Today we welcome the last of our ‘Lights Out!’ visitors to our blog. Angela Sunde is here to tell us what she used to read after ‘lights out’ when she was a child. Angela Sunde’s book Pond Magic, is an Aussie Chomp and will be published by Penguin Australia in September 2010.
As a child I was a little scared of the dark. It’s not surprising really. You see, after lights out, when Mum and Dad were watching TV in the lounge room, my brother would slither into my room on his stomach and pop his head up next to my bed with a wicked grin. Then, when my face was as pale as the flannelette sheets tucked under my chin, he would point to the top cupboard above my wardrobe doors (a cupboard I was too small to have ever seen inside) and tell me “A witch lives in there”.
After many interruptions to their evening viewing, Mum and Dad replaced a light bulb on the wall above my bed with a red globe. It was warm and soothing and I could easily see my brother’s bottom as it slunk into the room, sticking up in the air like a shark’s fin (enter Jaws music here).
What the red light globe also allowed me was the pleasure of reading in bed. Every book and comic had a red tinge, but I could read for hours and fall asleep with adventures and words spinning through my head. Mum knew of course. The pile of reading material under my bed must have been a sure giveaway. She warned me I would damage my eyesight and I promised the red light was only there to keep away my fears, not to read.
That was a lie.
I devoured every book in the school library and my cousin’s collection of Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’. A trip to the shops meant a detour to the bookstore, where I purchased the classics: Little Women, Black Beauty, What Katy Did, Heidi, My Friend Flicka and Thunderhead, and read them all by the red light of my room.
A favourite of mine was Betsy in Spite of Herself by Maud Hart Lovelace, the adventures of a young teen in 1907. But my large volume of ‘The Works of Lewis Carroll’ took pride of place on my bookshelf. The illustrations by John Tenniel had me in raptures and one year a friend and I went to a fancy dress party as Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
I never owned a picture book and coveted my cousin’s Green Eggs and Ham. Nowadays if I were caught reading after lights out, it would either be a picture book or a mid grade/YA novel. Adult fiction doesn’t excite me, even though I joined a book club to force myself to read it. It seems the young reader in me is still alive, tucked up in a flannelette sheet, reading under a red light.
© 2010 Angela Sunde
Visit Angela Sunde’s blog for more information about her and Pond Magic!
—
Alphabet Soup magazine has been celebrating the launch of Undercover Readers (our new reviewers club for kids)! If you’d like to join the Undercover Readers Club, you’ll find an information pack you can download from the Alphabet Soup website. As part of the celebrations, we had a different children’s author or illustrator visiting Soup Blog each day until 29 June 2010 (that’s today!) to talk about what they used to read after ‘lights out’ when they were growing up. You can read back through the blog posts if you missed any!