I tell stories. Now you’re supposed to say, “You
don’t, do you?” And then I say, “Yes, I do!” And then you say, “And do people
believe them?” And I say, “Sometimes.” And you say, “I bet that’s another story
you’re telling us!” And I say, “Probably.”
You see, admitting that I’m a storyteller raises
more questions than it answers. To begin with, I write stories. This is
one, for example. These stories come out of me, and my experiences. Mostly, but
not absolutely always, they have an I-figure as the narrator. Sometimes they
have several I-figures as narrators, inside frames. And the frames, in their
way, are as important as the stories. Sometimes, perhaps, more so – though
there’s always a story there, if you look hard enough. Maybe it’s a story that
someone else might like to tell, in a totally different way. But I want to tell
it my way, which is why I write it down.
Sometimes I wonder if I make a fetish of this
preserving of things. I look at all the things around me – books, CDs, videos,
boxes of old papers that I can’t bring myself to sort through and order or
throw away – and I wonder if I’m deliberately trapping myself in my past.
Deliberately? That suggests I’m hindering my development, in a self-destructive
kind of way. But maybe it’s just a part of who I am. All these things I keep –
they’re just a part of who I am, and they tell me how I got to be who I am.
Well – they would, if I looked at them or listened to them.
On the other hand, I really am a storyteller. I
actually stand up in front of people and tell stories that I haven’t written
down in advance. In fact, I’d be really worried if I had written them
down in advance. Then I’d have to memorise them. Then I’d have to remember them
when they were needed. Remembering is quite another skill than being
there in the story and saying what you see and hear. Of course, I have videos
of my acting performances, and sometimes I even watch them – when I’m showing
them to other people, that is. But I’d never want to listen to myself telling a
story – not least because I listen to myself anyway while I’m doing it. In
fact, I’m my own audience. If I don’t please myself, who will I please?
The stories that I tell are not made up out
of myself and my experiences. They are “traditional”, though of course I
embroider them with my own thread and my own kind of stitching. If I invent a
story for telling (and I have done), then it’s a re-working and a new
combination of traditional motifs. I’m not a purist, afraid of “contamination”.
I have writing for keeping things “pure”, and I don’t want people to monkey
around with my texts. But a story is only really alive when it’s being told,
and I want to make sure that it gets passed on. Stories actually want to
be told. They demand it.
And I think that may even be true for the ones that
come out of me.
Now, you know that I mostly write
ghost stories. I hardly ever tell them. There’s a very good
reason for that. The kind of ghost stories I write depend on you, the reader,
realising what’s going on without my ever telling you explicitly, which means
that all the relevant information you require to make the necessary deductions
needs to be given in exactly the right way, in exactly the right order and at
exactly the right time, and I simply couldn’t guarantee that, if I were telling
the story “freehand” as it were.
The kind of ghost stories that are suitable for
telling aloud are those where the aim is the communication of simple terror:
footsteps, turning door-handles, grating locks, unearthly sounds and spectral
voices. You know something supernatural is going to happen, and it jolly well
does. In my stories, you only realise afterwards.
It’s like that Furtwängler recording of Bruckner’s
Eighth Symphony with those loud extraneous noises in the softer passages of the
slow movement. At first, you’ll probably curse about the noisy audience, or the
inconsiderate bar staff, and wonder whether the people who transferred it to CD
couldn’t have edited them out or at least quietened them down.
Then, maybe, you’ll look at the notes on the insert,
and see that the recording was made in Berlin in 1944. Finally, you’ll work out
that the Apocalypse is providing its own improvised percussion, and that you’re
hearing Allied bombs falling on Alt-Moabit or maybe even the Alexanderplatz.
(They were probably dropping during other bits of the symphony, too, but
Bruckner’s the right sort of easy listening to accompany an air-raid, and could
probably be recorded on a runway at Heathrow without too much phonic
contamination.)
Let’s think about this another way. They wanted to
record the music – and they did that. Let’s be more precise: they wanted this
performance, with these forces and this conductor, in this time and place. In
which case, the bombs belonged to it. It wouldn’t have been honest to have to
have taken them out.
