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Favourite Reads: “A Little Aloud” edited by Angela MacMillan

This gem of a book is part of the The Reader Organisation (TRO). They run a Get into Reading programme to encourage those who may not otherwise read to do so by giving them the option of listening to others read for them. These recipients may include the mentally or chronically ill, those living in deprived areas, prisoners,  recovering addicts and a whole range of others. The TRO argues that literature speaks to us all. It started in Liverpool but is now running in Australia and elsewhere.

The Foreword is written by Blake Morrison, an accomplished writer and patron of the TRO. In it he recounts how he asked the writer Doris Lessing, “What does it all mean?” Lessing answered with a question of her own: “What are human beings for?” He pursues this question and asserts that making meaning is a human trait, a need: “We are stories.”

I read the poem “For a Five-Year-Old” by Fleur Adcock with a class. It’s about a snail; the child sees the snail and the parent advises to remove it so that it won’t be crushed. The child agrees and the agreement is as natural as anything else the child might do upon the suggestion of the parent, like having something to eat or a bath. But the speaker realises something: “I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:/your gentleness is moulded still by words/ from me”. However that same voice admits to acts of terrible cruelty: “[I] have trapped mice and shot wild birds/[…] drowned your kittens”.

The child simply wants to look at the snail. His response is curiousity. The parent teaches the child to dispose of the creature all the while living hypocritically: “But that is how things are: I am your mother/ and we are kind to snails.”

The poem is made to be read aloud. It is richly complex and interesting. It solves little and only obliquely illustrates one basic difference between children and adults.

Go make your meaning.

R.H.

Macmillan, Angela (ed.) A Little Aloud: An anthology of prose and poetry for reading aloud to someone you care for, Chatto & Windus, 2010