The Storyteller’s Son

My mother was a storyteller. As children she would regale my sisters and me with stories of her own childhood, growing up in the East End of London before the war. Sometimes she told stories to amplify a lesson she wanted us to learn, but more often than not it was for the sheer joy of the tale. These stories were oft repeated and told with such vividness that I would picture myself living in the houses and streets where she was brought up, and through them too began to see my aunts and uncle, her siblings, in a different light. The stories gave me a sense of place and identity, which was something I never got from my father, who was definitely not a natural storyteller.

Like many women of her generation she gave up her career to bring up her family and in so doing largely stopped generating her own stories and instead lived vicariously through her children and their exploits. In later life those experiences came to her third-hand as she took on-board stories about her grandchildren, but that didn’t stop her re-telling them in minute detail. And because the Storyteller knew that a story’s authenticity can be lost if some of the detail is omitted she was not afraid to fill in the gaps if she considered the original version was deficient: on more than one occasion I recall listening to a tale that sounded vaguely familiar only to realise it was something I had told her previously, and that she had embellished for mass consumption. Very much a case of ‘playing the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order’.

Curiously she was not a good teller of jokes. Her problem was that she got so wrapped up in the punch line that she couldn’t remember the pre-amble that led up to it. Many times she would arrive home still chuckling over something she had only just heard and we were left to try and guess the first part of the joke, which we invariably failed to do.

(She died almost four years ago, two days after her 95th birthday and, with a symmetry that would have pleased her storytelling instincts, two days after the birth of her third great-grandchild).

I am that storyteller’s son. Those that have worked with me over the years will know that I too rarely miss an opportunity to tell a story to illustrate a truth or use an allegory to explain a concept. I think and talk in pictures and it must drive people crazy waiting for me to get to the point. I dread to think how many productive hours have been lost by my storytelling!

The great fear I have, as my disability increasingly restricts my ability and willingness to get out to create new adventures, is that I will soon run out of stories to tell. This fear is amplified in our present time when, not only am I not able to experience new things because of being in lockdown, but none of the people I talk to are either, and that has left me feeling bereft. The memes, funny videos and clips of the latest antics of Donald Trump that do the rounds are a poor substitute for real life; they amuse, but they don’t feed the soul.

For the storytellers amongst us these are trying times. My mother would have hated it.

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