top of page
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
Search

We are a Raft

thestorystein

The Sheffield train from St. Pancras slowly eases out of the platform and we find ourselves trundling along towards the first stop and my final destination, Leicester. A Colombian man takes the seat next to me, and in a somewhat inebriated manner offers me a corona from his dishevelled backpack. I politely refuse, whereupon, he begins whistling gladly and going through the strange ritual of attempting to suck in his stomach which is protruding through his somewhat inadequate vest top.

The wonderful Attenborough Arboretum is once again our venue...

Putting this amusing but strange scene to one side, I gaze out of the window and watch the dust rising from the tractors harvesting the fields in the distance. It is now my 5th year facilitating this same storytelling club in Leicester. Debbie, who runs the storytelling club, has now set up a new charity entitled “The Raft”, which has aims to empower vulnerable families in the Leicestershire area to create community and support each other.

I reflect as I plan and look out the window that it has always been a part of my year that is a privilege and a luxury, to be able to spend time with these children and hear their stories but also an opportunity to reflect on my own practices and ways of storytelling.

The Colombian leans his head over, interrupting my rhythm and thoughts, and laughs at my daily plan, “Is you hombre? HA HA HA! Very good, very good…” He points at my scraggly cartoon drawing of myself and my beard. I nod, as he takes another swig of corona, before he gently submits himself to the rattling train and falls soundly asleep.

Speaking of corona, the inside of my throat feels as though someone has been rubbing it with a particularly coarse sandpaper and has neglected to remove the sawdust. I wonder how I will be able to run a week of storytelling with no voice. God quietly reminds me of the simple fact that ultimately he will guide us this week and I just need to lean in to that.

I rely on my voice a lot. It is one of my gifts as a storyteller, my ability to go high or low, to express interesting intonations, to put on different accents. Without a voice, I feel lost and yet simultaneously strangely empowered to explore other mediums of storytelling that are not so reliant on a raspy frog somewhere in the back of my throat. When the gifts we have been blessed with have been taken away, what is left? What are we when everything is stripped back? I am reminded that “We can give everything away to the poor but if we have not love we are just a clanging cymbal…” Ultimately, I am here to demonstrate to these children how valuable and important they are. I need no great booming storytelling voice for this, just appropriate and select actions and words.

 

 

Crocodile Tears and Real Tears


We began our sessions as always via an introduction with a puppet. A number of the children were uncomfortable with using my go to puppet, Curtis the crocodile, on account of previous offences of biting in past storytelling sessions. I therefore also offered Jemima the cat and Freddy the sad fox as alternatives. Curtis, using a few crocodile tears, displayed that he was somewhat upset by this rejection facilitating some children to still use him.

Curtis and his crocodile tears

I have noticed over the last 5 years of working with primary school aged children that generally the levels of anxiety have heightened over the past 3-4 years. Children seem to be increasingly afraid to try new things, to push themselves outside of their comfort zone, to meet new people. If this is the case with primary school children who have had no experience of the care system or what it is like to be fostered/adopted, then this is heightened again for the ones who have experienced these things such as the children part of The Raft programme. The global pandemic doubtless has had a significant impact on children of primary school age and has inextricably shaped their world and the way they see it. The seemingly endless streams of entertainment, screen time and social media I’m sure are also playing a factor. I imagine also that many parents at this time are experiencing financial stresses which equally cannot help but seep out into family life. We are living in an anxious age, how can we be non-anxious presences in this anxious age? I genuinely believe that telling stories, whether they be allegorical (forest is being cut down), metaphorical (the badger under the blue hood), literal (I have never been on a plane) or just plain fantastical (the small snail that grew), offer a means of exorcising anxiety or at the very least expressing some of this anxiety through a safe medium. One of the children, B, I could see was very anxious coming into the week. He was unwilling to participate in the first day of puppet introductions, an anxious and hunted look appearing on his face. As the session progressed he became more involved and drew a wonderful drawing of a badger hiding under a blue hood. Much to my regret now, I asked him whether he could write a short story about his wonderful drawing of the badger under the blue hood. Thinking I was helping him I began dictating a short story and allowing him time to add his own ideas. He began writing frantically and anxiously the tears flowing freely from his eyes onto the page like an ice stalactite starting to melt. I realised I was causing him distress and told him he could stop writing. In relief he put his pencil down, I asked him what he needed and he said that he just needed some space.

In spite of having a few tears on the last day in saying goodbye, throughout the week he has grown in confidence, told stories through puppets and shown bravery and resilience in communicating with those around him in the group. And perhaps also, these tears are a sign of strength, just like Curtis’ fake tears, they are a flag waving to others that we need something from them whether that be a warm hug or some space on our own.

 



Puppetry and agency


Throughout the week the children have been finding puppets that I have hidden throughout the arboretum living out various stories of their own. The first day they were lost, the second day they were injured from the storm from the previous day, third scared, fourth hungry and fifth angry (Curtis the crocodile ate their breakfast). The children love this part of the session. As they run out into the sunshine and the trees, there is a sense I think that they are collaborating in and immersed in an imaginative world that they are playing a part in, that they are shaping. R exerts some of his bountiful


The Arboretum is the children's puppet hunting ground!

energy leaping from tree to tree in search of another puppet. M gently caresses the unicorn puppet that she gently saved from being trapped under a pile of logs. O giggles as she watches L ask Freddie the sad fox “What happened in the storm?” There is an agency and a power here that the children can exert over the puppets. For a time, they can be the ones who look after others and are fully in charge. Dr. Sylvan Baker, an applied theatre practitioner who works with care experienced children, explains that as children are able to tell and share stories that they are able to regain some of the agency they have lost through the traumatic process of the care system and all the processes that surround it. With the children I have most certainly seen that they have grown in confidence and a sense that they have control over the process.

