Why we still need Stories

...and no one is too young to hear them

Photo by Robyn Budlender on Unsplash

I was lucky really as far as being read to is concerned. My parents were divorced and Dad was in the RAF up in Lossemouth in Scotland. My sister and I had to wait several weeks to see him and it was always worth the wait. He was the youngest brother of four older sisters in a very busy family and I get the impression he was quite often left to his own devices for entertainment which growing up in North Wales involved activities such as investigating caves and sea cliffs with his friends. He loved Richmal Crompton’s Just William and it sounds like he and his cronies got up to similar scrapes.

Retrospectively, I think because he had had a rather chaotic upbringing he put extra effort and thought into our cultural environment. I can’t remember what the first books he read to us were but I remember always being read to. The Chronicles of Narnia series were a favourite ( to this day hot chocolate reminds me of The Voyage of The Dawn Treader as that story time was the first time I drank it) .

The best memories are filled with him shaking with laughter and unable to speak when Richmal Crompton’s sharp wit got the better of him and left him unable to continue. We loved this (and well we would wouldn’t we? ) watching how powerful storytelling can be that it can stop you in your tracks.

“Dad! What?! What?!” We’d say as he’d wipe his eyes and tried to regain his composure to continue reading.

The legacy it left me and my sister with was a constant desire to lose ourselves in a book, reading under the covers after lights out, at boarding school covering Enid Blyton and Jilly Cooper's Rivals with other dustjackets as they were banned. A book is a country at the back of a wardrobe, it is a rabbit hole into dreamland, an escape tunnel, a time out and a time to retreat within.. especially when feeling homesick and a bit lost.

Fast forward to when I was twenty seven reading birdsong Birdsong by Sebastien Faulks whilst on tour with Les Miserables. I finished it at 3am and wept for hours afterwards. After I finished “The Goldfinch” a few years later I experienced a new kind of grief from the fact I wouldn’t spend any more time in the company of the antiques dealer “Hobie.”…Its crazy isn’t it how magical that world of our imagination is when you read?

Art is a symbiotic full circle and writer and reader are both equally important for that art to be realised. It is only complete once it is received by another. I think so anyway.

Having my own children was a fantastic excuse to delve back into children’s literature and I discovered brand new favourites such as Lydia Monks My Cats Weird Mo Willem’s Knuffle Bunny and Cressida Cowell’s hilarious That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown. Not forgetting of course Helen Cooper’s Tatty ratty which sparked a lengthy philosophical discussion on who Tatty Ratty really is at the end of the book. Read it and you will know what I mean. My sister and I totally disagreed!

Add to this the joy of introducing my children to those I had been read as a child. My 19 year old daughter and I have just finished reading Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and have had so much satisfaction discussing it walking through Richmond Park (the weather is very ‘wuthering’ there at the moment).

Time spent reading to your children is time spent with both of you discovering new experiences together. It’s often also where you discover you have the same sense of humour, or love for a particular genre. The same same sense of connection as I edlightedly discovered watching the Muppets and Bagpuss and my children finding them just as enjoyable as I did.

If you can please listen to Katherine Rundell’s The Lion the Witch and the Wonder its a wonderful series on BBC sounds discussing why we all need children’s fiction in our lives for so many different reasons but mainly I think to keep the Wonder. As Dr Seuss says “Oh the Places you’ll go!”

What are the moments that have really stayed with you from what you have read? let me know.