Phrase, Fable…..and Faith
A couple of years ago I changed my mobility scooter (my ‘iron horse’) for a later model. The representative from the mobility firm, a very bright and knowledgeable your man, explained to me how the controls worked. There’s a hand throttle that can be set at the beginning of a journey that determines maximum speed obtainable ‘When the arrow on the control knob is as far to the left as you can get it’, he said, ‘You’ve got the lowest speed. There’s a tortoise on the dial at that point to remind you’. He went on, ‘When the arrow is as far as it will go to the right, you’re on maximum speed – and you’ll see that there is a rabbit on the dial there to remind you’.
A rabbit? surely not. It must be a hare. And so of course it was. It was then that it dawned on me that this by no -means-ignorant young man had never heard of the fable of the Hare and the Tortoise – something that I imagined everyone knew from infancy. I certainly was never taught it at school. I must have just picked it up somewhere along the way – but where? Then I realized. We didn’t learn Aesop’s fables at school, nor did we learn the Greek myths. But by the time we left school we were pretty familiar with both – and with a huge swathe of stories from the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments.
We had never learned those fables and those myths, but we had learned to read, and had continually practised reading out loud. In our infant years we had read Aesop’s fables and traditional ‘nursery’ stories such as the Babes in the Wood, Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and the three Bears and so on. As we grew older we graduated to the Greek myths and the plots of some of Shakespeare’s plays.. I can even remember the books from which we read them. They were Nathaniel Hawthorn’s ‘Tanglewood Tales’ and Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Thus I learned all about Pandora and her box, Theseus and the Minotaur, Jason and the Argonauts, The Trojan Horse, and the voyage home from Troy of Odyseus (I also remember learning that his wife’s name wasn’t pronounced Penny-lope as I had fondly imagined!). When, a few years later we started ‘doing’ Shakespeare’s plays, the plots of at least some of them were familiar to us. As we read aloud to the class we also learned how to speak ‘proper’ English – though we may still have preferred our own Suffolk dialect at home and in the playground!
As for the Bible, in those days it was felt that one religion and one moral code were as much as any child could be expected to cope with. We didn’t have RE. We had Scripture lessons and we studied both the Old and the New Testaments. We also, of course, had a School Assembly every day at which a passage from the Scriptures was read and a hymn, usually with a Biblical theme, was sung. Roman Catholic children, whose parents objected to our non-denominational lessons and assemblies, were excused them – but they had their own religious instruction elsewhere. I never met anyone who wasn’t at least nominally a Christian until years later when I was in the Army. Nobody left school without at least some acquaintance with the main themes of the Old and New Testaments
Nowadays all of that sounds antediluvian! I am sure that today, instead of ancient fables, myths and folk tales, they read (if they read aloud at all) something more ‘relevant’ to today’s world. Britain is a determinedly secular society, but one in which all children are taught something of the beliefs and practices of the world’s major religious faiths. The hope is, I suppose, that children will leave school with a feeling that there is a measure of truth in all religions. I think it much more likely that most will depart the education system convinced that all are equally delusional.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter. The ‘proles’ in George Orwell’s 1984 could fulfil their task of creating wealth for others without any acquaintance whatsoever with, for instance, ‘The Hare and the Tortoise’, ‘the Boy who cried Wolf’, ‘the Trojan Horse’, ‘the Labours of Hercules’, ‘the Judas kiss’, ‘the Labourers in the Vineyard’, ‘the Widow’s mite’, ‘the Prodigal Son’, ‘Feeding the Five Thousand’, ‘Casting pearls before swine’.
Twenty-first century ‘proles’ (they’re nowadays more likely to be regarded as Human Resource Units) can do the same. Cultural ignorance won’t stop the wheels of industry from turning, or bankers collecting their bonuses. Politicians will still complain, and tabloid headlines mock, when ‘turbulent priests’ denounce policies which leave coming generations with no interests beyond computer games, professional football and the hope of ‘coming up on the lottery’.
Britain may, for all I know, become the most materially prosperous nation on earth but we will (if I may use an almost-forgotten metaphor) like Esau, have ‘exchanged our cultural birthright for a mess of pottage’!
A sub-culture of illiteracy?
Perhaps we ought not to worry too much about what children read and be thankful for the fact that, in our area at least, most children can read.
A week or so ago the London Evening Standard ran a series of news stories about the appalling standard of literacy among young people in London, and the effect that this has on their employment prospects. The newspaper claimed that 30 percent of children grew up in homes with no books. I find little consolation in the fact that 85 percent had access to a computer games machine!
Old people like me tend to go on and on about how different – and how much better – things were in the days when we were young. I try hard not to do that because I know perfectly well that I certainly wouldn’t want to be living again in mid-twentieth century England. In many ways life is infinitely better today than it was then.
