Reading Aloud
By PENELOPE HUNT IR HAROLD NICOLSON has condemned the prac-
tice of reading aloud to one's children, on the grounds that it makes them mentally lazy. Mine are so mentally lazy anyway that nothing I can do could make them much worse. This is not a literary generation. The young know in their bones that it will not be necessary to learn to read; all this ABC stuff is just a Mum's fuss. Once they can master Stop Go Exit Ladies Danger Way In Gentlemen, and sign their names on the back of a cheque, they can live a full life with television and leave literature to those who care for that sort of thing. I sympathise with them. I was mentally lazy myself. I far preferred to play noisy games, to build bricks, to sing songs, to play cards, or simply to sit on the garden wall and kick my heels. My parents brushed aside these inclinations and pressed on remorselessly until they had sold me the habit of reading. They broke through the sound barrier and now I can read anything except a military masterpiece serialised in the Sunday Tinier.
Children must be caught off their guard, and when comparatively weak and helpless. Capitalise on measles and post-influenzal lassitude. Read to them in bed at night when they are prepared to listen to anything provided you will stay another five minutes. Do not dream of consulting their tastes, and have no truck with space literature. Plunge right in with, say, Stumps, Froggy's Little Brother, or the Fairchild Family. They will be dumbfounded into attention.
I am presuming that you have disregarded the advice of the County Agricultural Committees and have read them right through the works of Beatrix Potter; also the Little Black Samba series and the Babar books. They are thus familiar with Crime and Punishment and the appalling hazards of life and, as you will have noticed, they like them. Modern writers of children's books, with the exception of the deservedly popular Miss Violet Needham, never allow the children in their books to die; but infant mortality in works of the Victorian children's writers is uniformly high, and no one was ever a jot the worse for the tears they wept over The Story of a Short Life. In another of Mrs. Ewing's enchanting books, Jan of the Windmill, 80 per cent. of the infant per- sonnel fall to the Great Reaper, but this in no way detracts from the charm and innocence of the book. The hero of Mrs. Moleworth's A Christmas Child dies in the last chapter; this does not spoil the book for me now, nor did it when I first read it at the age of eight. And it was right that Mrs. Ewing's Jackanapes should die : in real war it is always the characters like the brilliant and dashing Jackanapes who do die, and the bumbling Tonys who live on.
In the matter of what will or will not frighten, children are at their most incalculable. My father started reading me Stevenson when I was seven; I was enthralled by him. Unappalled through The Black Arrow, Kidnapped, Catriona, and The Master of Ballantrae, I was so paralysed with terror by Ben Gunn in Treasure Island that I could hardly walk upstairs to bed.
At the same time my mother led off in the winter evenings with Alfgar the Dane, and The Rival Heirs, written by the Reverend Somebody in about 1860, Rather on the lines of Miss Charlotte M. Yonge's The Little Duke, they are tougher, less maiden-ladyish, stronger meat altogether. They have small print and no illustrations; with- out parental aid I should never have got around to them. From then on I read them once a year for the next five years. Al/gar the Dane gets off to a flying start with the massacre on the eve of St. Brice; there is a splendid St. Sebastian martyrdom before you are halfway through, and the pace never seems to flag. No parents wishing their chil- dren to grow up pro-Norman should allow them to read The Rival Heirs; the Reverend Somebody, although a gripping raconteur, is a shamelessly pro-Saxon partisan, and I have never since been able to take a wholly balanced view of anyone called Etienne. I am much afraid that these two sizzling works are out of print.
The Just So Stories and the Jungle Books need reading aloud, not because they are difficult but because they were written for this purpose. So also does Alice. Children will probably not think Alice funny unless their parents very obviously do. My mother read me the court scene in Alice with tears of laughter pouring down her face; I laughed in sympathy then, but not again. Alice is a taste far too surrealist, educated, and difficult for most children. For others the two Alice books have an inexhaustible magic.
