Learning to read is not

something I can remember doing. I cannot remember that magic moment when those strange black squiggles on a page actually meant something.  In this I believe I am extraordinarily fortunate. 

I know how I learned to read. My earliest memories are of sitting on the Senior Cat's bony knee. He has one arm around me. He is using the hand on that arm to point to each word in the book he holds in the other hand. It is cold enough to have the oven door of the old wood burning stove open. This is the way the kitchen is being heated now that my mother has finished using the stove for other purposes.

I must have been about seventeen months old when this first happened. It happened more than once. The Senior Cat was the one who read bed time stories to me and this is where we read them. I must have made the connection between the marks on the page and the sounds at about that time. It was a short jump from there to wanting to know what the marks meant when I saw them in other places.

By the end of that year - summer here in Downunder - I could recognise some words. My mother, another teacher, had begun to label everything for me. I remember the house as having paper strips in her "infant school print" all over the place.  She would sigh and print the word and put it on an object for me. There were probably not that many words there but it seems like many in my memory. 

The Senior Cat went on reading bed time stories to me. He went on putting his finger under each word. "Watch and you will learn to read the story all by yourself."

And I did. The following year, just before my third birthday, I was given a "train toy set" as a Christmas and birthday present. I don't know why it was a "train toy" and not "toy train" set but it was something I was very, very pleased to get. My paternal grandparents gave it to me. Grandpa was the person who bought it. He knew exactly what I wanted. There was the little green engine, the little carriages and the track that could be an oval or looped. I was thrilled. I spent Christmas morning under the dining room table trying to get the pieces of track together so the train could run along the tracks. My limited manual dexterity skills meant I failed over and and over again. The Senior Cat joined me under the dining room table and said something like "tell me what to do and I will help". He must have known of course but I looked at the instructions and read them to him. 

I remember this because I remember what followed. The Senior Cat put the track together. He showed me how far to turn the little key to wind the engine and we set off on an adventure. In all the time I was the proud possessor of that engine I never over wound it...and I can still not quite forgive my mother for simply bundling it up and passing it on when we moved to yet another place some years later. At the end of play time under the table though there was Christmas lunch and, before it started, the Senior Cat put the instructions on the table and pointed to various words. He asked me to read them again and I did it. The adults seemed surprised and pleased. I was more interested in eating lunch so I could get back to the train tracks.

I thought of all this yesterday when a young friend, M..., who has been at school for two years was reading his book to me. He is not interested in reading or school. He wants to be out on his bike or his scooter or kicking a ball. His mother tries to make time to read a bed time story to him but admits that she does not always manage to find the time. "And anyway he can always hear one on his i-pad." 

No, that is not the same. It makes me realise how very, very fortunate I was in not having any sort of electronic device but rather real people who cared enough to see I could read as soon as possible. 

After that my paternal grandparents gave me books and they went everywhere with me. We went on the little green Hornby clockwork engine...and I still miss it.