Tales From The Darker Side Of Winter

They've not got the gritters out early enough again

Ghost stories are as much a tradition at Christmas as turkey, trees shedding pine needles all over the sitting room floor and dad wearing a silly hat at the dinner table. The BBC usually crank out an MR James adaptation or two over the holidays, and in that spirit of making everyone draw a little closer to the fire while the wind whistles outside Mike Payton and Tim Ralphs gathered an audience of two dozen together in a candlelit room in Beeston’s White Lion pub on 10th December for an evening of stories that featured ghosts, spirits, trolls, hangings and occasionally a cheap pun.

The tales ranged all over the world, from Japan, to Tibet (the source of the truly mind-shattering pun) to Norway to Mexico to the gallows that used to stand in Nottingham. The little snippets of authentic folk wisdom that add flavour to stories were present (“Chopping wood warms you three times; once when you cut it, once when you carry it, and once when you burn it”), as were funny voices and the ghoulish details of decapitation and death that delight everyone. Some were little more than shaggy dog stories, but Mike Payton and Tim Ralphs leavened these with some that felt old and handed down from long ago. The best was perhaps an unnerving tale from Romania, about a man who sought a place where death had no dominion, and who found it.

I grabbed a quick chat with Mike afterwards about the art of storytelling.

How long have you been in the storytelling business?
I guess I’ve been doing it semi-professionally since 2009/2010. I started doing bits and pieces and charging a bit of money here and there, and from about 2011 onwards it’s been at least half my job. I’ve been doing things in schools as part of one set, and storytelling just grew until it formed the main source of my income.

So you have a day job as well?
I was an English teacher for nineteen years. In 2010 I went down to four days a week so I could do storytelling on day a week, and it’s gradually shrunk compared to my time spent storytelling. I’m trying to make it dissipate completely. It’s not a bad balance. You wish you had a bit more space to work in bigger projects, but I’ll probably stick with this set up for at least another year or so.

I understand you want to host a regular storytelling event in Beeston.
Yeah. I’ve been running a storytelling event in Matlock for the best part of five years now, and while it’s a lovely club I had a sense for the last year or so to do something a bit more local. Beeston has been a real mess with the tram works recently and local businesses have been hammered but it felt like the end of the chaos was nigh and some of the local pubs have been done up hoping for a big splurge of business, so the time seems right. I went to Oxjam a while ago and I was in the White Lion and it was rammed, went to another pub, The Star, and it was packed too. It looked like there was a real audience for live events here, and sure, this was music, but I’d bet some of these people would enjoy storytelling as well. So I got in touch with Tim and propositioned him with the idea of a show around Christmas. I think there was enough enthusiasm on this first show to make a regular event possible, so as from February, probably the third week in February, it’ll be a regular thing. It won’t just be us performing all the time, and we’ll be bringing in storytellers from all over.

A storyteller hung about with a fox on eighties TV

What’s your connection to Nottingham?
Running a storytelling club in Matlock is sort of an accident. I’ve lived here since 1990, barring the four years I lived in Mexico which kind of inspired me to switch jobs, and have lived in Beeston for almost twenty years. The only reason I plied my trade in Matlock was I had a great training opportunity in Matlock with Graham Langley, a guy who’s been in the storytelling game for about thirty years, one of the people who was part of the whole revival of the art in the 80s.

Do you tend to tailor your stories for your audience beforehand or do you decide as the evening progresses?
It honestly depends. I’ve done some storytelling events in Nottingham, where we’ve set up a yurt, and had no idea what stories I was going to tell until I’d seen the audience, because literally anyone can walk in. You might end up with 20 under-fives, a bunch of adults, some giggling teenagers, and so on, so that is the point where you think about what will work for them, and you dig through your catalogue of stories and pull something up that’ll work. A night like the one you saw was a loose set, and while we knew pretty much which ones we wanted to tell we can decide the way we tell them and that’ll depend on the reaction of the audience. I don’t know until I see the whites of the audience’s eyes quite how a story is going to go.

Do you find it’s the same sort of audience wherever you go?
There’s a hard core of storytelling enthusiasts that will always go. The other night there were five of six of the thirty or so that came who I recognised as regulars on the circuit, but some others might be coming for their first time and you’ve got to be careful about not making the first story, the one that’s introducing them to the act, too complicated. I spoke to quite a few people afterwards and lots said they had no idea what to expect, as they’d not been to an evening like it before. You can see them gradually relax into it as the evening goes on. I really think that storytelling is for everybody. Lots of people have the preconception that it’s just for kids, until they actually come and listen to a story or two and then they get it.

Where do you get your stories?
It’s a real mish-mash. I’ve heard a couple of thousand stories over the years, and maybe one in ten I’ll think it’ll work for me. The etiquette is that no one owns these stories, so you’ll approach the storyteller and ask if they mind you taking it and the answer is always yes. You personalise it and make it your own, and I guess 40 percent or so is from other storytellers. Sometimes a member of the audience will give you one after the show. And of course lots come from books, old books of tales. I started off telling Mexican tales, as I’d lived there for a while, and I bought lots back with me. I’m not ashamed to say the internet is often a great place for them. I find it easier to learn a story when I’ve heard someone else tell it, but the internet can be a handy shortcut when I need a few Icelandic tales in an emergency.

Mike Payton and Tim Ralphs hope to be starting a regular storytelling evening in Beeston in the New Year, so look for them in the third week of February 2015 in the White Lion.