I read because my mother read. She taught me to read, then she took me to her very special place. Boots Lending Library. They used to have them upstairs in every Boots store in the UK. You paid to borrow books - not much, but my parents didn't have much money - but reading was that important to her.
She paid a few pennies for me to borrow books, too. Going to the library with my Mum was one of those lovely shared moments - the kind that stays with you forever.
My favourite author was Enid Blyton. She wrote fast paced adventure stories with kids taking on the bad guys. She's been out of favour for a long time, but she knew how to make those pages turn.
My mother's favourite was Netta Muskett. It's a name that has never left me. It belongs to those magic few minutes when we browsed the shelves, both hoping to find a book by our favourite author that we hadn't already read. When I joined the Romantic Novelists' Association when I sold my first book, a few months before my mother died, the Netta Muskett Award was still the one to win. The name itself just brings back those precious moments.
I exhausted Boots ability to keep up with my reading and joined the big Public Library and found a whole new range of authors to keep me happy. And by the time I was thirteen I was in the adult library, because, well, I'd grown out of most of the stuff they had on the shelves. YA wasn't a genre in those days, although the last book I remember taking out of the junior library, Jampot Smith, would probably fit into that category.
But back to the adored Netta whose books were, apparently, somewhat risque for her time. Her grandson, James Muskett (@N_Muskettbooks on twitter) and her publishers, are now re-releasing some of her books.
I've downloaded this one -
Misadventure -my chance to discover why my mother loved them so much.
If you're in the UK this month, It Happened In Paradise
will be sitting on the shelves W H Smith or a supermarket near you, or
waiting to be downloaded to your favourite reading device.
