Out of my Comfort Zone -- and Having Fun by Sheena Wilkinson

My helpers 

I don't really 'do' small children. Never having had any children of my own, or any nieces or nephews, I've had little to do with them. When I do primary school visits, I insist that the minimum age I'll work with is nine. Which makes sense -- I've written books for middle grade, teen, young adult and adult, but nothing for smaller kids. 

But this post comes to you after a full day of reading to Very Small Children Indeed, including babies in prams. Reader, I am shattered! But what fun it was, and I've decided to tell you about it, partly because those of you who are writers might also find you're asked to do something you didn't think you could, and end up rather enjoying. And in the current financial and intellectual climate, we could all do with maximising our chance to earn money. 

One of my main roles over the last ten years has been as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. The RLF is the world's oldest literary charity, founded in 1790 with a remit to support writers. Their ethos is simple: writers matter because writing matters. And they put their money where their mouth is in various ways: giving grants to writers in need, but also giving writers work in a wide range of educational and community settings. I like to see them as a matchmaker: matching up the writers' skills with people who would benefit from them. I started off in 2015 as a Writing Fellow in a university, helping students with their essays, and since then have delivered various kinds of workshops in universities, schools, workplaces, mental healthcare settings and more. 

What has this to do with reading 'Piglet Meets a Heffalump' to Very Small Children Indeed?

Well, the RLF derives most of its income from authors' estates (mine won't be worth much, but I'm going to make sure I give them something) and one of their most high-profile donors was A.A. Milne, most famous, of course, as the writer of Winnie-the-Pooh. Next year is the centenary of the publication of the first WTP book, and  there will be celebrations in lots of places, starting off in my very own Northern Ireland. 

Disney, Historic Royal Palaces and the Royal Literary Fund have got together to transform part of the grounds of Hillsborough Castle in County Down into a storybook wonderland: Winnie-the-Pooh's Hunny Hunt. Every Saturday a different RLF author will bring the world of Winnie-the-Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood to life. My remit -- being local I was the first of the authors to give it a go -- was to read from WTP as well as from my own work. 

I was well looked after by everyone -- by the RLF (as always!) and by representatives of Disney and the staff at Hillsborough, but the biggest thanks must go to my own old toys, pictured at the top. I wasn't sure who would turn up to Owl's Storytelling Corner, but I was pretty sure they would be Too Young for my own books. And so it proved. The children ranged from eleven-ish down to nought-ish, with the average being about four. They had never heard of me or my books; they just wanted a story. Luckily I had chosen 'Piglet Meets a Heffalump' which is a Very Satisfying Story Indeed. 

I had brought Betjeman Bear, Blue and Scottish Toby along simply to look cute, along with a 'hunny' jar but very soon I pressed them into service to act it all out. After all, long before Disney, the original Pooh characters were based on real toys owned by Milne's son Christopher, so perhaps it was fitting that my scruffy old toys* played their part. Betjeman made a dignified Christopher Robin; Blue, who has sat on my bed for 56 years, did not deserve to have his head jammed into a hunny pot for the entertainment of small children, but he has survived worse over the years, and Scottish Toby made a surprisingly convincing Piglet. 

I learned a lot today. I learned that if you let one child hold one bear, you have to let her tiny sister hold the other one, even if the latter's nose is dripping snot which she is cheerfully rubbing with the same hands she is holding out for the bear. I learned that small children love being asked to give 'a loud roar of sadness and despair' in Heffalumpish style, even if they do not know what all the words mean. And I learned that sometimes, doing something outside your comfort zone can be Jolly Good Fun.

*Betjeman Bear requests that I point out that he is neither old nor scruffy, but is in fact a beautiful handmade bear sewn by my friend Elizabeth and is no more than twenty years old and therefore Very Young Indeed. 

The Silent Einsteins - Andrew Strong

I was once a great believer in philosophy for children.  I’d read a class of children the wonderful chapter from Winnie the Pooh, ‘Eeyore’s Birthday’ in which  Pooh wants to give Eeyore a pot of honey but eats the honey, and Piglet has a balloon for Eeyore, but it bursts.  So Eeyore ends up with a burst balloon and an empty pot, but he’s delighted, he can put the burst balloon into the pot and take it out again. He’s happy.  Then, of course, the children can discuss happiness and what it is and what it means, and how it happens.  The wordy, confident pupils usually dominate the discussion, sometimes offering insight, often demonstrating some sort of philosophical approach.  “It depends what you mean by happiness,” one will say, and I will be delighted.

The quieter children will still be thinking about the story, or are lost somewhere along the way, maybe stalled at the point where Piglet falls on the balloon and thinks he’s dead.  But, you know, we have to move things along, get to the philosophy bit.

Except the other day a wordy confident child asked me if I knew what E=MC2 meant.  Well, I said, I do, sort of, but I can’t really explain it beyond the most superficial outline.  I did my best and he said he understood it.  I explained that Einstein had one of his first major breakthroughs when he thought of someone falling.  A person falling for long enough would achieve weightlessness.

