Palpable excitement

On Wednesday and Thursday this week, I felt particularly conscious of this multi-faceted effect. On Wednesday, I was at Warwick University doing one of my annual sessions with students on Hilary Minns’ storytelling module for people working with children. Thursday was the final session of my Kensington Palace course for parents. Both times, I felt the palpable excitement of people who have already started to experience the effects of their storytelling on children. And not only children. One Kensington Palace mother read us a story she’d written during the week. Beautifully written it was too. During the course, she told us, she felt she’d discovered a new facility for writing. She reported how affected her husband had been by this.

New skills, new confidence, new powers of invention: the KensingtonPalace crowd will, I feel sure, go on to great things. Already they are well into planning storytelling clubs for the children in the schools their children attend. I have offered my help in getting these going.

As for the Warwick University students, they’ll soon be planning and writing their end-of-course dissertations. In doing this, they will be using and recording their own new awareness of the effects of stories on children.

Leading workshops – a particular skill

But it’s an important point to make: leading workshops in such a way as to produce these effects is a particular skill of its own. I know I’m good at it (I should be by now!) and of course I know it’s not the only way of working as a storyteller. (I love the other ways, too.) But it does require a particular set of qualities – knowing how to put participants at their ease; activities that can involve all in the group, including the shyest; a storytelling style that does not show itself off but encourages people to feel they can do it too; a way of working that recognises and develops people’s individual interests, skills and styles. And last but not least, a love of employing and sharing the ‘secrets’ of the storytelling art.

The need today

It’s a tall order. And it represents one of my current concerns about what’s happening with storytelling in education today. Right now, we badly need more storytellers who want to foster this way of working so there can be more parents, more teachers and more childcare workers spreading the joys and wisdoms of storytelling. Is enough happening to fund this kind of development? Are enough people aware of the need? What happens if and when this kind of workshop-running dies out?

At the end of my Kensington Palace session on Thursday, I told the Star Apple story. I knew everyone there would love it. If you don’t know it already, it’s the most glorious and simple magic. But that’s not the main reason I picked it to end with. I chose it so I could say, with feeling, to all the people who were present: ‘I’ve told you this story because you’re all stars.’

So no apologies for retelling the story again in this Blog.

Story: Star Apple

Once there was a girl who was bored. “I’m bored,” she kept on saying. The little girl’s mother told her, “You could go and watch TV.”

“That’s boring,” the little girl said. “Then go and tidy up your room,” said her mother. “That’s boring,” the girl replied.

The girl’s mother finally said: “Well, here’s another idea. You could go and look for a little green house with a chimney on top and a star inside.”

“Huh?” the little girl answered. “You can’t have a star inside a house.”

Yet she did as her mother suggested. She looked in her toy cupboard and under the stairs. Nothing! Then, after telling her mother what she was planning, she went out on the street and looked at all the houses. But she couldn’t see a little green house with a chimney on top.

So she went to her granny who lived next door. “Granny,” said the little girl. “Mum’s gone mad. She told me to find a little green house with a chimney on top and a star inside. And I can’t! And it’s silly!”

Granny listened and then quietly said, “Why don’t you go out in the garden and look underneath my apple tree?”

So the girl went out in the garden but she still couldn’t find what her mother had said. She went back inside and told her granny, “Granny, there’s no little green house with a chimney on top and a star inside.”

Then her Granny went out with her and, from under the apple tree, she picked up an apple that had fallen onto the grass. She showed it to the little girl. “See?” said Granny. “A little green house with a chimney on top!”

“Uh!” said the girl. “But there’s no star inside.” “Let’s have a look,” said Granny.

So Granny went in the kitchen and cut open the apple and inside was a beautiful star.

P.S. Please remember. Very important. If you tell this story, please choose an apple with a good amount of stem for a chimney and please don’t cut the apple downwards. Cut it open across the middle. Besides, if you’re telling the story to young children in school, keep your knife well-wrapped and put away.
And if your apple is red and not green, change the story to suit.

Storytelling Cookbook

 ‘And all I know is, that if they are not yet done feasting, then they are probably at it still.’

In other words, when a story ends well, it’s not hard to imagine the characters in it sitting long into the night , chewing things over in more ways than one. When I’m finishing a story with children, I often bring in that idea of eating afterwards – it’s a little bit of a tease.

