The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark

Re-reading children’s books as an adult is often something of a revelation. Often, the revelation is simply that the whole adult thing is actually a bit of a cover, which can be blown by a few well-chosen quotes from a mournful toy grey donkey, and you have to admit to yourself that being paid to sit at a desk all day is all very well, but in all honesty you’d rather be out playing Pooh Sticks. At other times you are taken aback by the sheer banality of the content, and begin to understand why your dad suddenly found something pressing he had to go and do – usually in the shed – when you asked if you could read “Where’s Spot?” together for the fiftieth time. (I’m not sure why they had such a pressing need to know where Spot was in the first place.) And sometimes the revelation is that actually there’s something rather clever – or, more often than not, rather rude – that you never noticed as a child and that was probably put in there to make the lives of the adults who read the books to the children marginally less tedious.

There are quite a few books from my childhood that have the first effect on me, and whose glories far outweigh those in the likes of Harry Potter, which I never really got into, not least because J. K. Rowling’s propensity for adverbs got more than a little irritating after a while. (Have you not noticed that in those books nobody ever just says anything? Everything has to be said casually, or urgently, or sharply, or coldly...) To name but a few, if you’ve never discovered Allan Ahlberg’s “Please Mrs Butler” or anything by Shirley Hughes (gorgeous drawings that look like places where real children live, as opposed to those perfect 1930s detached houses that came complete with a garage and a dog called Pat) I urge you to go and borrow them from your local library while you still can. Then of course there was the real Winnie the Pooh, which was far, far funnier than Disney’s poor yet popular imitation, especially when read on a cassette by Alan Bennett, and includes lines like “You can’t help respecting anybody who can spell Tuesday, even if he doesn’t spell it right.”

But there’s one book I’ve always loved more than any other, and judging by the outpourings on Facebook lots of other people agree with me – “The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark”. If you have no idea what I’m talking about I recommend you to go away and read it or, better still, get Maureen Lipman to read it for you (not in person – she’s probably quite expensive – but you can get it on CD in Waterstones for a fiver). Basically, it tells the story of Plop the baby barn owl (and where can you go wrong with a name like Plop?) who is (there’s a clue in the title, folks) afraid of the dark. So his mother sends him off on his own – in the daytime when they’re asleep – to find out all about the dark, in frankly a shocking display of owlet neglect that would have avian social services flocking to the nest these days. This premise thus established it’s easier to imagine a tiresomely predictable chain of events, at the end of which, lo and behold, Plop decides he does like the dark after all. And there is a bit of that at times. Fortunately for Plop, it so happens that everybody he meets seems to have an almost fetishistic love of the dark and absolutely no qualms about meeting a talking owl. Not one of them says “Yeah, I see what you mean, dark’s quite scary cos you might get mugged and that”. Instead they babble on about fireworks and stargazing and Father Christmas. Similarly Plop fortuitously stumbles upon lots of nice, wholesome people, and not the sort of people you might routinely expect to be hanging around in the dark. Jill Tomlinson might well add a touch of realism to the whole story by having Plop meet teenagers who, far from getting their kicks playing hide and seek in the woods and singing round a campfire are sitting on the wall of the local garage slowly drinking themselves into oblivion with a bottle of White Lightning. But she doesn’t, and, pleasingly, she mitigates the whole “this book is going to teach you something” with some lines so sweetly funny I (much to F’s annoyance, as he was trapped in the car with the CD playing) let out a delighted “awww!” every time I heard them. They include “I don’t think owls have those. Not barn owls, anyway,” and (Plop’s only a baby, you see, and he can’t really fly yet) “he closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and fell of his branch”. It occurred to me that this is a book I’ve never seen dramatised on TV, yet I have far more visual images from it than from many that have.

Anyway, I’ve rambled long enough and I’ve proven, as per the start of this post, that the whole adult thing is just an elaborate yet flimsy cover, and one day people will find me out and realise I’ve just been masquerading as an adult all this time, it’s just that these days I have a husband and gym membership and I drink coffee and real ale and other such things that denote grown-up status. In case you were wondering, I am actually going to give the CD to my 5-year-old niece, in the hope she’ll enjoy it as much as me. But it’s going on my ipod first...

