week. So I grew up with those same few books, now slightly tattered: Five on a Treasure Island, Little Women, What Katy Did. A few years later, after I was born, we moved to the very edge of the city – Melbourne, where beyond our house was bush and orchards in which we kids could run wild.
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