I love these stories. My Dad read them to me frequently particularly the one about the butterfly that stamped its foot - in retrospect, it seems he was trying to make some kind of point. My favourites were the Elephant’s Child, the Cat and the Sing-song of Old Man Kangaroo, which I enjoyed for the rhythms in the prose:
Man was a genius. Not absolutely sure I’d read How the Leopard Got His Spots to a kid nowadays (“Black’s good enough for a nigger”) but I suspect I’d give it a go and then have a long conversation about how the world has changed since Kipling’s days.
Oh, and the Crab getting his shell as well. Top stuff.
I love them all so much, but The Elephant’s Child has always been my favorite.
“Come hither, little one,” said the crocodile “and I’ll whisper.”
My grandfather read the Just So Stories and The Jungle Book aloud on tape for me when I was just a little Winkie. We lived pretty far away, and he wanted me to know his voice and not be afraid of him on the phone (and he wanted to be able to read to his granddaughter.) More than a couple of decades later, he still calls me Oh Best Beloved.
Goddamn hamsters. The one time I write a post in which I make a momentous discovery in researching the answer, and it gets et.
Anyway, what I discovered was that HarperCollins has released a wonderful series of recordings Boris Karloff made of the Just So Stories. Karloff, born William Henry Pratt and the son of British diplomats, had a marvelous speaking voice and an evident love of children. I grew up with these recordings and credit him, Kipling and Milne (Karloff also recorded Pooh readings) for my love of language.
What saddens me is that so few children grow up with these stories anymore. Usually, when I mention them or allude to them I’m the only one who’s even heard of them.
No, more prosaically he was trying to impress on me the idea that when small and powerless individuals stamp their foot, only the whims of their superiors make their wishes come true and that in fact, foot-stampers don’t have the power they think they do.
I can’t even begin to imagine why he thought I needed that lesson as by the age of 5 it had already become perfectly apparent. Now, had he read it to my sister, family life might have been very different.