Throughout our childhood, mother read aloud to us, usually at the kitchen table, but sometimes, as a treat, in the front room and sometimes, on warm summer evenings, in the meadow beyond the garden... The books she chose for these readings were, I now see, startingly bad. Two of her greatest favourites were 'Coming Through the Rye' and 'Freckles'. The first was a tale with a middle-class Victorian background showing true love thwarted by a designing woman... But there was a passage at the end of 'Freckles' which overcame her so that she could not continue...