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When it comes to bedtime reading, old-fashioned is best

By Peter McCloy - posted Monday, 7 June 2004


Some time ago I was reading Winnie-The-Pooh to my grandson when I realised to my horror that both he and I were nodding off. I wasn't worried about him - this was a bedtime story.

But I was raised on Winnie-The-Pooh. For me, it was not a book I would nod off to.

It was Chapter One, in which we are introduced, and Pooh Bear, having climbed a tree in pursuit - surprise, surprise - of honey, had fallen out of the tree into a gorse-bush. Well that's how it was written:

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He leaned just a little bit more and "Snap" went the branch and down fell Pooh. He bounced from branch to branch to branch until he ran out of branches and landed headfirst in a bush.

Something was wrong, this was not how it should have been. Then I noticed that this was the American version, especially for the kiddies. What an insult to the kiddies!

I hurried off to the original, which, of course, has a prominent place in my book shelves. This is how A A Milne describes Pooh's fall:

"Oh, help!" said Pooh, as he dropped ten feet on to the branch below him.

"If only I hadn't -" he said, as he bounced twenty feet on to the next branch.

"You see, what I meant to do," he explained, as he turned head-over-heels, and crashed on to another branch thirty feet below, "what I meant to do -"

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"Of course it was rather -" he admitted, as he slithered very quickly through the next six branches.

"It all comes, I suppose," he decided, as he said goodbye to the last branch, spun round three times, and flew gracefully into a gorse-bush, "it all comes of liking honey so much. Oh, help!"

You couldn't fall asleep reading that, could you! The Americans, it seems, in their desire to make everything accessible to everybody, have reduced poor Pooh to a lowest common denominator. It was like a Reader's Digest condensation of Winnie-The-Pooh, and it sent me to sleep. The magic has been removed, and Winnie-The-Pooh simply falls out of a tree.

It is my self-appointed duty to be an old-fashioned grandfather to my grandchildren, and it is a role embraced with enthusiasm by my children, for they too learned about Winnie-The-Pooh from the original. I will never give my grandchildren an electronic toy or a computer game, and I shall read to them only from books that have magic in the wording as well as a story line. Books that are challenging, not just accessible.

I want them to be challenged, not sent to sleep. Well, that's not quite what I mean: I want them to go to sleep with the sound of magic in their head.

Classics like Winnie-The-Pooh and The Wind in the Willows are timeless, and I want them to be familiar friends to my grandchildren as they were, and still are, to me. I want them to know the beauty of the English language; this is a journey that starts with Pooh Bear and progresses to Shakespeare, not Mills and Boone.

There are many people in my grandchildren's lives to provide instant gratification - they all have fine collections of videos and CDs and electronic and computer games. So I'm old-fashioned I suppose, although Harry Potter gives me some comfort - that fiction can be magic and well-written and can still capture the attention of both children and adults, that the human attention span, when appropriately stimulated, can survive beyond the thirty second television grab.

I read books to my children, books that were old-fashioned even when they were young, but to my great satisfaction they are all now voracious readers, and even encourage me to be old-fashioned with their children.

The kids love it, of course. Mind you, they have a different attitude when I want to teach them to do little odd jobs like chopping the firewood but they all have their own copy of Winnie-The-Pooh, courtesy of their grandfather, and they look after it. I have a feeling that it will always have an important place in their bookshelves too, and that some day they will enjoy reading it to my great-grandchildren.

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About the Author

Peter McCloy is an author and speaker, now retired, who lives on five acres of rock in an ecologically sensible home in the bush. He is working on a 20,000-year plan to develop his property, and occasionally puts pen to paper, especially when sufficiently aroused by politicians. He is a foundation member of the Climate Sceptics. Politically, Peter is a Lennonist - like John, he believes that everything a politician touches turns to sh*t.

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