Alphabetical (8 page)

The way experts, teachers, monks, priests, parents, carers, acquaintances, publishers, booksellers and street pedlars have tried to teach children to read has varied down through the centuries. Evidence consists of the reading materials that survive and a mixture of teachers' and ex-pupils' accounts. Obvious perhaps, except that what people think they're teaching and what people remember being taught may not be the whole story.

Every night, my mother read to me: Beatrix Potter books,
The Little Red Engine
, Babar books, Puffin picture books about farms and planes and trains, Père Castor books translated from French. Each Christmas, I was given a new crop of Puffin picture books which I pored over for hours, inheriting my older brother's pile started four years earlier. At school, we were introduced to the Beacon Readers.

I learned to read.

What I don't know is who out of our class didn't. When I was nine and ten, I was in an unstreamed class. About half
of the class were children who had been with me since nursery and I can remember hearing one or two of them trying to read out loud to the teacher but not really managing.

The Beacon Readers and their ilk evolved out of centuries of experiment with method, tone and purpose. In every era, the authors and publishers have proclaimed a certainty in their introductions, prefaces and notes which seems to derive from the fact that the books and schemes are in stages or steps that the teachers and children will take. There is no sense that children might be learning to read in any way other than along a straight line, accumulating skills, whether these be letter by letter, syllable by syllable, sound by sound, half-word by half-word, or whole word by whole word. In my experience, this is not always the case. The children I know haven't moved in a straight line. They have advanced with some aspects of their reading while standing still in others, then ducked back to grab one bit, while forgetting another . . . and so on. Likewise, the primers and ‘readers' rarely mention that there is a learning-to-read world beyond this particular, apparently fail-safe, teach-all book or series of books.

No matter what method of teaching reading takes place in the surroundings of school, millions of children have acquired at least some, in some cases all, their reading skills (if ‘skills' are what you read with!) from hearing and poring over this kind of printed material in the company of brothers, sisters, cousins, friends, parents, grandparents and carers. In the case of each of the children I've helped bring up, there have been different breakthrough moments, different ways of ‘getting' how reading works. With each of them I can point to different ways in which they ‘got' one word and figured out that the way they had ‘got' it could be applied to other words.

For one, it was the Dr Seuss book,
Hop on Pop
. I can see that boy sitting up in his bed, having looked at it on his own for a while, saying the lines over and over again, laughing and laughing. For another, it was hearing
Where the Wild Things Are
read to him again and again (at his request) so that he reached a point where he knew what word was coming up next, pointing at it, and saying it. The book mattered a great deal to him and on one occasion, as we reached the moment where Max ‘wanted to be where he was loved best of all', he blurted out ‘Mummy!'

I have often thought of this as a fine example of how the very youngest of children interpret what they hear and start to read. After all, there is no ‘Mummy' in the book. ‘Mother' is mentioned as someone whom Max would like to eat up and who sends Max to his room. We don't even see her in the pictures. What this three-year-old reader did was fuse his own ‘Mummy' (his word, not the author's) with who he imagined was the ‘object' of Max's emotions. To do this, he had to interpret a rather odd phrase that he would not have heard outside of the book: ‘he wanted to be where he was loved best of all'. He was learning to ‘read with understanding' by discovering he could interpret books for himself.

Yet another child became very angry about being taught to read. She decided she couldn't and wouldn't. At the time there was a series of books called ‘Jets' which combined cartoons, speech bubbles and a bit of continuous prose; I gave her a pile of them. I said that she didn't have to read them to me, I was quite happy to read them to her if she wanted me to. If not, she could just look at them if and when she wanted to. She opted for a bit of all three: I read a bit, she read bits to me, she looked at a lot on her own. The important thing for the kind of person she is, was that it was all driven by her. She was in control of when, where, how often, and at what pace.

All this seems a far cry from a ‘Phonics Screening Check' delivered to children at the age of six in order to determine how well every child can sound out letters and read them in lists of real and nonsense words. The claim I heard being made by a minister is that this teaching method and the test will ‘eradicate illiteracy'. We shall see.

THE STORY OF

•
‘C' STARTS OUT LIFE
as ‘gimel' in Phoenician. Its shape was something like a walking stick or the number 1 without a serif on the bottom. In fact, it meant a stick as used by a hunter, perhaps something like a boomerang. The Greeks called it ‘gamma' and when they switched their writing to run from left to right, they flipped the hunting stick. Some Greek settlers in Italy preferred a crescent-shaped ‘gamma'. The Etruscans turned the hard ‘g' of ‘gamma' into a ‘k' sound. The Romans added the serifs and created the elegant thin-thick line.

c

This is of course just a small version of ‘C' and it appeared in manuscripts from around
AD
500.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

The Normans would have pronounced the letter as ‘say', as in modern French, and the Great Vowel Shift turned it to ‘see'.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

If you've been saying ‘Julius Seezer' for ‘Julius Caesar' you are both right and wrong: right because that's how we say it, but wrong because the Romans of the time pronounced it ‘Kye-' (rhyming with our ‘rye') ‘-sar' or ‘-zar'. This is yet another indication of how everything in language changes. By the time the Roman Empire was in decline some people were turning the ‘k' sound into ‘ch' – a sound that persists in English with a loan word like ‘cello'.

The Normans arrived in Britain pronouncing the lone ‘c' as soft ‘s' – think ‘city' and ‘civil'.

