Whale Tails, Whale Tales and Wonky Donkeys: Stories of Hope for Us All, by Georgie Tennant

Did you hear the wonderful news story, last month, about the huge art installation in the Netherlands that caught a train that had overshot the end of its tracks? The stop blocks somehow failed to do what they said on the tin and the whole of the first carriage (containing the driver, at the end of his shift) ended up dangling over the end section of the track.

Here’s where the art installation came in. Aptly named, according to some sources, “Saved by the Whale’s Tail,” the enormous sculpture, placed there some twenty years previously, found itself supporting a whole carriage of the precarious metro train, preventing it from plummeting thirty-three feet to the ground beneath.

(There are no copyright-free images that I can post here, but have a look at this link and others for some fascinating pictures).

Something about that story captured my imagination. Here was a piece of art that had brought enjoyment to passers-by for twenty years. Maarten Struijs, its creator, may have envisaged it capturing people’s imaginations and taking its place in history, but not even his wildest dreams could have imagined that it would, one day, end up preventing a train from plummeting to the ground.

In this, I think, there is hope for all of our art, all of our writing. We craft and create, spending our days honing our work into something that is, at last, worthy of being released into the world, for enjoyment, education or inspiration. Who can even begin to imagine where our humble words, might end up, what purpose they might fulfil in someone’s life that we can’t even begin to picture in the here and now?

It got me thinking about other unlikely stories of unrecognised potential – or at least potential that wasn’t recognised at first.

Herman Melville, for example. Moving from one whale tail to another (see what I did there?!) – ‘Moby Dick’ was a story that appeared to seal the fate of this particular author – and not in the way that he had hoped. After a couple of successful novels, Melville got so carried away with his weighty tome of a whale tale that it all but ended his career; everything he had written was out of print by 1876. End of story. But it wasn’t. Three decades after his death, the interest of a scholar named Raymond Weaver ignited interest in Melville’s work afresh, leading ultimately to his place in the history of literary greats that he still holds today.

Shakespeare is in this club too: in 1592, Robert Greene, an author of the day, declared the young William “an uneducated Jack of all trades.” When ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was first performed, critics didn’t like the plot and the language. Many of Shakespeare’s plays were performed a dozen times and then dropped, as was the tradition at the time. They weren’t deemed ‘proper literature,’ and many plays were only published after his death. Now, classrooms of students still study his work and even the moons of Uranus are named after characters from his plays.

Back in the twenty-first century, the story of the Scottish Granny reading “Wonky Donkey,” to her small grandson captured imaginations as it went viral around the world in 2018. The book had garnered reasonable interest and sales in Australia and New Zealand when it was first published in 2010, but it took the 8 million Facebook views of the videoed mirth of a Scottish Granny to give it a revival its creator could never have dreamed of. One copy ended up selling for £800, such was the sudden surge in demand.

I take heart from all of these stories and I hope you will too. I love the words of Ecclesiastes 3 v 11, in the New Living Translation. It says, “[God] has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work, from beginning to end.” We may work on our poems, stories, novels, blog posts, devotionals and articles, envisaging a certain path for them. These stories, and this verse, encourage me to hope and dream just a little bit bigger.

Georgie Tennant is a secondary school English teacher in a Norfolk Comprehensive.  She is married, with two sons, aged 12 and 9 who keep her exceptionally busy. She writes for the ACW ‘Christian Writer’ magazine occasionally, and is a contributor to the ACW-Published ‘New Life: Reflections for Lent,’ and ‘Merry Christmas, Everyone,’ and, more recently, has contributed to a phonics series, out later this year. She writes the ‘Thought for the Week’ for the local newspaper from time to time and also muses about life and loss on her blog: www.somepoemsbygeorgie.blogspot.co.uk