For some reason we were never confronted with the famous animal books in childhood -neither "The Wind in the Willows" nor "Winne-the-Pooh", nor any Beatrix Potter -and when I did meet the works of Kenneth Grahame and A.A. Milne, at the age of twelve or thirteen, I was past them to the extent that I read from a height, like a connoisseur, with no involvement, accepting with sophistication rather than naivety the clothing, the speecg and the human motives of the animals.