A Little, Aloud
Page 1
A Little, Aloud
An anthology of prose and poetry
for reading aloud to someone
you care for
Edited by Angela Macmillan
Foreword by Blake Morrison
Illustrations by Mary Lundquist
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781409015178
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Published by Chatto & Windus 2010
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Copyright © The Reader Organisation 2010
Foreword copyright © Blake Morrison 2010
Illustrations copyright © Mary Lundquist 2010
The Reader Organisation has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
We are very grateful to Mary Lundquist for
providing illustrations free of charge
www.marylundquist.com
The publisher is donating all royalties in full from this book
to The Reader Organisation.
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
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Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Foreword
Introduction
How to Use this Book
A CHILD’S WORLD
The Doll’s House Katherine Mansfield
The Little Dancers Laurence Binyon
Reading Notes
STRANGE LADIES
Great Expectations (extract) Charles Dickens
It Was Long Ago Eleanor Farjeon
Reading Notes
THE UNLOVED
At the End of the Line Penny Feeny
Incendiary Vernon Scannell
Reading Notes
GHASTLY CHILDREN
The Lumber Room Saki
Rebecca Hilaire Belloc
Reading Notes
INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE
A Message From the Pig-man John Wain
For a Five-Year-Old Fleur Adcock
Reading Notes
LOVE’S LONELY OFFICES
All the Years of Her Life Morley Callaghan
Those Winter Sundays Robert Hayden
Reading Notes
FATHER AND SON
Powder Tobias Wolff
Digging Seamus Heaney
Reading Notes
REAL GOLD
Silas Marner (extract) George Eliot
Rich R. S. Thomas
Reading Notes
BLESSED BE THE INFANT BABE
Silas Marner (extract) George Eliot
A Parental Ode to My Son Thomas Hood
Reading Notes
SHAME ON ME
The Snob Morley Callaghan
‘What Does Your Father Do?’ Roger McGough
Reading Notes
CLAMOROUS WINGS
I’ll Tell Me Ma (extract) Brian Keenan
The Wild Swans at Coole W. B. Yeats
Reading Notes
THE PATHS OF OUR LIVES
David Swan Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Road Not Taken Robert Frost
Reading Notes
UNJUST LIFE
Edward Mills and George Benton: A Tale Mark Twain
Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord Gerard Manley Hopkins
Reading Notes
COURAGE AND ENDEAVOUR
My Left Foot (extract) Christy Brown
A Noiseless Patient Spider Walt Whitman
Reading Notes
THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY
Black Beauty (extract) Anna Sewell
The Charge of the Light Brigade Alfred Tennyson
Reading Notes
MEN WERE DECEIVERS EVER
The Handbag Dorothy Whipple
Sigh No More William Shakespeare
Reading Notes
THE TROUBLE WITH PLEASURES
A Pair of Silk Stockings Kate Chopin
Are They Shadows Samuel Daniel
Reading Notes
DESIRE
The Necklace Guy de Maupassant
Overheard on a Saltmarsh Harold Monro
Reading Notes
TROUBLE
Far From the Madding Crowd (extract) Thomas Hardy
In Memoriam (extract) Alfred Tennyson
Reading Notes
PHASES OF LOVE
Jane Eyre (extract) Charlotte Brontë
To Anthea, Who May Command Him Anything Robert Herrick
Reading Notes
LOVING
The Fight in the Plough and Ox George Mackay Brown
My Love is like a Red, Red Rose Robert Burns
Reading Notes
LOVE AND MARRIAGE
Madame Bovary (extract) Gustave Flaubert
Sonnet William Shakespeare
Reading Notes
LITTLE ACTS OF KINDNESS
Little Women (extract) Louisa M. Alcott
‘Among All Lovely Things’ William Wordsworth
Reading Notes
FACES OF FRIENDSHIP
The Railway Children (extract) Edith Nesbit
Friendship Elizabeth Jennings
Reading Notes
IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
A Work of Art Anton Chekhov
‘A Thing of Beauty’ John Keats
Reading Notes
AFTER DARK
An Adventure in Norfolk A. J. Alan
Silver Walter de la Mare
Reading Notes
DARK STAIRS AND EMPTY HALLS
The Demon Lover Elizabeth Bowen
The Listeners Walter de la Mare
Reading Notes
THE CALL OF THE WILD
The Call of the Wild (extract) Jack London
Sea Fever John Masefield
Reading Notes
CATS
The Summer Book Tove Jansson
A Cat Edward Thomas
Reading Notes
SOMETHING TO SAY
Trees Can Speak Alan Marshall
Miracle on St Da
vid’s Day Gillian Clarke
Reading Notes
