Rescued writing Although there were plenty of books lying about our house when I was a child, relatively few were left when my mum died, a dozen or so years after dad. Mum had macular degeneration in the last few years of her life so that reading was pretty much out of the question. I do, however, have a handful of books rescued from the family home. You can see two of them above, fruit of my dad’s membership of the Companion Book Club. I think I have mentioned this before. You got a recently published hardback book every month for about six bob rather than the pound or two that a newly published book would cost at the time (this was in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s). As I recall, we had several shelves of these books, with uniform cover styles, but most of them were disposed of during my mum’s declining years. On the front inner flap of the Helen MacInnes book, it says “5/9d to Companion Book Club members only. Originally published by Collins at 21/-.” This would translat...