Libraries Save Lives!
A talk given by Annie Dalton at Egmont
July 12th 2001
  I
grew up in the ‘fifties in rural Suffolk, the only child
of a single mum (in this we were rather ahead of our time!) and
it is highly probable that my library ticket saved my life.
When I say this to children, I can see them wondering hopefully
if that little square of cardboard perhaps stopped a speeding
bullet? But I’m not exaggerating. Without my local library
I think I would have died of loneliness. At least my spirit would
have died. Of course I am not unique in this and I know that everyone
in this room understands what I mean.
My first library was a converted forge in the village of Wickham
Market. I remember passing it on my way to and from school, glimpsing
flashes of heat and light inside.
In my memory the building’s transformation from village
blacksmith to library occurred miraculously a matter of days after
I learned to read, but this is probably not strictly accurate.
Its original identity as a place of shadowy enchantment where
horses huffed patiently, and a mysterious figure in a leather
apron bashed sparks from white hot metal, was for me never compromised
by its having mysteriously acquired electric light, shelves and
rows of books. It was more as if that earlier magic had simply
shifted shape. I didn’t consciously think this but that’s
definitely how it felt. I have no recollection of actually joining
the library. Common sense tells me an adult must have filled in
forms and so forth. Did my mother say, ‘Let’s go and
join the library?’ Probably, but that’s now how I remember
it. In my memory, I went into that library alone, drawn only by
an irresistible gravitational pull, exerted by the books themselves.
I needed stories to survive and so of course they were there!
I was able to join a second library too. The one at the USAF
base, where my mother had found a job in the Ground Safety office
for £6 a week, after my father baled out for good. Now that I
had unlimited access to books, I read voraciously, anything and
everything. But all writers, maybe especially children’s
writers, have books which prove to be touchstones, setting off
reverberations in that embryonic future writer. These may not
be great or even good books, but they speak to us, sending us
vital news we are unable to get any other way.
I grew up feeling frankly odd; too tall, too chatty, too dreamy,
too adult, definitely too fatherless, a child who stuck out like
a sore thumb in that brutal, extremely isolated area of East Anglia
where my mother and I had somehow washed up. Socially my background
was ambiguous. I was not a native East Anglian, and therefore
posh. Too posh to be working class at least, yet somehow not convincingly
middle class either. Now we’d rightly say, ‘Who cares?’
but in the ‘fifties that lack of social fit caused me a great
deal of bewilderment. But as we see again and again, the very
things which confuse and torture us as children, are gifts to
the future adult, particularly those who grow up to become artists
of some kind. We don’t have a fit in the world, so are forced
to drawn on our own resources.
My most precious resource, my News from Elsewhere, was books.
I’ll just single out three for special mention.
- The Valley of Song by Elizabeth Goudge. I was too young to
realise that Ms Goudge was drawing on classical mythology for
her fantasy about a little girl who saves a shipyard by getting
help from ‘the magical world’. But I was instantly
hooked by its nonconforming heroine, so bored by school that
she climbs out of the schoolroom window in the first couple
of pages! I loved too its intimations of a magical inner world
behind the everyday. This book is now out of print, but I was
thrilled to discover that another children’s writer, an
Australian, Jenny Pausacker owns a treasured copy. The Valley
of Song was her touchstone too.
- Harding’s Luck by E. Nesbit. The central character, Dickie
Harding, is a ‘cripple’, as they still said then.
A boy raised in unbearably ugly and loveless surroundings who
finds a way into the past and is spiritually healed by his experiences
there. This was my first encounter with the concept of time
travel. I was spellbound yet agonised as Dickie shuttled between
a somewhat idealised Elizabethan past and his deprived working
class existence in Edwardian London. The moon magic, obviously
impressed me enormously since it later crops up in a story of
my own, The Afterdark Princess.
- The Railway Children also by E. Nesbit. I loved this book
not for the railway adventures, which I could frankly take or
leave, but for its family, headed just as mine was, by a real
live working mum, the only one I had encountered in fiction.