LETTING GO
Flight Doris Lessing
Everyone Sang Siegfried Sassoon
Reading Notes
WHERE WE LIVE
On the Black Hill (extract) Bruce Chatwin
The Self-Unseeing Thomas Hardy
Reading Notes
SENIOR MOMENTS
Pickwick Papers (extract) Charles Dickens
Resolutions When I Come to Be Old Jonathan Swift
Reading Notes
WHEN YOUTH IS FAR BEHIND
Faith and Hope Go Shopping Joanne Harris
When You Are Old W. B. Yeats
Reading Notes
LOVE AT CHRISTMAS
The Gift of the Magi O. Henry
Christmas Carol Eleanor Farjeon
Reading Notes
CHRISTMAS EVE
A Child’s Christmas in Wales Dylan Thomas
The Oxen Thomas Hardy
Reading Notes
Read On
Acknowledgements
A LITTLE, ALOUD
The Reader Organisation (TRO) is a national charity dedicated to bringing about a reading revolution by making it possible for people of all ages, backgrounds and abilities to enjoy and engage with literature on a deep and personal level. Through their Get Into Reading project they run hundreds of weekly read-aloud groups for people who may not otherwise read, including people living in deprived areas, the mentally or chronically ill, older people living in care homes, prisoners, recovering addicts and excluded children. The organisation started on Merseyside but has since expanded across the UK, and groups are now also running in Australia, with projects beginning to form in the US, South Africa and Canada. TRO believes that the quality of literature is crucial – great literature speaks to all of us, regardless of who we are and where we come from. Its greatness makes it timeless and universal.
Angela Macmillan is a founding editor of The Reader magazine and has worked at The Reader Organisation since its inception. She runs several Get Into Reading groups for older people who live in residential care.
Blake Morrison is the author of two bestselling memoirs, And When Did You Last See Your Father? and Things My Mother Never Told Me, three novels, including the highly acclaimed, South of the River and The Last Weekend, and a study of the Bulger case, As If. He is also a poet, critic and journalist, and is a patron of The Reader Organisation.
Foreword
‘Poetry makes nothing happen,’ Auden wrote in his famous elegy to W. B. Yeats, and those who believe that literature and the arts are a sideline or an indulgence have been all too quick to agree. But Auden was careful to qualify his position. Poetry might not overthrow dictators but it can still have a value as ‘a way of happening, a mouth,’ he suggested. And for the benefit of readers, he urged poets to sing on – ‘With your unconstraining voice/Still persuade us to rejoice’. If poetry can persuade us to rejoice, or even just to keep going, then it serves an important purpose. I have never forgotten the man who came to a writing workshop I ran, many years ago, who said that he’d been about to kill himself – had the bath running, and the razor on the side – when he sat down to write a poem instead and, having finished it, decided life was worth living after all. It’s an example of how poetry does make things happen: of its power to inspire, console, heal and transform.
‘One sheds one’s sicknesses in books,’ D. H. Lawrence said, and a growing number of teachers, readers and health professionals seem to share that view. ‘Bibliotherapy’ might be a new word but the idea behind it has a long history. In Ancient Greece, Apollo was god of both poetry and healing: as Pindar puts it (in his Pythian odes), he’s the god
Who sends
Mortal men and women
Relief from grievous disease. Apollo,
Who has given us the lyre.
Who brings the Muse
To whom he chooses, filling the heart
With peace and harmony.
In similar vein, the Bible tells the story of David calming Saul by playing music to him on a harp: ‘so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him’. By the Renaissance, the idea that poetry and song could ‘banish vexations of soul and body’ was well-established, with the effects of tragedy thought to be just as therapeutic as comedy. In The Art of English Poesie (1589) George Puttenham advises the poet to use ‘one dolour to expel another’, the sad cadence in a line of poetry allaying the burden of pain or depression in the reader, ‘one short sorrowing the remedy of a long and grievous sorrow’.
