By aged 11 or 12, I was excelling at school and can categorically state that the very same mental engine you witness now as you read these words was alive, kicking and already fully installed and working within my young mind; and there were also obvious hints of my future Beachy self beginning to show as my fierce intellectual side would occasionally snatch and run with a thought or idea although I was far too young to identify such a phenomenon as being anything other than just me thinking or writing
True. There wasn’t an internet back in 1969 but, for minds willing, able or yearning for material of a more dynamic account of the history, science or culture than taught by a regular state school, there was a rich alternative although, I confess, perhaps not every child had a kind of “Offline” alternate source of information quite as exotic as my own!
My brother John, 8 years my senior, worked in a big Smith’s warehouse at the bottom corner of Yeovil town where packs of newspapers, comics and magazine were delivered wholesale daily in the very very early hours each day and this meant that, at the end of John’s shift, (after a 4am start), John would come home with a variety of partially damaged, spare or leftover comics and magazines.
Look and Learn
Look and Learn magazine, (think late 1960’s Internet by printing press but with amazing hand drawn graphics accompanying columns of fascinating text content designed exactly for any 12 year old with an enquiring mind).
Reader’s Digest. SHE magazine. Autocar. Beano.
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