March 2014

Driving back from a meeting of the Flying Ducks (northern chapter of RNA) on 6 March we saw lots of costumed children coming out of school. They’d been marking World Book Day of course. An interesting blog appeared on the Amnesty site this week too, listing the books banned for inmates of Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment didn’t come as a surprise but Cinderella did! It reminded me of when I taught English Literature to African children in the early 1970s in one of those one-party democracies, so-called. George Orwell’s Animal Farm was on the syllabus, thought to be a good work of anti-communist propaganda - till someone realised it paralleled almost exactly the way the President had banished his rival to a neighbouring central African country. It was banned overnight a few months before the Certificate tests and we had to do a crash course on an alternative. The choice? The Diary of Anne Frank!