When we returned to Crosskeys [a cottage in the village of Whiteleaf, in the Chiltern Hills near Princes Risborough] after the war ended, my sister Sally and I slept on bunk beds in the ground-floor nursery.  I was on top, and played the pocket-general. 

There, Sally and I lay and listened to my father retelling traditional tales, sometimes accompanying himself on his Welsh harp.  An Anglo-Saxon half-line, singan ond secgan (to sing and say), suggests a way of reciting that is pitched but not melodic, and that’s how my father told us stories: he sang-and-said them.