Know any stories about the blackbird? After racking my brain, I’ve concluded I don’t. But I’d like to. For this year, the blackbirds round us seem more beautiful than ever. With one pair out the front, one at the back, it feels like we’re surrounded by golden song – and it goes on from dawn to dusk. With some friends the other day, we all agreed. Yes, they said – and they weren’t all from round here – the blackbirds are especially brilliant this year. As good as the nightingale, two of us ventured. Maybe even better.

And that put me in mind of a story. You probably need no reminding. It’s the one about how the nightingale got its song. But at first it masquerades as the story of how the birds got their colours.

How the birds got their colours

One day long ago when the world was new, God sent a message to the birds to let them know that he’d soon be coming to give them colours. He even appointed a day and told them not to be late. The birds became very excited. On the day, they were ready and waiting, fascinated to know what these colours would be.

When God arrived with his suitcase, he got them all to line up. Then he opened his case, arranged his paints, picked up his brushes and began. You should have seen what he did – how beautiful he made them look and how different from each other in different combinations of reds and greens and yellows and blues.

After he’d finished, God was putting his things away when one little brown bird came hurrying up, all dishevelled and sad because he was late. God said he was terribly sorry: all his paints were used up by now, he had nothing left. When the little bird heard this, he was so distressed that God said he’d take another look just in case he could find a little something for him. ‘Ah yes,’ God said as he rummaged around. ‘Here is something, it’ll be just right.’

What God had found was a tiny spot of gold at the bottom of one of his pots. ‘Now open your beak,’ God told the little brown bird as he picked up the gold with one of his finest brushes. When the little bird’s mouth was open wide, God placed that tiny spot of gold right at the back of its throat. And ever since, that otherwise undistinguished little bird – it was the nightingale – has had gold in its song. (more…)

This Thursday night, I attended an event in a fine old house in Hackney. The house was Sutton House, a Tudor manor house that now belongs to the National Trust. The event consisted of two authors, Rob Cowen and Dominick Tyler, talking about their relationship with nature and landscape. Some of what Dominick said was personally recognisable to me: I’ve known him since his childhood in Cornwall. What both authors said about the impact of nature made me recall an important theme in story work I’ve done.

Rob Cowen’s book, Common Ground, is about the Yorkshire edgeland near where he grew up. One of those strangely absorbing places on the fringes of towns and cities where you can still find yourself immersed in the world of nature, he rediscovered his childhood edgeland as an adult. In Dominick’s book, Uncommon Ground, you see remarkable photos of landscape features and read about the terms for those features that have fallen almost completely out of knowledge. Finding the terms and the places which illustrate them was Dominick’s way of reconnecting with nature for behind his book, as with Rob Cowen’s, was his strong realisation of how much he’d lost in becoming urbanised as an adult.

And so to stories:

In story work I’ve done in schools, it’s always proved productive with pupils in the 10 – 13 age-range to ask them about places they value. I start with an invitation: ‘Think about somewhere you’ve enjoyed going to play, somewhere you like to lurk about.’ (more…)

 Hey, what’s this?

      A swing – but not where the old one used to be.

What’s it say on that bit of paper that’s hanging on the end?

     ‘Swing on this at your leisure.’

Wonder who put it there?

     Don’t know.

(more…)

In Pembrokeshire (again), I’m starting to prepare some workshops for Pembrokeshire National Parks. They’ll be training sessions for wardens, rangers and volunteers. But more of that anon. This week’s unmissable experience was another kind of storytelling – an art installation in Narberth.

Place of magic

Narberth – or Arberth in Welsh – is a crucial place in the Mabinogion, the epic cycle of medieval Welsh stories.  It’s where the stories and their magic begin. Today, Narberth is a dynamic little town where many varied artistic events take place – including oral storytelling. But the installation I went to see is an unique work of storytelling of another kind –  in painting, carving, words, animation and film.

