Pennac on the tube : revaluing reading to children

Abstract

On a cold December evening I made my way to King’s Cross St Pancras and boarded a Piccadilly train to Heathrow’s Terminal 4, well in time to catch a flight back home. I took out my dog-eared copy of Daniel Pennac’s The Rights of the Reader, first published in 1992, and continued amusing myself with the delights peppering every single page of this enchanting book. In the absence of pen or pencil I occasionally creased a corner of the page to mark a spot I wanted to return to and burrow for valuable quotations to include in my doctoral dissertation. After a while the two people who were sitting directly opposite to me caught my attention, not because they were in any way weirdly dressed or acting boisterously as sometimes happens when I am on the Tube, but just because they were engaged in something I have rarely had the pleasure to behold: a father reading to his daughter. The girl must have been about six and she was listening to a middle-aged man who I assumed to be her father. He had one arm around her shoulder, holding a book called In Control, Ms Wiz? in his free hand. The girl had an enchanted look on her face, staring into the distance as if totally unaware of sitting in a clanking train carriage hurtling towards the airport. Lost in Pennac’s library, the man read in a very low voice, aiming the flow of words directly at his daughter’s ear, almost uncomfortable to be seen reading to a young girl. I strained to catch the drift of the story but was mostly interested in observing these two people who seemed to have sprung out of the book I was holding in my own hands.