Old friends know that I speak the truth — some tried, then failed, to tempt with unsubtly oblong gifts — but new friends always defer to stark disbelief. I am an evidently literate graduate, I write for a living and I even have friends who write books for a living, so, surely . . ? No.

It is neither a boast nor a confession, just a fact. But any who find it sad or shameful — or, probably, both — might consider what they would doubtless call my “plight” against the recent outpourings from Andrew Motion and various literary chums who have lined up the lists of books that they believe children should have read before they leave school.

Philip Pullman prescribed Coleridge and Shakespeare, J. K. Rowling softened the edges with Defoe and Dickens — I haven’t read either, obviously, but I am guessing they are easier — while Motion’s own list included hurdles for children such as Homer’s Odyssey, Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady and James Joyce’s Ulysses, which I am similarly guessing are monstrously harder.

Such lists, it should be said, alert suspicion of snobbery in the kindest hearts. There was a poll a couple of years ago that sought to select the “top” 50 books by women; it produced wall-to-wall Austen, Murdoch, Eliot and Plath and not a sausage by Jilly Cooper, Penny Vincenzi or Elizabeth George. Still, if we are to give Mr Motion the benefit of all doubt and believe that he honestly seeks and finds pleasure in, say, James Joyce, then I shall say this: if you want fewer adults such as me, not reading books at all, you need fewer adults like him, stuffing them up the noses of children.

I did read at school, set text after set text. There was no choice — although, to be fair, nor was there much of a struggle, either. My mother had sensibly taught me to read when I was three, so I galloped effortlessly to the top of the class in English and pretty well stayed there.

We had fabulous, committed teachers. Miss Eggar wept real salt as she read aloud from Jane Eyre, thus stirring genuine interest, while on lighter notes we discovered that there is nothing more desk-thumpingly funny to a bunch of precocious 17-year-old girls than to extract an explanation of “the beast with two backs” from an overwrought teacher. Male.

Indeed, speaking of the beast, to this day I could probably serve you a passable essay on Othello, he having been the Shakespeare of our A-level year. (Exam Q: Was it Othello’s nobility and virtue that proved to be his downfall? A: Pah, woz it heck!)

But that, you see, is the point: we read the books, we were tested on them and we passed or failed accordingly. Reading books was, therefore, the stuff of school in exactly the same way as was trigonometry or chucking a javelin — and since leaving my esteemed seat of learning, I am as likely to curl up with Jane Austen for the fun of it as I am to flirt with a cosine or risk the wrong end of a spear.

It is a myth that those things you begin at school you automatically continue to pursue after it; indeed, with the possible exceptions of sport and music, most of the sustaining topics of adolescent education cannot be sloughed off quickly enough in the rush to attain — and to prove — adulthood.

By way of pertinent comparison: my daughter’s education was taken in less academic times. As I recall, she was force-fed only two works of literature, a Hemingway and a Fitzgerald, and the rest of the time she guzzled pap beyond belief: teenage magazines, lurid part-works on unsolved murders and every last one of a hideously lengthy series of little American girl-books with pink covers, called Sweet Valley High. (You can only imagine.) Even I, the great unread, was worried — until a friendly bookseller said not to fret, it’s not what they read that counts, it’s that they read. Wise owl, she was.

When child of mine left school she, too, relinquished teenage activities in favour of the new — but, do guess, what new did she find? Why, at the age of 18, there it was, laid out before her: the entirely unexplored landscape of literature, which she swooped upon with what would become and has remained a sincere delight.

Sometimes, wistfully, I feel sure that I missed out. When I listen to her remonstrate with whoever will listen that Charles Dickens is all very well but not a patch on his underrated pal Wilkie Collins, I think, goodness, I wish I had read either, just to join in the debate.

Other times, cheerfully, I feel that it really doesn’t matter at all; I indulge copiously in newsprint and sometimes, on holidays, I even dip into those paper-backed critters that you probably wouldn’t call books but which are as near as I get — bad thrillers on hot beaches, you know the kind of thing.

On balance, however, I suspect that most people believe my daughter to have the better part of the bargain. And albeit that it happened through sleight of circumstance, her coming late to the books she loves highlights that which Mr Motion failed to recognise: that the eminent works he so sternly recommended were written by adults, for adults — further, that to press them upon children in an environment in which they are used for the testing, marking and assessment of those children might, in the end, do a lifetime’s disservice.

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