CAE Reading and Use of English Part 7
You are going to read an extract from a magazine article. Six paragraphs have been removed from the article. Six paragraphs have been removed from the article. Choose from the paragraphs A – G the one which fits each gap (41-46). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.
Tell me a story!
Sita Brand is recounting the tale of how story-telling came to be in her blood, and as one might expect of a professional story-teller, she is doing a pretty good job of it.
It’s a dismally wet and chilly evening at the arts and music festival in North Yorkshire, where I first find Brand. She has been booked to tell rounds of stories – children’s fairytales during the afternoons and some darker, more ghostly recountings after dusk – but has suffered some unexpected nocturnal goings-on herself, her tent having filled up with rainwater the previous night. Yet, in keeping with the festival mood, she seems stoical as we squelch through a custard-like mud swamp.
She has lived and worked in several parts of England but most recently in Settle, the Yorkshire town beloved of walkers and railway enthusiasts but not hitherto known for its story-telling scene. In the four years since moving there, however, she has worked energetically to change that, establishing her own business, as well as founding an annual story-telling festival. But why here?
Not that her yearning came entirely without precedent. ‘The most exciting thing,’ she says, ‘is that I recently discovered that my mother’s side of the family came from this area. So, deep down inside I was always a Yorkshirewoman!’ She laughs. Having worked on and off as a story-teller for several years, Brand conceived the idea for the Settle Storytelling Festival as a way of establishing herself professionally in the area.
Before settling there she’d found work with Common Lore, a company of story-tellers and musicians. Later, she branched out and worked variously as an actor, writer, director and producer. She’s travelled a lot doing different things, but she admits, ‘In my heart, I’ve always loved stories and storytelling.’
This was a deliberate move on Brand’s part to get across her conviction that story-telling should not just be aimed at children. ‘When you look at books of traditional stories, they’re called folk tales,’ she says, raising her voice above the thudding jazz-rock bass emanating from beyond the tent. ‘They’re literally tales for the folk. That’s all of us.’ This year she says there will be more events specifically laid on for kids, ‘but the emphasis is very much on the oral tradition, about stories being passed down from generation to generation.’
Brand says many of her own stories were themselves passed on from family members, that she has then changed and reworked. ‘The way I tell it today might be different to the way I tell it tomorrow or the day after.’ Through that process, like a Chinese whisper, she says a story is refined and shaped in different directions.
A In addition to this, she thought she would be doing something that would genuinely add to the town’s mix. ‘When I moved there, shops were closing down in the recession. I felt it was a way to combine my passion and bring other artists together as well as to do something useful for the community. Which it did.’
B With a couple of hours to kill before her evening performance of ghost stories, she leads me over to the infinitely more convivial surroundings of the Hungry Elephant Café tent where Brand continues to explain how she reached this point in her life.
C ‘I’ve always loved stories and story-telling ever since I was a little girl,’ she recalls. ‘I remember I always wanted to be the one who read out the story, to the point where my mother said to me, ‘Isn’t it time you just wrote your own?’ I grew up in Bombay, and in India there’s always some cultural festival taking place and there’s always a story behind it.’
D Afterwards we troop into the darkness. From the conversations outside, it’s apparent that many of those in the tent have returned for the second night running, many people went thinking they’d just go to one event but found themselves attending several. Why? ‘That’s just about the simple pleasure of listening to a good yarn.’
E Part of that meandering took her back to India and to Southeast Asia, touring with a show based partly on her own upbringing in India, and which she staged successfully again in Settle soon after relocating there. To the surprise of many local people though, the Settle festival’s first incarnation was pitched mainly at an adult audience.
F As an example, she points out that many of the classic stories told today have evolved over many ages and through countless retellings, in many lands. ‘Take Cinderella,’ she says. ‘There’s a Vietnamese version and various North African versions, a North American version, a European one .. .’ She smiles. ‘I like that.’
G Bombay to Yorkshire might seem an unlikely path to tread but for Brand – with an English mother and a South Indian father – it is the fulfilment of a dream. Her introduction to Yorkshire came about ten years ago on a trip to look up old family friends, ‘I just fell in love with the place; I thought, this is where I want to live,’ she says.
For this task: Answers with explanations :: Vocabulary