In this way, perhaps The Lonely Doll would have been then, and is now, the perfect children’s book for me, the perfect evocation of what childhood meant, and means, to me. Whatever is inside me is not playful and innocent and I don’t feel as though it ever was. I have never wanted to recapture my childhood and do not consider myself to have an inner child. I stared into his beard and remained silent. I was told that if I wanted to borrow something I should say so. At the age of around six or seven I did attempt to steal an adventure book from my primary school teacher, but I was caught and ordered to give it back. They smelled of damp and appeared to be written in a foreign language. These included poetry anthologies, the complete Shakespeare, and so on. The only books we owned were a large leather bound collection my dad had bought when he and my mother married. We did not, in fact, have any in the house, and I knew instinctively that, being poor, I should never ask for anything. I did not read children’s books as a child and do not remember ever having them read to me.
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