In the novel, the mother’s single parent status is strictly
temporary, tidily resolved in a huge tear-jerking fest of wish
fulfilment at the end. But I absorbed something deeper than
that Hollywood happy ending and when Mum sold a story to a magazine
and cried, ‘Buns for tea, children!’ I sensed that
somewhere out there were other families who had lost a father,
there were others who had lived a hand-to-mouth life and survived,
even triumphed. The comfort I drew from this was immense. I
also absorbed that it was possible for a woman to be a writer,
information I could never have deduced from my immediate surroundings.
Apart from The Railway Children, the books I loved best would
all be filed under the category of fantasy. Tales of time-slips,
nannies who blew in on the west wind, magical worlds accessed
from inside a wardrobe; these wildly unlikely stories touched
me deep inside. Interestingly, they instantly struck me as being
true. A different order of truth, a code of some kind, I felt,
standing for some vast unknowable super reality.
 Did
I always want to be a writer? Actually that’s not how it
was. When I bunked off my village school to read and re-read my
library books, with my feet up the back of an old Parker Knowle
armchair and my head on its seat, I didn’t think, ‘I
will be a writer one day.’ Despite The Railway Children,
I didn’t entirely grasp that anything as extraordinary as
books could be written by mere human beings. But I did have a
sense of having found my home and this feeling never quite went
away.
Fast forward to some years later. I’m married to a mathematician
and we have three children, two adopted, and one homegrown. I
might be older but like the daddylong legs girl reading upside
down in the chair, I still don’t entirely know which way
round I am. However I am still finding my way to my local children’s
library, theoretically to borrow books for my children. In fact
my life has just been saved for a second time.
It’s during this period that I discovered a new generation
of wonderful children’s writers: Margaret Mahy, Robert Westall,
Diana Wynne Jones. This last writer was passionately recommended
by a friend who died last year and I shall always be grateful.
These writers had all the mesmerising qualities, which held me
spellbound in my old blacksmith’s library days, but their
voices were utterly contemporary. Something was lit inside me.
I wanted to do what they were doing. I wanted to do it so much
it hurt.
Even now, I didn’t think, I am going to be a writer. I thought,
I have to add a story to that vast sea of stories, which saved
my life. I wasn’t labouring under the delusion that my words
would save anyone’s life, you understand, but I had to do
it nevertheless.
So I started writing at the kitchen table when my kids were at
school, like so many writers before me. My first novel was published
in the late eighties. I have been earning my living as a writer
in a hit and miss fashion ever since. But when forced, as now,
to try to make some sense of my development as a writer, I have
to acknowledge that my work has changed and is still changing
in ways which are mostly mysterious to me.
When I pick up one of my early books, I have the sense that it
was written by a stranger, one very much talking to herself in
the dark. Sometimes, as with The Alpha Box, I suspect I was sending
out my characters as fictional space probes, to explore a trail
I did not yet have the courage to take myself. I have affection
for these books, but I no longer write that way, or even wish
to. I have changed. The world has changed. Childhood itself is
changing and children’s fiction is changing with it. To take
just one example; when I began, there were almost no books featuring
non-white children. Those there were tended to be ‘issues’
books. The idea of a non-issues novel, a fantasy say, in which
a black character played a starring role, would have been seen
as somewhat odd or perverse.
But I now had two mixed race children whose friends were every
colour in the rainbow, so it was natural, necessary, to put black
or golden skinned characters in my stories. Yet when I look back,
I see that the child I was primarily addressing in my early fiction
was myself; the nervy outsider. In fact when I was first published
I was instantly beloved of sensitive librarians, for which I will
always be deeply grateful! Then two events changed my life and,
as a consequence, my work.
I had been writing for perhaps four or five years but with a
growing unease. It is a privilege to write for a living but still,
something was missing. I had been a child, a student, a young
mother, then a children’s writer. Not exactly Indiana Jones.
