Talking was not my childhood strong point. At least, not for a long time. I had a terrible lisp and my
childish tongue substituted a y for an l. But once I surmounted these challenges, I was unstoppable.
My love for language was boundless, and silence was forever lost for my family.
Talking was not my childhood strong point. At least, not for a long time. I had a terrible lisp and my
childish tongue substituted a y for an l. But once I surmounted these challenges, I was unstoppable.
My love for language was boundless, and silence was forever lost for my family.
While books were still pictures with squiggly things between them, my mother used to read to me
nightly. I preferred her to my dad for the task because she did the voices. When my sister Lindsay
began to read, I hovered to ensure that anything she could do, I could do younger. Even after I could
read, I still loved to hear words spoken. Mostly by me.
Dr Seuss's Wumpus-filled wordplay was soon the firmest favourite. Oh, the places I went on the
wings of whacky words! Soon I leapt through the looking glass to find out what a slithy tove was.
Books were treasure chests of vocabulary: words for new things, or new ones to wrap old things
in. I was no longer happy, I was exultant, exuberant! I was useless at throwing, catching, kicking,
or running, which cut me out from all sport. But watching, listening and reading I could do with
aplomb.
Another thing I quickly learnt how to do, along with reading, was work the TV remote. Soon I was
watching Dumbo through, rewinding it, and watching it again. I also developed an incredible love
for computers and gadgets, and spent hours playing videogames. To my techno-dinosaur parents,
this was probably a very worrying turn of events. I was spending, so they thought, less time outside
or reading in order to allow for more time gaming or watching TV.
Many years on, I still play games. I still watch TV and movies. But I do so in-between reading
classics of English literature for university, along with writing for my journalism course. I didn't
turn into the gibbering Neanderthal that popular ideas of TV and video games suggest. I kept words.
This is because I grew up playing imaginative games of the media I consumed. I hauled on my
red Stetson and plastic-leather waistcoat 'embroidered' with horseshoes, and fired pistols like Clint
Eastwood at desert bandits. I took an old broom and forged Frodo's trusty Sting.
I had not just a love of words. I had a love of stories, of imagination. Too often, the two are
confused. Both are important to a childhood of reading. A love of words would make the deathly-
dull Cathy and Mark reading primers bearable. A love of stories makes them anaesthetic. It is
imagination that makes the reader, not simply literacy. That is what needs emphasis, a rediscovery
of the value of invisible friends, faraway galaxies and the wonder of the sound of a word.
* Brendan Ward is a third-year Journalism student.
