Books from my Mother

For Mothers’ Day I thought I’d look at reading and mothers, or to be specific, how my mum is woven into my reading history. 

To start with there are the books she read to me, especially the ones she read to us over and over again. Beaky the Greedy Duck and Rapunzel, and for my sister, One Little Bee and Tootles the Taxi. If pressed I’m sure she can still recite them.

We had a bookshelf in our dining room that was in my eyeline as I ate at the table each night. On it sat a number of hardback children’s books that I love though I have no memory of reading them or having them read to me. These included Little Grey Rabbit stories, Winnie the Pooh, Milne’s poems and a volume of Nonsense Verse. These are stories I associate with home as a child: The Owl and the Pussycat, Alexander Beetle and a bit of butter for the royal slice of bread.

Next the titles she passed onto me. Books I knew she loved, books I discovered when poking around the shelves at home. These include Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice and Jane Eyre. It’s funny, although we had books at home and both my parents had favourite authors, I don’t have any memories of them sitting reading, not at weekends or on holidays or anywhere. I do remember watching film and TV programmes with them both but not of us reading. 

I remember that she took me to the new village library when it opened. It was exciting, previously we had to make do with the mobile library or school library but here was a whole building full of books just down the road. I spent many an hour there after school and on Saturday mornings. She tells me now that she suspects it will not reopen after the pandemic, that the council will justify closing it. It’s tiny to me now but back then it was enormous and full of possibility. It was here that I found all sorts of companions, where my friends borrowed Judy Blume’s Forever so frequently that it was always in need of mending and the librarians never go the chance before another of us requested it. (Naively, I asked my mum what some of the expressions in Forever meant and she shrieked “What ARE you reading?” in horror. It was the last time I would talk to her about book content for a while…) 

Books I associate with my mother brings us to cookbooks. Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management and the Homepride of Home Baking are the two that I feel were used most, although does anyone still really use Mrs Beeton? I cannot recall any recipes from it. But I think as my mum is known for her cooking, especially cakes, she is associated quite widely with cookbooks. Certainly she has been given more than she can ever use. Delia’s Complete Cookery Course and of course, the Australian Woman’s Weekly book of birthday cakes. When my daughter was born, I bought a copy of this from ebay – it is a cracking example of fun things to with cakes that are impressive but in theory not difficult. For people with more skill in icing than me. 

These days, or those pre-pandemic days, we often swapped books. The occasional biography but mainly fiction. I shared Elizabeth Jane Howard, Lissa Evans and Joanna Cannon, she recommended Dawn French’s Dear Fatty and A Song for Jenny. She reads more cosy crime and chick lit than I do but there is a thread of things I can share with her. If we lived closer there would be a lot more. 

So I want to hear from you – what books do you associate with your mum? How have these woman shaped your reading and your reading experiences?