Perform Don't Tell

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Both my parents were story tellers. They weren’t readers. They didn’t have much in the way of formal education. But they did tell stories. My mother’s stories were about animals, folk tales full of morals and lessons to be learnt, very different to the stories my father told. My father liked to recount his real life experiences. He especially liked to talk about the time that he was attacked by a dog. The first time he told this story he stuck to the facts.

            He had been sent to the local butcher to collect the family’s meat. His family had been lucky that year, their only ewe had given birth to twins. One lamb had been set aside for breeding but the other had been fattened for the table. My father was on his way back home, arms full of parceled lamb, when the attack occurred. The dog had rushed up to him and had jumped onto his legs to sniff at the meat, almost knocking my father off his feet in the process. My father had been lucky enough to keep his balance and had the presence of mind to give it a swift kick before taking to his heels and racing home, safely delivering the meat to the arms of his waiting mother.  

            Over time the story changed. Eventually, it was no longer one dog but a pack of wolves that had attacked my father. Twenty of more of them had come racing down the mountains lured by the smell of fresh kill. The leader of the pack was the first to reach him. It sprang into the air and pounced upon my poor father sinking its fangs deep into his leg. My father fell to the ground and as he did so, two of the legs of lamb slipped from their parcels. Wasting no time, my father picked them up, one in each hand, and using them as clubs he began to beat the wolf about the head. The other wolves seeing their leader thus conquered, tucked their tails between their legs and fled into the far valley, never to be seen again.

            At the end of the story my father would roll up his trouser leg and point to his scars. My brother and I would lean in for a closer look and ooh and ahh. But the truth of the matter was that there were no scars to be seen.  But it wasn't important. So what if he embellished his story. So what if he left out facts and changed the details. It was not so much what he said that mattered, it was how he told the story.

            He left out the boring bits. He prolonged the exciting parts. He raised his voice when the story became exciting and whispered when it became intense. He waved his arms and kicked his legs. He smiled, he frowned, he snarled and whimpered. He made us feel as if we were there as if it was us fighting off the wolves. He knew how to draw us in. 

My father was a great story teller. But thinking back on it now, I realise that my father did more than tell stories, he performed them.