Time Travel for Nines and Under

It was my birthday on Saturday and just as I do every year, I listened to a lot of music, drank more than was really wise and thought about the past. More often than not, what comes to me is images; mainly the 60’s. So it’s Viet Nam, Woodstock, the Battle of Grosvenor Square, a Black American Athlete at the 68 Olympics raising a black gloved fist, the Chicago cops running amok and attacking anti-war demonstrators, Burntollet Bridge, the Battle of the Bogside, Free Derry…the list goes on and on.

From there I leap frogged to my career as travelling poet going into schools and have so many good memories and now so much regret that I can no longer. I’m told by teachers who wish to remain annonymous that creative work in schools is all but dead and that these days poetry is something to answer ten questions on.

And then of course it hit me – yet again- that as far as “educationalists” are concerned, I’m an irrelevance. I console my self with the words “Their loss!”

Of course the big question here is Why?

Is it to raise standards?

Instil a love and appreciation of poetry?

Well NO! Simply because it won’t. Every piece of real educational research into learning has come to the exact opposite conclusions…and yet it goes on. At this point, I could go off at a tangent as to why I believe this is happening but won’t…not just now anyway. I’d prefer your thoughts. Instead, I’ll give you the piece I wrote a mere 13 years ago and ask the simple question: how do poets, parent and teachers who agree with me fight back?

Time Travel for the Nines and Under

(originally published in Literacy Time, Scholastic Publications, 2012)

“Imagination is to space, what memory is to time..”: C. Day Lewis

When I began writing for children, I realised that even though the trappings of my childhood (black and white tv etc) were different from those of today’s children, the things that mattered to me were not.

At seven I believed (secretly) in magic, didn’t like the dark and loved getting presents. I also loved listening to stories about “the olden days”. Kings and Queens we learned about in school didn’t seem real. My Grandad’s account of the 1914 Christmas Truce did.

He described it all in such graphic detail, that I could see moonlight glinting barbed wire, feel cold mud, hear Silent Night in German drifting across No-Man’s Land. In my imagination, I was there.

Not quite a quick trip in the TARDIS but the next best thing.

“...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it.”: Ted Hughes

Some years ago an Everton school asked me to oversee a local history project. We discovered that Everton, like most place names ending in –ton, began as a Saxon settlement on a riverbank in a heavily forested valley. We talked about t the area now and what it would have looked like a thousand years ago. They didn’t have any trouble at all imagining trees, birdsong, a clean river etc. They just remembered their last school outing to a country park. I then provided this frame:

Now Everton is

(The sound of) Cars and lorries roaring up and down

(The sight of) Chip papers blowing down the street

But Everton was

(The sound of) Blackbirds singing in the trees

(The sight of) Sunlight glinting on a clean river

I gave them the opening line of each verse then asked them to provide three new lines of their own. Substitute your locale for Everton and try the same exercise. Once first drafts are completed, remove the bracketed phrases.

“...trust to your imagination...” : Coleridge

One of my better poems was prompted by reading the story of Caractacus in Rosemary Sutcliffe’s Heroes and History. I imagined a Roman soldier giving an eyewitness account of a battle against Caractacus, his being brought to Rome in chains and finally ending his days as a drunk in some Roman tavern. Later on, as a teacher, I retold the same story - i.e. sketched out main details as a flow chart, memorised them and then told it in my own words - and asked my pupils to pick one incident and describe it as an eyewitness.

I wasn’t overly concerned with “historical authenticity” at that stage. I simply wanted to emphasise the humanity of the participants.

It’s an exercise I still repeat and works whether you’re looking at an actual event e.g. a Viking longship moving towards you OR a mythological one e.g. Beowulf’s fight with Grendel.

“...it can reveal the conditions of living.” : Babette Deutsch

On a visit to South West Ireland a few years ago, I went on a boat trip out to an isolated rocky crag that was a major bird sanctuary. On our return journey the weather turned and waves loomed up on either side of what suddenly seemed like a very flimsy craft. The skipper assured me that we’d be fine but advised me to think “on something pleasant – it’ll help, believe me.” It didn’t. The deck was awash and my feet soaked with cold sea water. A while later I was reading Kevin Crossley-Holland’s translation of the Saxon poem The Seafarer :

My feet/were afflicted by cold, fettered in frost,/frozen chains.

As a description, it was perfect and helped me when I devised this next exercise. It’s about being at sea and has since worked for everything from Viking longships, Roman galleys, the Argos and Voyages of Discovery.

On board this ship...

I hear seagulls calling

+ 3 of their own

I see white-topped waves

+ 2 of their own

I feel cold and afraid

+ 1 of their own

But when I’m sleeping

I dream

For the last line I encouraged them write the first thing that came into their heads. Apart from the occaisional self-appointed jester who’d put in “a new motorbike” or some such thing, the majority would choose an image of safety and/or home. The results were often surprisingly moving.

“and my conclusion is this..” : Shakespeare

As a trainee teacher, the best piece of advice I was ever given was “start with the particular”. Now I’m not suggesting that you should abandon all the other elements on the curriculum and do nothing but write poems and stories. What I’m saying is that poems and stories are a way into the curriculum. By inviting children to imagine history from an individual human perspective, we can enable children to Time Travel and make it more real.