How Sharing Stories Can Save Lives: The Importance of Oral Storytelling in a Crisis

How Sharing Stories Can Save Lives

The importance of oral storytelling in a crisis

 “In a chaotic world acquiring books is a balancing act on the edge of the abyss.” Wrote Walter Benjamin in Unpacking My Library. The same could equally be said about reading books. 

At the onset of the first UK Covid Lockdown in 2020, my partner and I were living in different towns and suddenly were unable to be together. Panic. I was alone, there were initial difficulties getting food deliveries, toilet paper, a supply of masks. We were allowed only one walk a day, and that by ourselves. 

On one of these early walks I noticed signs posted on telephone poles requesting volunteers to help those in need. I thought I might pick up medicines for the infirm who couldn’t get out, and leave them beside doorways. 

On my first attempt, the narrow pavement outside the chemist with other pedestrians passing along required me to step off onto the road to avoid contact. A passing motorist pulled down his window and shouted at me: what are you doing? I told him. Go home, he said, indignantly, it’s not safe and you’re causing trouble, stay home, old woman, and let the volunteers look after you!

Be looked after? I was struck for the first time with the realization that in this new Covid world, at 78 I was old. And I was no use. This flummoxed me. I had anticipated helping others (not being helped)  – to keep fear at bay.

Then a chance change occurred a few weeks later. My family were phoning, Zooming, the usual. All of us asking how the others were getting on. By now I had chivvied my regular Library Shared Reading group into using Zoom – with some resistance from the less tech-savvy ones who’d eschewed the internet up till that point.

I’d adapted to plastic gloves and sceptic sprays and putting letters and parcels in quarantine for two days. With the help of friends I’d sourced food supplies. My road had set up a Whatsapp and we made a plan to come to the doors of our houses twice weekly to check up on each other. My partner and I phoned every night. My daughter, and brother, frequently. I was near open spaces, and had a dog. I was comparatively fortunate, I was coping.

But the stories of people in difficulties ballooned. One family story was of my sister-in-law’s mother, Nancy, who had very recently moved into care facilities in the same complex in which her husband was in a nursing home. When he’d begun to need more care than she could give him, they’d thought it a solution to give up the house they’d lived in for years, and for her to have a retirement flat in the same complex as the nursing home, so she could visit him every day. They’d been together for over sixty years.  

Mere days after Nancy moved in, the nursing home was closed to visitors. She had had no time to get to know her neighbours before lockdown. Worse still, very soon the retirement home’s garden – the only allowed outdoor space for the residents – became out of bounds when a stone wall that backed it became in danger of collapsing. She was incarcerated in unfamiliar rooms, adrift, alone, bewildered. 

When I heard this, I wondered, would a reading session once a week be any help? I’d recently read Terence Frisby’s heart-warming memoir of his and his older brother’s sojourn as evacuees on the west coast of England during WW2 with a salt-of-the-earth couple whose kindness and instinctive wisdom he records with gratitude half a century later. 

Nancy was initially as hesitant as I was about the project. She’d been a highly-respected counsellor with Relate in her time and founder of the charity Beat. Her work on eating disorders had won her an OBE. She had pride, and dignity. Her eyesight was such that she wasn’t reading any more, but being read to, what would that feel like? Would it be embarrassing, would she feel awkward?

 She agreed to give it a try, and side-stepping the complications of Zoom, she phoned me on Facetime on a phone her family set up for her. 

After a bit of trial and error we could eventually see each other’s faces. Hello, Nancy. We had talked fleetingly at family gatherings but I didn’t know her well at that point. I was conscious of her very blue eyes looking perspicaciously into mine, her fair skin, the heather tones she wore, her air of kindness, diffidence, intelligence. What did she see? 

I sat in my garden-room, and then later outside on the terrace so that the garden colours and sounds, the wind in the leaves, the birds flying by, the dog drinking water from the birdbath, a nearby robin scrabbling after a worm, became as much part of our interaction as the story we were reading.

I chose Kisses on a Postcard in part because of Nancy’s age, I’d hoped there might be resonances for her, and partly because the tone was so engaging. And I hit lucky. Nancy had grown up in a rural community with many similarities to those experiences described in the book. She remembered the evacuees (‘vaccees’) her village had housed. Nancy’s father had farmed, and many of the activities the boys in the memoir engaged in, and much of the lore of country living at that period, were those she had experienced herself.

Our one hour on a Monday afternoon – she would later claim to her family – turned around her week. Out of the formlessness and the unknowing day-to–day, there was this one certainty, this one clear engagement. For an hour, too, she could put the discomfort of the present to one side. While we discussed the characters in the book ad nauseum, examining their reactions, motivations, matching them or mis-matching them with our own, resting with pleasure in the solid yet kind-hearted reasonableness with which their hosts handled the boys’ growing up pains, and necessary readjustments, we also returned down memory lane. 

Each week’s episode triggered more of Nancy’s memories. And she had a willing listener in me. I think for both of us – and this is what books do – our temporary trapped and enclosed world opened and opened to vast other landscapes. We were taken out of ourselves – together. We got to know one another, we shared confidences in safety, we explored generational differences, our parents, being parents ourselves, aging. It was a two-way exchange.

Early summer came.  The book was finishing. The wall in Nancy’s complex had been rebuilt, she was allowed out. By now you could walk or sit with another on a park bench. I’d made a trip to reunite with my partner. Nancy had spoken to her husband through a gap of a window opening. She was beginning to meet her neighbours, her family were able to visit her. We were all relaxing a little.

As our diaries filled, so Nancy’s mental powers decreased. ‘That damned phone!’ She found it harder now to remember how to key in my number, she didn’t hear the phone when I rang because she’d accidentally switched off the ringtone. We scrabbled to re arrange the meeting. We read the books’ culminating chapters. Then a couple of short stories. The sacred Mondays became increasingly moveable, till we decided that sharing a book had seen us both through a difficult time. More than that, it had gloriously fulfilled its brief.

 Until close to the end of her life, Nancy would talk to her family about ‘that time reading with Christine’ and she’d want them to let me know (again!) what a difference it had made.

For me, too, Nancy. Thank you. And thank you to the writer Terence Frisby, who’s work drew many smiles in the toughest of times.

—

Christine Cohen Park is a novelist and award-winning editor of short-story collections, including Close Company (Virago). Christine is a former tutor on the University of Sussex M.A.in Creative Writing & Personal Development, is a freelance writer and facilitator of Shared Reading Groups. She lives in Lewes, Sussex. www.christinecohenpark.com/ X: @ccohenpark

 

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Category: On Writing