I find it easier to acknowledge this side of my work than to say I am a writer, even though I do both in equal measures. But âwriterâ sounds much more serious, as though I know what I am doing. Whereas storyteller sounds like I make it up as I go along.
Which I do.
Mostly.
When I think about what makes a storyteller, the first image that jumps into my mind is someone who knows many tales. Maybe they grew up surrounded by stories and can weave these elements together, creating new and curious combinations. Storytellers feel like colourful characters, embellishers who convey their meaning through words, images and sounds. I find myself picturing an old woman in a long cloak. Itâs night-time. She is sitting around a campfire, holding everyoneâs attention using only the power of her voice.
Being a storyteller suddenly feels like a tall order.
Iâm about to scroll up to the top of the page and cross out the sentence where I tell you that I am one, when I stop myself. This is my story. I want to tell you about myself to set the scene for the rest of the book. I will look at how some of the freedom I had as a child growing up in the 1970s varies so greatly from the children I work with today and how it was this independence and access to hours and hours of free, interrupted play that allowed me to develop as a storyteller.
I leave the above sentence unchanged.
The experiences we have and the stories we tell are the things that define us.
A Childhood Rich in Stories
My childhood was rich in stories. I pause again as I write this, wondering if the sentence is true. If there were a lot of stories in my childhood, doesnât that mean there were a lot of books? I think about this and draw a blank. I close my eyes and try to picture a bookcase in my childhood home. From the kitchen to the front room and up the stairs, I travel in my mind, seeing again the peeling purple paint of the bedroom I shared with my sister.
On the wall was a poster of my favourite pop group, the Bay City Rollers. It was covering a large hole. The hole had been created by a magical dragonâs egg that had been turned into stone by a curse from an evil witch. I remember my sister making up the story. When she had finished, she threw a very real and very large egg-shaped stone at me so I could see for myself. Unfortunately, I was never any good at Catch. The stone smashed into the wall. If it hadnât have been for that Bay City Rollers poster, I would have been in so much trouble.
My shared bedroom was full of stories, but it did not have a bookcase.
I think deeper, finding it hard to believe there was not one shelf of books, one cabinet of stories, one bookcase of treasures in the place that was my childhood home. I have spent the last few years ranting about how important stories are in childrenâs lives and how vital it is that they are read to. Yet, when I sit down to think about it, to begin writing a book about the growth of a storyteller, to start sharing the stories Iâve been told by children over the last few years, I realise that I have no memory of a bookcase in my childhood home.
So I did what any neurotic storyteller would do.
I phoned my mum.
Maybe I couldnât remember. Perhaps there was a bookcase in the hallway or a shelf in the front room. All I needed was my memory prompted, and I would see again those volumes of stories that must have been part of my childhood. For I am a storyteller, and my childhood was surrounded by stories.
âWhen I was a kid, did we have a bookcase?â I asked, almost as soon as the phone was picked up.
âYou what?â said Mum. She had no idea what I was talking about.
âA bookcase or a shelf? Did we have any books?â
My mum paused like it was some kind of trick question and then replied, âTrisha, I was a single parent. We couldnât afford books.â
âSo, how did you read us our bedtime story?â
I blurted out the question before I had time to compose it more politely. The silence at the end of the phone gave me my answer. There wasnât a bedtime story, nor was there a bookcase. How had I never realised?
A few days later, I was with a group of four- and five-year-olds, and I asked them about the books they owned. These children did not come from an affluent area, and I was keen to see how their situation mirrored my own.
As they answered my questions, I was relieved to hear that all of them owned at least one or two picture books. I know that is not a lot, but I was expecting some of them to have nothing. Research published in 2019 by the National Literacy Trust showed that more than 380,000 UK children aged 9-18 did not own a single book. Perhaps young children are more likely to have books bought for them. Maybe the number of books owned dwindles as children get older. Nowadays, more childrenâs stories are published than when I was a child in the1970s and getting hold of publications is much easier, but even within this group of children, I could see that poverty was still a barrier. The differences in the quantity and quality of the books these children owned were already apparent.
Next, I asked the children about bedtime stories, hoping that as there were a few more books in their homes than when I was a child, maybe todayâs four- and five-year-olds were read to more frequently. Again, the responses started well, with several of the children talking about stories as a regular part of their bedtime routine.
Then it began to change, and the âSometimesâ appeared.
And then the âNevers.â
Of the class of reception-aged children I spoke to, only twenty-five per cent of them regularly had a bedtime story. Thatâs one child in every four. Fifty per cent were read to sometimes, and the remaining twenty-five per cent were never read to at all. One of the replies made me saddest of all. When I asked four-year-old Malcolm whether he ever had a bedtime story, he said, âWhen I was a little baby, I did. Now I go straight to sleep.â The notion that at four years old, you have grown too big to be read a story is heart-breaking. But Malcolm is not alone. In the USA, in 2018, childrenâs book publisher Scholastic surveyed parents of children aged from birth to five years old about the number of times they read to their child. The results showed that only fifty-five per cent of under fives were read to at least five days a week, and only thirty-seven per cent were read to daily. Scholasticâs research found that as children grow older, they are more likely to become a frequent reader if they are read to aloud between five and seven days a week before starting nursery. According to their survey, forty-five per cent of children do not have this opportunity.
These findings echo the results gathered in 2017 by Gillian Washington, a UK primary school teacher based in West Yorkshire. She decided to find out how many children in her school regularly heard a bedtime story. The answer was less than a third. This drove her to start a local campaign, which she called Bring Back the Bedtime Story. South Parade Primary School in Ossett, Wakefield launched the programme with a parents evening explaining the immense value of stories, not only educationally, but also for creating precious family moments. While their parents were at the launch, the children lay on blankets in their classroom and had a story and a hot chocolate in their pyjamas. They even created a chant, âWhat do we want, bedtime stories. When do we want them NOW.â The work paid off, and the feedback was tremendous.
But what about the children who donât have access to this campaign?
In some ways, the lack of being read to and the limited access to books in the homes of many of the children I work with is similar to my own experiences of childhood. But does the fact that children are not being read to in the twenty-first century have a more significant impact on these children than it did on me when I was a child?
I began to think about the other areas of my childhood that influenced my growth as a storyteller.
Stories in the Streets
The great outdoors was where most of my adventures happened. That was the stage where our stories were acted out. Weâd play for hours in the woods near my house, or running up and down the street, pretending to be characters from the television, or ones we had made up. I remember spending whole days with my sister and the other children in our street just playing outside. We created a gang called The Dirt Collectors, who solved mysteries and were always looking for clues. Our name came from a soap powder advert that cheerfully asked, âIs your son a dirt collector?â The fact that we were a group of female Dirt Collectors felt strangely empowering.
I remember one time when my sister and I outlined a giant footprint in a pile of sand left by some builders. Then she tied me to a lamppost with a skipping rope. She left me for hours, but I didnât mind. I spent all that time pretending to be Ann Darrow and acting out the terror of being sacrificed to King Kong. I shared my woes with anyone who happened to be passing but refused to let them untie me. It was only when I didnât turn up for dinner that my sister remembered me. When she came to untie me there was panic in her eyes, but Iâd had a great afternoon, performing my one-woman show to anyone who would listen.
Sadly, everything I have just shared about the stories of the street are experiences that many children in the UK today will never have. The culture of playing outside, of spending whole days wandering pavements, or parks, unaccompanied by adults, sometimes bored, sometimes so lost in a story that you forget about time, relies on a belief that the streets are safe.
Research by the UK National Childrenâs Bureau in 2012 showed that nearly fifty per cent of parents have a fear of strangers that preven...
