The storyteller

esley Dowding, 58, collects stories, all sorts of stories from all sorts of places. Lesley is a storyteller. She writes a lot of her own stories and other storytellers pass on their stories.

"Just like ancient people. If you hear a story that someone tells you, say from Ireland, and you really like that story and think, wow, I could tell that, you ask permission. Can I tell that story?"

She doesn't read them out. Neither does she learn whole stories by heart. Instead, she learns the skeleton of the story.

"There are things you don't want to lose, so you might learn a phrase by heart."

And then the more she tells it, the more it changes. And it changes to fit the audience. Lesley doesn't just sit down and relate the story to her audience, she performs it for them.

"I get involved in the story, so I'm actually in the story. When I'm telling the story, I can see a picture of everything I say. It's like little videos going on in my head."

She goes to libraries, schools, anywhere she is invited, to weave her tales in such a way that she brings the imagination out in the audience through her words.

And fostering children's imaginations is one of the things she likes about storytelling.

"We live in a visual world, where children's imagination is almost stifled. Because, if you think about it, every picture, image, that a child gets is actually someone else's image. It's not theirs. But, if you give them words without the image, they have to start to put their own picture to it."

And she doesn't just tell stories to children.

She has written a fairy tale for adults called When Apples Were Golden, which takes an hour to tell. "That's quite tiring and you have to make sure you have your audience with you the whole way."

If Lesley was telling her own story, she would start by putting on the appropriate hat.

Then she would begin: "The trees were blowing, the leaves captured the dappled light of the sunshine, which cast shadows over the baby's face ..."

That's because she can remember lying in her pram looking up at the leaves. It was post-war London and her mother looked after a number of foster children, so the pram was probably a good place for her to put Lesley for periods of time, she says.

Lesley was born in southeast London, when London was still a bomb site, and was brought up listening to stories. Her mother always insisted she listen to story time on the radio. There was no TV. Even now Lesley prefers the radio to TV.

In London, Lesley went to the first comprehensive school. Before that, there was either a grammer school, which was the pathway to university and students had to pass an exam to get into, or, for the less academic, a secondary school. Lesley's school, Catford County Girls' School, was the first to combine both types of students.

The government put a lot of money into the school to ensure it worked, so it had the best of everything. It had a theatre and became well known for its drama.

"I did drama all the time. I didn't do any acting. I hated acting. I was a very shy person ... probably can't say that now."

Lesley wanted to be a stage lighting technician, so worked on all the drama productions at her school. She had a lot of opportunities because of the school's drama syllabus and when she left, she had all the relevant O and A levels necessary for the position. But when she applied for a job at the BBC, there was an unexpected problem: Lesley was a girl. It was 1968 and the BBC couldn't insure women to climb scaffolding. She could have got a job in the industry as a secretary, but she wasn't interested.

So she went to Nottingham University, in Lincoln, to study to teach drama. The course was another first. Prospective drama teachers had previously studied English and did a bit of drama on the side.

When she was a student, Lesley saw a job at the art school for an off loom weaver. Having no idea what that was, but needing the cash, she went to the library and looked it up. She found about two paragraphs on off loom weaving, figured out what it was, went home and made one. She got the job.

Off loom weaving is making pictures in wool. It uses Turkish knots and different textures to get different effects. "You always leave one loose thread, so the spirit of the weaver will go into the next weaving."

Lesley made one weaving, picturing New Zealand bush, that she gave to friends who have taken it to Antartica four times.

"It was so they had the New Zealand bush with them."

Lesley moved to New Zealand in 1975. She had been boarding with a family who had been to New Zealand and who often had visitors from New Zealand. Then Lesley got married to a man who was keen to come to New Zealand and farm. The couple came to Taranaki because they had met people from here. They have since separated, but have two daughters, Emily, a solicitor in Wellington, and Naomi, who works in banking in London.

When Lesley first came to Taranaki, she taught history, English and religious education at a high school. Drama was not on the syllabus. In England, history and theology had been compulsory, but here, theology was not on the syllabus, either.

Lesley is a lay minster for the Anglican church and takes services once a month in Okato and Oakura.

Her first job in New Zealand was teaching history at St Mary's Diocesan School, an Anglican secondary school in Stratford. Now she teaches at St John Bosco School, a Catholic primary school in New Plymouth.

"It's all the same God. I like sharing. I like seeing them grow. It's a great privilege being a teacher."

Lesley has taught at nearly every secondary school around the coast and finally got to teach drama when she was at Opunake High School.

"I wrote two courses for them, so we were able to offer students pure drama for fourth form and sixth form. It was really great to be able to do some really indepth training and a lot of those students went on to do performing arts and very successfully, actually."

She got into storytelling when she was taking extramural papers to enable her to teach primary school. One assignment required her to write a story, which the tutor then suggested Lesley send in to the School Journal. The story was published and later put on to CD. Someone from the journal put Lesley on to storytelling and she went to a storytelling festival, Glistening Waters, in Masterton. That was about 20 years ago.

The difference between reading a story and telling a story is the sound and rhythm of the words, she says.

Lesley has written a children's book called Midnight at the Lighthouse, which is written as a storytelling book. A linguist at the University of Waikato critiqued it for her.

He told her that when he read it aloud to his daughter, he felt like a storyteller for the first time, she says.

"Because it has a rhythm, which is different to when are you reading a book ... when I wrote that, I was really keen to keep the sound of the voice as much as the sentence structure.

"The book was edited to make sure it has a rhythm, so when you are reading it out loud, you feel you've got a rhythm to the words and you can put your own mood to the words."

Lesley's storytelling name is Lesley 2 Hatts. She actually has more than two and numerous costumes.

For Christmas, Lesley got a little striped tent designed for changing clothes at the beach. It is tall and narrow and Lesley plans to have it on stage with her and use it to change costumes in during a performance. She keeps talking while she's changing to ensure she doesn't lose the audience.

Sometimes, Lesley will put the hats in a circle in front of her and ask the children to pick a hat. "I wonder if there is a story in here. If I put it on, a story might pop out."

She goes overseas to tell her stories, but doesn't take many of her hats with her.

"The last one I took, I couldn't bring it back because it had a feather in it and it had to go into quarantine.

"My partner [Robert] paid a lot to get it out."

Lesley plans to get a big Lesley 2 Hatts sticker that she can put on and peel off her car, Miss Morrie, a 1950 Morris Minor, that goes "like a bomb".

Lesley loves vintage cars and has done since she was little. She has model cars given to her by her father dotted around her lounge.

"I would love a Model T, but can only afford a Morrie Minor."

Lesley's story isn't finished, so it doesn't have an end as such. She would wind it all up by saying: "Now is the night warm sleep to dream, dream to sleep."

By HELEN HARVEY helen.harvey@tnl.co.nz - Taranaki Daily News | Wednesday, 14 January 2009