Old favourites, new audience

Over the past year or so, as part of my day job, I've been partnering on a number of Paint the Town Read projects in western Sydney. Paint the Town Read is a community reading and early literacy initiative, developed more than 12 years ago in Parkes by the dynamic Rhonda Brain, then the principal at Parkes PS. Rhonda was concerned about the literacy levels of the schools' students, and so decided to put all their resources into literacy programs for the K-2 students (Stage 1 in NSW).This made a difference, but they were still only getting about 85% of their kids up to benchmark, and what the teachers determined was that the children who were falling behind weren't coming to school with the required degree of literacy-readiness—they were coming from text-poor home environments, where they weren't read to or exposed adequately to language through books, talking, singing, rhymes and so on.

So Rhonda decided a community education and awareness-raising project was needed, and so Paint the Town Read was born. 12 years later, the project's mascot the Reading Bug turns up at all community events; business around town carry posters and coasters and flyers about the importance of reading to your baby, tips for reading with your children, there's an annual community reading day, and it's just generally been absorbed into the fabric of community life. According to Rhonda, a local police chief said something to the effect of "In [insert name of another large western NSW town here] they steal cars; in Parkes they read books." Men in singlets in the local RSL club can be heard extolling the pleasures of reading with their children. And when the Reading Bug had a baby bug, the entire town turned out to welcome the new arrival.

(I wish there were a central site to link to, but there's not as yet, although Rhonda is busy working to make PTTR a national strategy for early literacy and I imagine a website is now just a matter of time. In the mean time, if you search for Paint the Town Read you will find a range of links that go to resources and a variety of local community PTTR projects.)

Paint the Town Read is taking off all over the place in western Sydney. In the Blue Mountains, Paint the Blue Read has been working effectively for more than a year. Launches for the St Marys area were held last year at Oxley Park  and St Marys South Public Schools, events were held in Riverstone and Mount Druitt and the program is starting as we speak in Blacktown, Auburn and Parramatta. In time, I'm hoping it might spread across to south western Sydney as well. The projects are being driven by community workers from Mission Australia and the like, and I've been helping to provide resources and authors for events, and sitting on some of the steering committees.

Oxley Park PS has become something of a hub for the project in St Marys,and has established a weekly reading morning at the school, where parents are encouraged to read with their children before school begins. (I was able to donate a box of the many review copies of picture books I receive at work for Oxley Park's reading tent.) To launch this new addition to the school calendar, they held a special reading day a couple of weeks ago, and I was invited along to be one of the guest readers. We were asked to bring along favourite books from our own childhood to share with the students. (Other reading guests included the Canteen Lady and groundsman, I believe, so I was in excellent company!)

I took along three books, not knowing what age I'd be reading to—Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh, Ruth Manning-Sanders' A Book of Ghosts and Goblins and a favourite picture book, Firebrand—Push Your Hair Out Of Your Eyes by Natalie Scott and Sandra Smith.

I started with a Year 2 class, and so the choice was clear—it was Firebrand for these kids. Now, I adored this book as a child, largely because, like Firebrand, my mother was always at me to push my hair out of my eyes. (Although my hair was nothing like Firebrand's gorgeous thick, deep red hair, alas.) My memory is that we used to borrow the book every year from Gosford Library when we were on the Central Coast for our annual summer holiday, although my friend Cassandra Golds remembers it being available from the Katoomba library (or it may have been the school library) when we were both children there in 1969 or so. (The book was published in 1968.)

I really didn't know how the children would respond to it—it's very much a moral tale, with naughty, bad-tempered Firebrand learning her lesson about tying her hair back neatly when she falls out of a tree (which she's climbed and discovered how much she can see when the wind blows her hair back, and she falls, of course, when her hair falls into her face as she looks down as she descends). I remember feeling a little put out at Firebrand's reformation myself as a child, but even so, the book clearly resonated with me—so much so that my parents eventually bought me my own copy.

The other thing I wasn't sure they;d respond to was the illustrations. The book is almost hilariously 60s psychedelic in its illustrative style and colours. (You can see a small low-res image of the cover here. Alas, I have since packed my copy and can't scan any of the pages to show you.) And of course, being published in 1968, the palette is limited by the printing technology of the day.