Ah, but it’s not quite as simple as that. What about
the really extraneous noises? The coughs, the sneezes, the slamming
lavatory doors, the programme sellers counting their small change just outside
the hall (as I heard them do in the Vienna Konzerthaus)… Do these count? Or the
imperfections of the recording medium itself? Are hairs in shellac the
equivalent of flies in amber – a piece of the past trapped in an eternal
present?
It gets worse. Have you ever listened to a
performance of something you knew well from your favourite LP – and jumped
because the scratch you were used to wasn’t there? Life, as John Peel
says, is surface noise.
And finally: on LPs particularly, where they had to
squeeze a lot into very little space, and where the dimensions and shapes of
the grooves corresponded absolutely to the volume and pitch of the music, it
often happened that a particularly loud passage would physically distort the
whole surface in that area, creating a “pre-echo” in the rapt silence before
the noisy bit, or a “post-echo” in the stunned stillness after it.
Life, I like to think, is like an LP. At the
beginning, (assuming you get into the groove) it races round, reproducing
everything with enormous clarity and oomph, but as it gets towards the end,
that is, the centre, it slows down, the pitch begins to wobble, the individual
sounds have less and less space to occupy, and finally all you’re left with is
the repetitive click-click-click of a needle that’s going absolutely nowhere,
until you put the record out of its misery by taking it off. CDs, of course, go
the other way, from the centre outwards, and although you can sometimes see the
actual reason why they skip, or repeat, they mostly just stutter or stop
playing with no visible cause. They just don’t have the same tendency to jump
into the future or the past because of a heavy footfall or an unwiped
drink-spill.
I tell stories. And because people seem to assume
that only quite young children will consciously want to listen to what they
know to be stories (older people preferring to fool themselves with stuff
called “news”, “soaps”, “documentaries” and the like) I get employed to tell
them in primary schools.
This particular primary school was in Hertfordshire,
near the village where I – what? Grew up? Hardly! Spent the years between my 9th
and 13th birthdays. That’ll do. Nice and neutral. Except that the
use of the word “neutral” inevitably implies some kind of conflict going on.
I’d come from London. I talked posh. I was bright.
Of course I got bullied. (I also had some really good friends – on one of whom
I did the dirty, by drifting away from him after I passed the 11-plus and he
didn’t. I drifted away from the others because they went to the grammar school
in the opposite direction, so maybe I shouldn’t feel so guilty.) What still
sticks in my mind, is the time that three of them (“them” – me and “them”!)
waved a knife at me in the narrow and relatively deserted lane through which I
walked to and from school.
Hobbs Hill it was called, a very steep asphalted
footpath up for the first bit, then flatter, with a cottage that was the
doctors’ surgery, which you could just about reach with a car from the other
end, the school end, if you drove very carefully, and didn’t mind hawthorn
scratches on your paintwork. It was the school end where it happened, as I was
going home. There was no one else about. I can clearly see the faces of two of
them and remember their names. About the third I’m not sure. I have a name and
a face, but I think it may be a later reconstruction and an injustice.
And the school? Oh, I think I enjoyed it well
enough. When I was driving to the “gig” – in one of the smaller villages to the
North, organised by a former student of mine who’d gone into primary school
teaching – I thought it would be fun to have a look at it, so I eschewed the
by-pass, and was ready to stamp on the brakes at the top of that horrendous
hill.
Only when I looked to my left, I saw that the little
Edwardian school, with its high-roofed hall that had obviously been “the”
classroom, and its built-in schoolmaster’s house, that had been the
headmaster’s study, had been turned into much sought after apartments – so
sought after, in fact, that they had all been sold, as the large but tasteful
sign proclaimed. What was it Napoleon called us? A nation of estate agents?
So I didn’t stop.