Readers down the ages have testified to literature’s capacity to make us feel better – better in ourselves and better about ourselves – by immersing us in the lives of others, or articulating eternal truths (‘what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’), or by speaking of feelings so deep and complex that they’re almost impossible to put into words. Some of these readers have themselves been writers. They range from George Eliot (who recovered from the grief of losing her husband George Henry Lewes by reading Dante with a young friend, John Cross, whom she subsequently married) to John Stuart Mill, who, thanks to a passage in the memoirs of Jean-François Marmontel, recovered from a ‘crisis in my mental history [when] I seemed to have nothing left to live for . . . A vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came over me, and I was moved to tears. From this moment my being grew lighter. The oppression of the thought that all feeling was dead within me was gone. I was no longer hopeless: I was not a stock or a stone.’
The reasons for it may not be clear, but literature in general and poetry in particular do seem capable of raising the human spirit; one of the most elaborate descriptions of the process comes in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey:
When we are harassed by sorrows or anxieties, or long oppressed by any powerful feelings which we must keep to ourselves, for which we can obtain and seek no sympathy from any living creature, and which yet we cannot, or will not, wholly crush, we often naturally seek relief in poetry – and often find it, too – whether in the effusions of others, which seem to harmonise with our existing case, or in our own attempts to give utterance to those thoughts and feelings in strains less musical, perchance, but more appropriate, and therefore more penetrating and sympathetic, and, for the time, more soothing, or more powerful to rouse and to unburden the oppressed and swollen heart.
To unburden her oppressed heart, Anne Brontë wrote about the natural world she saw around her, in all its bleakness: ‘Blow on, wild wind; thy solemn voice,/However sad and drear,/Is nothing to the gloomy silence/I have had to bear.’ Better a solemn voice than a gloomy silence. And poets’ voices aren’t always solemn, of course, even when their subject matter is grave. If you listen to Seamus Heaney read his poem ‘Digging’ (a poem included in this anthology) you can’t miss the sheer enjoyment of the performance, despite the serious questions he raises about loyalty, work and staying true to one’s family. It’s a poem about finding one’s way in life and, by finding the right words, rhymes and rhythms he shows us how that’s done and includes us in the process.
We tend to think of reading as a solitary activity and for most of us, most of the time, it probably is. But we read, in part, in order to feel less alone in the world, and a great novel or poem will put us in good company, even when we’re on our own. Books are inclusive: they invite us in and help us belong. It’s especially heartening when a poet or novelist expresses emotions and ideas that we thought, till we saw them written down, were unique to us: at such moments, as Hector, the schoolteacher in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys puts it, it’s as if a hand has reached out and taken our own. Literature has traditionally been presented as an individualist enterprise. But in reality it’s communal and collaborative. A book might exist as an object without anyone ever opening it. But it only exists as a text by being read.
And reading isn’t necessarily a silent activity. As children we are read to by others (parents, grandparents, teachers): it’s aura
lly rather than visually that we first encounter books. And though it’s said that people flock to literary festivals in order to see famous authors, the opportunity to hear them read from their work is part of the attraction, too. I know couples who read books aloud to each other in preference to watching television. And then there are books we read to friends in hospital or to relations in care homes. To share a book in this way can bring insights not available when we read alone. It’s as if the author acts as an intermediary, allowing us to broach subjects that there isn’t the time or space or intimacy for in the normal pattern of our lives.
Milton knew that reading had its limits, that a man could be ‘deep-versed in books and shallow in himself ’. But at best, literature touches something deep within us and, because of that, makes our dealings with the world deeper too. What moves us in literature isn’t just seeing the words, on the page, but hearing them resonate, in the air. Try it yourself, with the poems and prose passages in this anthology: speak them aloud, to yourself or someone close to you, and (to quote Auden again) ‘In the deserts of the heart/Let the healing fountain start’.
Blake Morrison
Introduction
SHARED READING, SHARED MEANING
Nearly thirty years ago I was putting the Nobel prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing on a train at the end of her first visit to Liverpool. I was in a state of great awe, this beautiful and distinguished writer was my hero, and old enough to be my mother. She was a storyteller who had captivated and deeply affected me; I had invited her to visit and talk, and now in these final moments at Lime Street Station, I wanted some last and meaningful remarks from her – I demanded this of her. So I asked her something childishly unanswerable along the lines of ‘What does it all mean?’ Ridiculously unanswerable, and yet she did answer – with a question fired right back at me.
‘What are human beings for?’ she said, giving me that gimlet eye contact of hers.
Her question stayed with me, and has woven itself into the nature and fabric of The Reader Organisation, and, indirectly, into this book.