Little Folks

My Great Aunt lived alone in a big house in Bingley. The front room of her house was almost entirely taken up with a huge grand piano.  She was a music teacher at the Grammar School and she taught piano to a high level. She was one of the women who found, after the First World War, that ‘all the young men had gone’. So she carved out a career for herself and lived independently for the rest of her life.

When I was a child, we used to visit my Great Aunt at her house and I was allowed to escape the grown up conversation and go and look at books. This meant going upstairs and to the end of a corridor, where there was another set of stairs. If you sat at the foot of these stairs, in front of you was a bookcase packed full of books of all kinds. So I sat there for hours, probably until called to tea, and browsed. I can’t remember now what I read, but I suspect I was most attracted to some bound volumes of Little Folks magazines, which had stories and poems and pictures. One of the volumes is open here. They are dated 1880 - 1884. Very strange reading they make now. The others are a tiny selection of the books, which would have been available to me. All the classics in big volumes, poetry, bound copies of journals etc. I often wonder whether my great love of books came from this time spent alone, sitting on the stairs surrounded with all this.
   
So why have I got the books? Because when my Great Aunt died she left me all her books and they arrived at our house in cases. I still have most of them, although I have to admit they sit on shelves gathering dust most of the time. I was glad that I kept them though, as recently I found that some of the oldest, see the topmost one in the pile for example, belonged to my great, great, great grandfather who was an Independent Minister in the early 19th Century. He has written in some of them – quite special.