M Jr began her new life as a junior high school student last month and as I suspected, this marked the end of an era – the era, that is, of reading her and M Jr II a bedtime story.
Both my mother and father were avid readers (she a librarian and he a second-hand bookseller), although oddly, I have no memory of them reading to me and my brother when we were young. Even so, I had various motives for wanting to read to M Jr and M Jr II from as early in their lives as possible.
First, I thought it would be a good way of adding more English to their daily routine (there is also the Linguaphone-related theory that if you listen to something before you go to sleep, it is magically imprinted on your brain). Second, I wanted to cut into their total screen time and cut down on pre-sleep blue light. Third, I thought it would convey the magic of storytelling and by extension, instill in them a life-long love of books. Fourth, I had a kind of vague, rose-tinted idea that it would deepen the bond between us as parent and children.
And did I achieve those goals? Well, I would go so far as to say that I wasn’t entirely unsuccessful.
For example, one of the books that we read many, many times when they were smaller was called Peter’s Pebbles, about a boy who magically turns the pebbles he has collected from the beach into animals and so on. One evening, I lay down on the futon between M Jr and M Jr II and started to read when, like the audience at a pop concert, M Jr began reciting the story of Peter’s Pebbles without me needing to. Even now she still can’t read English – I’m relying on her curriculum from this point onwards to do the job of teaching her – so she had simply memorised the story through the sheer repetition of hearing it so often.
On another occasion much more recently, I was about to start a different book – possibly a comic, although I’ve forgotten exactly what it was – when M Jr II got there first and began reading it aloud himself – not perfectly, but in a mastered-more-than-20-letters-of-the-alphabet kind of way. Again, I’ve always prioritised conversation and made no attempt to teach him how to read, and when, astonished, I asked how he had learned, he said, ‘Oh, I taught myself while we were in England.’ ‘How did you do that?’ ‘I was just looking at all the words we saw on signs and things.’ Occasionally, I’ve also read things like picture dictionaries to them and been pleasantly surprised by how often they can guess an English word from just the definition or provide the definition from just the word.
As for screen time, I think I’ve been less successful, as they tend to get a lot these days and have always had the TV on until bedtime. Also, there were evenings when, even after the TV had been turned off, I was too tired to read to them, they were too tired to listen, or one or other of us fell asleep while we were doing so, thereby further reducing the radio of printed word to moving pictures.
Have they developed a love of books? It’s too early to say, although they certainly like comics, which I try to supply them with paper versions of as an additional screen-time tactic. They don’t, however, read anywhere near as many ‘proper’ books as I did when I was their age, which may be because there simply weren’t as many TV programmes to watch (or games to play or smartphones to ogle) in the 70s and 80s. Also, even if they did want to read more, it wouldn’t be in English because of my speaking-and-listening policy – despite teaching himself the basics, even M Jr II isn’t at the point where he can sit down and read an entire book by himself.
So how about the mysterious parent and child bond? As much as the act of reading books itself, having ten or fifteen minutes together at the end of the day has contributed to this. If something in a book was funny, we laughed together about it, if something was interesting, we talked about it, and if the book wasn’t interesting in the first place or we just weren’t in the mood for stories, we talked about something else instead.
Other books besides Peter’s Pebbles that became favourites included Stanley’s Party (a beautifully illustrated story from Canada about a dog who takes advantage of the fact that his owners go out every evening to make himself at home, raid the fridge, and eventually have a massive house party), Raymond Briggs’ When the Wind Blows (they became surprisingly absorbed in this, possibly because they’ve learned about Hiroshima and Nagasaki at school), the Richard Scarry books, Winnie the Pooh (I didn’t remember much about these from my childhood, but found myself almost crying with laughter while reading them out loud as a fifty year old), the Mr Men and Little Miss books, and of course Roald Dahl.
A large proportion of the books that I read were brought to Japan in my suitcase after trips to the UK, although of course, M Jr and M Jr II didn’t always like the same things that I did or that I expected them to, and I sometimes reassessed my view of a book after reading it for the first time in more than 40 years.
A case in point is Danny the Champion of the World, which was my absolute favourite when I was a child – partly because it depicts such an ideal father-and-son relationship, which resonated with me as the son of a single mother whose only saw his own father once in a while. Reading it again, the first half was as brilliant and magical as I remembered, particularly the scene where Danny wakes to find himself alone in the caravan, illegally drives a car to the woods to find out what’s happened to his father, and very nearly gets caught by the police on the way. The second half, however, was a bit of a let down. First – and as M Jr and M Jr II also noticed – there are several points in the story that stretch the bounds of credibility too far. For example, how are we supposed to believe that two people – one of them a child and the other with a broken leg – can carry 120 pheasants to their car in one go and just two sacks? Speaking of broken legs, how does Danny’s father manage to cover the five or six miles to the woods on foot just as quickly with a plastercast on one leg as before he broke it? How is it possible to fit the 120 pheasants into a single souped-up pram (from which they then break free and fly away)? And is catching 120 pheasants really enough to scupper the entire hunting party the next day (despite being too many to carry or fit in a pram, it seems like too few for a landowner to hold a grand event at which all sorts of people will spend the day shooting the shit out of any and every pheasant they see)?
There is also a very long, fairly boring, and unnecessarily dialogue-heavy scene in the last part of the book, during which several different characters simply stand around talking and watching things happen. Without a Wiki-check, I don’t know if there’s been a film adaptation of Danny the Champion…, but I’d be willing to bet good money that if there has, this scene was either cut, drastically re-written, or ruined the film in the same way as it did the book.
The Dahl books that I do think have stood the test of time are The BFG, The Witches (neither of which I read as a child, but found myself being carried away by as if I still was), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and particularly Fantastic Mister Fox, which again had me LOL-ing at the grotesquely hilarious trio of farmers, with their Dickensian names and disgusting habits – one of the reasons for Dahl’s genius is that he is not afraid to make the bad guys and gals in his books genuinely repulsive and unremittingly awful, to the point that if a modern-day writer used the same technique, they may be criticised for being non-PC.
On the other hand, M Jr and M Jr II actually told me to stop reading Matilda after just 20 or 30 pages because they found it so boring, and I felt similarly uninspired by The Twits, which seemed half-finished or that it was written when Dahl had lost his mojo or had a publishing contract to fulfill.
When we went to the UK in 2022, I brought back several books by David Walliams (purchased in charity shops, of course), who appears to be phenomenally successful and has been heralded as a worthy successor to Dahl. Although it is uncharitable of me to say so, I have to say that with the exception of one or two enjoyable or funny scenes, I was deeply disappointed and would much rather have watched a Little Britain DVD or even the highlights of his swim across the English Channel.
As it happens, M Jr II lost interest in my bedtime stories several months ago and began reading a manga by the bedside light instead. M Jr may have carried on listening for a while longer, but now spends so much time in the shower that she usually goes to bed when I’m already tucked up in my own bed and fast asleep. Still, I feel as if I have done my job as a parent and that one day, they may even be inspired to read to their own children (and in English?)…
