Emily Tee - Reader, Writer, Reviewer.: A Nod to World Book Day

To honour World Book Day today, I am going to share with you one of my earliest memories of books. The protagonist book in my story is When We Were Very Young by A A Milne.

I was never a fan of Winnie the Pooh. Even now, whilst reading aloud to my daughter, I feel like there are too many words to get out in one breath and the sentences don't flow in the way they ought to. At the age of three, I didn't even know that Winnie the Pooh existed, nor that A A Milne was the author of the book I wanted to read.

There were certain days of the week that I would spend the mornings with my Grandma, whilst my parents went to work and my sister went to school. I used to enjoy those days because it was mostly just me and her, I would help her clean the house and I'd play in the garden whilst she'd make lunch for my Grandad.

This particular day, I had got hold of this book, When We Were Very Young. It was quite a thick book; it had a pale blue cover with Christopher Robin in a white square in the middle. I was only three, so I couldn't read it myself, so I kept asking my Grandma to read it to me. As an adult, I can see that I was probably being rather irritating, I wasn't asking her when she was sat not doing anything, I was asking her when she was in the kitchen buttering bread or getting the hoover out.

After what seemed like hours to my little brain, but was probably around twenty minutes, my Grandma sat down with me and started to read the book. 'Changing Guard at Buckingham Palace' was the second poem in the book, and as soon as she read it in her singsong way, I fell in love with it. I asked her to read it again, and every time she got to the end of a verse, I chimed in with, "Said Alice!".

For a good while after this first read, every time she looked after me I would ask her to read the same poem to me, and she always would. It soon became our trademark poem, or song (we used to sing it more than say it).

One conversation I remember quite clearly about this poem was how confused I was by the pictures. I was sure the child in the pictures was a little girl, and I was sure that the little girl was Alice. I didn't understand why the little girl, Alice, was marrying a soldier...maybe she just really liked that soldier? I concluded. And where was Christopher Robin?

From the mind of three year old me, here's the poem, the song, one of the first memories I have of loving a book. If you get the chance, search for a version of the song so you can hear the rhythm, it'll stay with you for years...I can't stop singing it now...