Legacy of 'Three Billy Goats Gruff'

It is often said of person that he or she is a ‘reader’ almost as if one were saying that so and so were a ‘red-head’. My mother was both a reader and red-head, my father was neither. But is one always a reader? Is one born a reader?

I remember my mother telling me that she had been so taken by a reading of ‘A Christmas Carol’ by her school teacher that on that occasion especially asked her teacher who had written it and if she could read something else by him. I no longer recollect whether at that time she did or did not read more but later she did tell me that this was the start of her great love of reading. Her favourite Dickens', she told me, was ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ – and although I never saw her read any Dickens I presume she did. She grew up, like many in her generation, with Arthur Mee’s ‘A Children’s Encylcopedia’, which was in our bookcase when I was young and from which she read to us. There were many happy days I spent looking through those ten volumes.


I was not very fast in reading when I was young. I remember that in one of my early school readers I came across the story of the 'Three Billy Goats Gruff’. Although it was accompanied by a captivating picture of the troll under the bridge and the three billy goats it was the reading of the story that was the great delight. As I remember it now, forty-five or so years later, it seemed that was the first story in a school book that held any interest for me. I loved it so much that I read forward, completing the whole book, in the vain hope that there might be another such story. I didn’t find one in the remainder of the book, nor in any other school book and so I’ve come to the conclusion I just quickly fell behind in reading due to lack of stimulation. This was while I was still at Burnside School, so I must have been between 5 and 7 years old. Later at Springfield between the ages of 7-9 years I remember we were introduced to a new reading programme. I guess it was one of these ideas that might have originated in the USA. It was a graded programme of reading that you, the pupil, put yourself through.

One day the teacher, it must have been Miss Smith of whom I remember very little, brought out a large new box. In it were reading cards graded and colour coded. The idea was that you read perhaps the brown cards first, answered the questions and self-marked your answers, then moved on to the next set: the orange, the green and so on. The stories were boring in the extreme. I remember that I was very quickly left ‘way behind. Perhaps I wasn’t the slowest, I don’t know – but certainly I felt a great sense of frustration that I was still way behind in these stories and the questions and so on, while others were nearly finished working through the whole box. I don’t see it did me much good at all.

Of course I have to take into account that I was the youngest in the class, my birthday coming, as it did, on the very last day of admission for the year, 31st of August. The oldest in the class were nearly a full year older than me and it is only to be expected that they were faster than me. Even so that doesn’t explain it all. At Burnside I had completed reading the book with 'Billy Goats Gruff' long before the others and had done it on my own and I remember the frustration I felt at still having to work through the rest of that book at the pace of the rest of the class. When the new reader was given out I was able to quickly skim the whole book and see if there were any interesting stories in it. There weren’t in that one, nor the one after that. I must have just given up on stories in school books.

But what about at home? We had a comic delivered once a week – it was no doubt interesting up to a certain age but after some time my sisters and I pleaded with our mother to stop it – we were too old for it. We opted for separate comics, the girls opted for the ‘Judy’, I opted, I think, for the ‘Beezer’ – which was a bigger format and with slightly glossy paper. I remember I read everything in my comic and even a few stories in the ‘Judy’ – I especially remember ‘Colleen: the Witch’. As I mentioned there was the encyclopaedia. I don’t know if my sisters ever read it or not but I certainly knew the ten volumes, how to find an entry through the index and how to find my favourite articles. There were plenty of pictures, drawings and many blue-tinted photos of statues, churches and the like. Several of these pictures still stand almost as icons in my mind today, seemingly as clear as if I saw them yesterday. The picture of black and white picture of Orpheus as he sets off on his search – done, as I now know, in a Pre-Raphaelite style; the black and white drawing of a segment of the sun ablaze with scarlet flames; a train engine done in the same style with the flames in the same scarlet pumping through the engine as if it was blood and not flames; the Venus de Milo; and so on. There were nursery songs done in a very sweet 19th century style with innocent girls and boys dancing and singing on the page along with the crotchets and quavers that seems to dance up and down five lines. Many of the entries I must have read many times over and that at the very time when I seemed to be falling behind in my reading at school. It really seems to have been a thing of interest.

A little bit later, maybe when I around eleven years old two other things to read made an appearance. I clearly remember the circumstances of the first. We went on a visit to Fittie, in Aberdeen, to see Flora and Alan Buchan and her family. Flora and Alan make an appearance elsewhere in these pages so I won't repeat that again. What I remember is that Flora was always pressing things on you, in her big hearted way. She was as big hearted as she was big bodied! It would be hand-me-down clothes of young Alan, who was just a little bit older than me, or extra cakes she had baked or old golf clubs that old Alan had no use for – there was always something. One time I had to try on a dark suit of clothes that had belonged to young who was just a bit older than me. I didn’t have a pair of long trousers – so I guess I must have still been at primary school and therefore about eleven. It was either on this same occasion or very close to it that Flora was holding forth on a wonderful boy's magazine that had just come out and that they had given young Alan – they always called him ‘young Alan’. Alan had loved it. It was amazing, full of stories, and oh, all sorts of things. I was given the copy of the first issue to look through and I was too shy to say what I really thought. I didn’t like the look of it – it was quite different from the Beano, Dandy or even the Hotspur, which also included stories. It was a big paper, I think A3 in size. Big drawings to go with the stories – you know the sort, big action roughs to go with a sea story or a war story. Despite my shyness, or even because of it, I don’t know, I left with the ‘Boy’s Own’ in my hand. I read it and I liked the stories – they seemed to engage me. There was even a page devoted to Science and little experiments that you could try out. All in all it was a real move up in terms of reading and I began to take this magazine weekly and usually looked forward to it and read it all.