A tale from India

For instance, in that marvellous Indian tale, Bhambhutia,  (you can find it in The Singing Sack by Helen East), an old lady is threatened with being devoured on her way through the forest to visit her daughter.

The story describes how she succeeds in getting back home inside a life-size clay pot she constructs. But the old lady is clever enough to stay in the pot till the animals who still want to eat her have gone to sleep and are snoring around her. It’s when she hears their snores that the old lady knows it’s safe to climb out and quickly run into her house. But that’s not quite the end of the story. Next morning, she gives the pot its reward for bringing her safely home. Either it can go round the world or it can stay with her.

It’s a good point for a bit of discussion. In my experience, lots of children say they’d choose to go round the world – and in multi-ethnic Britain, many say they’d visit the countries where their families originated. Equally, lots of children decide that, if they were the pot, they’d stay at home with the old lady. We talk about it. Then I end the discussion like this: ‘Well, in the story, it says the pot decided to stay with the old lady. And I know that’s what it did because the last time I went to have tea with her, it was still there.’

The proof of the pudding – Kensington Palace revisited

The proof of the storytelling pudding lies in the eating. Thursday was the 6th session of my Kensington Palace storytelling course for parents. It was intended as an opportunity to reflect on what has happened up till now and what might happen after this. The parents’ reports provided a feast.

First came a report from two of the mums who, a few weeks ago, went together to Chelsea Library to tell their stories. The visit had been arranged by our course-organiser at Kensington Palace. The audience was a class of 6 – 7 year olds from a local school. I felt so proud hearing these two mothers relate what happened when they got there. Everything they said made it apparent how much they’d absorbed from the course. How to arrange themselves, choosing low chairs; how to speak with the children; how to gain and hold interest; questions, pauses, props, refrains – and all this after just 5 sessions on the course, 10 hours in all. They said the children had been wonderful: they’d listened and responded brilliantly. But what was best of all for me was to hear how much the two tellers had enjoyed themselves too.

Equally moving was a report from another mum. This mum’s elder daughter is only five years old and it appears that, up to now, she has been very quiet at school – so quiet that last year her mother was called in to school on several different occasions to talk about the child’s shyness.

What a turn up for the books! Since coming on the course, the mother has been storytelling with her children and this has brought some stirring effects. At a recent show-and-tell session in school, the little girl got up, went out the front and told the whole class the story of Mrs Wiggle and Mrs Waggle, which is one story we’d done on the course. The teacher, naturally, was delighted. But that’s not the end of it. As well as continuing to come out of herself at school, the little girl has also been storytelling at home to her younger sister, sitting the toddler down in front of her to do so. Besides, she has announced to her mother, ‘I’m a storyteller now.’

For some children – and for some adults – telling a story is a good and easier way of communicating. Maybe that’s because it does not feel so personally revealing as talking directly about yourself.

Funnily enough – to come full circle with this week’s metaphor – this may be why a lot of mothers I’ve worked with find that a very good time for telling stories is when they’re in the kitchen preparing a meal. It’s something about the sideways-on approach that can make it very effective.

What next?

Next week we’re to have an extra session at the Palace. We will be talking about how the parents who came on the course might take things on in the future. Developing more stories to tell? A school storytelling club for younger children? More storytelling visits to the local libraries? We’ve already discussed what’s to be on the menu. Next Thursday we’ll see what appeals.

Among other things, Eileen Colwell was:

• founder of the first children’s library in the UK
• first patron of the Society for Storytelling
• an oral storyteller par excellence

Eileen was also a storytelling inspiration to me and huge numbers of others. I was thinking about her this week on two separate occasions, once in connection with the TV series on storytelling, By Word of Mouth, which I originated and devised back in 1989. The series was shown on Channel 4 in 1990 and I’ve just had some DVD transfers of it made from the videos of it that I possess. Eileen Colwell figures prominently in the third programme in the series. She comes across as vividly as she did in real life, sparkly-eyed, lively and wise as she was.

