Childhood Memories

ONE morning, when I was 11 and living in a terraced house in a dusty, practically treeless housing estate in Batu Pahat, Johor, I received, in the post, a fat brown package, plastered with British stamps and blue airmail stickers. A brown paper package, whether tied up in string or not, is indeed one of my favourite things. A brown package from England at that point in time could mean only one thing: my eldest sister had sent me a present.
She sent me things from time to time and I have forgotten the contents in most of the parcels that came to Segamat and Batu Pahat from High Barnet, London. I do recall a very sticky box of Cadbury chocolate eggs though, and admit to licking the inside of the envelope it was wrapped in.

That morning in Batu Pahat, there was no chocolate, but I will never forget what I felt as the layers of brown wrapper came off to reveal five or six paperbacks tied together with string. Oh! The excitement, the mouth-watering pleasure that a book-lover feels when he receives a gift of books! I can’t remember the exact contents of the package. I think one of the books was The Canterville Ghost, but the title I do remember clearly, the one I read first and then re-read, and loved and guarded jealously, and still own, was Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery.