Years of reading helped to make me a writer

With National Libraries Day on Saturday and the ComicCon events at Rutherglen Library and Town Hall, local writer and historian Dorothy Connor looks back on her childhood reading. As a child Rutherglen Library was one of my favourite places as my mum would take me there every day to choose a nursery rhyme or picture book.

As a result of this and copying my brother’s homework, I could already read and write a bit before I started at the Burgh School.

I was a voracious reader and my favourite newspaper comic strip was Rupert the Bear in the Daily Express. No villains or monsters for me.

I loved comics and I had over the years The Schoolfriend, The Princess and then the Bunty and Judy, which were three old pence every week. They were full of picture stories and serials and we waited eagerly every week for the next instalment.

My brother would get the Victor and the Valiant comics, or boys’papers as they were known, once he had grown out of the Beano, the Dandy, the Beezer and the Hotspur.

They also bought and sold paperback books and I remember when I was older I had a collection of Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers school stories. I sold them and then bought others from Clark’s, a rag and bone man’s, in King Street, Rutherglen.

Aunts and uncles often gave a book for a birthday or Christmas present and my uncle Jackie, who was a great reader himself, always told me it didn’t matter what I read as long as I read something.

Enid Blyton was my favourite childhood author and Aunt Cathie would send my brother Famous Five books, which I also enjoyed. A great treat at the Burgh School was being allowed to take home a book from the class library every weekend and we all looked forward to it. There was also a shop with a small private library in Stonelaw Road, where books could be borrowed for a small fee.

Once I got to Rutherglen Academy my reading material became more grown-up with Mirabelle, Jackie and later Petticoat magazine, which had a free pair of false eyelashes and a picture of the model Twiggy on the cover.

Once I got to 15 or 16 my reading matter became more serious. I was fascinated by Mata Hari, Master Spy and the very popular Man from Uncle secret agent stories, along with all the books by Alistair Maclean, who had been a teacher at my school but not in my time.

I really wanted to be a spy but settled on aiming to be a journalist, which meant I then pored over all the biographies of the newspaper chiefs of the day such as Lord Beaverbrook of the Express, thinking I would need this information for my interviews. I never did.

I was a very serious and determined schoolgirl and, despite being told by one Scottish Daily Express reporter that it was“no job for a nice wee lassie like you”, I went dutifully off to a careers night at school.

I did achieve my ambition at the age of 17 when I became a junior reporter on the East Kilbride News, an awardwinning journalist at 18 and the youngest news reporter on the workers’ co-operative Scottish Daily News at 21. At last, instead of reading all about it, I was the one doing the writing.