My Book Of A Lifetime: The Tale of Pigling Bland. By Beatrix Potter

No, it's not Crime and Punishment, though that turned the Thames into the Neva and made me skulk around for weeks as Raskolnikov. And it's not Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, though I was Stephen Dedalus too, pious one minute and profaning the next. Instead, it was a small, grey book with falling-out pages, kept in a box in a cupboard at the top of the stairs in my great-aunt's house. On every visit it was found and read again.

The plot of Pigling Bland is simple enough. Because Aunt Pettitoes, the old sow, has too many children, she sends the boy pigs Alexander and Pigling Bland to market. They mislay their papers, and Pigling gets lost. Creeping into a hen-house, he discovers the beautiful black Pig-wig, and they run away together.

But the story was never the point. Pigling Bland taught me the love of words, and the power of them. I loved them before I knew them. "Alexander was hopelessly volatile." Pigling was "peaceable". Pig-wig, sleepy, is wrapped in an "antimacassar". Most perplexing and therefore most wonderful (words to be struggled through, like a tangle of branches in a magic wood), "Aunt Pettitoes gave to each a little bundle, and eight conversation peppermints with appropriate moral sentiments in screws of paper."

This book also showed me the tactility and weight of words. A lot of porridge is eaten in Pigling Bland; each time it is introduced slowly and ceremoniously, as in "Mr Piperson fetched meal from a chest and made porridge". The short, thick words add to the imagined oaty, milky taste. The pigs' licence papers are pinned inside their waistcoat pockets; that "pinned" was so exact, it almost pricked me.

Sometimes the words were mad and surreal: "Beware of traps, hen roosts, bacon and eggs... Observe sign-posts and milestones; do not gobble herring bones." Their madness didn't matter; it made music. So did the judicious semicolons, a neat, quick, teacherly pause; and so did the free-standing sentences, changing the tempo to delicate reflection. "She became quiet, and there was a smell of peppermint."

Pigling Bland sparked lasting enthusiasms. One is the joy of setting out, travelling light. Another is the naming of places, and knowing where I am. Near the end the sun rises in a dazzle of light, creeping down into green valleys dotted with white cottages and trees. "'That's Westmorland,' said Pig-wig." Such declarations still ring regularly in my dreams, together with the signposts that are pictured all through Pigling Bland. They point "To the hills", with the coda, invisibly understood, "and far away". For this is a book about escape, from rules, licence-papers, policemen, death; and it ends with a defiant dance towards infinity.

Ann Wroe's biography 'Being Shelley' is published by Vintage; she is also co-author of 'The Economist Book of Obituaries' (Profile)

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