'When I was about six, she decided that the time had come for me to learn to read. And that was when she made her mistake. Instead of merely sitting me down in front of Peter Rabbit, The Secret Garden or the Jungle Books and telling me to get on with it, she provided a dreadful book about a Rosy-Faced Family who Lived Next Door and Had Cats that Sat on Mats, and expected me to get on with that. I was outraged – I, who had walked the boards with the Crummles, and fought beside Beowulf in the darkened Hall of Heriot. I took one look, and decided that the best way of making sure that I should never meet the Rosy-Faced Family or any of their unspeakable kind in the future was not to learn to read at all. So I didn’t, and my mother never quite had the hardness of heart to stop reading to me. We had lessons and lessons and lessons; and we got practically nowhere.'