My second reason for remembering Eileen was the talk I went to on Tuesday night. It was a Children’s Book Circle occasion and I was there as the guest of my friend, Valerie Grove, who was there to introduce and talk to Anne Harvey, a great expert on Eleanor Farjeon and the administrator of her estate. Anne is just bringing out a new selection of Eleanor Farjeon’s poems under the unusual title, Like Sorrow or a Tune. Afterwards I shared with her a delightful Eleanor Farjeon anecdote that Eileen Colwell had told me.

The occasion of the anecdote was Eileen’s decision as a young librarian that she would very much like to try and tell Eleanor Farjeon’s story, Elsie Piddock Skips In Her Sleep. But she also decided that before she told it in public, she must seek permission from its author. First she wrote to Eleanor Farjeon. Then she was asked to visit in person. When Eileen turned up at the appointed time and knocked at Eleanor Farjeon’s door, she felt extremely nervous, especially when the door was opened and Eleanor Farjeon stood there and said, ‘Don’t say anything my dear, I just want to look at you.’ After peering intently into Eileen’s face, the great lady stood back and pronounced her verdict. ‘Yes, you are Elsie Piddock. You may tell the story.’

Elsie Piddock Skips In Her Sleep thereafter became the story with which Eileen was most strongly associated. Her tellings of it greatly influenced audiences abroad, for instance in Canada and Japan, as well as audiences here in Britain. I guess the last time she told it was on 8 May 1999 at the Society for Storytelling gathering in Loughborough which was arranged to celebrate her 95th birthday. Next week will be the 14th anniversary of that occasion. I for one will never forget it. Tellings like that live on.

The saying was a favourite of my wise friend, Lynne, poet and publisher and mother of two of my god-children, who died very much too young. Why I remembered it now was the work I’ve had to do on behalf of my Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award nomination. The nomination is being made by the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling. To help, I’ve needed to provide lists of my work over the 30 years of my storytelling. Performances, workshops, courses, special projects, residencies, work in schools, talks, articles, publications – making the lists has been momentous for me, a real walk down memory lane. Yet how else is it possible to demonstrate the work across time of an oral storyteller, especially when, for most of that time, we didn’t have video recordings?

How to measure storytelling

In a very significant sense, the work of the oral storyteller mostly goes into the air (and, hopefully, the hearts and minds of those who listen). How can its results be measured? Its comparative invisibility creates many problems, especially in regard to what happens in education. Especially after the lovely long comment that arrived this week from Hilary Minns of Warwick University, I’ve been thinking about the problems all over again.

Since the 1980s

When I began storytelling at the beginning of the 1980s, the storytelling revival was just beginning to stir. Some who were instrumental in it, Ben Haggarty prime amongst them, were of the view that storytelling for adults was what was urgently needed to be brought to people’s attention.

Storytelling with children, Ben thought, was already known and accepted.It’s clear he was right about the adult side of things and what he and others have done in this respect has been enormously successful.

Yet it soon became my experience that storytelling with children was, by then, not happening either – not in schools nor even with nursery children.

Before very long, along came the Oracy Project, the huge national enterprise which brought to prominence the essential need and value for children not only of speaking and listening but, very importantly, of stories and storytelling. In the mid-1990s, the Society for Storytelling added a strong voice to the cause with a prominent campaign about Storytelling in Education and an informative poster-style document that went out to all the schools in the land. I played a part in both these major initiatives and throughout the first decade of the new millennium found myself extremely busy both with storytelling in schools and delivering huge numbers of training courses for teachers and other school staff in authorities throughout England and Wales.

And now?

Now I think that a whole host of changes – curriculum changes, target-setting, focus on exam results, funding cuts, computers, show-and-tell methods – are having a massive and deleterious effect. I’ve written about this before in this blog and am still thinking hard about what can be done. The Storytelling Module that Hilary Minns started and runs at Warwick is very unusual in this country. Every year, people who are, or are going to be, working with children find in it an inspirational and highly effective course in telling stories with children and what can be developed from the storytelling. Whenever I go there to do a session, I see and hear how enormously valued it is by the students.

Why aren’t there more of such courses? Shouldn’t there be one in every teacher-training college in the country? What happens when the current generation of storytellers and storytelling teachers cease working? I, for one, simply can’t bear the thought that, in future, children in schools may never hear stories because there’ll be no-one to tell them.

Things change. All the time we’re being carried along like clouds across the sky. I believe it’s high time for us to look about us, take note and speak out.

