The River of Reading
Josie Johnston charts a course from a struggling early reader to becoming a book worshipper, reading teacher and romance writer
“All the things you treasure most will be the hardest won,” Dar Williams says, and I know that’s true for me. First as a reader and now a writer.
Growing up in small-town England in the 1970s, I was caught under the very tip, of the tail end, of the strangest reading-teaching diplodocus of all time. The Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA) had its own spellings, its own conventions, its very own letters. Try reading this.
It says, “The ice angel gave the owl a ring.”
I know. It’s like Old Germanic. And they did this to five-year-olds.
Now imagine yourself as that five-year-old, in love with stories and trying to read your big sister’s Bunty annual. You open it up, flushed and proud, desperate to show off your new skills to Grandma… and you can’t. It’s a different alphabet from the one you learned. And you are crushed.
Maybe a more accurate acronym than ITA would have been WTF.
I often wonder how I really did learn to read in the end. I have this whole backstory in my memory where my father taught me in secret, and I got into trouble at school when the teacher found out… except, no, that’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
At another time in my childhood, I was convinced my dad was secretly Fred Flintstone — they had the same hair, and when Dad came home from work, he always put his head around the door and called out “Yabba-dabba-do!”. So I can’t be sure about the reading thing.
However, it was, fast forward a few years, and that same hopeful child became a studious little pre-adolescent, still in love with reading. I devoured anything: school stories, adventures, rhymes, comics, mysteries, fairy tales, cereal packets, my Grandma’s collection of Reader’s Digest.
Genuinely, at ten, I got a concussion when I walked into a lamppost because I was reading a book I’d just bought with my holiday money and started reading it before I left the store. Oh, and I consumed everything I could get my hands on about ponies. I have a theory about girls and horses. It’s a transitional thing before you fall in love with men. All that muscle and sweat. And leather. Or maybe it was just me, already a romance writer in the making.
Anyway, thanks to public libraries and a stubborn streak a mile wide (I’m certain about that much at least), the little girl reader progressed to the Big League. One of my most vivid memories is of settling down on my bedroom chair at about twelve years old, with a library copy of Pride and Prejudice in one hand, a dictionary in the other…
And my life changed forever.
Later still, I was blessed to be able to study English Literature at university and then to become a teacher myself. And now I teach children about books by day, and I write kissing books at night. I guess secret double lives are a family trait.
One of the things teachers try to do in schools — as we slash a path through the overgrown jungle of ever-changing education policy, fight the terrible tigers of testing and scale the Himalayas of paperwork — is support children to develop their own love of reading. Gabrielle Cliff Hodges pioneered Rivers of Reading, where children trace their own journeys to becoming readers. They explore their own reading “moments”, exclaim over how far they’ve travelled already and discover how much further they can go if they desire to. It’s become a sacred process to me.
When Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in 1951, he imagined a world where books were banned (the title refers to the burning temperature for paper). As an act of defiance, people committed books to memory and would recite them to each other in secret. They gave up their own names and would introduce themselves as War and Peace, or Beowulf, or Far from the Madding Crowd. I would choose to “become” Jane Eyre. If Pride and Prejudice introduced me to English Literature, it was Charlotte Bronte’s masterpiece that introduced me to Romance with a capital R. Now here I am, writing my own romances with strong, flawed, lovable men and dauntless, principled, imperfect heroines.
I don’t know where I stand on the matter of religion—each to their own, with respect and love. But I know where I stand with reading. Reading is alchemy. One of the ultimate good deeds, I believe, is supporting someone to become a reader.
Reading, for me, is the key to the kingdom. I tell my pupils, if they have a book, they have a friend. Reading is nourishment for the heart, mind and soul. Stories are a place for joy, reflection, empathy, laughter, tears. They help us to process our emotions and ideas, deepen our understanding and make connections. They help us to deal with our troubles, reconcile us to our realities and gain a window into lives we would never otherwise touch upon.
Reading is alchemy for the soul.
Josie Johnston’s first romance novel, Walker (American Princes 1), will be published in the spring.
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