PETE MEETS POLLY HOWAT

(From F&F#52 Feb. 2005)

For the past few years I’ve worked at an event at Wicksteed Park every June. Other regulars have been Bob Wilkins and Polly Howat. I took the opportunity to do interviews with them both. Here is Polly’s. As is often the case at such events all the tellers are working at the same time and you don’t get to hear them tell so I started by asking Polly about her stories:

We’ve worked together here for the last three years but I’ve still never heard you tell a story properly! - I’ve just overheard odd little bits, so tell me about your repertoire for a start… what kind of stories do you tell?

My repertoire goes from age 3 right through and I really like telling multi-cultural tales so it’s stories and folk tales from all over the world. For little children I make them interactive and we have little rhymes going through and songs and I use hand puppets sometimes, and a singing bowl, and... what else do I do? I do try and put a lot of myself into the stories and I do write stories myself sometimes for children. I try and make my stories very exciting when they’re meant to be exciting; and sad; and healing and soothing and scary!

And how about the adult ones? You do Beowulf and things?

Yes, again, I do multi-cultural and if anyone wants to commission me I’ll take on that commission, if the terms are right! I’ve been into hospices and you tell the right stories and again they’ll be very healing stories and the amazing thing is that often you can tell a story that you would tell to an 8 year old and you can tell it to an adult—you might tell it in a slightly different way, but… I think stories are really ageless and timeless.

You live in East Anglia. Is there an East Anglian flavour to your stuff?

Some of it. I’ve written four folklore books centred on East Anglia and I have specialised as well in tales from the Fenland—meaning Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire Fens and the Norfolk Marshes. I’m really interested in that sort of thing. All those stories are very, very bleak; you don’t get ‘fluffy bunny stories’ there and I do like stories with an edge to them. I quite like being an ‘edgy’ storyteller. I think I’m at that age when I can be quite ‘edgy’! So that would be quite a speciality and I also very much like Celtic stories as well; and then I like sun, moon and stars stories and… as I say, from right across the world. I do travel quite a lot and I love to pick up stories as I go travelling; and artefacts which I can tell stories around which is really lovely.

Where are you from originally?

I’m Hampshire. And then I lived in Somerset and I’ve been living up in the Cambridgeshire Fens for the last twenty-nine years.

I saw you on television a year or two back talking about opium poppies in the Fens…

Yes, we grow opium poppies—not for a living! They are the indigenous poppies and I’m really keen to keep them going because as a folklorist… I mean, people used the poppy syrups and the poppy cake and poppy everything for their myriad ills. It was the valium of time ago! You have to keep these things going...

How did you get into storytelling?

How and when and where…it was 15, no 16 years ago, and I’d written some books and… It is amazing isn’t it? I’d always loved telling stories to my children and I’d just finished a manuscript for ‘Ghosts and Legends of Lincolnshire and the Fens’ and there was an actor who was quite well known then—Colin Blumeno (neither of us are sure how to spell that! Pete) - he’d been in the Bill for yonks, and he came to be the manager of the Angles Theatre in Wisbeach, and he was going to get an actor chum to come down and read ghost stories—local ghost stories, and someone said "Well, Polly’s just finished a book..." so he came to see me and I thought, well, there’s no way he’s going to have my manuscript before it is published, and we were talking and he said "Well, if I direct you would you like to have your own show for three nights?" so I though "Wow!". And he really, highly directed me and I read from a lectern, but each night I thought that sort of story really should have been told. And that’s really what gave me the idea. And I found I was good at telling stories and I worked harder and harder and harder and it’s how I make my living now. But, isn’t it weird? It’s pathways isn’t it? If I hadn’t written the books and if I hadn’t known that woman who happened to know Colin Blumeno I would never have been a storyteller. But it really is my way of life. I really do believe in story telling. My head is like a cauldron bubbling with tales, perhaps too much sometimes!

What kinds of places have you worked?

I do a lot of schools, all ages and abilities. I’ve done prisons which are always quite good—sex offenders and lifers. I’ve done festivals, arts centres, lots of TV and radio... I’ve been up Monkey River in Belize telling stories in a tropical rainstorm! All over the place. This is the lovely thing with stores… when you’re a traveller if you meet some English-speaking people you can tell stories and perhaps someone gets out a guitar and plays music and you tell stories. It’s good…

I’ve done drama work with profoundly disabled people and they selected a Fen story—I’d told them stories and they selected one and I wrote the script and we had a professional dramatist and every person had a part—the ones in wheel chairs were done up as bogles and they just had gauzy bits on them and we went to the opening night and, again, that was just so lovely, to see your story coming true with all these people who perhaps, wouldn’t have had the chance before.

How about memorable events—the good and the bad!?

The bad! You want the bad! This is a salient point, when you are a rooky storyteller… I had been booked by quite a prestigious sounding group who were coming to Norfolk, on a tour of Norfolk, and they really did sound quite the ‘bee’s knees’ in the title. I was booked in to tell them some stories so I had worked out my repertoire and, by gum, I was going to tell those stories, as you do when you’re just starting out. So I was put in this hotel and the roof, you know.. it was such a high ceiling and a horrible chandelier thing and I waited and they were Ladies and finally they came and they were very Old Ladies and they’d obviously had red wine for their supper and the last thing they wanted was storytelling and one of the stories was going to be funny and as I was telling this funny story they all went to sleep! That was just awful! With the nous I’ve got now I would have just changed that whole repertoire. That was one of the worse things...

I don’t know about the best things… One of the best things was in prison, talking to sex offenders. Just, on the surface, a bunch of really nice guys and at the end I said "Would anyone like to share a story?" wondering what the Hell I was going to get and one young man got up, with a dreadful speech impediment and he told his story and the Educationalist said he rarely speaks and what was so nice was he told his story with this "w… w… w…" and none of the other guys sniggered or looked bored. For me that was really very nice. It’s very often people who do have Special Needs, they will react.

I was in a hospice once and I told a story and this old lady who was profoundly ill said "That was lovely dear. No-one’s ever told me a story before." It’s those little things, isn’t it? that are as good as any big, high blown performance? For me that’s what storytelling’s all about really. I don’t go for the big stuff. Everyone deserves a story. I really do believe in the power of storytelling and the way it connects.

I hope to carry on storytelling until I’m an old, old lady! A crabby, bad-tempered old lady! As long as you’ve got your health and you’ve got your voice you should be able to carry on storytelling… and you have to have your mind, I guess. Because being a storyteller you really have to be on the ball because sometimes you do miss out a chunk and you’ve got to have the nous to put it in later. And I think we’ve all done stories where you come away thinking "Oh no!"

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