Gervase Phinn: Start of a life-long love

"Reading is the fundamental tool of all learning," the former Schools Secretary, David Blunkett, once said, expressing a truth espoused by educationalists throughout the centuries. Books are, of course, the architecture of a civilised society and reading is the very protein of growth in learning. Children should not just become competent readers but also come to love reading and find in books great sources of pleasure.

Recently, I spent a morning at Montagu Junior School in Mexborough, near Doncaster. I had met the children from the school at the Doncaster Book Awards where my novel, A Bit of Hero, had been short-listed. The Library Service in the town had initiated this book award in an effort to encourage young people to read more widely and introduce them to new authors. Schools in Doncaster were invited to take part.

After the ceremony, I was mightily impressed by the children from Montagu Junior School, by their knowledge of children's literature and their enthusiasm for reading. The head teacher invited me to visit the school to see how they fostered such a love of books and to read some of my stories and poetry.

The key was, as I expected, the teachers. They were passionate about reading, recommended appropriate material, read stories and poems regularly, advised parents on the books to buy, invited authors and poets into the school to talk to the children and mounted superb displays focusing on popular children's writers.

Schools should, like Montagu, endeavour to create such a vibrant and dynamic reading environment, particularly for those children who have little experience of books and reading in the home.

I was very fortunate as a child for I had parents who, when I was barely out of nappies, read with me – not at me or to me but with me – each night. I soon came to know the fairy stories and the Beatrix Potter books by heart. My father would lift the text from the page and we would talk about the words and the pictures. Should he change anything (which he did deliberately) I would know and correct him. As I grew older, I was taken to the public library and was given a book every Christmas and every birthday, and even at 11 my father would read stories with me. If every parent read with their children for just half an hour each night, it would bear the fruits of a lifetime.

At lunchtime I sat with some of the older pupils at Montagu School. One young man, with a thatch of mousy hair and eyes as brown and as bright as a fox's, took me aside as I packed up my books to leave. "I'm sorry you didn't win the award, Mr Phinn," he said. Then with all the honesty of the young and the bluntness of those born in Yorkshire, he added, "I didn't vote for it myself but it was quite a good read".

Then he shrugged. "But we can't all be winners, can we?"

YP MAG 29/5/10