Magic-makers

Sarah and Tim Williams are the makers. Sarah is becoming well-known throughout Wales as an artist. I’ve known her since she was born and value her work very highly. Tim is an enormously skilled craftsman in wood and also a musician. Tim and Sarah got married a few years ago and Tim recently persuaded Sarah to sing with him on one of his albums, thus revealing that she also has a fine voice.

Together, Sarah and Tim have created an extraordinary, gallery-filling piece about their Pembrokeshire world. Sarah’s place of upbringing is in the north of the county, Tim’s in the south. Their new work brings both parts together in a circular installation which you enter to view. (Tim used a portable swimming pool as its basis).

The installation (more…)

In the Africa section of my boxes of stories, I have a file of stories from Benjamin Kipkorir, my Kenyan friend. They’re animal stories in the main, many about clever Rabbit, and they’re the stories Ben and his friends used to tell as children. In the evenings,  gathered round the fire with their elders, they’d rival each other to tell them and – as Ben put it – to tell them well. Ben gave them to me years ago after I’d got involved with storytelling. 

On Thursday morning this week, Paul and I got a message from one of Ben’s twin daughters telling us he’d died the day before, peacefully and surrounded by his family at his home in Nairobi. In the succeeding hours, in the midst of my sadness, I felt another story – the extraordinary story of Ben’s own life and how I’d come to know him – all coming together inside me like a massive part of me that has been there, persisting and enriching, for a very long time.

Short story of a very long friendship

Ben was a member of the Marakwet  people. He grew up a poor boy, walking a long distance to school. When he got into High School, he began to do extremely well. After Makerere University and later Cambridge, where he came to do his PhD, he became a University history teacher. Later, he was appointed Chairman of Kenya Commercial Bank and made a great difference to Kenya’s economy by extending the Bank’s presence to cover the whole country. Then he was made Kenya’s Ambassador to the United States.

I first met Ben when I was 18 and in Kenya doing Voluntary Service Overseas. I met him because one of the unmarried mothers at the convent where I worked arranged for me to meet her friend Lea, the wonderful woman Ben later married who sadly died some years ago. The friendship strengthened when Ben came to Cambridge (I was by then at Girton College) and when Lea came to join him for their wedding. It has survived and grown ever since. It’s very hard to know it has gone – except it hasn’t. Ben’s dear family is still there and my relationship with him and Lea will always live on inside me surrounded by all the awareness of Africa the friendship gave me. 

‘When an old person dies,’ says the African proverb, ‘ a whole library goes up in flames.’ Ben was only in his 70s. But what a huge library his story was. And here’s one of his childhood’s animal tales. (more…)

In folklore, bears are the harbingers of Spring and last weekend, visiting friends in Berlin, I saw a good many of them. Like the painted elephants that appeared all over London in the summer of 2010, these were extremely colourful creatures. Unlike the London elephants, which disappeared at the end of the summer when they were auctioned off for charity, the Berlin bears are there to stay. The bear. after all, is one of the symbols of the city and they are among its new emanations.

Bear stories

Covered in slogans or embellished with pictures, upside down or arms raised in a wave, the Berlin bears kept reminding me of bear stories. One I recalled while walking around is a foundation myth of the Modoc Indians of California. A very touching story, it tells how the little daughter of the Great Spirit is peeping out of the mountain in which they live when a great wind catches at her hair and blows her out of the mountain. After sliding down the snowy side of the mountain, the little girl ends up being found and raised by a mother bear. When she is grown, she marries one of the mother bear’s sons. Their children become the Modoc people.

But alas, when stories are prompted, it’s not always a matter of remembering them fully.  One of the curses of the storyteller is sometimes being plagued by half-remembered things, flotsam from stories that, once encountered, are no longer there in your mind. Back in London, I’ve had to try and catch up. One question that was bugging me had been prompted by my favourite among the Berlin bears, the blue one painted with signs of the cosmos. Wasn’t there a constellation or two that represents bears? And the answer, of course, is yes. It’s a story that occurs in Greek mythology. (more…)

A young friend of mine was still a teenager when he said to me once, ‘When you tell me a story, the room goes all still.’ How time passes! He’s nearly 40 now.

