These Island Stories - John Dougherty

Do you remember the Opening Ceremony? It’s a measure of its impact that I don’t have to say which one, or what it opened. You know what I’m talking about. For days - perhaps weeks - afterwards, the country seemed like a warmer, friendly place.

I don't have permission to use any photos of the Opening Ceremony.  So here instead is a picture of some cake, courtesy of Michael at www.foodimaging.co.uk

Of course, not everyone felt this way. Daily Mail columnist Peter Hitchens on several occasions derided it as ‘a social worker’s history of Britain’, a phrase which I found revealing in its oddness. Does Mr Hitchens believe that social workers don’t have a right to history, or that their history is somehow inferior to other people’s? Does he think that a person who spends his or her working life looking after the needs of others is somehow less worthy than someone who spends his working life writing opinions for a newspaper with a less than glorious history of bending the truth, not to mention supporting parties with less than pleasant ideologies?

It’s the sort of question that is all too pertinent in these days of Gategate, the scandal of the Government’s Chief Whip apparently calling a police officer a “pleb”. The whole row has that sense of “some people are better than others, not because of who they really are but simply because of their station in life”, which unpleasantly echoes Hitchens’s ‘social worker’ jibe. I’m reminded, as the row unfolds, of how the Opening Ceremony made me feel.

You see, I’m not the only one to have reported unaccustomed feelings of patriotism after watching the Opening Ceremony; and I think I know why. On previous occasions on which I’ve been asked to feel patriotic, the feelings were supposed to be stirred by things that, well, don’t stir me. I quite like the Queen, I suppose, but I don’t feel the country would necessarily be a worse place to live if someone else were our Head of State instead. I never think, “I love being British because we have an army and some big ships!” or “gosh, isn’t it great that we once sent emotionally damaged ex-public schoolboys out all over the world to impose their values on whatever cultures they found there!"

But what Danny Boyle and Frank Cottrell Boyce did, bless them, was to provide an alternative narrative of which I could feel proud. Free universal healthcare! Black people and white people having babies together and nobody even thinking it comment-worthy until that twerp Aidan Burley and, yes, the Daily Mail point it out! Creativity in writing and music and art! Children’s literature, for goodness‘ sake!

I suppose, really, that what it did for me - and this is hugely significant, considering that I grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles - was to tell me: it’s okay to be British my way, whatever that means to me. If I want to prefer a social worker’s history over a right-wing pundit’s history, I can. It doesn’t make me a “pleb” who needs to ‘learn my place’.

So why am I mentioning this here, so long after it’s all over? Well, I just felt moved to point this out:

Literature, and perhaps particularly writings for children and teens, do this as well. Can you remember, during your childhood, reading something in a book and thinking, “But I do that, too!” or “That’s just how it feels!” or “So it’s not just me!”

I can. And the lesson of the Opening Ceremony is that that’s important. Enormously important. Children’s writers do many things, but one of the best things we do is to say to children: “You know - it’s okay to be you.”


John's website is at www.visitingauthor.com.
He's on twitter as @JohnDougherty8 
He will be appearing at the Cheltenham Comedy Festival on November 17th 2012.

His most recent books include:

Finn MacCool and the Giant's Causeway - a retelling for the Oxford Reading Tree
Bansi O'Hara and the Edges of Hallowe'en
Zeus Sorts It Out - "A sizzling comedy... a blast for 7+" , and one of The Times' Children's Books of 2011, as chosen by Amanda Craig

Out of the Ground Comes Light - Dianne Hofmeyr

We all saw it… the power of storytelling. 


Who will forget the London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony with children being wheeled in on brightly lit hospital beds, winged bikes flying through the air reminding us of the magic of riding our first bicycle, floating trees, the chimney stacks rising from the ground, the Child Catcher and Voldemort versus Mary Poppins, Evelyn Glennie’s wild drumming, the Queen arriving with James Bond, J K Rowling reading an excerpt from Peter Pan, Kenneth Branagh as the engineer Brunel, speaking Caliban’s famous lines from The Tempest…  the explosion of story telling… the moments of glorious insanity, the pandemonium, the sense of celebration?

  

And as writers we have reason to celebrate when the scriptwriter for the ceremony was none other than 2004 Carnegie Medal winner for his debut, Millions, based on his own screenplay for the film of the same name whose novel, Framed, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Book of the Year as well as the Carnegie Medal and his 2009 novel Cosmic was also shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal… and who in 2011 was commissioned to write a sequel to the Ian Fleming children's book Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which was published in October 2011 as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again –  Frank Cottrell Boyce (I wrote about him in a previous post when he was guest speaker at our CWIG Conference last year)

He says he stayed eerily calm watching the event with his wife and two of his seven children. Its clear that for the planning, he and Danny Boyle and the other designers shared things they loved about Britain – the Industrial Revolution, the digital revolution, the NHS, pop music, children's literature and genius engineers. He bought Danny a copy of Humphrey Jennings's astonishing book, Pandemonium and the show's opening section ended up being named Pandemonium. He added a few very personal touches to the evening, like using the motto of his old school, St Helens: Ex Terra Lucem – out of the ground comes light, for the idea of the Cauldron.

He is quoted as saying: ‘For me the evening was like a work of art – it’s complex like a great poem or painting and as a result people can take different things from it and react in different ways.’

Someone else said of the evening. ‘It was enchanted. And it belongs to all of us. We are secure enough in our traditions to play around with them.’ 


Yes it was brave... very brave... creative and wonderful... story telling at its best. And the magic of it is probably rightfully summed up by Caliban's lines from The Tempest:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.

www.diannehofmeyr.com