The works of Arthur Ransome do not read well aloud. It is a weariness of the flesh to build all those camp ovens, brick by brick, by word of mouth, however fascinating and stimulating the mental building may be. Books like Robin Hood, The Story of a Red Deer, The Heroes, The Chil- dren of the New Forest, The Settlers in Canada and the Morte D'Arthur generally have large print and copious illustrations and will sell them- selves to your offspring without your aid. There is also a splendid but more neglected work in this category, The Tiger, by H. Mockler Ferryman. Beautifully illustrated and told in the first person, it has the 1-was-there quality to the highest degree. During the early months of 1918 I WAS The Tiger. Rousing at evening from my lair and occasionally pausing to sleek my savage flanks, I prowled the Indian jungles in quest of sambhur, or gazed out proudly over the heads of my staring captors.
My mother also read me Little Women and Good Wives. One night, when my sister was ill, I persuaded my father to go on with the chapter. My father was a man with a strong stomach. He was never ill at sea, and rarely on land. He read Little Women with mounting nausea, and finally was obliged to desist. I thus learned the mental differences between the sexes. One sort can read Louisa M. Alcott without throwing up, and in- deed with pleasure; the other sort can not.
Kingston's In the Eastern Seas and Ballantyne's Coral Island and The Gorilla Hunters were read aloud to my brother, and I listened too. These can be read to oneself if there are at least six pictures to illustrate their more hair-raising episodes. So
also Peter Simple and Masterman Ready. The moral tone throughout is cosily high. 'Merciful Heavens!' exclaims Mrs. Segrave, fairly regu- larly. 'What a deliverance !' But at the last moment the great Ready himself leaves the shelter of the stockade (because little Tommy Segrave has taken the bung out of the water-cask) and falls a victim. Never mind. The savages are on the run. People may die but right will triumph. This is a matter about which children of all ages like to feel assured.
When I was ten I graduated to Dickens (my mother) and Scott (my father). I preferred Scott. My father was a non-skipper; if Sir Walter gave us three pages describing the caparison of the Abbot's mule, he read it and I listened to it. We were made of stern Victorian and Edwardian stuff, and, furthermore, television was not yet. The telephone rarely rang; there was no cocktail hour. Dinner was at eight-fifteen and it was cooked by servants. We could afford to let Sir Walter, raised in similar circumstances, take his time. Wisely, my parents left Shakespeare alone. No one should read Shakespeare until they are twenty-one, and they should first have seen him acted on the stage.
Every night from the age of eight, when I was in bed my mother read me a chapter of the Bible. She read right through the Authorised Version and out the other end. Then she began again at Genesis. We left out nothing, except perhaps some of the more technical chapters of Leviticus. No one begat anyone without my being put in the picture. She treated me as old enough and sensible enough to be told it all. I was aware of not being fobbed off. I am everlastingly grateful to her. That marvellous singing prose, those eternal values rang in my ears night after night. I fell asleep with it. It went right in.
I remember particularly one evening in the autumn of 1916. We were on board a P. and 0. liner in the Mediterranean. My mother-travelled twice a year between her husband who worked in Egypt and her son who was at school in England, taking her younger children with her. She was not of a nature to be deflected from this programme by a little matter like unrestricted submarine warfare. I had seen a picture in the Illustrated London News of the sinking of the Lusitania, and I used to pray very heartily that we should come safe to port. The sister ship to ours had been sunk on this route the previous week, a smaller ship that left Marseilles a day ahead of us had been sunk four hours ago. I was eight, and I was aware of danger and of deliver- ance.
It was a rough evening and we both felt rather ill. The waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea, green against the sunset, slapped and banged against the scuttle of our cabin. The camp-stool, upholstered in carpet, collapsed with a sudden clatter. Dark clouds added to the melancholy menace of gathering dusk at sea. The drinking water, beneath its covering tumbler, whooshed in the water bottle. A large blue pendulum, my mother's dress- ing-gown, swung slowly on its hook. She read me the story of Joshua, and of the improbable crum- bling of the walls of Jericho before the trumpets and the shouting of Israel; a crude tribal tale with faith in God running like a vein of silver through it. This then was God, the same then as now, unable to drown and able to save. It is more than likely that in character and disposition the German submarine commander who lay in wait for our ship .was more of a Christian than I will ever be. It did not, then, feel that way to me. I knew myself a part of a noble army, of a church militant, something greater and more important than myself. I might drown, but others would go on. I belonged, and it was comfort and bliss.
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