Next Week: well, next week is a big Anniversary for me. It will be exactly three years since I was diagnosed with the nasal lymphoma from which I now seem to be in full remission. Another reason why I’ve been thinking a lot.

For another thing, my husband Paul is currently taking an Advanced Singers’ Performance Course at Morley College. On Tuesday this week, along with other singers from the course, he took part in a lunch-time recital. He sang three songs and, though I say it myself, he was brilliant. He stood well, he engaged his audience and he sang with real feeling and a beautiful tone. Back at the house, before and after, we talked about every aspect.

Stance:

In performance, singers stand. Storytellers either stand or sit according to individual preference and the type of performance. In any staged setting, standing is usual. If your choice as a storyteller is to sit, you’re giving your audience some of the feel of the fire-side traditions of storytelling, which can be extremely effective. But in a larger situation, it limits your ability to project.

What you do with your stance is important. Some storytellers enact parts of their story. Some – which is rather different – make frequent use of dramatic gesture. For myself, though I’m inclined to use my hands a bit too much, what I aim for is the same quiet relaxed stance that is recommended for the singer. This enables the focus to be on what is being communicated rather than the communicator. It’s an aspect of story-sharing which, I believe, can and should be part of performance.

Look:

Where do you turn your gaze when you’ve got an audience before you? That’s another vital question. Making eye-contact is a powerful tool for both the singer and the storyteller. Yet it can be over-used. For some audience-members, it can be intimidating.

As a storyteller, you immediately notice which people in an audience are looking at you directly and with a willingness to engage. (Adults, unlike children, often do not look in your direction at all, preferring to go into their own world. This can be disconcerting.) My practice is very much to respond to people that are looking at me but to try also to be conscious not to get too hooked onto any one person’s engagement.

I also recommend a bit of dissembling – finding a place in the audience where you can direct your gaze, as though at someone in particular, but not actually so. Instead, you’re looking in between the faces, somewhere in the middle distance, but in a lively way as though focusing your whole audience into one ideal listener who is there but not present.

Feeling:

Feeling is vital but it does have to be felt. Simulated feeling is showy. It’s where, in my view, performance ceases to engage. For me, it needs to come from the heart. It needs to be thought and felt.

Beauty of tone:

On Friday this week, Simon Jenkins in the Guardian wrote about the nightingale (which, like the cuckoo, is in serious decline in this country due largely to loss of habitat). He wrote about the sheer beauty of the nightingale’s song, as if it sings for the pure joy of singing. Paul and I heard one once on the island of Iona: we stood right by the tree where it sang and listened to it for ages. We walked on and when we returned it was still singing.

There’s something in the nightingale’s song for storyteller and human singer alike to aim at: a voice that can be easily heard and where every bit can be heard, a tone that does not distract by being scratchy, unpractised or forced and a love of the doing where the beauty is what flows out.

P.S. Sadly, Session 6 of my Kensington Palace parents’ course, which was due to happen on Thursday this week, had to be postponed (health issues on the part of the organiser). It was to have been our Reflections session where we would also talk about what next. Fingers crossed, it will happen in May.

Pleasing (for me!) 

1. I’ve just heard I’m being nominated for an Astrid Lindgren award. Astrid Lindgren was the wonderful Swedish children’s writer who created Pippi Longstocking. I’m to be nominated in the Storyteller category.

2. On Monday I had a phone call with the editorial consultant whom I’d asked for a professional opinion on A Long Run In Short Shorts, my collection of short personal stories. She said she loves them. She’s urging me to try and find a publisher for them. She says they deserve an audience.

3. On Thursday I learned that a book on storytelling and sustainability to which I’ve contributed a chapter has found a publisher and is to be published next March.

4. I’ve managed to do a whole lot of writing during this week while I’ve been home in Wales.

All very pleasing. Of course, I’m sure there’s no chance at all of me winning the Astrid Lindgren Award. Finding a publisher for my stories is going to be very hard. The only payment for the sustainability book will be one free copy and the writing I’m currently doing is sure to take a whole lot longer before it’s complete.

Never mind. It’s the doing that counts.

And I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the cuckoos. On Thursday , another BTO (British Trust for Ornithology) blog gave news that Chris, the tagged cuckoo about whom I wrote last week, has made it over the Mediterranean.

