Two stories that demonstrate the freewheeling nature of a child’s imagination . . .
Working with the children a week ago to devise texts for the hoarding, I met a boy I had not met before.
I gave him some paper and pens and he returned with a full page of writing – his story – which was impossible to read or make sense of. So I asked him to read it to me, his finger pointing to each word he had written – a story about trains.
He held on to the paper and during the day read his story to different play workers.
It turned out that each time he did so, the story was a new one, each completely different. As he pointed to each word, a new scenario was being created.
When I told Frances at South London Gallery about this, she told me of the girl who had written and illustrated a story on large sheets of paper pinned to a long fence. Frances had congratulated the girl on her story, and the girl, like the boy, told Frances her story, or rather a new story to the one she had told me, this too changing to a completely different one.
