ABSTRACT
True? I might have been telling them stories about myself from my own child’ hood days —or motherhood days, or grandmotherhood days, or personhood days. Such stories we all have. They may not be true in detail-memory or wishful-thinking or both can play tricks on us-but they are true in principle, which is what counts. Such stories make storytellers of us all, every day-you and me and them. Such stories have the right to a daily place in the nursery and infants’ schoolroom: adults must tell their own stories if they are to elicit stories from the lives occupied by the children they care for. Personal experience is the class-or nursery-room’s strongest resource. Each child has expert knowledge of her/his own life: it’s easiest to become articulate about what you know best. And you know your own life is real. But the story I had just told Sumita’s class was a different sort. This one was about a lonely fisherman who stole a mermaid’s magic garment as she sat singing on a rock. He fell in love with her, of course, even though she had her back to him, for such was the beauty of her lovely voice. He knew, like all the people in that part of Donegal, that without her magic cloth she was but a woman, unable to return to the water and obliged to follow the thief, even to the end of the world. But this mermaid needs to walk on her two little feet only as far as the fisherman’s thatched, whitewashed cottage in the hamlet on the cliff top where the other fisherfolk live. There she becomes a wife, and as the years pass, the mother of three children, two girls and then a boy. Far from the sleek cool waters she once called home and the sweet smell of
the magic garment returns to her hands and becomes again a second skin to her body.
