2. The Day I Learned to Read
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I was born in Wolverhampton, a large industrial city in the West Midlands of England . . .
People born in Wolverhampton are known as Wulfrunians, after Lady Wulfrun. She was an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman who founded a settlement there in about AD 985. By the 1100s, Wulfrun's hill-top village was known as Wulfrunheanton (Wulfrun's high town), which eventually changed into Wolverhampton. One of my clearest childhood memories is learning how to read. I was six or seven years old and was struggling to make sense of the squiggly marks printed on the pages of books, or chalked on the classroom blackboard. All my classmates seemed to be reading well, so why couldn't I? I felt left out. My parents thought they could help me with my reading. They sent me to stay with an uncle and aunt for a weekend, at Symonds Yat, a village on the River Wye, Herefordshire. Their wooden house stood on stilts at the river's edge (you can see their 'stilt house' in the photo on this page). If the river flooded, the water came right up under the house, and sometimes inside it. It was probably the first time I had been away on my own, and it was a real adventure. My aunt was a retired teacher, and by using her sets of phonics cards, where words with similar sounds appeared in long lists (blue, black, blurb, for 'bl' sounds, and so on), she patiently helped me with my reading. The boy who had struggled with reading became a good reader, and by the time I was ready to move from infants to juniors (from Year 2 to Year 3 today), my teacher, Miss Barbara Martin, said this in my end-of-year infant's report:
Reading: Fluent
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