When I was young, for reasons clear to regular readers of 
these posts, I was a book worm. Well, not so much a book-worm as a book-dragon. Once I discovered that it was possible to escape into a book I was hooked.
What was I escaping from? Well, start with a drab house, a stressed mother, bullying at school, arms and face too long, hands too big, hand-me-down clothes, sparse meals…
From such a place I could escape to a ranch in Canada, a long treck in China, a Scottish farm, a Spanish hacienda, a Danish castle, a house called Manderlay, a sailing boat, or a boarding school in Surrey. Adventure, colour, drama, comedy and tragedy were at my finger tips at the turn of a page. It was fan-tastic. On reflection, my life then could define the term escapism.
Nowadays there is a school of thought that disadvantaged children should be offered literature that validates and reflects their own environment.* There are good examples of this. We have novels 
like those of David Almond or Alan Garner that might do this in a way sufficiently complex and multilayered to be of interest right across - and up and down- the snakes-and-ladder board of class and culture.You may have your own favourites that fit this bill.
In those days, though, I did not look in literature for what I already knew; I looked for what I could wonder about: sumptuous rooms, tea on the table and a smiling mother, picnics in the dorm, trekking in the wastes of Canada, murderous wives and predatory widowers, love beneath the oleander tree, walking with a hundred Chinese children to safety, delivering lambs on a Scottish hillside, assassinating kings and sailing with my comrades down Coniston Lake
So far, so escapist. But in so escaping I discovered for myself the universals of emotional, political and social life far beyond the confines of that small house in that small town. I now feel certain that this level of escapism ensures that - in tune with the Bronte sisters - though one’s domestic life might be contained, the spirit can roam free and the soul is never parochial.
However, being a book-dragon was not without drawbacks. One day at school, escaping the dining hall clatter of plates and voices onto Crusoe’s Desert Island, I was pulled up by my red-haired German teacher.
‘What are you doing there, Wendy?’
‘Reading, Miss.’
‘Two hundred lines! I must not read at the dinner table.’
I must not read at the dinner table
I must not read at the dinner table
I must not read at the dinner table
I do now…
wxx
* (Afterthought. Of course there was all of D H Lawrence in which I did recognise aspects of my own life. And I did encounter The Family From One End Street written and illustrated by Eve Garnett, a charming and romanticised version of working class life which no more resembled my own than did The Forsyte Saga… )