But I know what he means. When Helen East was at Waterstone’s in Piccadilly telling her London Tales  last week (her book of these is published by The History Press), there was a palpable sense during the storytelling of moving into a different place and time.

A welcome gift?

So what’s to be done when time feels harassed, weighed down by anxieties and things that have to be done? When that’s so – as this week for me – I try and remember Mink, that hero figure in North American Indian legend who brought the sun to the people. Later, according to another story of him – and I see that I told it in this blog four years ago on November 19th, 2011 – Mink also brought time to the land. But after he stole that clock from the white settlers’ house, there was a big downside to the new possession.  From then on, time became something that had to be managed. The story warns that we have to be mindful. Without care, time can dominate.

A welcome gift?

A wonderful counterbalance comes in those old Welsh folktales where someone sits under a tree to listen to the sound of  birds singing and, wholly enchanted, becomes oblivious of time going by.

Robyn Meredydd is one such fellow in Carmarthenshire lore. It’s a lovely summer’s day, the sycamore tree is in full leaf and the bird is singing so sweetly. But when Robyn eventually  comes to himself, the tree is withered and dead, his farmhouse when he reaches it is covered in ivy and the old man who comes to the door turns out to be his own nephew who confesses that when he was a child, he’d once heard about an uncle called Robyn who had disappeared.

Time is a puzzle. Yet it seems to me that any of it that’s spent listening to the singing of birds is refreshingly worth it –  one of life’s inestimable pleasures. It restores a sense of calm and the confidence to think that, after all, life’s problems can be managed. Certainly it’s a whole lot better than, last night, the sound of the foxes screeching the night away out in the back.

 P.S. I hope you’ll agree that, in their way, both my photos this week are symbols of time. (more…)

In the library this week, I picked a slim little volume called Search Party off the New Books shelves. ‘Wow,’ I thought when I opened it up and saw poems about poverty and homelessness, disadvantaged kids, aspiration and anger and love.

George the Poet

George the Poet is a young black British man. His parents came from Uganda. He succeeded in getting into Cambridge where he studied politics for six years. But he wasn’t happy with where that was leading. Now he is a rap poet. He has a strong and powerful voice and he’s using it to express what he feels needs expressing.

George the Poet’s poetry challenges all complacencies, for example about the way disadvantaged children fall behind in school. I hope he gets widely heard. He not only has the intelligence and the language to speak out in protest. He also has some spot-on ideas about how to change things.

School Blues

School Blues begins by clearly stating – with accompanying statistics – how children from disadvantaged backgrounds enter secondary school with lower literacy skills than their peers. The second verse begins like this:

It’s time to stage an intervention –
One that’s designed for engaging their attention. (more…)

Question: What’s a story? The answer, I’m sure, will be familiar to you. Answer: It’s a letter from the past that we send on to the future.

This saying popped back into my head this week from the higgledy-piggledy storage box I’m obliged to call my mind. A family member was wanting to talk through our family tree. So I’d plunged into some actual storage boxes up in the loft where the contents are an absorbing horde of photos, postcards, notes and letters. (more…)

This Wednesday I made my trip to the Story Museum in Oxford. And if you ask what a Story Museum is for, an unbeatable answer was provided by the late-lamented Terry Pratchett. ‘Asking why the world needs a story museum is like asking a fish what water is for.’

My visit was to attend the launch of a book – the new second edition of  The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. This is a wonderful tome. First published in 1984 it has now been refreshed and brought up to date by Daniel Hahn. Danny as he’s normally known had got me to redo the entry on Storytelling for this new edition. Hence my invitation to the launch. I enjoyed it. There were lovely people to meet – the good people who run the Story Museum where the party was held, people who do interesting jobs at Oxford University Press who publish the Companion, and, marvellously, Mari Prichard who co-produced the original edition with her late husband, Humphrey Carpenter. Mari is Welsh and, in true Welsh style, we found we knew lots of places and people in common.

Draw Me A Story (more…)