If spelling were a matter of a purely rational divvying-out of letters to match sounds, then all soft ‘s' sounds would be indicated with ‘s', and all hard ‘k' sounds with the ‘k'; the ‘c' could be buried with Caesar. Instead, we have ‘c' which can be the ‘s' sound of ‘ceiling' or the ‘k' sound of ‘cut' or ‘picnic'. You can have a ‘tic' or a ‘tick'; an ‘e' following ‘c' in a single-syllable word or the last syllable of a word tells us to use a soft ‘s' – ‘pace', ‘police'. To tell us to say ‘k', we write ‘ache' – double it and we say both ‘k' and ‘s': ‘accept'. From at least as early as 1606, scholars were on to this criminal state of affairs. Playwright and poet Ben Jonson – no stranger to crime himself (he avoided execution for a murder he committed) – thought that we should have been ‘spared' the ‘c' letter but felt that it was already too late to quarrel with those who had laid it down in the first place.

In French, ‘c' is soft when it is followed by an ‘e' or ‘i' and hard when it is followed by an ‘a', ‘o' or ‘u' . . . unless a ‘cedilla' has been stuck to its bottom. This little sign (a figure 5 without a hat) tells us that the colloquial ‘ça' is pronounced ‘sa'. Whether the cedilla outlasts the smartphone keypad epoch is another matter.

‘C' combines with all the vowels along with ‘r' to make ‘crab' ‘cress', ‘crisis', ‘cross' and ‘crunch', with ‘l' to make ‘clam', clench', ‘clip', ‘close' and ‘clunk' and with a ‘z' in the loan word ‘czar'. It can combine with vowel ‘y' in ‘Cyprus', ‘cynic' and ‘Cyril'.

You can find it embedded in the three-letter consonant sound ‘-tch' as in ‘itch' but that sound is of course much more usually written as ‘ch' as in ‘church'. Putting a consonant sound in front of the ‘c' also gives us the very different ‘arc', ‘alchemy' and ‘anchor'.

For sound-play with the ‘hard c' see ‘
The Story of K
', and for ‘soft c' see ‘
The Story of S
'.

‘Ch' word-play gives us ‘choo-choo train', ‘choochy face', ‘hoochie-coochie man', ‘cheep-cheep', ‘cheeky-cheeky', ‘chop-chop', ‘the Chattanooga Choo-choo' and ‘cheap and cheerful'.

C
IS FOR CIPHERS

A
N ISSUE OF
the
Daily Telegraph
during the Second World War included the usual crossword but on one particular occasion was accompanied by a challenge, in which readers were invited to solve the puzzle in under twelve minutes. If they thought they could, they were asked to make contact with the newspaper. Some twenty-five readers were invited to Fleet Street to sit a new crossword test. Five of them completed the crossword in twelve minutes while one other had only one word missing when the time was up. A few weeks later, these six people were interviewed by the intelligence services and recruited as codebreakers at Bletchley Park, where a team of people were deciphering the messages transmitted by the German military through Enigma machines. Some of the clues are straightforward: ‘16 across: Pretend (5)', for which the answer is ‘feign'.

Others are what are known as ‘cryptic':

13 across: Much that could be got from a timber merchant (two words – 5, 4), for which the answer is ‘Great deal'.

14 down: The right sort of woman to start a dame school (3), for which the answer is ‘Ada'.

18 ‘The War' (anag.) (6), for which the answer is ‘Wreath'.

The most cryptic is: ‘22 across: The little fellow has some beer: it makes me lose colour, I say (6)', with ‘impale' being the answer, though the last thing I ‘impaled' was a barbecue sausage.

If you tot up the techniques needed to solve these they include: memory of synonyms and definitions; awareness of idioms, homonyms and puns; an ability to see letters on the page divorced from their meaning, usual punctuation and spacing; and the ability to jumble and reassemble letters. At the time it was felt that these capabilities would be useful when faced with the encrypted messages that the centre at Bletchley picked up – pages that looked like this:

FDJKM LDAHH YEOEF PTWYB LENDP

MKOXL DFAMU DWIJD XRJZY DFRIO

MFTEV KTGUY DDZED TPOQX FDRIU

CCBFM MQWYE FIPUL WSXHG YHJZE

. . . and so on across several pages.

I'm not particularly good at crosswords though I did win the
Boy's Own Paper
crossword competition in 1958. I'm pretty sure I was imitating my parents who spent every Sunday afternoon in a huddle over the Sunday
Observer
's ‘Everyman' crossword, an activity that seemed even then to be full of dubious motives: repetitive, compulsive behaviour; enjoyable masochism; rigid, rule-bound process; succumbing to the will of an anonymous tyrant . . . To watch them was an initiation into the inner recesses of the alphabet. The anagram procedure they followed was to write the letters in a ring; words for which they had some letters
were written out on the white margins of the
Observer
with the blanks written as dashes; they talked of possible and impossible letter combinations and then roared with laughter when they overlooked the ‘cn' in the middle of ‘picnic'.

Cryptic crosswords today have become yet more cryptic, using many encoded ways of indicating what procedure you must use whilst embedding the code in a feasible phrase or sentence: the word ‘about' will inform you that you must work out an anagram of what comes next, though there is an alternative use telling you that the word preceding ‘about' will be split up and positioned around (i.e. ‘about') the following word. So, ‘Boss about tearfully (4)' is ‘sobs' but ‘Boss about one trying to be a scary gangsta (7)' is ‘booness'. There are at least twenty other procedures like these to make crosswords, some of which involve codes – substituting parts or all of words, and some of which involve ciphers which, like anagrams, involve substituting one letter for another. Together, these methods can be called ‘encryption'.