Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.

Howards End, E. M Forster

I live in the centre of England. In the East Midlands, in fact, as near slap bang in the middle as you can get.

I’m surrounded by the Dukeries, the great estates of four powerful dukes. Stories are still told about one of them: one of the Victorian era Dukes of Portland was such an eccentric he excavated tunnels and underground rooms at his estate, Welbeck Abbey. The tunnels meant he could be conveyed by carriage to the closest railway station without being seen. Lit with skylights, one was used to harbour delicate plants. Another led to the below-ground ballroom. No one knows why he spent the equivalent of millions in today’s money building these things, but the stories of his eccentricity abound.

Going further back in history, a little closer to me than Welbeck and only ten minutes from my front door, is Sherwood Forest, with all its legendary history of Robin Hood righting wrongs and saving fair maidens from the robber barons. The power of that story has passed into fable, almost. Everyone knows who Robin Hood was. Might have been. Almost certainly wasn’t, but why let truth get in the way of a good story of how the poor and weak can turn the tables on the rich and greedy? I fancy we could all look at our political masters and wish for a Robin Hood.

The reason I’m musing on the power of story and how it’s stitched into the very landscape? Earlier this week, I went to Cresswell Crags, a prehistoric site on the edge of the Welbeck estate. I’d never been before. I was unprepared for how a walk across a flat meadow, looking like any municipal park, morphed suddenly, without warning, into a primeval limestone gorge peppered with caves and looking as though, at any minute, a dinosaur would poke its head around the side of a tree. Straight out of ‘1 Million Years BC’, for those of you old enough to remember life before CGI and Jurassic Park.

Our Neolithic ancestors sheltered in those caves. At the end of last ice age, when hominids had overwhelmed the Neanderthals, roving bands of human hunters used the caves as they followed the deer. They didn’t just exist there. They lived there. The caves were home. And one of them, Church Hole, has the oldest verified cave art in the UK, with images of bison, deer and birds. that were carved more than 12,000 years ago.

I’m not talking about art like the Lascaux paintings in France. Nothing so colourful. These are carvings, scored out of the limestone. Honestly, they’re so sub-fusc that it’s a moment or two before your eye can even see them, but once you know they’re there, you can’t stop seeing them.

Our guide was refreshingly honest about archaeology’s limitations. They don’t know exactly why our ancient ancestors carved the cave wall, though they can theorise until they’re hoarse.

One theory really struck me.

They might be about story-telling, the guide said. A visual aid in telling stories about the animals children were likely to see, showing them the pattern of animal migration and herd sizes, and through that perhaps even a way of keeping track of time itself. In short, a way of helping them relate to their world.

I found that oddly thrilling.

Stories, the anthropologists say, are central to what it means to be human, common to every known culture, a way of recognising patterns and imposing them on our lives to give meaning. That was as true for our far ancestors as it is for us. Of course, that’s a high-flown, academic way of saying that we humans like nothing more than a good tale. We’ve never liked anything better, it seems, right back to a time we were fending off sabre-toothed tigers with one hand and carving our vision of our world into cave walls with the other. Stories have always been a way of combining our desires and imaginations with daily life, of brightening dark times and allowing us to celebrate the good. Stories are part of our very existence: the jokes and anecdotes we tell in the pub, the books we read, the films and TV programmes we watch.

Stories are transformative. They can change our understanding of our world and of people that are not ‘us’, helping people to see and understand differences, and hence to build empathy and tolerance. They can shape us, change us, challenge us to see from perspectives other than our own. Stories are the great connectors.

If ever I needed reassurance about writing, those little cave drawings provided it. The next time our genre is riven with ‘you shouldn’t tell those stories because they aren’t you and they aren’t about you, you don’t have the right to tell them’, remember our cavemen ancestors. They knew the power of storytelling. We should, too.

I don’t have to justify what I write. None of us does. Not to anyone. All we have to do is tell our stories, and let them do the work of building connections, of sharing, of helping readers see a world that isn’t their own.

All that matters is that the connection happens. The rest will fall out as it chooses.

About Anna

Anna was a communications specialist for many years, working in various UK government departments on everything from marketing employment schemes to organizing conferences for 10,000 civil servants to running an internal TV service. These days, though, she is writing full time. She lives with her husband in a quiet village tucked deep in the Nottinghamshire countryside. She’s supported there by the Deputy Editor, aka Molly the cockerpoo, who is assisted by the lovely Mavis, a Yorkie-Bichon cross with a bark several sizes larger than she is but no opinion whatsoever on the placement of semi-colons.

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