IT WAS A STUPID THING TO DO. THE bar hung about 8ft off the floor of our school gym; we had invented a game that involved jumping off a chair to catch it, then swinging off to land, exhilarated, by the lifts. As you can see, this was far, far back in the mists of time, long before the days of Health and Safety. I was 11. So I leapt off the chair and reached for the bar. I missed. I broke my ankle very badly indeed and was in plaster up to my hip for eight weeks.

Why am I telling you this story? Because there was an upside, of course. As I lay in my hospital bed a friend of my parents' came to visit, carrying a book for me that was far, far thicker than any I had read before. She knew that I'd have some time on my hands, after all, and thought this might help to while it away. So, when I was sent home and began my long stint on the sofa (happily, I hurt myself just before the Easter holidays began) I opened her gift and began to read. I read all morning. I read all afternoon. I couldn't stop reading. Sometimes I stopped reading to eat the jelly that my mother insisted was good for my bones (I don't like jelly). I read on into the evening. Turn off the light, my mother said. I found a torch. The book didn't last quite as long as my parents' friend thought it would.

The book was Gone with the Wind, and I have held it in great affection since — so I was pleased, despite the rather doubtful result, to have that charming rogue Rhett Butler in our required reading slot. Perhaps Celia Brayfield's review will send you back to the source of Donald McCaig's novel — which has sold, I read on the late Miss Mitchell's website, more copies than any book apart from the Bible.

Seventy years ago it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I wonder how many people view it as a relic, as Uncle Tom's Cabin is viewed; a book that tells us something of an historical period but would not now be read for its own virtues.

With those sales figures, a great many of you will have read it already; but for those of you that haven't — especially if you are feeling poorly and in need of being completely swept away — I highly recommend it. A good saga, as Celia points out, is hard to find, and this is one of the best, full of war, romance, dresses made from curtains and 18in waists — a vanished world, built on cotton and slavery and pictured as it is destroyed. Rather more than just fiddle-dee-dee, I'd say.

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