CHARLES DICKENS A GENIUS OF SUBERB SPELLBINDING MYSTERY

I am supremely grateful to my dad (not for his horrendous abuse of my person although that taught me much about the practical aspects of child abuse) but for all that was positive and right that left deep and beautiful memories on a mind that escaped from the ugliness of those events and into the classics so widely read by so many in the days of my childhood. My beloved dad read to me in my infant years, all the while becoming the colourful characters depicted in the works of Stevenson, Kingsley and Enid Blyton to name but a few. At 2 and a half to three years of age I followed along as he read and every word was imprinted upon an eager, impressionable and receptive mind. Before I entered kindergarten at the age of five I was already reading the "Naughtiest Girl in the School" with ease. Then enter Charles Dickens into my life with his suberbly constructed works of spellbinding mystery written at a time when his relationship with Victorian English society had left him disenchanted. My English literature teacher at the time chose "Great Expectations" for one of our studies. The orphan Pip, and the convict Magwitch, the beautiful Estella and her guardian Miss Havisham woven together in a work whose very title provides the foundation and insight into the pain and squalor, the pathos and irony of Victorian England. He was indeed the "superstar" and the schools today would do well to encourage children to study his work and the classics generally.

I have made the most of the times I have had my grandchildren to stay over the holidays. They struggled with their reading and comprehension. Off I went to a great second-hand bookshop and purchased a veritable pile of classics. Children of the New Forest, Little Women, Jo's Boys, A Child's Garden of Verses, Treasure Island, and heaps of "the banned by schools books such asShip of Adventure and many others written by Enid Blyton. I also purchased all the "Horrible History" books I could lay my hands on. What excellent fun we had. We read together concentrating on diction, phonetics and acted out the characters which soon assumed colour and life. Following these excursions into the wonderland of great children's classics their other school work improved out of sight and I sent them home with some more exciting novels every time they came to see me. Their written comprehension was now excellent and their teachers could hardly believe the transformation when they submitted assignments that were properly researched, carefully presented and considered. It was evident too that all this reading and acting had made a huge difference to their grammatical expression. No more "dids" and "dones" and "woulds" and "coulds" in the wrong place and their speech was a joy to hear. The kids and their teachers were excited with the approval ratings they had to provide and which were so justly earned. I felt quietly pleased with my efforts. I had proved something to myself and to their school without lecturing them about their clear deficiencies.

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