Perhaps that’s why I applied for a post at Wellingborough
Prison as writer in residence. I got the job and worked at the
prison, on and off, for three years. During that period I also
took part in a writers exchange between the East Midlands and
Jamaica, spending three months travelling in that harsh, beautiful,
history-haunted island.
When I first went to work at the prison, I went around saying
blithely that this experience would change me. I said the same
thing about the Jamaican exchange. Both times I had the idea of
a tasteful little addition to my house of self; a pretty conservatory
I could show off to my loved ones.
In actual fact the change was more along the lines of a wrecking
ball. I still burble Ancient Mariner style about my experiences
to anyone foolish enough to let me grab on to his or her sleeve.
But the truth is the impact of these experiences stopped me writing,
literally stopped me in my tracks, because I simply didn’t
know who was doing the writing. Then when I started again, I was
flat broke and had to write a great deal very fast simply to make
a living for myself and my daughter.
By this time I was somewhat less enchanted by my own psyche.
I began (shock, horror!) writing about characters who were not
necessarily like me, not even cunningly disguised versions of
me and mine.
I was also poignantly aware of the continuing existences of the
young men I had known in the prison. They had somehow crept under
my skin when I wasn’t looking, becoming part of my heart’s
family and I suspect they are now there to stay, with their blank
and/ or sneery faces, beefy muscles, tattooed knuckles, streetwise
wit and often desolate life experience; young drug dealers, thieves,
murderers. Past helping you might think, irredeemable, throw away
the key. Yet when we wrote a musical together, PRESSURE, these
young men insisted that their anti hero, Stone, should be redeemed,
healing everything which he had unwittingly helped to destroy.
This musical, part Dante’s inferno, part Christmas Carol,
took eighteen gruelling months to write and record, with a constantly
shifting cast. But for those of us who worked on this project,
and even for inmates on its periphery, the prison became a different
country. That dingy room looking out on to swathes of razor wire
came alight and alive with something I can’t even name. But
it had to do with the miracle of story, the transforming power
of the human imagination.
Perhaps this is where Vasco Shine came from, the vampire villain
of The Dream Snatcher, the first real novel I wrote after my residency,
and sequel to the younger, gentler The Afterdark Princess. Vasco
appears again in The Midnight Museum, now transformed into the
children’s ally, also Alice
Fazackerly’s love interest, though as Kevin Kitchener points
out, he is never exactly going to be a team player!
The Tyler Rapido stories certainly grew out of my prison experience,
and I suspect my prison stint is currently feeding into the teen
fantasy novel I’m working on for Egmont. Its working title
is The Rules of Magic.
When I first suggested it to Cally, I said I had in mind a book
that would be ‘a cross between The Faraway Tree and Buffy
the Vampire Slayer’. Now I describe it jokingly as ‘Dr
Faustus for the MTV generation’, though Rumpelstiltskin is
definitely in there too. The story deals with that unconscious
bargain made by parents with the best of intentions; the carelessly
given promise, the unwise choice which poisons the unthinking
innocence of the child and his/ her world, yet which also triggers
the vital process of growing up.
Far from being sensitive introverted souls, my two main characters,
Dino and Morgan, are dedicated party animals. They live for and
through their peers, and when the call to adventure comes, they
resist. No wonder. In order to expose the truth of what is going
on in their city, they’d have to unplug from their peer group,
risk being weirdoes and outsiders, a fate comparable to shunning
among the Amish. But in stories the call cannot be resisted as
we know, and so Dino and Morgan are eventually forced to open
their eyes and face the truth, about their families, about their
city and about themselves.
They must lose their dependency on the world’s approval,
face their fear of depths, and set out on a terrifying journey
to rediscover the long lost rules of magic.
Annie Dalton
Other Book World articles
Puffin's 60th Birthday
ClearVision Helping young
braille readers
Young Readers UK 2001
Annie Everall
|
