Last week we left acclaimed children’s author and storyteller Tony Bonning singing songs and telling tales at Glenlochar playgroup, a chance pastime which was in time to become his vocation.
He and his family had moved from the Lothians to Knockvennie, over the hill from Parton, in 1992, eight years after he bought a piece of land on Screel Hill, which he named Taliesin.
He had founded his own tech company CTT, was a freelance journalist and had worked on ITV’s Oracle teletext service.
But his talent for holding young audiences spellbound soon spread.
“I suppose I began to build a reputation as something of a troubadour,” Tony chuckles as we chat at his Solway-side cottage near Dundrennan. “And before I knew it there were three Tony’s music groups at the CatStrand every month, Castle Douglas every Wednesday and Kirkcudbright on Tuesdays.
“Mums, dads and grans would come along too and at last I knew I had found my forte. But my biggest fans were all three year-olds! The way I survived being autistic was to be a bit crazy and act the goat.
“And I brought that energy into my performances, which the kids loved.”
It’s illuminating to hear Tony reminisce about busy folk nights in Pringle’s at Corsock and the Burnbank in Twynholm before he moved to the comparative bustle of Kirkcudbright in 1997 just as his latest children’s book, Another Fine Mess, was published.
But, he tells me, it was an invitation from the Scottish Book Trust that saw his storytelling career take off.
“They asked me to do a tour of schools in and around Stirling,” he recalls.
“Suddenly you have a Scottish children’s author – of which there were very few in those days – taking tales to the kids in his Readiscovery Bus.
“And it was utterly brilliant. The Raploch was an area full of drugs and deprivation but my music groups with the kids went down a storm.
“It was just me, my guitar and my stories and songs.
“I never heard any more about it until a woman called Bea Ferguson from Edinburgh Libraries toured the same area after I had been round. They were still raving about the shows I had done for the kids – probably because they are always completely bonkers!
“Bea then asked me if I would like to do a gig at Asda in Edinburgh.
“It was in the boiler room, which was a big space, and it was roasting hot.
“But the acoustics were great and there were more than 50 kids there.
“Bea said afterwards ‘That was amazing, you had them in your hands the whole way through’.
“I just thought ‘Well, thank you very much!’”
Tony smiles at the memory of what happened after word got out to other children’s libraries in Scotland.
“My phone literally came off the wall,” he laughs.
“Calls were coming in left, right and centre.
“Statistically it just went through the roof.
“It was then that I realised what I did worked – but it was time to get smart about it. I built a database of all the schools in southern Scotland.
“And out of 100 mail shots I would get an average of 10 returns, which was very good. If education is fun then children will learn.”
Tony describes a popular children’s book he adapted into a song for young audiences.
“The Bear Hunt is a very moral tale – it doesn’t talk about going back, just about going forward,” he explains. “You can’t go under it, you can’t go over it, you have to go through it.
“It teaches the importance of persistence and perseverance.
“But there’s always that implicit morality of kindness and sharing.”
By 2008-2009, Tony tells me, he was doing 300 children’s shows a year.
“It was exhausting – however you got wonderful energy from the children,” he says. “They keep you young and wear you out at the same time!”
Tony recalls how in 2002 he set up the Galloway Children’s Festival in Kirkcudbright, ensuring that hundreds more kids experienced the magic of storytelling and singing rhymes.
“I was helped greatly by Dumfries and Galloway Council’s education department,” he tells me.
“It supported us for the entirety of the festival down the years and that helped get the message out to every child in Galloway.
“We even had people coming from as far away as Fife and Carlisle.
“Folk would tell us that’s why we come for our holiday at Brighouse Bay or Sandgreen – because the children’s festival is on.
“It was always the week before the summer break.
“It stopped with Covid, which was a shame, but I felt it was the right time to stop anyway.
“I had so much work to do and only so much runway left.
“I can remember when the children’s festival started like yesterday.
“Yet it was 20 years ago – and I don’t think there’s 20 years ahead of me. I have too many manuscripts and too many things left undone, the preservation of Scottish and Gallovidian folklore for example. I have a big cupboard with an enormous collection of folk tales stashed away in it.”
Tony worries unchecked exposure to social media, computer games and banal TV programmes are stunting children’s development, eroding once distinctive accents and language.
But he takes solace in how games and tales can survive against the odds.
“I was tuning a guitar one day beside a window in Pinwherry Primary School,” he smiles. “One of the kids outside told the others a joke and it rang a bell.
“Then I remembered that I had heard the same joke as a child in the playground at Crosshill more than 40 years previously.
“There’s a sense of reassurance in how children pass on their tales of the playground to the younger ones. They in time become the older children and pass those stories on to more wee ones, and so the cycle continues.
All art is storytelling, Tony believes, and Galloway has “a vast treasure house” of mystical tales and legend.
“People can borrow, steal, adapt and use for books, for ideas, for plays,” he says. “I know how well it works when I stand up in schools and tell these tales.
