Daffodils grow from bulbs. They are flowers. They can’t be brave except in our anthropomorphising minds. But there be it. To me they’re brave and especially now when it’s been so cold and windy and wintry. In my garden there’s a great big clump of them right next to where Eunice the wind got the better of a small tree by blowing it down, refusing to allow it to continue to live.  But the daffodils survive. I love them.

Of course, over there in Wales (I’m in London), this is not yet the right time to celebrate the daffodil. That should happen – and will – on St David’s Day, March 1^st.  If old custom is anything to go by, girls will arrive in their schools on that or a nearby day with daffodils pinned onto their shirts or jackets. Boys will boast leeks which, if habit is the same as when I was in school, they will slowly munch during the course of the day, eventually reducing them to sadly truncated versions of how they started out.

Custom was (and I presume still is) in my Secondary School in St David’s that, on St David’s Day or  another close-by date if March 1^st wasn’t possible, an Eisteddfod was held. (And for those who don’t know what an Eisteddfod is, it’s a whole series of competitions in such activities as singing alone or in groups and reciting (also alone or in groups). I particularly used to enjoy Cyd Adrodd which is when a group of you recite a poem, leaning in to the feeling of it with the volume and sound of how you’re saying the words.

I think it was the habit of partaking in Eisteddfods (or Eisteddfodau to use the correct Welsh plural) that made me into a storyteller. For the habit involved doing whatever it was – namely singing or reciting alone or in groups – in front of an audience, of course including the adjudicators and also friends or family if the Eisteddfod was maybe happening in the church or chapel your family attended. But inevitably it was an audience and however small or big an audience consists of people who see and hear (and probably judge) what you’re doing. In this way, for me, the experience probably proved formative for my storytelling work. It couldn’t remove shyness or apprehension.  An audience will always judge! Yet doing something in front of an audience must have been a key to the storytelling career that lay ahead of me.

One of the aims of the storyteller is to draw the audience in to what’s being presented to them. Perhaps that’s an aim in all performance, at least where speaking or singing is concerned. For if it’s acrobatics you’re doing, you probably don’t want the audience to jump up and join in, rather you might like them simply to admire. But certainly with storytelling, at least in my experience, you want to draw your audience in to your story both as individuals and as a group. And there’s nothing like it – the feeling of people coming together as they experience the events and emotions of a story.

Thinking about it now therefore, I realise that all those years of competing in Eisteddfodau must have acted in some sense as a preparation for my becoming a storyteller. Competing in an Eisteddfod generally happens on some kind of stage. Telling stories sometimes does and often doesn’t. Yet it always has to aim at drawing people in.

So back to the daffodil. A daffodil can have no conscious aim. But as it blooms in garden or hedge, woodland or park, it usually does appeal to those that come across it. Daffodils are such lovely beings. In their modesty and often their  braveness, blooming even in the midst of whipping winds, they become a symbol of doing what you do and what you can whatever the circumstances. And now I’m hoping that, having emerged, the daffodils in my garden can stay around a while, symbols both of bravery and of beauty.

Tags: Eunice, St David's Day; daffodils; leeks

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