But I still wouldn’t have called myself a reader. At least not until one day around the same time as the 'Boy's Own' made an appearance that I was down with German Measles. Mum at that time worked in R.S.McCall’s local newsagent. She brought me back two books to read. One was Brian Aldiss’ ‘Hothouse’ and the other was ‘Agents of Vega’ by James H Schmitz. Hothouse I must have read within a day or so and loved it. It was an adult book but I could read it easily and I could read it in colour. I was amazed that I could read in colour! Still those colours are evoked for me when I hear the title of the book. ‘Agents of Vega’ I guess was an interstellar spy novel, a space opera, and a bit beyond me. Even so, I tried to read it. I gave up and never went back to it. Having finished ‘Hothouse’ I was still recuperating in bed and asked my mother if there was any other book by Aldiss in her shop. She returned with Aldiss’ ‘Greybeard’ which was quite different in setting from Hothouse and evoked greys, whites, and bleak landscapes. I loved it too. And so started my love of Science Fiction. I think I could have been described then as a ‘reader’ – I devoured books at an alarming rate.

There were one or two other books and comics that I recollect. There was ‘The Texas Rangers’ that my Aunt Margaret and Uncle Ken had given me. I never enjoyed it but I did read little bits and pieces of it when I was bored and lying in bed. I also had a copy of the Jungle book and I often read bits and pieces of that too – but I was never gripped by it. When I was ten years old I saw in little shop in Ballater where we went on holiday that there was a copy of ‘The Observer’s Book of Astronomy’. This was a little pocket book on astronomy by Patrick Moore and my eyes must have lit up seeing it. My grandmother, Gradma Lornie, who was with me bought it for me saying that this would be my Xmas present! It wasn’t, for at Xmas she gave me a pocket telescope. I read the whole of that book many times over and I spent many long hours peeping at this and that in the sky. Sometimes I used to go of a winter’s eve up Springfield Road and look look north at the sky over Dyce airport with its brilliant coloured lights. Gran’s cousin, Aunt Muriel, later gave me a big handsome blue covered, gilt edged edition of the 19th century ‘Half Hours in the Tiny World’ Although this must have been about a year after the astronomy book I read the whole thing many times over. I had a microscope and often spent long hours with it looking at various things that I kept in bottles. There was the great educational kids magazine called 'Look and Learn' which I loved and an up market version of it, 'Knowledge' that I borrowed from Robert.

My childhood friend, Robert, was, if I remember rightly, probably quite a bit in advance of me in reading: at Springhill he was way on in that box of cards with the boring stories; at Fernilea he always turned out in the top section of the class, me, invariably, very near the bottom. Robert took me down town to King Street. Of course I knew King Street – we always passed it on the way to the beach or on the occasional visit to the Downtown Baths. Just at the top end of King Street, near Union Street, was a big second-hand bookshop. I suppose Robert must have been introduced to it by his older brother, Terry. I think this was my first time in such a bookshop, in fact I think don’t recall any bookshops before that one though I suppose I must have been in some. I still remember the musty smell of the old paperbacks and the collection of Science Fiction and Horror stories, and some racks of Superman comics. I don’t suppose I must have had much money to spend – pocket money in our family was always very, very little. First three-pence when we were very small, then sixpence when we were a bit older, maybe around this time. I think later it might have gone up to a shilling. There’s not much you could buy for that. Nevertheless I couldn’t have been in a better place than that for value for money. I usually came away with a collection of Science Fiction short stories, or Horror. Robert seemed to favour the horror more than me but we shared our books and I guess he must have read my Science Fiction too. He introduced me to the ‘Doc Savage’ series of books, which were maybe a collection of books around an ‘Arnie’ type figure. A bit later, once James Bond had really become a film hit I began to read those stories too – maybe I would have been 13 or 14 by that time. By the time I was 14 or 15 I guess I could read most things if I was interested in them. Mother gave me ‘I Claudius’ to read after she had herself read it. I loved it and also went on to read ‘Claudius the God’. I was a paper-boy in Dundee by that time and I had begun to earn my own money. It was invariably spent on books as I remember it. I rarely read what was given at school – I still found the set texts were very boring and even at Harris Academy I really had to force myself to finish ‘The Colditz Story’. I think I read a bit of Nevil Shute at Rockwell when I was 14 or 15. I liked him as a writer too. But, yes, I had begun to read and I never stopped and so, like my mother, I was both a 'red-head' and a ‘reader’ – an avid reader.