However, in a couple of years I too, caught the reading sickness. It was my nurse
Lizzie Clark from Carnoustie, Scotland, who infected me about the age of five: The fat cat
sat on the mat - and all that. I never looked back. I was soon in a fever - while not under-
standing half of what I read - but reading and reading.

It was not till much later that libraries began playing a major part in my life. I
have to confess I've always been intimidated by them. The Mitchell to this day frightens
me stiff. So I think you should take pains to make yourselves less frightening to those
likely to be frightened. In my teens I had a great affection for the City Library because
you could take the books home - those old, linted, often rather smelly volumes. In the State
Library and the hallowed Mitchell, the frivolous side of my nature finds itself at variance
I can never concentrate. I am really more interested in people than ideas, so my attention
continually strays from my book to the faces around me. Perhaps it's all to the good in
a novelist, but it sometimes makes me feel an impostor sitting amongst so many serious
people - even though we are united in our devotion to books - however different our ap-
proach and the results.

I've led a peculiar kind of life - in two hemispheres and a variety of spiritual
worlds. I was sent to several schools and one university. I've had every opportunity for
education, but I don't see myself as educated in the accepted sense - the sense respected
by my colonial parents, and as discussed endlessly today in the press, on the radio, and the
telly. To me, having gone through it all, real education is self-education, though of course
you've got to get the nudge from somebody. I got very few nudges at the schools I went
to, except from a man I thought mad at the time, and realised later that his clown's perform-
ance was that of a genius. At Cambridge the lecturers were deadly, with the exception of
one visiting Frenchman. I more or less gave up lectures and dropped out into the library.
To give them their due, my tutors gave me the nudge, and how grateful I am for the worlds of
French and German literature they opened up.

And this is what my perhaps boring preamble is leading up to. I can't see that the
debate by educational experts is getting us very far. Wide and independent reading - self-
education - is what matters. And you, the librarians, are in the best position to give a
lead to confused youth. I am not condemning our teachers, many of them genuinely dedicated,