Here you are, about to read Elaine Feinstein’s analysis of T. S. Eliot’s letters, or getting ready to argue with our choice of the top 100 books of the decade. If you’ve got this far, you take the fact that you can read for granted. But how, and when, did you actually learn to do it? It’s pretty miraculous, when you stop to think about it, this human ability to translate marks on paper (or clay, or rock) into meaning. Without it, much of the modern world is — you will forgive the pun — a closed book.
I learnt to read early one morning. My parents were sleeping, and I was sitting at the bottom of their bed. I had with me my favourite book, one I’d made my dad read to me over and over and over, until I had it almost — but not quite — memorised. In the past, looking over its pages, there had always been gaps in my understanding, but this one dawn, suddenly there were not. And that, as they say, was that.
The story I read was The Diamond D and the Dreadful Dragon, found in The Sesame Street Storybook. It’s out of print now, but you can still find it online: and Sesame Street itself has just celebrated 40 years of educating and entertaining kids the world over.
I have a personal interest in this particular anniversary. Big Bird lived in our building. We were on the 25th floor and he — Carroll Spinney — lived on the 30th, the top floor of our apartment block in New York. He was (and is) an elegant, silver-haired, silver-bearded fellow of a friendly disposition. A joyful memory of my childhood is walking into the local supermarket with my mother. Suddenly I heard — and the whole supermarket heard — my name called out, Hi, Erica! in an unmistakable voice, the voice of a 9ft-tall bright yellow bird. The whole place seemed to stop: but Big Bird was nowhere to be seen! The silver-haired man continued his shopping, undisturbed by adoring throngs. Now this is what I call fame.
A few years later my parents, as it happens, came to work for Jim Henson, a fact totally unconnected to our upstairs neighbour, though it made those chats in the elevator all the warmer. There had started to be, via Sesame Street, a trickle of fan mail to the Muppets — not much, you understand, just a few letters. Would my mother (who had worked in public relations before I was born) like to take on the minor task of answering them? Sure.
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This was around 1975, when Sesame Street had been going for six years. Two years later, Henson thought he could sell the idea of a puppet show for grownups to network television. Network television wasn’t so sure; so The Muppet Show got made right here, in England, by Lew Grade. It went on, of course, to become one of the most successful television shows in the history of the medium: and pretty soon our small apartment was packed to the gills with fan mail from around the world. I earned pocket money slitting open the envelopes.
What was extraordinary about growing up with the Muppets was that being behind the scenes never caused the magic to rub off. That’s how it is with real magic, which Sesame Street and Jim Henson’s Muppets possess. Kermit was no less real for being on the end of Jim Henson’s arm; and I remain eternally grateful to The Diamond D and the Dreadful Dragon. On my way to where the air is sweet — Happy birthday, Sesame Street!