I asked the wordy, confident boy to imagine he was in a lift, holding a pen, and then the cable broke and the lift fell, and kept falling until he was weightless.  Imagine, I said, you then let go the pen.  What happens to it?

Wordy boy mimicked the pen shooting up out of his hand.  And then, from behind him, I noticed a girl who had said nothing, but who was listening intently, suddenly leaning forward.  She was staring at me and her eyes were bright.

“It would stay there,” she said. “The pen would just stay there.”  She nodded to herself as if confirming her idea, and sat back, resuming her silent rumination.

These silent children, these children who don’t shine or sparkle, or who fail to make any early impression on the world, I am convinced their thoughts are quietly gestating.  Their minds are finding new ways to reimagine the world.  The wordy, confident ones, the brilliant academic children who fly through exams, they have often matured early, they know to repeat what they’ve been told, adding some calculated sparkle for good measure.

Here’s an example of a test question that so infuriated me I set fire to it and let it float, a fiery cloud, over the silent fields of my suppressed rage.  It asked pupils to read a text and then describe what a character was ‘feeling’.  In order to do this, it seems, a pupil scours the page for synonyms of the word ‘feel’ and then quotes these phrases.  ‘He sensed doubt’ ‘His worries compounded’ and so on. Yet throughout the passage there were louring skies, distant cries, a current in a pool eddies and swirls, all these things externalising the protagonists fears. Yet none of these were acceptable.  The limits of what the text could do had been set in stone by some evil test setter. 

Education rewards the wordy group, and more and more, demoralises the others.  The winners go on to become evil test setters.  And things like ‘Philosophy for Children’ just exacerbate it.  The quieter pupils allow images to rise and fall, let them simmer and settle.  The wordy ones want to pin them down as soon as possible, try and articulate something immediately. 

But literature is not a science, and art cannot have such simplistic one to one relationships.  A single word is a trove of associations, a text is a universe, and there is far too much to be found to expect everyone to discover the same things.

Pooh versus the Prince

When I was 14 and knew everything, I was surprised to hear a friend of my mother’s – an English teacher, and a funny, intelligent woman whom I much liked – say that she couldn’t stand Winnie-the-Pooh.

I thought I must have misheard at first. It just did not compute. Not – like - Winnie-the-Pooh? It was as unthinkable as not liking chocolate, or Morecambe and Wise, or fresh air. She must be referring to the Disney cartoon, I decided, but she insisted otherwise. “But,“ I spluttered, “how can you not like it?” I tried, none too articulately (it’s hard to find arguments for the self-evident), to explain the many things that made Pooh irresistible. The humour of course, the playing with words, the adorably simple yet accidentally profound conversations of Pooh and Piglet, Rabbit’s bossiness. Tigger’s bounciness, Owl’s sententiousness, Eeyore’s eeyorishness... How could anyone fail to love all these and still be a member of the same species, let alone teach English literature for a living?

When I finally drew breath she told me what had put her off the book. In short, she found it to be saturated in a middle-class, southern English cosiness that might be appealing as a nursery fantasy if you happened to be a middle-class, southern English reader (here she fixed me keenly), but that excluded her, a working class girl from Northern Ireland. There were no Peace Walls in the Hundred Aker Wood.

I can’t remember what I said in reply. I’ve a nasty suspicion that (being afflicted with teenage omniscience) I thought this merely showed her lack of empathy and imagination. Yes, she might have grown up in the middle of the Troubles, but the magical thing about literature was that it could lift you out of your own life into those of other people. With the help of A. A. Milne she could soar across the Irish Sea to Sussex on the viewless wings of poesy – to a place where everybody knows your name (as long as it’s Christopher Robin) and there’s always hunny still for tea.

These days I’m no longer quite so sure I know everything, and although I still love the Pooh books I understand how somebody else might not. More importantly, I’ve come to terms with the fact that the book hasn’t been written (and never will be) that everyone will like. There is no Platonic Book – the book all other books are striving to be and beside which all others must be found wanting, the book that would bring an end to literature if it were ever written because no one would want to read anything else. Instead, there's an ever-growing Library – a Library in the form of a forest that is perpetually sprouting new trees, new branches, new leaves for new readers. Isn't that a more liberating way of thinking about it?

As a matter of fact, there are plenty of classic titles that I don’t particularly care for. Take Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. More than once I’ve had people clutch me by the arm to tell me it’s their favourite book, a miracle of style, magical, profound, a philosophy of life as much as a story. And I nod, and smile, and say, “I’m so glad you like it.” The fourteen-year-old me is still there, yelping all the reasons why The Little Prince is a twee borefest, but I keep these thoughts under wraps.

In the Forest of Literature everyone is entitled to their own Hundred Akers.