Because my father was a diplomat, my childhood was largely spent travelling from place to place. The bedrooms in which I slept, the words spoken outside the door, the landscapes around me constantly changed. Only my small library remained the same, and I remember the intense relief I felt when, tucked once again in an unfamiliar bed, I opened my books and there on the expected page was the same old story and the same old illustration. When Mole, in The Wind in the Willows, returns to his little house from the big outside world, and lets his eyes wander round the old room, and sees how plain and simple it all is, and understands how much it means to him, I remember feeling something like pangs of envy, knowing that he had somewhere to come back to—a “place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.”
In the distant childhood of my generation, wrapped in the soft folds of supernatural fancy, our playmates were Pippi Longstocking and Pinocchio, Sandokan the Pirate and Mandrake the Magician; those of today’s children are presumably Harry Potter and his companions, and Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things. Rooted in their own histories, these characters cannot be caged between the covers of their books, however brief or vast that space might be.