Reading aloud to our small children

In a lifetime of innumerable pleasures, the richest pleasure of all was reading aloud to our small children. Wendy and I shared this pleasure but I did most of the reading when I was home to do it.  When our first two children were small, I didn’t get involved much in evening or weekend meetings and hardly ever in out of town meetings, so I was almost always available, giving Wendy a chance to take time off from her full-time job of child rearing and home making – she did by far the lion’s share of all other aspects of rearing our first two kids, as well as everything else.

We began reading to Rebecca and David before they could understand the stories we told them.  On MV Pretoria, the ship that took us from Adelaide to London in 1961, we had some simple verse books, The Little Engine That Could, The Cat in the Hat with doggerel rhymes and nonsensical stories that made them (and us) laugh out loud.  By then Rebecca was 4½ and able to get the point of Doctor Suess’s crazy humour.  My favourites were A A Milne’s poems, When we were very young and Now we are six. We had these in books given to me in the early 1930s, when I was the target age for them. I began to read these poems to Rebecca and David when she was 4 and David wasn't quite 3.  Rebecca appreciated and laughed out loud at some of these poems and so did David, probably not with full understanding but imitating his big sister.

We were really poor in 1961-62, four of us trying to survive in London on a slim scholarship stipend intended for a single man. It was a challenge to pay for food. Food for the mind, however, is as important as food for the body. We bought a few good books for our kids, Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web, and The Magic Pudding. We read these over and over, at least twice on MV Morelia, the ship returning to Australia in 1962 after our year in London. By then the kids and I who did almost all the reading, were getting a bit bored with these much loved stories.  [Prompted by the kids I made up a story to tell them when we were in the middle of the Indian Ocean, half way between the Red Sea and the coast of Western Australia. The story was about two little children I called Jennifer and Christopher, and the talking parrot they got in a dusty pawnshop near the wharves of an Australian seaport. The parrot had once sat on the shoulder of the leader of a pirate gang, a villainous one-legged ship’s cook.  When I told the story to Rebecca and David I didn’t give him a name but he was obviously Long John Silver in Robert Louis Stephenson’s Treasure Island. I’d almost forgotten about this story until I was reminded of it when reading Wendy’s diary of our voyage home to Australia in 1962.  I began to write the story down for the first time in the summer of 2014].

Reading aloud to our children became a precious evening ritual during our years in Edinburgh. We had a comfortable, capacious chair with arm rests wide enough to accommodate a child’s bottom. We established a habit we all looked forward to. With Rebecca sitting on one arm of the chair, David on the other, and Jonathan on my lap, I read a succession of classics. I think we began with the four I’ve already mentioned, Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web, and The Magic Pudding. By 1965 it had been long enough since we’d last read these that the kids and I were ready, indeed eager, to hear them again. And of course Jonathan wasn’t born when we’d read them on the ship on the way back to Australia in 1962.  The other books I read to the kids were an honour roll of great children’s literature: Alice in Wonderland, and Through the Looking-glass, A Christmas Carol, some of Hans Andersen’s stories, The Borrowers, then moving on to middle childhood, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Little Women, Jo’s Boys (two of Wendy’s school prize books); Gulliver’s Travels, King Solomon’s Mines, Oliver Twist (which we abandoned: it asked too much of our kids’ attention spans); Arthur Ransome's stories about boating in the Lake District, Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn. The Sword in the Stone may have come next; then we began on Tolkein. Our collective pleasure survived through The Hobbit, but by the time we got to Frodo’s adventures when he and his brave companions set off to retrieve the Ring, Rebecca and David were both reading well on their own. The Fellowship of the Ring was too exciting, they were both too impatient, to wait for the evenings of shared reading and listening that I enjoyed at least as much as they did.  By the time we came to the third volume of Tolkein’s trilogy, I was reading just to Jonathan, although from time to time one or both of the two older children would come into the living room to eavesdrop as I read the latest installment of Frodo’s adventures. 

We talked a little about the message or the moral in some of these children’s stories. I tried, unsuccessfully I’m afraid, to show Rebecca and David the rigorous logic behind Lewis Carroll’s/ Charles Dodgson’s apparent craziness.  I had more success talking about the stupidity and futility of going to war over whether eggs should be opened at the sharp or the blunt end – or going to war over almost any of the causes for which tyrants, and many elected leaders, have forced their subjects to fight.  

Not long after we reached that stage in family evolution we migrated again, from Edinburgh to Ottawa, and for a few precious years family togetherness prevailed in several other ways.  I'll say more about that in another post.