Book of a lifetime: Charlotte’s Web by EB White

From The Independent archive: Helen Humphreys on the classic of children’s literature that holds a great lesson about loss and the place sadness and death occupy in a life – and how each of us is irreplaceable

(Garth Williams)

I was a child who loved reading. I was crazy for the world of books, a world I felt was much more exciting than the one I actually lived in. To have some of the thrill of story, I would try and put myself in the way of adventure in my “real” life. Usually this involved riding my bike around the neighbourhood, or squelching through the pond opposite my house. For a long stretch of days one summer, I stood at the window of my bedroom, notebook in hand, looking for suspicious people to document. I made my little brother stand with me, as my assistant. His job was to look up the street while I looked down.

Around this time, I read Charlotte’s Web by EB White. This whimsical story of the friendship between Wilbur the pig and Charlotte the spider moved me like nothing else had moved me before. When that spider died, I was inconsolable. My mother, rather nonplussed at the amount of sobbing I was doing over a children’s book, tried to calm me by pointing out that Charlotte’s babies meant there were lots of spiders at the end of the story. But of course, these other spiders didn’t matter because I didn’t know them. I didn’t care about them.