Beginnings

Little scrap… a tiny child with a lazy eye.  A pirate, with a patch over my good eye in a bid  to improve the one that barely works.   Sometimes I wonder how I managed to navigate anything with that patch, let alone my school work.   My left eye has always been blurry with vision only ‘half there’.  Maybe that explains my struggle with what’s right in front of me and why I’m often much happier inside my head.

When I could see, from behind thick spectacles, I lost myself in books and in stories.  We lived in a small 1960s terrace with a garage beneath the living room.  My parents converted it into another room and it was full of books.

I was sensitive, felt ugly, was bullied.  In my over-sized uniform, even the well-meaning comments hurt me - ‘ooh look at that little one…she’s tiny!’.  I didn’t like being me and stories gave me a way to escape; be somebody else and try and make sense of what people feel and why they do the things they do.

Storytelling leaked out into my real world by way of my mother who is an amazing seamstress.  With fancy dress, I could be anyone and I took up every opportunity (and even won a few prizes).  My crowning glory was my mother's awesome mermaid creation - made entirely of crepe paper scales... at the competition, they had to parade me around in a bucket.

My sister and I were always outside playing with the other children in the road.  Always role-playing and making up games of intrigue, investigation and pursuit, inspired by the heroes found in books.  We'd put on theatre shows for the street, or pretend we were hoteliers or shop-keepers and sometimes even spies.  It was all imagination and freedom; the legacy of not having too many toys.

I think they gave up on the eye-patch.  Perhaps protocol changed or maybe it was never going to improve.  My schoolwork improved and I loved to write stories and poems, it wasn't homework for me at all.  

I shared a room with my sister (often with a skipping rope divide - 'that's MY half!') and I remember Mum reading us bedtime stories, sat between the two beds.  It makes me sad that bedtime reading is dwindling with less than half of children being read to regularly.  My Mum worked so hard as a teacher and now I realise how much  time she made for us, despite her having to sit-up until midnight marking books and preparing lessons.  I think there are many reasons for this decline in the bedtime story but the sadness is that I know this special time benefits both parent and child.  It was certainly the most special, regular time I experienced with my son.  It's what's at the heart of Camp Dodo as we build it.  Thinking about these special, shared family moments.  Moments children crave the most according to recent research; and moments that connect us to each other.  A cwtch and a book at the end of each day, introducing us to characters, places and situations that will lead us into our dreams.