Early Years: Nick

Isabel Colegate’s book A Pelican in the Wilderness has some interesting stories and she tells them well. I am particularly grateful for the information towards the end about Holly Hill, a place that I will always remember fondly and in some ways aspire to.
The narrative that I found especially useful, however, was the connections she made between the eremitical tradition, the Romantic Movement and garden design. And it made me think: is the mature garden envisioned by Capability Brown and Inigo Jones really the garden of the Romantic?

And is this idealized perfect landscape also the world in miniature, or the wild wood tamed – and hence is it Outside in children’s literature?

There are plenty of organizations concerned with wolves in the UK. This link takes us to a site selling hybrids very close to wolves not so much as pets as companions (the site warns) and this organisation is working to reintroduce
I visited these people, the UK Wolf Conservation Trust last nght. They see themsleves as principally concerned with education about wolves; their wolves act “as ambassadors” fulfilling the trust’s founder’s ambition “to dispel the myths and misconceptions that surround them.” It might be said therefore that by looking at long-term conservation through education they hold a middle way between the re-introduction approach and (if I can say this without sounding too damning) the “tamer nature” approach of domesticated wolf hybrids. Of course, taming, living with and breeding from wolves can’t just be dismissed as a modern fad; it could be argued it is one of our oldest animal-human relationships. I like to imagine the symbiosis of human hunters and wolf packs listening for and watching one another’s hunting movements (and maybe a long period where ‘we’ scavenged off ‘them’ and maybe vice versa – and the even longer period [which we are still in] where we compete for space and food, and then at some point in one of those periods, that first time a wolf stood cautiously to one side and some human threw her or him a piece of offal… Pure mythology on my part.

But if that’s my aetiological myth, I felt close to it at Howl Night last night. Hearing wolves howl spontaneously as the twilight deepened was wonderful; managing to tune my voice into howling with a wolf – specifically this wolf – got me thinking about why our voices can be so alike. A sort of convergent evolution suggests itself – the need to communicate in similar terrains for similar tasks with similar groups – and this leads me to the big question I want to explore,one I’m always exploring really: what is this relationship founded on, and what are its characteristics?

It strikes me there are two elements that I can explore – two  interrelated issues I’ve already touched on in this post, but which I need to come back to: competition and symbiosis.

Do we fear and love the wolf because it competes – or competed at least – with us, especially when we moved to raising livestock which it took?   It might be argued that we developed, perhaps, a respect, an understanding of it – but at the same time a rivalry, even a fear that occasional confrontations will have done nothing to dispel.   Perhaps Steven Mithen’s fascinating book the Singing Neanderthals (an interesting critique is here)  might have some insight – I must have a look  back at this.   I also wonder whether we fear and love the wolf because we have lived close to it, tamed and shaped it, and the pure wolf seems somehow to remind of this process? Is the former what gives us the werewolf, the predatory danger, and the latter gives us the named and befriended ambassadors we met and howled with last night?

I am no longer sure that the wolves were what was A l’envers in my previous post.  What often moves around I this story is not, of course, the wolf, who remains the familiar predatory, possibly sexual bzou (this link has a lot of detail but I’m unsure about all the content!), but the girl. Is she little? Is she dressed in red, or grey, or what?

Why this should have struck me in the bath while reading Mark Rowlands‘ book on living with his wolf, I don’t really know, but perhaps I need to think more about the figures of the wild if I’m going to write about the outdoors, than about the children who go into the woods. More weasels, fewer moles.

Or at least, it’s a separate section – what one meets in the (fictional) outdoors.

Like this Cynocephalus.

I have two books in front of me as I write. One is the book I was going to write about – Sandra Beckett’s Recycling Red Riding Hood – the other (Rosa’s) is the movie companion for New Moon

It strikes me that the relationship between Bella and the Native American werewolves is in some ways a Conte a l’envers, as Beckett describes them.

Working from the writings of Gianni Rodari (who has more than seventeen entries in the Beckett index), she explores how Red Riding Hood has become such a universal tale that it is possible to play with the plot (including the Perrault text and images) as a tale told “Upside Down, Inside Out and Backwards.” And in finding a heroine like Bella Swan, and placing her in the situation she does, Stephanie Meyer effectively creates a Conte a L’Envers, a mixed-up version where a young woman in the woods is the one who holds the power over the wolves who are her friends, her would-be lovers. Bella smacks a werewolf on the nose as if he were a boy stepping out of line in a soap-opera prom; we are somewhere Angela Carter might recognise.

As something of a footnote, it is interesting to see this reversal taken even further in the movie book I have in front of me, where the wolves, however terrifying they are as wolves, are, in human form, mostly young and lacking in much body hair, exemplified in the website a – very far from the older, predatory wolves in so much of the Red Riding Hood iconography, yet drawing on the idea of the wargus (see this entry) as on the margins of society.

Beckett takes the wonderful Zipes exploration of Red Riding Hood to a new stage. She uses a European overview – rather she uses an understanding of countless retellings in Europe – to look at what Rodari calls A sbagliare le storie, Getting Stories Wrong, and what other contemporary writers identify as Upside-down stories.  Ths method is exemplary; it allows Beckett to explore the variety of Riding Hood stories (if Zipes removes the ‘little,’ Beckett presents a rainbow of different coloured hoods!), and in doing so to look again at what makes this story so special.  Hats off to her – hoods down, whatever – for updating the critical literature to include exploration of two lacunae in Zipes’ book: The wolves in the Ahlbergs, notably in Jeremiah in the Dark Woods and the Jolly Postman, and the RRH tales of Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes.

More questions than answers in this post: a work in progress.

