Header overlay
Ysenda Maxtone Graham on reading aloud

Three in a Bed

‘Where are we, exactly?’

That is a question I’ve asked all too often. The scene: three in a bed (husband, 11-year-old son in the middle, me); dog asleep at the foot. The time: 9.30 p.m. The reason: husband is reading aloud to us, and last night, as usual, I fell asleep towards the end of the chapter. Surely the most delicious kind of falling asleep is the gentle, helpless drifting off you do to the sound of the reading voice.

The son is slightly exasperated at this question as he never falls asleep while being read to. On the contrary, he changes position, kicks out, laughs, comments and speculates about what’s going to happen next. The story activates rather than lulls him.

‘Mummy! Honestly! Don’t you remember? They’ve just arrived at Helm’s Deep.’

Of course. Helm’s Deep. But just hearing those words brings on this evening’s overwhelming sleepiness. Théoden. Denethor. What exactly is the difference between those two? Husband and son know; mother is not so sure.

‘Tell the Éored to assemble on the path, and make ready to ride the Entwade!’

Mmm? You’ve lost me again, but it all sounds lovely.

With one of our older sons, my husband walked the 155-mile London Loop round the wooded edges of the metropolis, which took half a year of Saturdays. Reading The Lord of the Rings aloud to the youngest is the stationary equivalent of such a journey: a time-consuming adventure in which the partakers share every knoll and tussock. The nightly habit of reading aloud has become something the family depends on for equilibrium. Whatever happens in the husband’s stressful job; whatever happens in the son’s school day; whatever worries we all have, we know that before bedtime we will walk together into the world of a story we don’t want to end.

Just as he prefers to drive rather than be driven, my husband would rather read aloud than be read to. Both preferences suit me fine as I hate getting back into the

Subscribe or sign in to read the full article

The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.

Subscribe now or

‘Where are we, exactly?’

That is a question I’ve asked all too often. The scene: three in a bed (husband, 11-year-old son in the middle, me); dog asleep at the foot. The time: 9.30 p.m. The reason: husband is reading aloud to us, and last night, as usual, I fell asleep towards the end of the chapter. Surely the most delicious kind of falling asleep is the gentle, helpless drifting off you do to the sound of the reading voice.

