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In his visits to the local library with his grandmother, Nicola, Bertie rarely spent much time in the children’s section, with its bright primary colours and diminutive chairs. He was a voracious reader, and required no encouragement to engage with books that normally would not be found on the bedside table of the average, or indeed any, seven-year-old boy. So while such tables might be graced with the usual juvenile literature – expurgated, of course, to remove any trace of undesirable authorial attitudes, and given the nihil obstat of the censors – in Bertie’s case, tales of talking pigs were conspicuously absent. He understood the appeal of such stories to readers younger than himself – his brother, Ulysses, for example, was beginning to show an interest in such a literary diet – but he himself preferred books of greater weight and substance.