Why I love storytelling

I love stories. The earliest story I remember is a bedtime favourite my dad told me, The Three Billy Goats Gruff. I loved it and my dad loved telling it.

“What story do you want tonight, wee man?” he’d ask.

“Three billy goats gruff please dad. Please please please”. I had the book but he didn’t need it. He was a dab hand. He’d do voices and act out scenes. I loved it. I’d squirm and hide under the sheets when the scary troll appeared to bully the little goats and I’d giggle and laugh when the final billy goat rammed that nasty troll off the bridge. It’s one of my fondest childhood memories.

I was a good reader as a child. I was reading my own bedtime stories at quite a young age but it was always better when someone else read them to you. Asterix and Obelix were the mainstays if you don’t know them you need to look into it and, I promise you, if you have kids do them the favour of getting them a few to try them out. You won’t regret it. Reading books on my own let me delve into all sort of fantastical rabbit holes.

I was spoiled as a child. Very spoiled. Probably the best way was in books. My parents, especially my dad, was – still is for that matter – a voracious reader. I was too young for those books though but thankfully I had two older brothers and a godmother (who went on to be an expert in child education) who drowned me in books. J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Asterix and Obelix, Calvin and Hobbes, classic myths of Ancient Greece, the Vikings, and King Arthur were my staples. It wasn’t long before I would consume my eldest brothers dungeon masters guide and monster manual from cover to cover. I could quote you entire sections, despite never having played a single session of D&D, because the details were so rich and consistent. I was cultivating my inner geek back in ‘88.

I was never a good school pupil. Shocked? You clearly don’t know me. I was too wilful and believed myself much smarter than I really was. A tiny extrovert, bursting with energy, and no attention span. I found it hard to maintain focus in many lessons – unless it was reading or writing stories about dragons- until I was in primary 2. That’s the second year of elementary for any non-Scots reading this, about age 6. That’s when I met Mrs. Barlow. Now, let’s get this straight. Everyone was terrified of Mrs. Barlow, she was old, needed a cane, grumpy, had blue-purplish rinsed hair and a manner of reprimand that chilled to the core if you stepped out of line.

“You boy!” She’d boom. The whole room would stop. Thirty kids simultaneously praying the old dinosaur’s vision was based on movement. No such luck.

The memories, even now, make me frosty. However, I remember stepping into her classroom, I don’t know why we were there but it was the whole class. The walls were covered in images of all the tales I knew of Ancient Greece, I saw Heracles and his labours, the birth of Athena, Odysseus and the Sirens, Theseus slaying the Minotaur, Perseus holding Medusa’s head, King Midas, imagery of the Underworld and a list of the Olympian Pantheon. This terrifying old lady made me feel more at home than I’d ever been at school just by being in her room.

“Why does she have all this cool stuff,” I thought. “This can’t be school stuff”. There were a couple of other kids who had an idea of what all the decorations were but I felt like I held the Rosetta stone. I had the inside track others didn’t.

Mrs. Barlow would often tell us stories and I’ll tell you this… my attention was focussed. I absorbed every single minute detail and she transformed from tyrant to kindly grandmother telling stories by the fire. I bombarded her with questions, no longer fearing her attention, she had the answers I needed. She did a pretty good job of always telling us something new despite the finite supply of Greek myth after all. Now, we were small kids, the more salacious details of some Greek tragedies were obscured from us (No stories of Oedipus… well… we all know how that goes, or Zeus sleeping with women in the guise of a white bull or some such.) but they did a good job by us and I found out the extra details when I got older. My love of these myths never left me. In all honesty, their value only increased when able to conduct more adult analysis of them. I think this is the core reason why I love them so much, they have meaning and relevance for everyone. The moral tales at their heart are often multi-layered and survived the rise and fall of civilisations. I sincerely believe we must never lose this method of moral teaching. That’s what such stories are, reflections on morality, ethics and human nature. These are considerations no human being should ever be without.

Every kid needs parents and siblings like mine to feed them these stories. Failing that, they need their own Mrs. Barlow, a terrifying, purple-haired, Scottish schoolmistress, with a voice to make a drill sergeant flinch, weaving stories of goddesses and princes, princesses and heroes, heroines and monsters, curses, swords and magic to spellbind hyperactive children, help them to think, always dream and, most importantly, always question.