“That’s when you understand the power they hold – the children are in awe of them.
“I can hold an audience of children for a solid hour just with these magical tales. You can see in their eyes the emotions they are going through – they are the ones seeing the pictures through their imagination.
“You are kind of painting tales in their heads but they are the ones holding the paint brush. When children are watching TV they are passive – doing nothing except taking in the music and moving images.
“But storytelling is such an active process – it gives them only the words and they have to do the rest.
“It’s all about how you perform and the power of your storytelling.
“People will often say to me ‘You are good at that’.
“And I always reply ‘Well, it’s my job!’.
“If you are a carpenter who has learned his trade well, you want to make a very good door.
“There’s only one bad way to tell a story and that’s not to tell it at all.”
Tony’s favourite poetry, I learn, is Japanese haiku – a concise poem comprising three unrhymed lines, the first and last of just five syllables, the second made up of seven.
“I write one or two every day,” he smiles.
“That’s my exercise – it’s a minute observation and a kind of Polaroid picture in words.”
To illuminate the point, Tony recites a haiku he composed on the Fell of Laghead, a lonely hill between Gatehouse and Laurieston.
“I wrote it quickly up in the clouds blowing past off the Solway,” he recalls.
“Great grey galleons – Sailing from the western sea – With cargoes of rain.”
On his storytelling tours of schools Tony would get pupils to write haiku – with one child in particular sticking in his memory.
“I was at this school in East Kilbride telling these kids about the secret to haiku,” he recalls.
“They had to write down three words for the first and second lines, and for the third – which had to be the punchline – I told them to go over to the window and describe exactly what they saw. To explain I said, ‘Big tall tree, moving in the wind, like a ballet dancer’ – it was all about getting them to look past the obvious.
“There was this wee boy, who the teacher said was very naughty and I wouldn’t get anything out of him. I went round the desks and this wee boy actually tried to cover up his work. ‘Don’t worry,’ I told him, ‘you don’t have to read it out.’ I looked at what he had written and was dumbstruck.
“I just told him ‘I’m going to give you the biggest compliment I can ever give – I wish I had written that!’.
“He was a poet – a real poet – and I told him never to stop being one.
“I made sure the teacher heard but I did not criticise her. Yet I could see she thought maybe she had missed something.
“He was so pleased to hear encouragement and praise. I am very supportive of teachers,” Tony adds.
“One said to me ‘You know Tony, you are the cherry on the cake’.
“I replied ‘Thank you, but don’t forget you are the cake’.”
Tony believes his high functioning autism gives his special insight into how children view the world.
“When you have had quite a hard life as a kid you never want kids who may be a bit like yourself to go through the same thing.
“You need to be able to speak to kids who are autistic – I don’t know whether it’s the energy they give off but I can see it.”
Tony’s latest adventure was an epic journey across Scotland from its southernmost mainland point, the Mull of Galloway, to Dunnet Head in Caithness, the furthest north.
His walking companion was Chief – a rescue horse from the 3R’s Centre near Gatehouse.
Tony is “halfway” through writing a book on his trek.
Candidate titles include “Are You the Man with the Horse?” – a question he was asked innumerable times on the road – and “Courage and Flag” – his response to a crofter’s question about what he needed on the busy A87 through Kintail.
Tony also scoffs at the notion of Scotland as a “wee” country, pointing out that he and Chief trekked 1,000 kilometres – 600 miles – and took four months to do it.
“We had already travelled 100 miles by the time we arrived in Ayrshire,” he chuckles, “and going along the North Coast 500 took up another 200.”
What was his motivation for what some would consider a madcap undertaking?
“I did it for three reasons,” Tony smiles. “For the hell of it, for the folklore and for charity.
“I really physically challenged myself, which is something I have always done. The mountains, the hills and the land were my muse as they always have been. Along the way I did a lot of collecting tales and storytelling in schools and old folks’ homes.
“And I raised £3,500 for the 3R’s Horse Rescue Centre where Chief came from.”
The daily routine of keeping going over mountain, road and moor in all weathers, often sleeping rough, took its toll.
But there was a spiritual element to being at one with wild places.
“I had a total shift in the way I looked at the world,” Tony says.
“There was this sense of wow, I have done things that most people could not do.
“And it’s not about ego – ego gets you killed.”
“On day three after I got home I could not rise out of my bed,” he laughs.
“I had to roll out onto all fours to get across the room and my back ached liked hell. That was after 12 hours’ sleep – my first deep sleep for four months.
“There were times during that journey I thought I had reached the bottom – then had to dig deeper still.”
There’s a certain intensity behind everything Tony says. And it strikes me if the label “free spirit” was invented for anyone he would be a prime candidate.
“That’s what the long trek north with Chief was all about,” he says.
“It shows I still have that sense of wonder.
“I am in awe of the world around me.
“That what’s I tell the children – never lose your sense of wonder.”
