Animal at the Story Museum
Story Museum, a year-long celebration of animals in is Animal investigates the special appeal of animal stories for children, and what these teach us about ourselves and the natural world. Author and contributor to the Geraldine McCaughrean ventures in.
A
s the Story Museum in Oxford announces its new theme – Animal – visitors could be forgiven for thinking they are in for a day at a city farm. But the Museum has given it the
subtitle A Safari through Story which promises something wilder. Naturally, the animals roaming the Pembroke Street enclosure are all pelt-plush with Story. They swish countless Tales behind them.
Prior to the launch, seven classes at one local school had each been listening to and learning seven traditional folk tales, myths and legends from one of seven world regions. A whole term was given over to loosing animals into every aspect of the curriculum. The Story Museum supplied them with the luxury of a professional storyteller, Cath Hogan, and the children responded with re-enactments, retellings and wall hangings. Tapestries inspired by the same stories now hang in the Story Museum, specially made by embroiderer Ally Baker who shared her skills with the school-children. I was asked to suggest all the stories I could for Cath to tell and Ally to illustrate,
each one featuring a different species of bird, animal, insect or fish. It fell out rather handily, since I had just finished writing an anthology of animal stories for Oxford University Press’s forthcoming Greatest Stories project; my head was still aswarm with animals. Writing them had served to remind me how much I enjoy anthology work – also how much I miss my own primary school days when I spent a deal of time (secretly) being a horse.
Animals have been dragooned into education of all kinds over the centuries – cautionary life lessons (Aesop’s Fables), philosophical examples (The Blind Men and the Elephant), political satires (Reynard the Fox), Buddhist sermons (The Hare in the Moon), parables and propaganda. Stories served as currency in foreign parts. Some were written down by scholars, far more passed from storyteller to audience, parent to child. What they were not was the special preserve of children. The pity is that so many traditional stories have now been tamed, toned down and gelded, to make them ‘suitable’ for child readers. Both the children and the stories have lost out by it.
The joyful fact is that children are at ease with animals. Most have been ‘befriended’, from birth, by a succession of bears, rabbits, dogs, cats, ducks... The first time they identified with someone other than themselves, it was probably with their teddy bear. It is easy for children to imagine child-like thoughts are going on inside animal heads. They can appreciate an animal story even without picking up on its hidden meanings or motives – especially when it’s been well illustrated. But do let’s leave in something of those hidden meanings and motives, the strangeness, the fear, the life lessons, because, at some level they may be absorbed, and the story can retain its original potency.
12 Books for Keeps No.217 March 2016
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