I hadn’t expected the blue and white plaque, but it
was a shock. So much so, that I even forgot to check what had happened to the
pub opposite the school, called (then, but who knows now?) The Steamer,
referring to something horse-drawn, to judge by the sign, not steam-powered at
all, where my Dad (recovering from viral pneumonia) waited with an umbrella to
pick up me (running a temperature of 1010) from the three
morning-only sessions of the 11-plus which got me the grammar-school place. I
had actually drunk with my Dad in the other pubs in the real village at the
bottom of the hill, one of them quite close to the Mimram – but I didn’t stop
there, either.
I went on to the “gig”, in Mardley Hill, or
Digswell, or Codicote, or Woolmer Green, or wherever it was. And I told stories
all day – different stories to every class, which is what I try to do, so they
can tell them to each other, and don’t just have to repeat them for some stupid
pedagogic reason.
Towards the end, some parents appeared, obviously
early to pick up their offspring, and asked if I minded them coming in to
listen, so I told them that there was nothing I said to kids that I wasn’t
prepared to repeat in front of adults, which they thought was a joke, only of
course it wasn’t.
When I finished, with that noisy and comforting
story from the Brothers Grimm, which is called The City Musicians of Bremen,
but I always rename after the nearest large settlement to where I’m telling it,
so that here it was called Welwyn Village Band, an attractive young
mother (without a wedding ring, I noticed, so I was doubly interested) came up
to me with her little boy, and said, “Thank you so much – Johnny really loved
it! He was looking forward to it so much – he always gets very excited by these
things – in fact, he was so excited last night, that he couldn’t sleep properly
– could you, Johnny? He even had a nightmare, which is most unlike him!”
“What was it about, Johnny?” I asked, not cutting
the mother out deliberately, goodness knows, because she had a lovely face and
a lovely voice, but talking to Johnny because he was the one telling the story.
It’s a thing we storytellers do. We couldn’t talk if we couldn’t listen.
“I was in a lane,” he said. Then he stopped, as if
he was back there, in that lane, and looking at what was happening in order to
tell me about it. I was aware of his mother, leaning towards him protectively,
but not interfering. I liked that. Some kids just do need protecting. I
know. I was one. At the very least it makes you know that for once in your life
you were loved.
“I was in a lane,” he said again. “There were three
of them. They had a knife.” Then he couldn’t or wouldn’t say any more, but
turned to his mother and buried his face in her blue gingham skirt, that went
very well with her ruched white cotton blouse.
“He was very scared,” she said, “I had to sit with
him till he went back to sleep. He has such a vivid imagination. He knew their
names, too, you know – but they weren’t the names of any of the boys he goes to
school with – not here, nor at the other school.”
“The other school?” I asked.
“We don’t actually live in this village,” she said,
“ we live in the one that has the – er – Village Band!”
“Didn’t he like it there?” I asked. “Was he bullied?
At the other school?”
“No,” she said, “at least, I don’t think so. But it
was a bit big. And a bit rough. This is nicer. Isn’t it Johnny? Especially when
people like you come and tell stories. Ooh, excuse me for a moment – I just
need to catch someone – ”
While she was on the far side of the room, arranging
some babysitting, I asked Johnny, “Do you still know their names?”
“Only two of them,” he said, “I forgot the third.”
And he told me them. And they were the same.
Among the stories I know, there’s one by James
Thurber about a man who’s bullied at school, and when he’s grown up, he sees a
child, rather like himself, being bullied, and after the bullies have gone, he
goes across and tells the child he should have stood up for himself, and the
child begins to cry, and the man loses control, and starts hitting the little
boy because he won’t stand up for himself, and then a teacher comes and drags
him off, and everybody thinks the man’s a terrible bully. That’s a story I
don’t need to tell, because somebody else has.
Johnny’s mother came back and said thank you again,
and hoped I would be back, and I said I hoped I would be, too, and then she
took him off home for tea (and probably biscuits).
And that’s the end of my story, and because it’s
written down you can go back to the beginning again and try and make sense of
it, which is something you can do with stories, but not, alas, with life.
Completed 14th
August 2003, 8.30a.m. - 12.35 p.m.