Called Out of Darkness Page 0,10

to be the only brave one in the house when a pirate broke in and threatened them all.

Belinda paled, and she cried, Help! Help!

But Mustard fled with a terrified yelp, Ink trickled down to the bottom of the household, And little mouse Blink strategically mouseholed.

But up jumped Custard, snorting like an engine, Clashed his tail like irons in a dungeon.

With a clatter and a clank and a jangling squirm He went at the pirate like a robin at a worm.

The reason I've copied out here so many stanzas of this poem is because I think it was significant that we, as little children, were acquainted with this kind of rhythm and vocabulary. Other poems in the book make a similar demand on the mind, and offer a similar musical delight.

Probably nothing I ever wrote as a published author did not derive in some way from the sixteen or so poems my mother chose, over and over again, to read to us from this book. The sheer pleasure of the experience was key.

I spent hours, not reading the poems, but looking at the silhouettes on each page and it did seem to me that these tiny pictures, usually no more than intricate borders for the poems, were filled with mystery.

But her poetry reading was the smallest part of my mother's influence. She told us fabulous stories all the time.

Lying on her bed, listening to her, I learned all about life. She loved to recount her own experiences, how she'd gone to California and lived among a family of movie people, ventured out to a town called Trona to work for a while, lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, though Heaven knows why, and how she'd dated this or that interesting young man, and gone to this or that Mardi Gras ball, or dinner at the yacht club, or how her father - dead in 1917 - had been a powerful longshoreman who could carry huge sacks on his shoulders, dazzling other weaker men. She discoursed at length on other people, their psychology, what they were like, and she loved above all perhaps to tell us the plots of movies. Ben-Hur she had loved and also The Count of Monte Cristo, starring Robert Donat, and there were numerous other films which she sought to make real for us, which we might never see.

Nobody then dreamed of the archival world in which we now live in 2008, a world in which almost any film or book can be retrieved within a matter of hours. Films could be lost in time in those years. Indeed they could be lost forever.

And when precious films returned to the art house theaters for a special run, our mother made sure that we saw them. The Red Shoes directed by Michael Powell with Moira Shearer was perhaps the greatest masterpiece to which she exposed us. But she also took me to see Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Another film which she took us to see was A Song to Remember starring Cornel Wilde as Frederic Chopin, and Merle Oberon as George Sand, his lover. I was so taken by this film, so taken by the emotions of the young Chopin, when he clutched a handful of Polish earth and swore to remember it, that I wanted nothing more than to have such meaning in my own life, something that precious to me, something to which I could give my whole soul.

In later years we went back to that same art house theater for other extraordinary films, like The Tales of Hoffmann or a film of the opera Aida or delightful British comedies about Chesterton's Father Brown and his jewel thief friend Flambeau. This was my mother's doing, this film going, this believing in film as an art form, and seeing it as a door to inspiration and imaginary worlds.

Over and over again, my mother said, "I want to rear four geniuses and four perfectly healthy children." Now, that might frighten a more timid person, but it never frightened me. She told us stories of geniuses of all kinds. She loved describing the vivid social world of Charles Dickens; she recounted to us how the Bronte sisters had written under pen names because they were women and then had taken London by storm as their real selves. She told us the story of the great author George Eliot. She told us about G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc and Oscar Wilde, whose stories for children we