Books

I was an avid reader, and for most of my childhood I read at least 4-5 books a week, and usually a book a day: It helped to connect with a larger world outside the smallness of the mountains, the endless forests and fields, the hamlet and the village. Books filled me with hope through filling colour, stimulating my imagination. Books, as the films I watched at the cinema, told me I had reason to dream - of other places, people, things to engage in.

Although having grown up in the country meant that we always had to be part of all the work that needed to be done around the farms, I took my first real job when I was ten years old. I worked in a quarry, and the job itself consisted of climbing up on a grid much like a monkey equipped with an iron bar. With this bar my task was to get lose any stones which had got trapped in the grid. I had to work fast, because it would only be a couple of minutes before another load of stone was poured over the grid, so if I weren't attentive or fast enough the whole loadful of stones would end up on my head.

Working from 7 am to 5 pm six days a week, I made the equivelant of £1 or a $1 and a meal at noon a day. I was nackered by end of the day.

At the end of the summer, I had a small fortune. I had been brought up to be very rational in my spending, so I bought a new desk for myself: so far I'd done all my homework at the kitchen table. My new desk was made of teak, and it looked mighty fine, I thought.

I still had money left, so I went to the local bookshop and I spent it all on books. It was a treasure. Buying my own books for the time in my life, was extraordinary, and I can still feel the tremor inside thinking about it, as I felt then. Books were my friends, my inspiration, my love.

"What do you want all those books for?" asked my mother. "Couldn't you have bought something sensible?"