Earlier this week, I went to a writers club dinner and some strange topics of conversation came up, though, not surprisingly, books we had read was one of those topics. During this I was rather surprised by two of the shared memories.
The first was the kind of guilty pleasure moment. One of the ladies said she remembered the first Mills and Boon book she had ever read, but to my shame and everyone else’s amusement, I said not only do I remember the first Mills and Boon book I ever read, but I still have it!
At the dinner I didn’t immediately remember the title, but it did come to me within a couple of minutes. “Impossible Bargain”, sadly I was able to tell the story of it much more easily, even though I read it when I was about 16/17.
Well just to prove that I do still have the book, here’s a picture. “Impossible Bargain” by Patricia Wilson. The code on the back is 8802. For those who don’t recognise the coding system, that means it was part of the Mills and Boon offering from February 1988, which means I was actually 18 years old when I read it.
Is that old to start reading romances? If feels like I was younger and given what else I’d lived with by that age, I’m surprised I was that old before I started on the M&B. To be honest, I was a bit of swotting teenager and most of what I read back then was text books. Boring, but there you go.
This wasn’t the only memory we shared. I actually said there were two books which I remember from my childhood, that virtually no one I’ve ever meet remembers and until very recently I was beginning to think I’d imagined the pair of them, but surprisingly someone at the table actually remembered reading them too. “Fattypuffs and Thinifers” and “Bottersnikes and Gumbles”.
Recently I found a copy of Bottersnikes on Amazon.com, but it was $75 before international posting. But as I was searching the internet to get the pictures below, I was somewhat surprised to suddenly find both books available on Amazon.co.uk.
Guess what? I’ve put my order in for copies of both. Have a horrible suspicion that I’m going to be disappointed when I re-read them, I’m not seven anymore after all, but it’s a piece of my childhood coming back in a way.
The Write Route 