Little Dalek on the Prairie

This is the fifth installment in the Dalek Game.

When I was little, my father would read to me after dinner while my mother did the dishes. One day he asked me what I wanted him to read and I said, “Little Red Riding Hood”. He objected strenuously, I burst into tears and he chose the first book he found on the shelf: Little House in the Big Woods, the first of the ‘little house’ books. My mother objected to his lack of expression and made him take over the dishes, and from then until I went to boarding school in year 11, my mother read out loud every night while my father did the dishes. I grew up in western Queensland, but since we were graziers, doing school by Distance Education, using a wood stove, baking our own bread and so forth, life seemed a lot closer to Laura Ingalls’ than to books being published in the 1980s.

Of course, if we’d had a tv I would have known that what we were really missing was Daleks.