I think though that school leavers were more literate in the 1930s than they appear to be today. Most children left school at 14 able to read and write. Their grammar and spelling may have left a lot to be desired, but they weren’t illiterate. Most of us, for example, read one or more boys’ magazines every week. They weren’t just ‘comics’. Full of exciting adventure stories, they were illustrated with line drawings but were by no means simply cartoons with captions. We read them from cover to cover and swapped them with our mates. There was the ‘Hotspur’, the ‘Rover’, the ‘Magnet’, ‘the Skipper’, the ‘Bullseye’ (this specialised in horror stories and incurred parental disapproval!) and others. They catered for boys between about the ages of 10 and 16. There were others for younger children and yet more for girls. Don’t forget that there was no tv in those days, only crackly ‘wireless sets’. Reading ‘tuppenny bloods’ as we called them (because they were full of blood and thunder?) was a major home leisure activity – a means by which we could escape into a world of Cowboys and Indians, of pirates and smugglers, of cannibals on tropical islands, ‘lost tribes’ in central Africa and - a theme that always fascinated us working class kids - posh English public schools!
I was in the army from 1939 till 1946, always in the barrack room (never the officers’ or even the sergeants’ mess). I lived with farm labourers, shop assistants, factory hands, fishermen – most of them manual workers. I knew only one man who was unable to read the typed ‘Battery Orders’ displayed daily and who was unable to write home to his family, his wife or his girlfriend. He was neither unintelligent nor lazy and I have little doubt that today he would be diagnosed as dyslexic and given special support. This was, you’ll realize, during World War II when illiteracy would not have been a barrier to recruitment!
In prisoner of war camps it was writing and receiving letters to and from home that gave us hope and kept us sane. Some received ‘Dear John’ letters announcing that a girlfriend (occasionally a wife) had found her ‘true love’ and was saying goodbye. I was not one of those!
Nowadays I can no longer write with any confidence with a pen in my hand, but I can, thank God, still use a keyboard. Emails have made it possible for me to keep in touch with my scattered family and friends in a way that posted letters could never hope to do. Nor can I nowadays find the concentration needed to settle down with a book. This, I think, is partly failing eyesight and partly inability to remember what had happened on the previous page!
The Evening Standard is much better able than I am to discuss the effect that illiteracy has on job prospects. I do know though, from the experience of many years, how much pleasure the illiterate miss as a result their inability to enter the world of books – even if they never progressed beyond ‘who dunnits’ and ‘sex ‘n violence’ thrillers.
Finding employment for the disabled – and losing it for others!
The Government has begun its big initiative to help back into the job market disabled folk who are considered to be capable of work.. Firms who take them on as employees will have financial help when and for as long as they do so. I hope that the scheme will prove to be successful
I would have been more impressed if, at the same time, that same government’s policies were not ‘exporting overseas’ jobs that could, and should, have been performed by able-bodied workers here in Britain. Just last week came the news story that to meet the demands of the cuts to local authorities finances, Birmingham City Council is saving money by outsourcing IT work to India. This work can be done more cheaply in India because of the lower wages, and cheaper (and nastier!) housing, transport and other services that exist there.
Loss of jobs in this way is inevitable for as long as there is unrestricted movement world-wide of goods and capital, and values that rate the reduction of prices for the consumer and the maximising of profits for multi-national retailing empires, above the retention of jobs in the United Kingdom.
Cut into our public services even more deeply, increase the number of unemployed and reduce their benefit payments (there’s nothing like the incentive of starvation to encourage the unemployed to seek work!), widen still further the gap between the richest and poorest of our nation – and who knows, perhaps we too could become a source of cheap labour for wealthier nations! Is that a thought that cheers you up?
Lieben und geliebt zu werden ist das höchste Glück auf Erden
‘To love and to be loved in return is the greatest good fortune on earth’
Regular readers of this blog will know that I quoted the above words, culled from a German calendar in 1944, at the partnership ceremony (same-sex wedding) of my granddaughter Jo and her partner Siobhan on 23rd April this year. I said that, in 60 years of marriage Jo’s Grandma and I had discovered their truth. I hoped that Jo and Siobhan would do the same.
How delighted I was three weeks later when, on my 90th birthday, Jo presented me with photos of her Grandma and I, and of herself and Siobhan, Siobhan holding their partnership certificate! The photos were displayed within a frame bearing the quotation from the German poet and philosopher Goethe! It was a deeply appreciated birthday present - and one that proved that my words on 23rd April had fallen on receptive ears!
Jo and Siobhan (Jo is on the right) on their ‘wedding day’, and Heather and I taken, I think in the 1990s, when we had been married for about 50 years.
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