Bedtime stories used to be fun – but not now Mary is the reader
Iused to love my daughter’s bedtime. Not because it was almost time for her to be unconscious and so I’d get some much-needed rest for 12 or so hours (nothing, and I mean nothing, is better than when your children are fast asleep and unable to move or talk).
No, the reason I loved it was because I got to read to her.
One of my favourite childhood memories is of my dad reading to me.
Holding a book in one hand and a glass of Boddingtons in the other, he’d read classics like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlotte’s Web, White Fang, and 50 Shades of Grey.
Happy times.
And now, four decades on, I do the same with my kids.
But – and herein lies the reason for writing – my oldest Mary is now at school and is, because this is what these bloody places of education tend to do, being forced to learn to read.
Every night she’s sent home with a book, which we as parents are instructed to encourage her to read and it has, I hereby declare in ever-soslightly dramatic tone, ruined my life.
No longer can I just read to her.
No, she has to read to me. But listening to her trying to do so is as enjoyable as sharing a double bed with a boa constrictor.
Her current book, for example, is called On The Dot and is about three children (Pat, Sid and Tom) playing a game.
The book is 12 pages long and here are its entire contents: ‘Pat is on a dot. Tom can sit on a dot. Sid can sit in the gap. The cat is sat on the dot! That cat can nap on the dot!’
I’ve checked and – and I really just can’t believe this – it hasn’t yet won the Booker Prize, though surely that’s just an oversight on the part of the organisers.
The book is – as you’d expect from something aimed at children taking their first tentative steps into the world of literacy – supremely simple and short.
However, it takes us about 45 agonizing, painful, infuriating minutes to get through the damn thing (I write that sentence with real feeling, as I have just emerged from her bedroom and am in urgent need of a large glass of wine and a Valium pill).
What happens is this.
First I spend around 20 minutes coaxing Mary into trying to just look at the cover.
‘Can’t we play instead?’ she asks.
‘No, it’s bedtime and you’ve got to read this for your teacher,’ I reply.
‘But playing is so much more fun’.
‘Well, yes it is,’ I agree, ‘but unless you want to grow up to be a complete thicko then we need to read the book.’
This negotiating goes on for many more minutes before we strike some sort of deal, usually involving me agreeing to get her a glass of milk and half a chocolate biscuit and in return she will, graciously, look at the book.
The first page – next to an illustration of a weirdlooking kid wearing terribly baggy blue shorts and with his tongue lolling out of his mouth – reads: ‘Pat is on a dot’.
‘What does that first word say Mary?’ I ask.
She has a slurp of milk, a bite of her biscuit, and spells it out.
‘Per.’ Two minute pause. ‘Ah.’ Three-and-a-half minute pause. ‘Ter.’
‘Brilliant,’ I lie. ‘So, what does that spell?’
She thinks hard and shouts triumphantly, ‘dab,’
I look at her to see if she is taking the mickey.
She isn’t.
‘No, no, dab is dee. It begins with dee. This word here,’ I say pointing to the book, ‘begins with per. Per. Then an Ah and a Ter.’ I say this so slowly and so deliberately that I have literally said the word ‘pat’ out loud.
‘So, what do you think it spells?’ I venture.
She stares at the page with intense concentration, as if
trying to unnerve an imaginary adversary, then suddenly shrieks, ‘bottle!’
Oh my god.
We’ve got 12 pages of this to get through and she’s stumped by the very first word.
Now according to Mrs Canavan you are meant to encourage and cajole and wait till your child works the word out.
But we started this book 11 minutes ago and I’m already losing the will to live so I say: ‘Pat, it’s Pat. Per Ah Ter’ in quite an exasperated voice before catching myself and adding, in what I hope is a slightly kinder tone: “Let’s try the next word. Can you spell it?”’
The next word is ‘is’.
‘Try the first letter,’ I say. Mary stares at the page with a kind of transfixed bewilderment for a good minute or so, before saying hesitantly, ‘ah’.
‘No, it’s i,’ I say, wondering if I’ve given birth to some sort of delinquent.
‘Ah,’ she says.
“No, i,” I half-yell back with the tetchiness and disbelief of a man who has never before had a row over a vowel.
Around 25 minutes later we have not yet made it to the end of page four and Mary says: ‘Daddy, can we do it tomorrow?’
I’m about to say no when I remember I’m out the next night and it is Mrs Canavan’s turn to put our daughter to bed, so I reply: ‘Yes, of course darling’, kiss her, say: ‘Well done, your reading is really coming on,’ (she’s not yet five so has no concept of sarcasm) and leave the room.
I am now drinking a large glass of alcohol and will, I’m fairly certain, have advanced liver disease by the time she is actually able to read.
‘I look at her to see if she is taking the mickey’