Sinsull — A selection of my read-to-by mother/read-4-self between the ages you mention: Classic fairy stories; tho my mother learned very early to be a bit careful because I cried for an hour when Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger on the spindle and DIED; so she couldn't even get to what I later discovered was the next sentence, 'but she didn't die; she went to sleep for 100 years'.

Alice; Milne - more 'Very Young' & 'Now 6' than the storybooks, though them too: esp 'Sir Brian Botany' & [in particular] 'The Knight Whose Armour Didn't Squeak' — & I could see all the allusive innuendos to Sir Thomas Thom's avoidance of conflict too, & precisely what was meant when "Sir Brian went on a journey and he caught a lot of duckweed' [INCIDENT, you see; with some subtlety added in] — & also that both these were intended as jokes about the 'Stories of King Arthur' which another favourite at that time; along, in same series of retellings for children, a book of Classical myths called, I think, "Tell Me A Story" or some such [they had green covers I remember; & I think illustrations by Rackham]. Something I discovered from this last one btw - my 7yrs-older sister mentioned Echo & Narcissus to my mother; 'How do you know that story?' I asked - I had just had it read to me from MY book. 'Everyone knows that story,' mother replies: 1st time, I recall, that I ever appreciated there was this corpus of stories that 'everyone knows'...

   The American pig Freddie [ever come across him?] - Freddie The Detective a particular favourite; my first detective story, leading me on in later life to Doyle, & to Sayers, on whom 60 years later I was to write the entries in The Cambridge Guide To Literature In English & The Continuum Encyclopedia Of British Literature.

I should, I am sure, have been, not so much bored as puzzled by WtWTA — 'but what's it supposed to be about' I should doubtless have asked pathetically - as, you will gather, I still do.