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For years and years I have been saying (when people asked what book I liked best when I was young) The Silver Brumby by Elyne Mitchell. 

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So when last month Collins decided to publish a new edition, they asked me to write a note to go in the front of the book recommending it to a new generation of readers.  Naturally I re-read the book before I began writing my piece. 

Do you know, it seemed like a book I had never laid eyes on, let alone taken to my heart!ÌýÌýI remember vividly how it made me feel back then.ÌýÌýI realise how strikingly different from my other horsey books it must have been at the time.ÌýÌýI can quite see the power it had to turn me into a horse and show me the world through a horseÂ’s eyes. But the words?ÌýÌýStrangers!ÌýÌý I was amazed at how completely I had forgotten a book so dear to me. 

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Some readers, when they reminisce, remember minor charactersÂ’ names, plot twists, what they liked best, particular scenes, where they were when they read a favourite bookÂ….ÌýÌýMe, I just remember enjoying one.ÌýÌýSometimes I go back to a best-loved book of childhood and cannot even see what possessed me to like it.ÌýÌýThe Ship that Flew by Hilda Lewis seems quite ‘educationalÂ’ to me now, but at the time I read it, it left me thinking that at any moment I might find a shop with a model ship in it that would carry me to far off places and times.

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 Nostalgia for books sent my daughter into mourning last week when she read of Brian Jacques death in the newspaper.ÌýÌý“A bit of my childhood has died,” she said.ÌýÌýThe Redwall books were such a regular playground for her imaginings when she was – what? – 8, 9, 10?ÌýÌýI can sort of understand her sorrow, although it seems to me that Redwall did NOT crumble into dust last week simply because its architect died.  Brian even has another new book still to come out!ÌýÌýThe great consolation for writers is that their worlds outlive them, just as the Greek myths outlived the GreekÌýÌýcivilization.

…Okay maybe some of us can’t hope for quite as long an afterlife as the Greek myths, but a couple of decades after the funeral would be agreeable.