Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. Take Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. She wanted ‘to do something nice for the folks in my home county [Tennessee]. I wasn’t thinking on a larger scale,’ she says. But her idea to send a free book every month to every child enrolled in her scheme from the moment of birth right up until the age of five has now taken off and is reaching children across Australia, America and Canada. Four years ago she arrived in the UK to launch it in Rotherham, south Yorkshire, at the invitation of the local council. From sending out just 2,300 books each month when the scheme began 12 years ago, 700,000 children are now part of Dolly’s library.
Sarfraz Manzoor’s incisive Radio 4 programme How Dolly Got Rotherham Reading (produced by Mark Rickards) questioned how much this is just another publicity stunt by the country-and-western star, who has never been shy of promoting her brand. All the books are stamped with Dolly’s personal logo, a butterfly, and every child receives a personal message from Dolly. The scheme, too, is a ‘franchise’ operation, other places replicating the idea with advice from Parton’s foundation but with funding from sponsorship deals they have looked for themselves.
Manzoor talked to Dolly at her extraordinary ‘Dollywood’ theme park in Tennessee, complete with a mock-up of the ‘wooden shack’ that was her childhood home in the Smoky Mountains. But he also went in search of participants at a literacy conference, who were asking the question, how do children gain that first phonemic awareness? He talked as well to parents whose children have been receiving books as part of the scheme: have they made a difference?
Many of Parton’s relatives never went to school; they were too poor and the children were needed to help out on the land. Her father was unable to read or write, she says. Dolly, who was one of 12 children, knows too well how this impoverishes people. You can feel pretty hopeless as a child, and once an adult are too embarrassed or find it too difficult to start learning such a basic skill.
Dolly says she’s been reading all her life, can never remember not being able to do it — even though the only book they had at home was the family Bible. She didn’t say how this happened. It was music, her voice, and her talent for making the most of it, that took her out of childhood poverty and brought her fame (and fortune) across the world. Yet she has never forgotten where she comes from, still lives in Tennessee, and many of her songs tell of what it’s like to be poor and to feel ‘crippled’ by it.
How much is Dolly’s Imagination Library altruistic, asked Manzoor, driven by her desire to give back to her community, and how much is it just part of the Dolly brand? When she turned up in Rotherham, she was dressed in her trademark spangly dress, beehive blonde hair, the highest of heels, and she launched into song straightaway.
‘You can’t tell me in 2011 that you can’t have access to books,’ says Manzoor, who grew up without books in the house but went to the library to find them. What makes the Imagination Library different from other reading schemes running in the UK, such as Book Start, the National Literacy Trust and the London Evening Standard’s campaign to sponsor volunteer readers to help children?
It’s all about Dolly. She has no illusions, no utopian vision. But she knows what makes a difference to a child born into hardship. The books are sent direct to each child at home through the post. They come each month, regular as clockwork, 12 times a year, a personally addressed parcel through the door. The books start arriving almost from birth (parents are offered the chance to join the scheme on the maternity ward). They are carefully chosen (by literacy consultants) to be age-appropriate and ‘progressive’, developing the child’s imagination and reading ability. They become part of that child’s world.
Michael Morpurgo, former children’s laureate, who runs farm holidays to take children away from difficult circumstances and give their imaginations a chance to breathe, was on Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday morning with a ‘personal reflection’ on the atrocity in Norway. It was one of those radio-stopping moments. Something about his voice, its gravity and calm authority, broke through the morning haze and forced me to stop, sit down, listen.
He was moved to speak by the memory of a holiday last summer, sailing down the Norwegian coast and landing on islands such as Utoya to picnic, relax and read. On the boat he was reading Beowulf, that ancient tale about the battle of good and evil which came out of the legends of the North. Norway has become a model of democracy, prosperity, equality, yet it is, as elsewhere, still vulnerable to evil. ‘The monsters are out there,’ says Morpurgo, ‘and they are not like Shrek.’
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