The more I think of there really being chalk pits in Suffolk, the more I want to explore more deeply my assumptions about the universal mythic landscape. A sideline about a pub called “The Lime  Burners” and here is their link – suggests to me all those out-of-town (or out of settlement) occupations that might have been part of the storyteller’s landscape.  Quarriers, limekiln workers, miners (like the seven dwarfs?), charcoal burners – all people whose occupation maybe allowed them a little latitude.  It is interesting that charcoal is now something of a tourist attraction, even mentionedin the sanitised Suffolk walks discussed here. I suspect no-one on these well-signposted walks will discover demonic figures gleefully plotting by a fire!

Is this part of a warning myth, as I’ve speculated before? Part of a recognition that people away from the huddle of village and town are not recognised? Not “one of us”?

Philip Pullman, in today’s Observer, is deep in Bettelheimland when he talks about the Fairy Tale protagonists and their struggle for Independence and adulthood – and maybe this is where the two themes intertwine, although this is merely conjecture:

Is there a warning about the ‘others’  in the woods because they are dangerous, or because they represent a possible different set of choices? A world away from the close-knit and settled farming community?

Or is it that, for adventures to take place for the young, the protective adult needs to be absent?

It doesn’t answer my query about Tom Tit Tot, though.

It was interesting reciting the edgy DeLaRue/Zipes’ reconstruction of the Story of the Grandmother to PGCE students in the woods today, those lovely dappled woods where the magpies chatter and one group saw a deer and we all felt at ease with children in the outdoors. In some ways it felt rather like the side-by-side comparison of Red Riding Hood stories on Katherine Harris’ site or rather the student project on the site

And it set me in mind of the power and transferability of Sendak’s Outside Over There, represented in Labyrinth , where themes such as burgeoning sexuality, sibling rivalry – not to mention the more complex issues of siblings and new babies in reconstituted families – are dealt with so openly. Is OOT more menacing because of the subtler treatment of the themes?  Or is it merely ambiguous to the point of being open to any interpretation?

Although publicised by the IOL, it actually comes from the English Outdoor Council:

This is one of their aims for the week:

Encourage your school to be doing something adventurous in the outdoors this year. Book a week at a centre. Produce leaflets showing the opportunities that are on offer in your local area. Invite the media to visit some of your initiatives.

And it is a media-focussed initiative, to some extent. So what does a practitioner do?

A full text of the guidance – some of which is from last year, so the dates aren’t quite right – is to be found here.

One of the things that isn’t quite right is a broken link to teacher net. Using the (rather cumbersome) search facility found an interesting case study that looked worth sharing, from Turners Hill in W Sussex.  This is where it gets interesting from my point of view.

Wouldn’t it be great to share good practice, not in the spectacular but in the particular? What if schools – Growing Schools or not – told their parents, their local community, and perhaps most importantly their neighbouring practitioners what great things they have been doing outside? The synergy (not sure I really like the buzz word) demonstrated at Turners Hill is exemplary.  As the case study reports:

…it was impossible to plan for one area of learning without thinking about the other areas. What is started at one stage needs to be developed in another. Learning should be for life!

And where this might be a Shibboleth for some, it seems to be real practical work in this school.

They aren’t alone, of course, and in the “Thinking Primary” section of QCA’s pages on the Rose Review, are case studies from schools. Here, for example, we see Berkswich Primary School Head teacher Martin Holmes and deputy Head Jill Pearce-Haydon publicising their school with a similar vision: “We use the environment to support learning. Our work has an ecological theme and we have created a rich outdoor learning area to curriculum delivery.”

How rich is rich, then? The article continues:

In fact the school has an outdoor theatre, a mathematical garden, a play area designed by the learners, a scientific quadrangle and a water harvesting area that provides power for the school’s other ecological areas such as the weather station and irrigation system!

But how does all this relate to a successful learning experience?

“It is all designed to provide an active learning environment for the children. The wormery is open to all and water system has transparent pipes so that the children are able to observe it working. Our curriculum is one that focuses on direct experience and creating ‘wow’ moments. We know that children don’t see learning as subjects, they see learning as learning.”

Seeing learning as learning. Not seeing subjects as  separate things, however we deliver the bits we need to deliver. Not seeing walls between English and Geography any more than between inside the classroom and outside. All tall order for a school: a tall order for teacher-trainers who are preparing students for jobs in schools like this.

This was just going to be a place to put some links for Play Day really, but it is interesting to see BBC reportage on the issues around play. On the one hand, it reports that Parents feel something is fundamentally wrong with modern childhood – and this is the link – but Over-cautious parents stop play in the report linked here. One of their latest posts bemoans the lack of knowledge about nature, but it’s a shame that BBC Wildlife’s article is only half-heartedly represented here, as a sort of teaser for “go and buy the magazine.”

The tension is not just from the BBC needing both stories and balance, however; it comes from the ambiguity we have around seeing outside as a place of danger, something I suspect we get, at heart, from maintaining the warning stories of a rural past (e.g. Red Riding Hood from France [although note that the link takes you to the great book by Jack Zipes rather than a text of the story per se], the almost global Witch-in-the-Woods type stories such as Teeny-Tiny and the Witch Woman, which is the folk-tale basis for our generation’s flagship fear-of-the-woods experience, the Blair Witch Project) in urban environments, so that the myth comes about that Outdoors is Bad. It is possible that we feel somehow that children should learn from adults to fear an Unknown and possibly supernatural evil in the Antiqua Sylva. I don’t know.

Tragically, this juxtaposition has a further complication in today’s story from S Wales, and there might be more to contemplate about incremental exposure to hazards being part of the education we need to give children, if we are not to seem as if we accept awful occurrences like this with a callous “accidents will happen” shrug.