Torch under bedclothes

By balancing the stool on the chair, I can just reach the top of the wardrobe. I know it’s silly and dangerous, but I’m sensible and a good climber. I’ll get into trouble if anyone catches me.

It’ll be worth it.

Up there under the ceiling is a cardboard box full of books the new vet carried into our kitchen when he arrived for supper yesterday, announcing: Anne would like these. Out of politeness he’s allowed to show what’s in there: a glimpse of maroon, occasionally light blue bare boards, dust jackets long gone: a dozen fat volumes – twenty perhaps. All the same size, the same but different. A collection! On the bottom right hand corner is impressed an almost illegible signature, which seems to say Cuid Blyton. Cuid is a funny name, I think, but the titles are irresistible: Five on a Treasure Island, Five Go to Smugglers’ Top. For me! All night, and all the next day, unread adventures torment me: Five Go to Mystery Moor, Five Go Off to Camp, Five Go to Billycock Hill.

My mother deems them “unsuitable”. You can read them when you’re old enough, she says.

It’s not fair. She knows I am a good reader. The headmaster calls us in for reading tests. He says, I don’t know why I bother with you and Christine Simpson, I only call you in to cheer myself up. He puts his arm round me in a fatherly way. I have a reading age of fourteen.

It is only years later that I realise my mother meant when you’re old enough to recognise them for the trash they are.

Meanwhile, here I am, tiptoe on the stool balanced on the chair, stretching for the forbidden books in the cardboard box just too high for me to reach. I try jumping. The stool rocks alarmingly. Only by tugging and tearing a corner of the cardboard can I get a hold on one. It’s alright, no one will look on top of the wardrobe until Christmas time, by when I’ll be old enough to say I was much younger when I committed the crime. They might even think the box was torn already. So I dip in and grab a book.

Five On a Treasure Island. The vet is a methodical man. It’s the first in the series.