He’ll probably be back in England any day now – a sign of real Spring.

Amusing

A week ago, on the train down to Wales, we’d got into Wales and were between Newport and Cardiff when the nice young boy in the seat next to me turned to look out of the window. After a moment he said to his friends who were sitting nearby:

Too much grass!

Too much country!

I hope he and his family enjoyed Cardiff, which is where they got out.

Not Pleasing At All!

The boy on the train reminded me of a conversation which has stayed a lot in my mind. In London recently I met someone from Brighton. During the chat we had together and after I’d told him I’m Welsh – I know I don’t sound very Welsh when I’m in England – he said pointedly, ‘Welsh is pointless. It’s silly to teach children Welsh, ridiculous to require that applicants for some jobs in Wales be able to speak the Welsh language, what’s needed now is for people to look outwards and participate in the wider world.’

I wish I’d said to him, ‘I think Brighton is pointless. It isn’t needed. People who live there should move somewhere more useful like London or New York or Beijing.’

I wonder what he’d have said. He obviously had no idea or knowledge about anything Welsh – the music (William Mathias or Carl Jenkins); the novels (Tê Yn Y Grug or Y Storïwr); the Eisteddfodau (Cenedlaethol or Urdd); the pop scene (Meic Stevens or Cerys Matthews); the poets (Dafydd ap Gwilym or Menna Elfyn) …I could go on.

But in a way the conversation was good. It really stirred me up.

Da Bôch! Go well!

But it wasn’t Lloyd who became the centre of attention in this week’s BTO blog. It was one of the English tagged cuckoos called Chris.

The Cuckoo’s Tale

Early on Thursday morning this week, while I was still fast asleep, Chris the cuckoo was settling down on the slope of a hill in the High Atlas plateau in northern Algeria. From data received on his tag, the place where he’d arrived appeared to be a shallow slope covered with juniper trees. Only three hours earlier, he’d still been in active migration, flying north on a flight of 2000 miles from the Digya National Park in Ghana where, this year, he’d gone to complete his preparations for crossing the great Sahara desert.

By the BTO’s calculations, Chris had made that flight of 2000 miles from Ghana in less than 60 hours and at an average straight-line ground speed of 35 mph. In so doing, he’d become the first of the tagged cuckoos this year to get to this stage of the annual journey.

Like the other tagged cuckoos, Chris had spent the winter in central Africa and then, after starting his migration back to Britain, he’d gone to Ghana to feed himself up for his Sahara crossing. This year, like last year, he’d reached the north side of the desert on almost exactly the same date – 4 April this year versus 5 April last year. Last year, too, he’d headed towards exactly the same spot and, once arriving, had not lingered there long. Only two days later, he was on the wing again, making his way across the Mediterranean to Italy.

So now we wonder how things will work out this year. When will he set out over the Mediterranean? Will he make it safely to Europe? And will he get home to England – though, of course in the case of a cuckoo one has to ask where home is? Is it in England where he will breed? Or is it in Africa where he spends the winter? Or is a cuckoo’s home in the air on the wing?

The Road Home

I’ve been thinking about why I find it so moving to hear about the cuckoos’ journeys. I don’t think it’s only because they are such a mystery and miracle of nature, though that is striking enough. Journeys, I conclude, are also important to us as human beings because they are symbolic. They evoke our imagination.

And in the case of the cuckoo, my empathetic imagination feels acutely the enormity of what has been undertaken, acutely admiring the bravery of one tiny creature that on so long a journey manages itself so miraculously and with such apparent foreknowledge that on the way it makes sure to go to a place where, by stocking up with food, it can prepare itself for overcoming the difficulties inherent in the crossing of a massive desert.

The cuckoo’s journey also makes me think about our own homing instincts as humans. These are so much a part of story, traditional and personal, all over the world. Many, many traditional stories tell us how someone goes on a journey and comes back after the quest, usually with deepened experience. Going home represents a widely-shared urge for completing the sense that there’s a cycle to our lives. So deep is this urge, and so common that we easily notice the difference when there’s a departure from it – as in the case of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the widely-loved writer who died this week aged 85. She’d grown up in Europe, lived a whole chunk of her life in India (she’d married an Indian) but then, aware how much she also loved America, she had afterwards moved to New York which is where she died.