Interestingly, throughout the week the puppets have also helped me with my own lack of agency over my voice. With my storytelling skills severely damaged by my raspy and hoarse voice, the puppets have come in handy for some subtler storytelling where they themselves are telling the story, without me having to say much at all. After the first session in the afternoon stormy clouds rolled in. Thunder boomed like someone banging a large drum over our heads and there were forks of lightning streaking the sky. The next day I hid the puppets as usual and informed the children that they had been caught out


A rare form of zebra cries out for help after being caught in a tree during the storm...

in the storm yesterday and we needed to rescue them from various parts of the forest. As the children surged out in excitement they were already invested in the story because they had been part of it yesterday afternoon.  B asks me if the puppets who were injured from the storm will be okay. L peers excitedly at the trees hoping to see a giraffe or elephant hanging from a branch in need of rescuing. In some ways for that time as a storyteller, I have become wonderfully obsolete as the children tell their own stories about what happened through the puppet’s eyes and voice.

On day 3, I’m afraid to say that a fever in the night and an even worse voice the next morning meant that I reluctantly had to release the storytelling for the day over to Debbie. The day was spent in a blur of sleep, lemsip, strepsils and chicken soup lovingly prepared by my host family. Debbie, by all accounts, did fantastically well and the children were able to have another day storytelling. I return to the question again, “What are we when everything is stripped back?” Ultimately, the human spirit is one which contains considerable resilience and Debbie, in spite of feeling overwhelmed and nervous about running the storytelling session dug deep and overcame her anxieties to deliver the session with the support of Chris. Some of the children, who struggled with the change of someone else delivering the session still told stories and had fun. I, a shivering wreck throughout the day, managed to arrive at the end of the day feeling much restored. Even as we suffer and struggle, there is a beauty in the human spirit of resilience, fortitude and community as we join together to overcome.

 

Problems and Solutions


Each day I offered the children an opportunity to work as a team to construct an object or a scene and to act it out. I usually offered a problem like, “There are some people who are going to chop down the arboretum what can we do to stop them?” Or “We have just landed on the moon when an alien has appeared to stop us from returning to earth until we are his slaves for 7 years, what do we do?” Or “Three elephants have escaped from the zoo and are running riot in the city what can we do?”


The rocket ship complete with an inbuilt kitchen is ready to launch...

I have learnt that when you present children with a problem scenario they are much better able to engage with it imaginatively rather than if you tell them, “Okay, now make a play about someone chopping down trees.”  The problem to them becomes a real entity which needs to be dealt with and thus they engage with it creatively. There are huge benefits to this kind of imaginative play. Doctors and champions of imaginative play, Jerome and Dorothy Singer, explain that children who engage in imaginative storytelling have more agency and make more positive decisions as adults because they have learnt to miniaturise problems and tackle them in the world of play as children.

The children typically split themselves into two groups, girls and boys. The differences between the two groups were interesting. The girls typically built much more concise


A and his dad construct a fantastic fence to stop the people from cutting down the forest...

constructions i.e. a fantastic den they were camped in to protest cutting down the arboretum, a rocket ship equipped with a kitchen and a city with a school and hospital. The boys typically made a much less concise construction, focusing more on mini rehearsals of how they would deal with the situation, at times with violence “We’ve made a cannon to shoot at the people cutting down the forest, BOOM!” and at other times less so, “We’ve constructed a huge magnet that will suck the keys to our spaceship out of the alien’s hands.” Both the boys and the girls worked well as a team to build their narratives and structures to come up with excellent solutions to the problems I presented to them, demonstrating the most collective confidence in presenting and telling stories I have seen for these past 5 years.

Debbie kindly drops me to the train station for my departure and we discuss ideas for a podcast on storytelling on the way. I hastily jump out of the car at the nearest traffic light and give them a cheery wave which is reciprocated in turn. I leave Leicester with, as always, a sense of gratitude for the time that I have been able to spend with these amazing children and their carers/parents. I am also filled with a sense of hope. Hope in the knowledge that these children and indeed their parents/carers, as they have engaged with and continue to engage with imaginative storytelling in their lives will be able to overcome the problems that life holds for them. Hope that, as they work together in community on this cobbled together raft that we all cling to, that they can overcome. As the train rolls out of Leicester station, I gaze pensively out the window, and the question returns to me again, “What are we when everything else is stripped back?” We are storytellers, we are resilient, we are children, we are empathetic, we are stronger together, we are community, we are carers, we are life and joy givers, we are friends, we are human beings, we are a raft.


If you would like to listen to a podcast of Debbie and I discussing the benefits of storytelling for children who have been fostered or adopted please follow this link...https://open.spotify.com/episode/7dHwc4xwKqBP9UvQArPinF?si=4a3a52bcf59e4394

25 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


bottom of page