Reading Out Loud
Published in Eland newsletter, 2025
Being read to out loud has magic to it. Children and old people immediately understand that it means not just compelling words but close company, real engagement and an abandonment of all other distractions to engage in a shared, lived experience of now. It is impossible to be a good reader, caught up in the musical pace of your narrative and keeping a weather eye over your menu of accents, and not be totally present.
I still cherish my memories when the thrill of the story was in fantastic contrast to the close, protective warmth of the person reading to you: the excited delirium of listening to my mother read The Water Babies whilst running a high temperature from scarlet fever, especially the bit when the boys become prickly and cannot be loved and trusted and cuddled any more. This moment of Freudian high-drama was made more intense by the fact that all four of us children took turns sharing my mother’s double bed while our father was away at sea.
Our father was a great raconteur, who made long car journeys entertaining with ribald jokes and farcical anecdotes about his many failures as a young midshipman. On camping holidays, he could recount an amoral Saki short story as we sat looking into the fire, but when the weather was sufficiently bad, he would read to us. One Easter they rented a very small, very remote Welsh cottage from a friend. We had climbed to the summit of Cader Idris in the rain that day, so after tea we were all in the right mood to listen to Robert Louis Stevenson. A life spent in the Royal Navy, from the age of ten, gave my father an impressive range of voices with which to bring the characters of Treasure Island alive. I’ll never forget the arrival of blind Pugh at the Admiral Benbow Inn. That afternoon he threw himself into the performance and we all screamed when his voice was interrupted by measured footsteps stomping across the roof. Later, we discovered that these ghostly footsteps were caused by an old ram who knew how to climb the cottage’s low back wall in order to graze the grass that grew through the old thatched roof. We all insisted on sleeping in the same bedroom that night, keeping our sleeping bags as close as possible to the huddle of basset hounds on their pile of smelly blankets.
The autumn after we buried my father, we decided to take my mother on holiday with us and explored the Cnidus peninsula in Turkey by boat. Grieving is tough; you both need to be alone with your sadness but also desire the warmth that you are missing. At a stroke, my wife read the situation, and after breakfast on day one told the boatload that she would read aloud after lunch. She was not discouraged by the catcall of complaints about the value of silence, the need for an undisturbed siesta, or the importance of one’s own reading, but that afternoon established herself on the shady corner of the deck, and read aloud, initially all alone. But like a siren, one by one we were all drawn into the story, and much to my pleasure I noticed how my two blonde daughters had moved aside to make space for their grandmother. By the second afternoon, the entire boat was addicted, and the Turkish captain began to consult his chart, looking for the right place to anchor quietly for storytime. My wife has an exceptionally good reading voice, and also has stamina, and did all the characters with such verve (throwing in her knowledge of Russian) to make the off-stage mutterings of either warlocks or secret countesses extra vivid for her small but devoted audience, sometimes confined within the narrow theatre of a camper van.
We have often talked about which of the Eland books would be suitable for holiday reading, and perhaps one day we will have enough time to record Rose's reading. If I wanted to inspire a single parent, it would be wonderful to get them to listen to Dervla Murphy travelling alone with her tiny daughter in southern India, On a Shoestring to Coorg. Smelling the Breezes, an account of a long, family holiday walking down the spine of the Lebanese mountains, assisted by tents and donkeys, is another liberating inspiration to can-do. As is Warrior Herdsmen, six months living amongst cattle-herdsmen in Uganda, where the indomitable author, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas looks after two small children as she records everyday life, eventually turned into a series of articles for the New Yorker. I also think Red Moon and High Summer would work well for family listening, especially on a road trip through North Africa, for it is both an adventure story, a doomed Romeo-and-Juliet love affair between adventurous teenagers and a brilliant immersion into Tuareg culture.
My only experience of reading an Eland out loud was for my mother. She was a great traveller in her day, but at the last stage of her life, we made a ground-floor bedroom of her old sitting room, with the advantage of a wonderful old brick fireplace where logs could burn slowly and cast a lovely glow, no stairs to fall down and a conveniently close loo with plenty of room for her beloved lurchers to loll around and sleep. There, in the evenings, I would read to her from The People of Providence. It is not about some distant, exotic corner of the globe but a humdrum, modern English housing estate in south London – the sort of place that you might instinctively want to run away from – but such was the genius of Tony Parker for listening and questioning, for recording and editing, that the place became alive with fascination and the most unlikely adventures. Time and time again, my mother would accuse me of making it up, but I had to confess that I had neither the wit nor the skill, and would come closer to her pillow and show her the lines, so she could see there was no deception. We both looked forward to the readings, not only for the adventure of discovering what was happening in the next-door flat but for the different tones of life, for the humour and the wonder. It was vastly more rewarding than either the chilled distance of the radio or the banality of the television, and I had the satisfaction of watching someone fall asleep, yet knew in the morning that we would talk over these characters together. We never finished the book, but it felt good returning the gift of being read to out loud.
“I still cherish my memories when the thrill of the story was in fantastic contrast to the close, protective warmth of the person reading to you”