Lights and Music

 
Nine year old Tom and eleven year old Joan have been farmed out to their grandparents for the weekend. Joan is dreading a weekend on the farm away from her PC and Play Station while Tom is looking forward to Granda’s bedtime stories about fairies. The old grass-covered fort on the hill behind the house forms the centrepiece of one of his stories. During the night the children are alarmed to see lights coming from the fort and wake up their Granda. When he looks out of the window the lights have gone and Granda is very annoyed at having been disturbed.

Everyone settles down to sleep again but then Joan sees the lights again. She decides to brave the dark, solve the mystery of the lights and prove to Tom that there is no such thing as fairies. Unwilling to be left alone Tom tags along. Half way up the hill they hear strange music coming from the fort just like the fairy music in Granda’s story. Panic-stricken they race back to the house and wake Granda a second time. Granda is very annoyed at being woken twice in one night.

Next morning a very tired, grumpy Granda sets off for the fort to check on his sheep. However he soon returns and says that he owes the children an apology. He has met some police men who are investigating the activities of a band of sheep rustlers who have been stealing sheep in the area. Granda is relieved to say that his sheep are still safely in their field because the rustlers were disturbed before they could load the animals onto their lorry. Joan smugly tells Tom that the rustlers must have used torches and probably had a radio in their lorry. Granda adds that that’s a bit of a mystery as the rustlers didn’t use torches and they had no radio in their lorry. Granda had suggested to the police that it was the children who had disturbed the rustlers but the police maintained that the men were scared out of their wits by something on the hillside. They kept muttering something about lights and music, lights and music.

Explain key words after listening to the drama.
 

 
thorn; yarn (story); shrivelled; wizened; rustlers; witnesses.
 

 
The two children in the story each had very different attitudes to Granda’s fairy stories. Tom loves them and Joan was sceptical and a bit bored by them. Did any of the pupils feel like Joan at the beginning of the story but get drawn in as the drama unfolds?

Do some of the children like scary stories and some don’t? Discuss different tastes in stories and films.

Why are scary stories so much more effective if told in an old creaky house in the dead of night rather than during the day? It’s easy to be cynical about fairies and ghosts during the day but on a dark stormy night we can all get the shivers if we listen to a good story.

The story within the story that Granda told might have been the hook that finally caught the interest of the more sceptical pupils. Ask the children if they can remember how Granda’s story went.

A young man saw strange lights and heard music coming from an old hill fort near his home. He walked up the hill to see what was happening. Up on the hill he looked around the raised grassy bank of the fort with the fairy thorn in the centre of the circle, but could see nothing unusual. He walked down the hill again to his own house. When he went inside it was full of strange people. They were as surprised to see him as he was to see them. When he told them his name, they said there was an old story about a man of that name who walked up to the fairy fort one night and was never seen again. But, of course, that couldn’t be him because that had happened a hundred years before. At that, the young man shrivelled up before their eyes into a wizened old creature and vanished into the air.
 

 
After talking about the above story, ask the children to write their own version of the tale.

Ask the children to think about from whose point of view they are going to write the story. They could choose to tell it in the third person or in the first person, from the young man’s point of view. Which might be more effective? Granda told it in the third person.

Can they make the story more scary? Can they think of more details to enhance the tale? When the young man re-enters his home, a hundred years have passed. How different would the furniture and people’s clothes look to him?

Ask the children to imagine the young man’s horror when he realises a hundred years have passed and he is lost in time.

The children could decide to change the ending of the story. The young man might run back up the hill and try and get the fairies to relent and restore him to his own time. He might have to enter their underground world and have various adventures there before he is allowed to return to his old life.

Perhaps the young man survives and has to live out the rest of his life as a stranger from another century. Ask the children to imagine what might happen to such a person. Would everyone think he was mad? Would he be interviewed by radio and television programmes all over the world?
 

 
Ask the children to think about the little clues that the writer plants suggesting that everything is not quite as it should be.

When they first arrive at the farm, the children notice that Granda now closes and locks his gate which didn’t happen on previous visits. Granda doesn’t explain why he locks the gate as he doesn’t want to worry the children.

On their first walk up to the fairy fort Joan breaks a twig off the fairy thorn. Tom gasps "That’s bad luck!"

The children have an uneasy feeling that they’ve already annoyed the fairies.

Granda asks the children to help him move the sheep to a safer field. Granda refuses to explain from what the sheep need protecting. When pressed he suggests foxes, but the children sense there is another mysterious threat.

The writer has cleverly created the sense that there is a mystery up there on the hill and some danger. Granda tells his scary story and the children are supposed to settle down to sleep. Granda turns off the light and the stage is now set.

The children see lights on the hill and rush in to wake their Granda. The tension mounts as Granda comes to look. There is an anti-climax as he sees nothing.

Everybody goes back to bed.

The children see the lights again but feel they can’t wake Granda again. Joan decides to go up the hill and settle the matter once and for all. Tom tags along. The tension mounts as they climb the hill in the dark. Then they hear the ghostly music.

Can the class remember how they felt when the music came in? Did it make the hairs tingle on the backs of necks? Discuss how atmospheric music can help to build tension and suspense. Listen for it in films.

There is a climax when the children panic and run down the hill and wake up their grandparents. An anti-climax follows when their story isn’t believed.

Talk about the story of the boy who cried wolf. This is a device which is often used in stories.

Next morning the terrors of the night are gone and everything seems explained by the presence of rustlers trying to steal the sheep. Then, just when we think everything is neatly rounded off, the writer introduces a seed of doubt in our minds. The rustlers didn’t have a radio in their lorry and they didn’t use torches, so there’s no logical explanation for the lights and music which both the children and the rustlers saw and heard.
 

 
Ask the children to write an alternative ending.

Suggestions:

The children come back down the hill and everything abut their grandparents’ house has changed. A hundred years have passed. How will the inside of the house look? What will the people be wearing?

The rustlers succeed in stealing Granda’s sheep. The children hide in the back of the lorry with the sheep and later rescue the sheep and lead them safely home.

The rustlers are taken by the fairies and disappear inside the fairy fort never to be seen again.
 

 
ENGLISH/LITERACY

Talking and Listening

Pupils should have opportunities for:

• listening and responding to live media presentations for a specific purpose and discussing these with the teacher.
• listening and responding to a range of fiction, including drama for example, discuss the behaviour and attitudes of a character in a story.

Writing

Writing will arise from a variety of experience and contexts, including: for example, drama, radio

Pupils should have opportunities to:

• Write in different forms and to develop control of the different conventions demanded by these forms.
• Their writing should include; stories creative and imaginative writing dialogues.

 
WORKSHEETS

 
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