Colm O'Regan: I'm reading Roald Dahl to the kids — it's a balancing act
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Reading to the children.
In the early years it was sometimes a grind. Not because they weren’t adorable little snuggle monsters and the little Julia Donaldson’s impeccable rhyming metre wasn’t always a joy, it’s just that reading the same book over and over again breeds a bit of ennui so getting through to the end took concentration.
When you sit on the couch to read to children and they’re all cuddled under your oxters, I don’t know whether it’s the oxytocin, a feeling of safeness or some sort of marsh gas comes up from the floor. But a wave of tiredness will descend like Derren Brown himself just started giving you The Eyes. Your energy is sapped so noticeably the children might as well be charging themselves off you. The energy that was conspicuously missing from them when it was time to get into pyjamas is now available to them in spades. They may even now get the idea to fetch some actual spades.
It’s a peculiar experience to fall asleep while reading aloud. You continue talking while dreaming but the words change. The children notice because you are no longer talking about snails and whales or overcrowded brooms. They used to nudge me when I started muttering about whether “that Gruffalo has public liability insurance” or “which bin is due out tomorrow after she puts out the hen, the goat, the pig and the cow”. There was one book which I never slept through though. “Who Stole My Hat” a battle of wills between a bear and a rabbit that has the most dramatic, wordless page in literature.
But now we’re into the good stuff. The chapter books. Books with plot. The girls can listen and make the pictures in their brains. There were a few months of so-so fairy books that they loved but each one had the same plot Find three magic objects, and all the bad people were boys. But now we’re reading books with real bite. And I'm getting serious flashbacks to the Golden Age of Reading, the 'If you're bored read a book' era.
The flashbacks are vague. Not always specific books. It's more a memory of a 'feeling'. Paging well-worn books from the library, or the charity shop, the more sterile off-white of a new-book page. They weren't famous books. They were the odd ones, the weird ones, definitely out of print now. They’re ungoogleable. They weren’t always very child-friendly books. They were bleak. Maybe it was that in the mobile library, I might have gone over the boundary to the older age-groups. (The floor was sloped like a bat-villain cave because of where the van was parked so I just went with gravity.)
And of course, when it comes to dark children’s books, it’s inevitable that Roald Dahl 'enters the chat'. The internet is full of debate about Roald Dahl and a plethora of dodgy views that he held and by common agreement it seems he was an awful langer at times.
Reading Roald Dahl to a child means them being enraptured in a giant peach and then me digressing every now and then to explain why a nasty thing he wrote is nasty. And then it’s back into the Great Glass Elevator in a breathless helterskelter escape from the Vermicious Knids.
It’s a balancing act that I’m sure I’ve got wrong most of the time. “Hey children, here is the world. It’s good and shite and sometimes good and shite from the same person."
The children seem to understand that and they like the good bits and know the iffy bits are iffy and then it's “Okay Daddy we know. Can you get on the with story please?”
It’ll keep me awake anyway.
