Vintage Item No.7: Disney Storybook

This is about the first book I remember owning, and reading for myself. It was a huge, thick, blue clothbound volume which, over the years, eventually lost its cover. I read that book into oblivion.

Purnell did these yearly Disney books - not quite the same as Annuals, with their mix of quizzes, games and strips - these were much more special. Treasuries, they would call them, filled with retellings of Disney cartoons.

Sometimes I forget that Disney was just about my first love. After dinosaurs and animals in the zoo. I was obsessed with Disney films. When I was four it was all about 'Bedknobs and Broomsticks.' When we had company round our house in Darlington everyone was cajoled into believing that our front room was the sea and we all had to get our legs up off the floor and sing 'Bobbing Along'. I had a blow-up dolphin and a toy chimp in dungarees to somehow add to the effect. My Big Nanna went along with all of this most enthusiastically, seeing a chance to gently mock the men in the family for not joining in with the fun enough.

This particular Purnell Storybook consisted of - I've since found out - a reprinting of lots of the 'Little Gold Books' from the US. These were concise retellings of film plots, accompanied by specially commissioned artwork and not simply movie stills. The illustrations in my first Disney book were gorgeously atmospheric things. They were lush with airbrushed colours and sometimes rather gloomy. Sleeping Beauty's castle and Gepetto's sleepy town were places of darkness in my book. The forest where Snow White was to discover the dwarfs was a terrifying one. I loved that fact that the drawings made a distinction between the films I knew (from the pictures, from clips shown on Bank Holidays on 'Disney Time.') It felt as if the versions glimpsed in my book were 'my' versions. They were something that belonged to me. They were more scary and less light and fluffy.

There were also some stories that didn't belong to any movie, and these were facinating for that. There's a very sweet, sentimental tale about a grandfather rabbit who teaches his whole family to paint things - Easter eggs and so on. He dies and it becomes a story about bereavement. We're told that he's gone elsewhere and is painting glorious sunsets and sunrises for everyone to see. I had forgotten that story completely until I ordered the book for myself from ebay, a few years ago. And then, of course, I remembered it all word for word, opening up that new copy of the Disney Storybook (which somehow smelled exactly the same as the one I had lost years earlier.)

So I taught myself to read with this, I realise now, well before I started school. By first poring over the illustrations as my Mam or Big Nanna read to me, hour after hour. (My Big Nanna would eventually get to stop by pretending she had lost her voice.) Just like my sister, seventeen years later, with her book of Victorian nursey rhymes, I would pretend not to be able to read it for myself, just to prolong the bliss of being read to.

These fairy tales were the first thing I consciously took in by reading. They're like a first layer of wallpaper and paint in a new house.