I was left alone in bookstores a lot as a kid.
While my mother went to the supermarket or the salon, I would sit cross-legged next to the shelves, getting well and truly stuck into a paperback - Enid Blyton, L.M. Montgomery or Monica Dickens. This was the 1980s, before rampant shrink-wrapping, and nobody minded a primary-schooler who took good care not to crease the merchandise.
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