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Jack was four years old and still at the age where I read to him every night when I tucked him up in bed. Lucy was seven, and I would have thought that she would have grown out of it, but she always insisted on having a story too.
Some years before, there had been a sale of stock from the Manchester Library. It’d enabled me to buy hundreds of children’s books for a song.
Now, every night at bedtime, I pored over them for suitable stories to read to the kids.
I found myself increasingly turning to the classics such as Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel. Stories that involved blood and gore, but had a happy ending. I was able to put my heart and soul into reading stories like that, and both the kids loved my performances.
It was while I was starting to read something or oth