Or not?

I suppose variations from the pattern have the effect of emphasising the pattern. For many years, my next-door neighbour in London was a Jamaican, a builder by trade, who intended that one day he’d do up his house (where he didn’t actually spend much time). When he’d finished the house, he told me, he’d sell it and use the proceeds to go back to live in Jamaica.

He took his time with his plan. One day, scaffolding went up at the back of the house. But long after it was erected, it stayed up, remaining there for a full 16 years during which time it became a regular resting place for the local animal life, cats and squirrels and birds. And in the end, what happened? After finally deciding to finish the house, our Jamaican neighbour sold it as planned. So far as I know, however, he still hasn’t gone back to Jamaica. He’d become so thoroughly rooted in London. Besides, as he once admitted after a short trip back home, Jamaica now felt too hot.

This week’s photos

Migration patterns? Even as I was preparing this Blog yesterday, I was on a train back home to where I grew up in Wales. In a week’s time I’ll be back in London. Meantime, my pictures this week are some of my local Welsh views:  

the chimney and tree I see from my bedroom window

one of the local sheep

the shed roof where birds frequently come to peck at the moss

and the view from the road out of the village

See you next week!

 All the stories we heard on Thursday were made up by the parents working in groups, all revolved around an object real or imagined and what follows is one of the four. It’s a Cinderella-type story and I hope I can do it justice. Its makers said they were willing for me to retell it but the retelling is in my own words.

The necklace of pearls

Once there was a king and a queen who had a son. When the son grew up, his royal parents decided it would be good if he got married. So they announced a great ball to be held at the palace. At the ball, they were thinking, he might meet a suitable bride.

After the ball was announced, there was a great deal of preparing. Extra people were brought to the palace to help – cooks, cleaners, hat-makers, musicians.

One person who was sent to help at the palace was a quiet, shy and good-hearted young girl. The job she was given was to assist with the cleaning. On the morning of the ball, she was sent to clean a particular room in which was a beautiful painting. The painting was of a lovely-looking woman with a little girl beside her who looked as if she was her daughter. Both the woman and the girl in the painting were wearing necklaces made of pearls.

But the painting was very dusty. The cleaning maid took out her duster and carefully started to dust it down. She began at the top – dusting, dusting, dusting – and it was when she came to the face that she experienced a very big surprise. As she dusted the face of the woman, the woman in the painting began to smile. Then as the cleaning maid continued, the woman’s necklace began to glow and slowly, gradually, it came out of the painting and clasped itself round the cleaning girl’s neck.

Just then, a strange creaking noise came from the wardrobe that was the only other thing in the room and when the maid turned round, she saw that the wardrobe’s doors had opened and inside was a most beautiful ball-gown. Then she heard a woman’s voice speaking. It was the woman in the painting. ‘You must put on this dress,’ the woman said, ‘and wear it with the necklace to the ball tonight.’

So that’s what happened. The cleaning maid put on the beautiful dress and went to the ball in the dress and the necklace and as she stepped into the room, everyone fell silent, she looked so lovely. The silence was followed by an audible gasp that seemed to come from everyone there.

Then the musicians began to play and soon, when the first dance was called, the prince who was the king and queen’s son stepped up to the girl in the necklace and asked if he might have the pleasure of dancing with her. The next dance, the same thing happened and every dance after that they danced together so that by the end of the evening, all who were present felt quite sure they knew who the prince was going to marry. They were quite right. The prince and the cleaning maid married and lived happily together ever after.

Story does work:

One element of my Storyworks philosophy – it’s outlined on my website – is that a natural, friendly approach to storytelling is an essential part of working with many different types of groups. The high art of stage tellings is not what is needed in work with beginners such as those who came together for the parents’ course in Kensington Palace. It would not have helped them relax and feel confident. Nor would it have helped them  learn how to become storytellers in their own lives and with their own children or to appreciate what storytelling can give them as adults on a day-to-day basis.

A second part of my Storyworks thinking is that true stories of people’s lives – be they historical stories from the royal palaces of the past or anecdotes from our own personal lives – can resonate fruitfully with other kinds of stories, including traditional tales, and also the new stories that can be created. All these different kinds of narrative can work together to create a compelling new awareness of the part story can play in our lives.

