What stories that you read or had read to you in your childhood have stayed with you?

[Yourinmyspot]

I remember one, though no idea what it was called about this old man that was grumpy and never smiled at anyone. The local children were frightened of him, but this one little boy used to smile at him whenever he saw the man.

The man never smiled back to start with, but then started to and it turned out he was just lonely and this one little boy just smiling at him cheered him up, then he was happy and started smiling at everyone too.

I wasn’t that old when I read it and it’s always stuck with me, that sometimes just someone smiling or acknowledging someone can make a difference to them.

We had a wonderful teacher for 5th and 6th class and every week she would randomly stop the class and read to us for half an hour. She read 101 Dalmatians to us and - my absolute favourite - The Island of The Blue Dolphins. such lovely memories.

The Owl Service is watchable again on YouTube. I was obsessed with it as a kid an keep meaning to watch it again to see if it still has the same effect on me. I also loved Weirdstone of Brisingamen and Elidor (same author, Alan Garner).

Oh yes the Owl Service, that really creeped me out, still does 😬

Also, Z for Zachariah
I am the cheese
The plague dogs

😭

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_for_Zachariah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_the_Cheese
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plague_Dogs_(novel)

Me too. Thank you, I'll take a look on YouTube but am always wary of rewatching things in case they spoil my memory of them.

I adored A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley (I'm a history teacher pretty much because of it!). Also When Marnie Was There by Joan G. Robinson. Completely haunting and beautiful.

The good old days when teachers could just introduce children to wonderful literature without it being a 3 part Literacy lesson.

I asked AI! .... who told me....

The book you are referring to is likely "Jubilee" by Margaret E. Smith. It tells the story of Jubilee and her brother, who are orphans in Victorian times and seek help from Mr. Parrot to attend school.

Tom's midnight garden and the weird stone of brizinghaman, both of which my babysitter read to me. Not to mention famous five

I wish so much my children could just learn not be herded through a syllabus.

My mum bought me a pop up 'The night before Christmas' book when I was little. Santa's sleigh and reindeers would pop up and 'fly' across the book, the stockings would sway on the chimney and other things which seemed magical as a small child. I used to ask her to read it over and over every night.

When older, I used to read The folk of the faraway tree by Enid Blyton myself and loved it.

The magic faraway tree, black beauty, the Narnia series, Enid Blyton especially St Clare's and Mallory Towers

Albert and the Lion - Marriott Edgar
My daughter loved Matilda by Ronald Dahl.
There's a theme here...

We had one book called The church mice at Christmas that I really loved, the illustrations in it were amazing.

My Mum used to read to me a book called 'Jennys Adventure'

It was about a rag doll who gets left behind at the beach by her little girl owner and who makes her way back home by herself. All sorts of creatures befriend her and help her along the way. She rips her dress on bushes, falls in the lake and some rabbits help to tidy her up and mend her dress. She makes it home with the help of her new friends.

I always loved it. So much that I sought it out as an adult and found a copy on Ebay and now own it once more.

I had a book called 365 Bedtime Stories thaf I remember being read to me every night.

I'd have loved to read them to my kids and grandchildren but my mother threw all our childhood stuff out 😪

Wonderful book.

My Teacher in primary school read I Am David to us and cried at the end. I bought a copy and read it as an adult and still on my bookshelf.

i remember that! And the cat usually was in the foreground with a looming face as if you were a mouse?

Three men in a boat
Wind in the willows

A City of Bells and The Little White horse, both by Elizabeth Goudge.

Rather different, the Strewwelpeter poems:
‘Augustus was a chubby lad, fat ruddy cheeks Augustus had’. Then he refuses to eat his soup, gets thin and dies, with a soup tureen as a headstone on his grave.
Harriet who played with matches, burned herself alive, and the cats sat around crying.
Various others, all ghastly morality tales and I loved the book as did my DSs in their turn.

There's a version of Belloc's Cautionary Tales you can buy which has Harriet, Matilda et al in it and illustrations by Edward Gorey - which fit perfectly! I got it at Daunt Books but I think Amazon have it.

The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig. I can remember running home for lunch when I was at primary school so that I could carry on reading it. I read it again quite recently (I'm now 64!) and it's still very moving.

I loved Ramona Quimby. My mum found a boxed collection at a church fete but it wasn't widely available in the UK at the time and we had less knowledge of US vocab so it was like a window into a familiar but completely different world. I found the insight into the US completely fascinating (no school uniform, bus pick up from your house) and spent a lot of time trying to work out what a graham cracker was and what her dad was trying to fix (a "faucet").

The English version of Strewwelpeter is available on Kindle, also as a paperback.

There are 2 that stuck with me book called kiss the dust about a Kurdish family feel Iraq and someone else’s baby about a teenage girl who got pregnant