A dark afternoon in December, aged about ten, I was in a class waiting for double geography. Mr Blake breezed in, told us to put our books away and, as a treat, he read us a story. It was ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, the famous ghost story by M.R. James.
Heads resting on our arms, we listened to this chilling tale of a scholar who takes a winter holiday at an English seaside town, finds a whistle buried in the sand engraved with the inscription of the story’s title, and makes the mistake of blowing it. An evil thing is summoned — a flapping, sheet-like, blind thing with a ‘horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen’. Once heard, never forgotten.
That story was by a mile the most memorable single event in my umpteen years of education. The second most memorable was being read the novel Moonfleet. Being read to is among life’s most enduring memories. It’s the joy of a good story that is the point of a new museum in Oxford, which has a lease on a fantastic muddle of buildings opposite Christ Church College, acquired in 2009 thanks to an anonymous £2.5 million donation. The Story Museum — the name misleadingly suggests specimen narratives in glass cases — is currently fundraising for a much expanded centre on the site where parents and children can go.
The place is already a-buzz. Far from being a twee middle-class Disneyish set-up, it is meeting a local need to insert stories into young lives deprived of books. You might not think it but Oxford beyond the dreaming spires is an urban hellhole of burning cars, despair and unemployment: it is ranked number 32 in Crap Towns: The 50 Worst Places to Live in the UK.
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