Responses

At the end of Thursday’s Kensington Palace session (Session 6 after Easter is when we’ll talk about the future),  participants were asked if they would each  like to say something they felt they had gained from the course. The confidence to carry a story forward … looking deeper … greater attention to detail …the endless possibilities … one door opening after another …

What wonderful things were said and what wonderful participants those who said them have been. For it is they, in their diversity and commitment and interest and openness, who have made the course so satisfying. It’s a remarkable course to have been included in the Outreach work of the Palace. Thanks to everyone concerned.

Happy Easter!

One detail that particularly struck me was his description of the feel on his hand of the delicate claws of a kangaroo mother.

The power of touch

Then, Wednesday evening, I had my own extraordinary experience of touch. In a workshop at the Interfaith Centre in Queens Park, the participants were asked to spend ten minutes talking in pairs (five minutes each) about how we are involved in narrative work. A crucial factor about the results for us all was that, as requested, we’d each spoken to each other with eyes closed, hands touching. It made us all highly aware of the essence of the other.

Connection! That Wednesday evening experience was part of the second Forum event arranged by St Ethelburga’s Centre for Peace and Reconciliation. Since conflict resolution is the very specialised field of work of a number of those who were present, I sometimes felt conscious of the comparative ordinariness of my 30-years of work as a professional storyteller working in schools and with groups of adults. Yet the very next day, back at Kensington Palace for Session 4 of my parents course in how to tell stories, I felt once again conscious of the extraordinariness of it – how, because of the people, it is full of meaning and value. And also, always, a sense of potential.

Points of connection

Here are some of the things I experienced on Thursday.

1. During a synchronised retelling of one of the stories I’ve taught to the group (Mrs Wiggle and Mrs Waggle), I became extremely aware of the big, beautiful eyes of a tiny toddler who had been brought along by his mother. My voice, my face, the story, the atmosphere? Whatever it was that engaged him so much, the little toddler was gripped. He sat looking up at me with such attention, it felt entirely obvious that he knew what was going on, and that in some way it was entirely for him. Connection!

2. With another bigger boy – a four-year old also there with his mother – I saw at once from the way he joined in, though often looking at her not at me, that the story was already familiar to him. So I knew his mother must have told it to him. I was delighted. It’s one of the aims of the course – to get parents telling stories to their own and other children. Connection!

3. During a break in the session, one of the Arabic-speaking mothers showed me a lovely jewellery box she’d brought in from home. She also showed me part of the story her 8-year old daughter had created and written about it. I got the sense that this story was something very new for the girl: her teacher in school had evidently been very impressed by what she’d done. For my part, I was impressed by the mother. Last week, we’d used the magic of objects as an inspiration for making new stories. She’d clearly passed on the magic and in so doing had engendered another example of the potency for change that can arise through story. Connection!

4. Contrast! Because I’d wanted my group to see some of the extraordinary objects in Kensington Palace in the context of their surroundings, this week’s session included what proved to be a wonderfully engaging and well-researched tour with Chiara of three of the rooms in the palace. Chiara has been working in the palace over the last little while and during her talk I was struck by the extent that differences engage us so much as human beings. In this case, differences included the contrast between different periods of history (18th century to now), different positions in the world (monarch to ordinary citizen), and hugely different status (the egregiously wealthy to ordinary man and woman in the street). For my group, too, there was the huge extra dimension of difference that can occur when people come from such disparate cultures. Yet Chiara’s presentation – good storytelling! – got everyone engaged and asking questions. Connection!

5. Added extra! During her tour, Chiara had shown us the doors where – back in the 18th century – you would have been refused entrance to the inner sanctum of the Cupola room if you’d been a guest who’d not been well enough dressed. As she spoke, I was instantly reminded of one of those tales of Nasruddin, that blessed wise fool of Middle Eastern story. You know the story?

Nasruddin was invited to a grand feast at the palace of the prince who lived nearby. On the night, he brushed his hair, combed his beard and dusted down his clothes. The guards at the palace refused him entrance – he was not well enough dressed.

Nasruddin went home, changed his jacket and returned to the palace. The guards again denied him entrance. He still did not look sufficiently smart.

At home once more, Nasruddin changed into his best suit of clothes. This time he was admitted.

