Ian Wedde

My earliest reading memory

ur mother, Linda, often read to my twin, Dave, and me when we were very young. She told us later that her brother teased her for reading books that were “too old for us”. I’m grateful because, when I began to read, it was the weirdness with illustrations by J Lockwood Kipling and WH Drake (sample caption: “The tiger’s roar filled the cave with thunder”). I read it obsessively and continued to do so after our family went in 1953 to live in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), way up the Karnaphuli River. There were snakes (“Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”) in the garden and elephants (“Toomi”) and tigers (“Shere Khan”) in the jungle up-river. The stories I was reading seemed to have transported me to a real place just outside the made-up place of the book where I could almost become Mowgli. It was this weird slippage between the story and the “real world” that got me hooked.