'And then one day I found a book. It was a book called Emily of New Moon, about a little girl whose father died of consumption – that made a change, to start with - after which she was brought up by strict aunts in an old farmhouse somewhere in Canada. A Canadian story, not an American one; but I barely registered that at the time. What made it so different from other books of its kind I did not know, and I do not really know even now. But for me it was magic. I carried it off and kept it under my pillow or clutched to my bosom at bed-making time, and it seems as though I read it all that summer long, which can scarcely have been the fact; but I think I must have read it through, at first voraciously and then with slow and lingering delight, at least three times on the trot. And it was summer. On fine summer nights the beds remained out on the concrete strip all night, and I used to read, half under the bedclothes to evade Night Nurse’s eagle eye, until the last dregs of the light had drained away [...].'