Evolving English: Great for Geeks

I was quite excited by this British Library exhibition and project when I stumbled across an article about it on the BBC website a while back. For a start, it initiated a nice little chat thread on Facebook which kept me amused each time I checked back between appointments. One of the aims of the "Map Your Voice" element of this project is to see how much variation there is in the way we pronounce certain words and how these pronunciations may have changed over time, such as "schedule", "migraine", "garage" and "scone" (it's got a magic e, for goodness sake! If it was meant to be pronounced "skon" it wouldn't have a magic e, would it? Crikey, did you never watch Look and Read?!) A friend of mine rightly pointed out that he must have a different version of Mr Tickle, the book they make you read out as some sort of test on these things, to the one in the British Library, as his doesn't at any point get a migraine due to his stressful schedule and end up going to sleep in his garage. But anyway, I digress...

So yes, the laudable and rather interesting aims are to map voices to presumably see how pronunciation varies and how much it's changed. But I have a few issues with this, and as I haven't whined a lot on this blog recently I thought now was about time.

Firstly, there are two ways you can contribute to the study. You can go to the - free - exhibition... if you live in London or you happen to be there, and if the booths are working on the day you go (when we went they weren't - a recorded woman with a slightly stern voice got half way through the set of instructions then gave up.) This does possibly skew the results slightly favouring the south of England, tourists and migrants from both home and abroad, which possibly makes for an interesting if unrepresentative melting pot of accents. But the good people of the British Library have thought of that, and have allowed you to take part remotely, via the means of technology. This is great, if you have a computer, with a microphone, a gadget-obsessed husband to help you out and are not phobic about downloading then registering your details on the programme you need to use to do the recording. This potentially skews the results to the a.) young, b.) wealthy (just the other day various newspapers commented on just how many kids don't have access to a computer) and c.) less remote, and in doing so probably loses out on some interesting data, and consequently, something of the great variety of voices they are trying to "map" in the first place.

And finally - and this is what irrirated me most for purely personal reasons - the way they ask you to label your recording once you've done it doesn't really allow you to acount for and explain the very diversity they are investigating in the study. Perhaps this is all part of the plan, and the whole project is staffed by modern day Henry Higginses trying to work out every inch of every participants' past purely by their way of speaking. If so, good luck to them, because social mobility is such that this must be pretty difficult nowadays, even for an expert.

The instructions ask you to state on your recording title where you spent most of your childhood, and then asks you to pinpoint on a map where you made the recording - not necessarily where you live now, but just where you happened to be at the time. This is fine if you're, say, from Liverpool and never moved. It's less fine if you're from a Bradford-based family but spent part of your childhood in Lancashire and your teenage years dividing your time between Guernsey and Yorkshire, with a brief spell at a boarding school with people from all over the world before setting down roots of a sort in London. And I suspect some people who originated overseas have even more of a problem than I did. Despite the very obvious fact that putting down "Lancashire" as a place of origin made my whole being shudder to its core (and my apologies to the British Library, who at the end of my recording will have heard a little snippet of "Put Lancashire", "But I don't have a Lancashire accent" at the end of the recording before I pressed the "pause" button), it's also misleading. Accents - as David Crystal, my favourite Linguistics Professor (what? You don't all have a favourite linguistics professor?)and whose own accent is a mix of RP with splashes of Liverpool and North Wales - has pointed out, are formed as a result of all sort of different things: where you're from, where your family is from, where you live, where you study, what you do... and they adapt depending on where you are and to whom you're speaking. This is why, when I go north, my husband tells me I sound Northern, whilst my Bradford-based family think I sound posh. Having an accent that isn't RP (which IS an accent, by the way, there's no such thing as "not having an accent", unless you spend your days blissfully silent) can be a mixed blessing. Dickheads like this will actively not recruit someone with a "working class accent" (and I put that in brackets because I'd love to see their definition of what makes an accent "working class", and perhaps back it up with some sort of evidence, which they should be able to do, what with being lawyers and all that?) At the same time, some accents apparently make you sound more trustworthy than others and also more intelligent - but obviously these are not qualities top law firms are keen to portray. And others are just, well, dead sexy. (Um, sorry, but on this, like many other topics, the Telegraph and I differ here. I'd go for Irish every time. Mmm...)

The exhibition, though, is superb. It's perfect for geeks like me who want to gaze at Very Old Books and murmur "hmm, that book is very old" and feel smugly intellectual about their Anglo-Saxon content, some of which I can still actually understand! (I realise my BA dissertation in the decline in use of the "be" prefix in post Anglo-Saxon word formation does little for my image, carefully honed to no avail throughout this blog...) It also includes a Tony Harrison poem, a section on the history of word games and lots of very lovely recordings from speakers all over the world, including, bizarrely, Guernsey. It's open til April, so do go along, and do map your voice online, while I go and rewrite Mr Tickle....