Well, they hung off every word. Laughed, shivered, loved it. Asked questions, pointed at the pictures—everything little kids do when you read to them. They particularly seemed to like Firebrand's four aunts, for those of you who know the book and remember them. I didn't expect them, of course, to reject the book openly on the grounds of its period look, or slightly old-fashioned morality tale feel (actually, much as I warn my students off writing them, I suspect very young children rather like plainly stated morals in their stories!), but I did wonder if a 42 year old book would hold their attention. And it did. A story is a story, and a good story will always find an audience. And a shared good story is perhaps the best of all.

The next class I read to was a Year 5 (or maybe 6?) class, potentially a tougher audience, but they were great too. (Oxley Park, it must be said, is a fantastic school and has a wonderful, strong but kindly and warm principal in Karen Maraga.) I told them about Harriet the Spy—they didn't know the book, and only a couple had even seen the movie—and read them a few of my favourite of Harriet's notebook observations ("If Marion Hawthorne doesn't watch out she's going to grow up into a lady Hitler") and showed them the illustration of her classmates after they have found and read that notebook. 

I decided, though, to read them a story that has stayed with me—dare I say, haunted me!—for more than thirty years. She's perhaps not all that well known or remembered these days, but Ruth Manning-Sanders was one of the most popular authors among my friends. I remember whenever we'd go to the Auburn Library, we'd go straight to the M shelves to borrow (and re-borrow) one of her wonderful collections of folk tales. I loved A Book of Folk and Fairy Tales, A Book of Princes and Princesses—I love all of them, but I especially loved A Book of Ghosts and Goblins and in that book, I most especially loved the story "Golden Hair".

"Golden Hair" (from Corsica) is the story of an evil Count who falls in love with a peasant girl named Golden Hair—or rather, falls in love with her cascade of beautiful hair. Golden hair's lover kills the Count and must flee—and when he sends word to her for a year later, it is instead the wicked, dead Count who comes for her.

As he rides with Golden Hair to the City of the Dead—and Golden Hair does not realise at first it is not her lover with whom she rides—the story repeats this refrain:

Patata, patata, patata, go faster go faster, go faster!

It was utterly thrilling. And I have had that refrain in my head (not permanently, you understand...) for decades...

So I read "Golden Hair" to the kids at Oxley Park and I can tell you—this ghost story has not lost a shred of its power to enthrall. And that actually doesn't surprise me. Manning-Sanders was an extraordinary writer, with a fantastically eccentric and effective way with language*. It was as much the power of her language as it was her stories that captured our imagination as children—and the children in that classroom at Oxley Park, far from Wales and the west country of England where she lived and worked her days.

I should also say that a big part of the appeal of Manning-Sanders' collections were the wonderful illustrations by Robin Jacques. Unfortunately, my scanner is suddenly playing up, so I can't scan the back cover of A Book of Ghosts and Goblins, which features the illustration for "Golden Hair", but if you look at Jacques' Wiki entry (linked above) there are links to plenty of sites showing his illustrations, and I'll try for the scan again later. However, here's a smallish image of the cover:

I've been steadily collecting copies of the Manning-Sanders collections. Most of them are ex-library copies, which is fitting, given I discovered her in the library, and I am pleased to have them. Oh, for a Jacques original!

So—stories that straddle the ages, the generations, that transcend period and fashion and place—so many stories! It's such a delight to get to share them with kids. I forget that, because I don't often personally get the chance. I need to do that more often. Paint the town read.

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(*I didn't think of that as a child reader, but I discovered it from the inside years later when I was working at The School Magazine and discovered, to my astonishment and delight, that we had unpublished Manning-Sanders stories on file—and I got to edit some of them! Not that you'd dare do much more than a light run-through for fear of disrupting her delicately, yet complexly constructed prose. Apparently the long-lived Manning-Sanders had an similarly long-living daughter, who sent her mother's unpublished stories to the School Magazine—and I'll leave it at that for Jonathan Shaw to fill out the story in the comments!)