At the party when the first course was served, he picked up the food from his plate and smeared it onto his clothes. The same thing happened when the next courses arrived until eventually he was summoned in front of the prince. What was he doing? How could he behave so badly, dishonouring his prince in this way?

‘Well,’ said Nasruddin, ‘it wasn’t me that was wanted at this party, it was my clothes. So I am not feeding myself. I am feeding my clothes.’

Back in our room, when someone mentioned that bit about not being well enough dressed, I told the group that Nasruddin story. How delighted and impressed I was when, scarcely half an hour later, it made a marvellous reappearance during a brief retelling by one of the groups of the story they’d created last week and are now in the process of refining. It gave me a huge injection of pleasure – a confirmation of the way stories can travel and pick up new wisdoms on their way.

For in their story as retold this week, the sickly prince had transformed from an adult into a young boy (a wise adaptation, since the story is meant for an audience of children). The wise old man who brings a magic mirror to the aid of the prince is at first refused entrance to the palace: his clothes are too poor for him to be allowed to go in and be seen by the monarch. Only when the king in his desperation for the life of his son hears about what the old man has brought with him is he allowed in with his mirror – which is, of course, what brings cure to the prince and joy to the king.

Clothes, money: they are not the end-all or the be-all.

Long live story and how it helps us to understand difference and let us know what is truly important.

Connect!

The same kinds of thing were said on Thursday at Session 3 of the Parents’ Storytelling Course at Kensington Palace. The parents on the course are a terrific group of people, all of them mums except for one dad. One said this week, ‘This storytelling course is really changing my life.’ It was the greater depth of their response to the world around them that several had noticed – like they were going more deeply into the things around them. One had done lots of Internet research on historical personages linked with the palace. Another is now bringing some of our storytelling techniques into the nightly storytelling she does with her children.

‘It makes them really involved,’ she said. ‘My son is aged nine. Now he is paying more attention.’

Making things happen

Making things happen was the general theme of this particular session, the third of six.

I began by telling a wonderful Chinese story which I’d told the day before in another of the classes at St Stephens Primary School. In it, a painter steps out of a much-admired mural he’s painted in order to help am orphaned child who is trying to learn to paint.

One of the particular aims of the Kensington Palace course is to base some fresh new stories on characters in William Kent’s mural on the King’s Grand Staircase. What would these people be like and what would happen to them if they stepped out of the painting and came back to life?

The Chinese story felt very appropriate.

After it, we moved on with my 5-minute seminar on basic patterns in story.

Pattern in stories

Question: If a story starts with a problem – and usually stories do – then what is likely to happen by the end of the story?

Answer: Some kind of resolution.

It’s such a simple realisation. Stories sort out problems, they give you a new perspective on life and in stories for children they usually end up happily. En route, of course, things can get a lot more complex. For one thing, there can be obstacles to the desired solution and we talked about the different types of obstacle that might occur, including weather and bad terrain. In the subsequent story-making, one small group ended up introducing brigands into their story, another two courtiers with poisonous thoughts.

Or there can be helpers in a story. A fairy godmother, a wise old man or kindly assistants, any of these could help bring a story to its resolution, often in a most unexpected way.

Magic of objects

Next I introduced some of my thinking about the magic of objects. Out of my basket came one or two items I’d pre-selected at home from my large store of such things. As they were handed around – a shiny slipper, a big old key – people came up with suggestions about what magic properties each might possess. For instance, the slipper might be magically able to fit any size of foot. It might be a slipper that could always find its missing partner. Or it might take its wearer anywhere in the world just like a magic carpet.

The day’s story-making

After we’d talked in this general way, we got on with the day’s story-making.

Each of the four small groups that formed for the work was invited to go and pick an object to see what help it might give to their story. The slipper, the big old key from my Aunty Mali’s house in Wales, a shiny necklace, a little ornate Indian mirror?

Four wonderful stories emerged (and were told to the whole  group by their makers) by the end of the session. What a pleasure! I felt like I was in them all.

A necklace that finally proves the identity of a lonely, orphaned child… A mirror that shows the truth about the nature of whoever looks into it…

Next week or the week after as the stories get finished (and, of course, there’s polishing still to do), I might retell one or two of them here – but only, of course, if their makers are willing.