The son is slightly exasperated at this question as he never falls asleep while being read to. On the contrary, he changes position, kicks out, laughs, comments and speculates about what’s going to happen next. The story activates rather than lulls him. ‘Mummy! Honestly! Don’t you remember? They’ve just arrived at Helm’s Deep.’ Of course. Helm’s Deep. But just hearing those words brings on this evening’s overwhelming sleepiness. Théoden. Denethor. What exactly is the difference between those two? Husband and son know; mother is not so sure. ‘Tell the Éored to assemble on the path, and make ready to ride the Entwade!’ Mmm? You’ve lost me again, but it all sounds lovely. With one of our older sons, my husband walked the 155-mile London Loop round the wooded edges of the metropolis, which took half a year of Saturdays. Reading The Lord of the Rings aloud to the youngest is the stationary equivalent of such a journey: a time-consuming adventure in which the partakers share every knoll and tussock. The nightly habit of reading aloud has become something the family depends on for equilibrium. Whatever happens in the husband’s stressful job; whatever happens in the son’s school day; whatever worries we all have, we know that before bedtime we will walk together into the world of a story we don’t want to end. Just as he prefers to drive rather than be driven, my husband would rather read aloud than be read to. Both preferences suit me fine as I hate getting back into the original lane after overtaking and I get a sore throat after two pages of reading aloud. Over the past year he has read the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy, followed by Watership Down, followed by the Odyssey in the E. V. Rieu translation. Each book has brought different delights and challenges. In The Lord of the Rings, one of the challenges is how to tackle the songs. You come across songs without warning in Tolkien’s books: turn a page and you’re face to face with a long wad of italics divided (or sometimes not) into verses. You must quickly gauge whether this is a minor-key song (about loss) or a major-key one (about merry feasts) and invent a tune accordingly. And, having invented it, you must remember it and repeat it in the next verse: a feat not made easier by the vocabulary Tolkien throws at you: ‘O Orofané, Lassemista, Carnimíre . . .’ Sometimes, when extremely yawny after a tough day of wrangling with Los Angeles lawyers, Michael has been known to substitute ‘he said’ for ‘he sang’ at the beginning and hope nobody notices. Occasionally, Tolkien unhelpfully writes, ‘Thus Gandalf softly sang’ after a song is over, by which time it’s too late to sing it. Imagined worlds work especially well as read-aloud books. You step together into a magical landscape. I must say, though, when Tolkien is being read aloud, it can sometimes be a bit like doing a long communal Rambler’s Association trail in walking boots. Thousands upon thousands of words are devoted to the terrain. Tolkien never allows you to forget whether his characters are trudging downhill or uphill. If I’ve heard one ‘The western side of each ridge was steep and difficult, but the eastern slopes were gentler, furrowed with many gullies and narrow ravines’, I’ve heard a million. What the reader-aloud, and the read-to, look forward to most is when characters make remarks in their own entirely distinctive fashion. That’s when the son roars with laughter and bounces around (‘Keep still, can’t you?’). And that’s when the accents and voices come in. Every British man, I suppose, has his armoury of accents and voices he can ‘do’. In Michael’s case, the accents include Yorkshire, West Country, West Indian, Germanic, Morningside, Glaswegian, Brummy and Cockney. The voices include military-posh, schoolmaster-disdainful, grandfatherly, regal, ‘noble, good and true’, boyish and (for girls) either girlish-innocent or tomboy. He tends to do baddies in schoolmaster-disdainful, and saves the ‘noble, good and true’ voice for the hero. Again, the reader-aloud has to get these accents and voices right first time – rather as Private Eye has to find a new self-parody form for a Prime Minister as soon as a new one is elected. Once you’ve decided on it, you’re stuck with it. (The ‘St Albion Parish News’ never was as good as ‘Dear Bill’.) Just as pianists say you can’t hide when you’re playing Mozart, and actors say you can’t hide when you’re doing radio, authors know they can’t hide when their books are being read aloud. Their stylistic bumps and infelicities are simultaneously aired and shared. Tolkien can get a bit Biblical. ‘And Aragorn looked on the slain, and he said, “Here lie men that are not the folk of Mordor.”’ But he’s a master of Latinate-avoiding English, and his Anglo-Saxon prose is music to the sleepy ears. The Lord of the Rings was always going to be a hard act to follow. There was a sense of bereavement when the trilogy was finished – more so, perhaps, than after a solitary reading, because it was shared and because more physical effort had been put into it. Michael decided on Watership Down which he had loved as a boy. The thick Puffin book sat unread on my bookshelf for years because as a child I couldn’t bear long descriptions of nature, and the novel (in my mind) made the mistake of beginning with the sentence ‘The primroses were over’, and then proceeded to give us two slab-like paragraphs describing ragwort, a brook, a brambly ditch, king-cups, watercress, a blackbird and a warren at peace. The book is in fact a masterpiece. If only I’d got through that first page as a girl, I would have met Hazel and Fiver on page 2. Richard Adams’s chapters are shorter than Tolkien’s – five to ten pages rather than fifteen to twenty. Short chapters are a good thing for bedtime reading. The reader-aloud can conclude the evening’s business with the words, ‘And here ends Chapter 9’, rather than having to say at an arbitrary moment, ‘Well, we’d better stop there. You really must go to bed. No, you really must or you’ll be exhausted. We’ll read the rest of the chapter tomorrow, OK?’ Adams, like Tolkien, has dreamed up a profoundly imagined alternative world into which the reader-aloud and the read-to can step together. Decades of thought about what it would really be like to be a rabbit must have gone into the book’s creation. That was another thing that put me off as a child: the illustration of a large, staring rabbit on the front cover. Did I really want to know what it must be like to be a rabbit? Let alone get to know an invented rabbit-language called Lapine? I now see that the world Adams created illuminates the lives of not only rabbits but all of us, illustrating how humans (as well as rabbits) can create both communal paradises and communal hells. After reading it you care deeply about your fellow living beings, whether human or animal. The vocabulary of Lapine is wholly convincing. A tractor is a ‘hrududu’. ‘Frith’ is the sun, i.e. God to rabbits. Noon is ‘ni-frith’. To feed is to silflay. Enemy animals are ‘elil’. The 11-year-old was enchanted by all this. As for the voices and accents, the character we most looked forward to hearing was Keehar, the outspoken black-headed gull who befriends and helps the rabbits. Viennese-West Indian seems to be the accent Adams had in mind, going by the spellings. ‘You ’urt me? I ’urt you like dam.’ Of Bigwig, ‘Meester Pigvig, ’e plenty good fella.’ And of the central quest of the book, which is to find some does to come and live with the rabbits, ‘Vind finish, den I fly. Fly for you. Find plenty mudders, tell you vere dey are, ya?’ There’s an adorable (though not of key importance to the plot) mouse whom the rabbits rescue from certain death. The grateful mouse, speaking ‘in the simple lingua franca of the hedgerow’, says, ‘You ’elp a mouse. One time a mouse ’elp a you.’ We yelped with delight when we heard that. It was about the sweetest thing we’d ever heard a fictional animal say. When a book is read aloud, you do notice and share its unimportant nooks and crannies, and this is another joy. Did you notice that word ‘does’? Of course, it’s the plural of ‘doe’ rather than the third-person singular of ‘to do’ – but the reader-aloud can be tripped up by that kind of thing. Michael was not sure how to pronounce the name of the chief baddie, General Woundwort. He plumped for ‘wound’ as past participle of ‘wind’, thinking of bindweed. Actually, I think it should be ‘wound’ as in ‘injury’, as woundwort turns out to be a ‘wound-healing herb’. But it was too late to change, once we’d found this out. In the next book, the Odyssey, we became unnecessarily interested in a character called Thoon. On suddenly coming across this name in the list of Phaeacians competing at the Games, Michael pronounced the name to rhyme with ‘spoon’. On reflection, he supposed the ‘o’s should be separate, as in ‘oology’. But – as with Woundwort – once pronounced, too late to change, and we elevated and speculated endlessly on this very minor character. (That was in fact Thoon’s sole mention.) There was another name which, again, one might not have noticed if reading the book to oneself, but which, read aloud, was bound to become a favourite, and that was Antiphates. Reading that name aloud to a prep-school-age boy is asking for trouble, and from that moment on, the poor man’s name was never mentioned without a made-up accompaniment of Homeric epithets: Antiphates, the wind-breaker, arriving with a thunderous clatter. ‘Dawn, fresh and rosy-fingered’. How many times did we hear that? Countless times. At first, fearing that the 11-year-old might tire of this repeated epithet, Michael left one or two of them out and just said ‘dawn’. But of course the boy loved the repetitions, and started chanting them aloud, along with the reader. ‘When they had satisfied their hunger and their thirst . . .’ To step into the world of the Odyssey is particularly delicious after a hard day in the twenty-first-century office or school. First, a slave brings you a silver basin in which to rinse your hands, and then he rubs you with oil. Then the faithful housekeeper mixes you some mellow wine and pours it into a gold cup, and sets before you some bread and a choice of delicacies. Domestic palace life is blissfully well described in the Odyssey – you wish you were there – and it comes as a terrible shock at the end when Odysseus massacres all the suitors in an orgy of blood and guts. I’m not sure we can face the Iliad after that horror. We’ve decided on the Philip Pullman trilogy instead.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 40 © Ysenda Maxtone Graham 2013


About the contributor

Ysenda Maxtone Graham is the author of Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School and The Real Mrs Miniver, both Slightly Foxed Editions.

Comments & Reviews

Leave a comment

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.