While listening to an audiobook you can conjure up your own images — what the characters look like, how they’re dressed, what kind of landscape the story is set in.
When these stories are transferred to television or film some of the magic can disappear.
I remember a long time ago listening to a radio version of Johanna Spyri’s classic children’s book Heidi, a story of an orphaned girl who goes to live with the grumpy grandfather in the Swiss alps.
Then, the same story appeared on television, and I was quite cross. The Heidi and the grandfather were from someone else’s imagination, not mine, and they didn’t seem right to me.
But I still remember the radio version in detail.
Similarly Barbara Sleigh’s The Kingdom of Carbonel (“the King of the Cats”) and Audrey Feist’s Wind Whistle Farm.
Thankfully, neither of these made it to television, so my childhood memories haven’t been shattered. But I still remember the “thump squeak” sound of the wooden leg of the evil Clint limping along the floorboards in Wind Whistle Farm and Mrs Catnip, the retired witch, from The Kingdom of Carbonel (the first time I came across the word “widdershins”).
