Reflections (21 page)

But where we
did
respond was to the same situations represented as fairy stories, or legends, or myths. My sister Isobel, for instance, was addicted to “The Little Mermaid,” which she read once a week and cried pints over regularly. This was because my mother had early on decreed that my sister should be a ballet dancer, on the grounds that she had the right face for it. And her face was probably perfect for it, but my mother disregarded her body, which rapidly grew too big and caused her to be turned down by all the major ballet schools. This was a huge tragedy to my sister: she was deprived of her one chance to earn her mother's approval. She had failed. So to read once a week of the little mermaid, who was not built to dance, but had been enabled to do so, albeit with acute pain, was exactly what she needed.

As surrogate mother to my sister, I had a lot of comforting to do, but I tended to take a bracing and contemptuous line about the dismalness of “The Little Mermaid.” This was because I had, of course, my own troubles too. My favorite reading, and from which I derived the same sort of help, was a huge old volume called
Epics and Romances of the Middle Ages
, which my grandmother had won as a Sunday school prize at the age of six. This was a collection of almost every heroic legend from Northern Europe that you care to name, although minus the Arthurian cycle and the
Kalevala
. It did not matter to me that not all the stories ended happily—although I preferred them to do so, because I needed to hope—nor did it matter that all the heroes represented, apart from Brunhilde, were male. I read and reread them because what I was after was paradigms of valor. Not useless valor like Roland's, who blew his horn too late—I only read that one once—but real, effective, striving valor that killed you the dragon, like Siegfried. When you are a small girl in sole charge of two smaller girls, you are very much in need of valor.

We were girls and we were children, and as both we were regarded as non-people by our parents and by every other adult we knew. But of course we knew we were people too. As a consequence I grew up keeping it firmly in mind that children
are
real people. Not only that, but I learned early on that childhood is such an important and impressionable time of anyone's life that very careful, special provision should be made for it. Having said that, at this stage I still thought I was going to write books for adults.

The conference center was in a very beautiful house in an even more beautiful village. The village was so beautiful that American tourists began to arrive in the place almost before the war was ended, and were always very put out to discover there was no public lavatory. Almost every aspect of the place was bizarre in some way. The house was haunted. I never saw the ghost myself, although I always ran through the grand front hall with my eyes shut if possible, and never, on any account, lingered there. And a few years later one of the girls who was working in the house as a cleaner turned and talked to the other girl cleaner in this same hall. After a bit she wondered why Aline didn't answer, and then realized she could see through her. Whereupon she ran off screaming and took a job at the bacon factory in Great Dunmow—on the grounds that buckets of blood were better than ghosts. In addition, the place was filled with folk who made pots and wove very ugly cloth and did folk dancing in the streets. One of them was the only man I know who could dance the polka amorously. I could go on for hours.
Everyone
was cuckoo in some way, including most of the people who came to the conference center. To take just one example, the county music adviser, who was an aging tenor, decided he would sing an aria from the roof of the house—which he did, and got so carried away that he did an encore, scattering what seemed to be confetti. It was later discovered that the confetti was in fact every scrap of toilet paper in the house. More had to be hastily procured.

You can see from this that I grew up assuming that ghosts and witches were a natural part of life, and that bizarre events and even more bizarre adults were the norm. We spent a lot of time dealing with these adults. Our parents frequently went off and left us alone, and we were expected to act as hostesses to whatever lunatic turned up in their absence. I think this is why my books are filled with dotty and exacting adults: I have a very strong sense of how much time children have to devote to coping with the adults in their lives. But far more than that, I gained an even stronger sense of the value of laughter. We spent a lot of time doubled up with laughter at these assorted lunacies, and though we were all very unhappy, the unhappiness became bearable because we laughed. In fact, from quite early on, I became aware that unhappiness and hilarity are very closely associated.

At that point I was in my first term at university. There, I found I couldn't talk about my bizarre background at all, because I had by then realized that it was not normal, and it was clear to me that no one would believe me. I still have trouble this way. I very seldom put anything in my books which is directly about my childhood, and when I do, I always feel I have to tone it down for credibility. For instance, in
The Time of the Ghost
, Fenella ties her hair in two knots to keep it out of her eyes, and this fact is not noticed for four days. My sister Ursula actually did this, but the truth is that the knots—one large lump on either side of her forehead—were not noticed for
six months
.

I mentioned earlier two things that my sisters and I habitually read. These two books were about a quarter of the books we possessed at that time. We suffered from a perpetual book famine. I suppose there is nothing better calculated to impress on you the importance of books than being without them, but I do not find I am grateful for it. My father was the meanest man I know—he could have Scrooged for Earth against Mars and won—and he could not bring himself to buy anything for us. He allowed us one penny a week pocket money for years—and you could not, even in those days, buy
anything
for a penny—until my sisters managed to persuade him we needed more, whereupon he allowed us one shilling a week on condition that we bought our own soap and toothpaste. To give you some idea of the inadequacy of this, I must explain that a tube of toothpaste then cost one shilling and ninepence. But he had been a schoolmaster and he knew that even girls should read books. He salved his conscience by buying the complete works of Arthur Ransome, which he locked in a high cupboard and dispensed, one between the three of us, every Christmas. I was literally about to enter university when the last book was given us. What other books we had we begged and scrounged, mostly from folk who would otherwise have thrown the books away. These were largely Victorian or Edwardian volumes, redolent of mildew, and all of them were very poor examples of the kind of book of which
What Katy Did
is rather a
good
representative—the story was always about a girl who starts out as unfeminine and naughty, but ends up in a wheelchair as a model of piety, a perfect angel, but good for nothing else. When we arranged our books on our bookshelf, these books all went into the longest shelf which was labeled
GODDY
BOOKS
. Half the shortest shelf contained
GOOD BOOKS
, and these were either folktales or adventure stories.

From the age of twelve, I was making clothes for my sisters and doing their washing and so forth, and it seemed a natural extension of this that I should try to supply the lack of books by writing books myself. I had a stack of music manuscript books given to me by my grandmother, and in these I wrote two long novels which I read out to my sisters in installments. If you have ever tried to write on music paper, you will understand why ever after I have not been able to bear any kind of lined paper. But I finished two books before I was fifteen. It is quite important to any writer to know that she can orchestrate and then conclude a long narrative. But it is also interesting to look at what was in those books. The first was a picaresque story from the point of view of one lad. For the second book, I took off and handled a whole gang of boys, from multiple points of view. And I remember that one of my chief delights in writing this one was in discovering that my characters had minds of their own. Whenever a small group split off from the main gang, it was not always the boy I expected who took the lead. But why boys? Well, if your main reading for girls shows them ending up in wheelchairs, it is obvious that boys live much more exciting lives.

This was still the assumption when I first started writing in earnest, which was not actually until I was over thirty. At that time, no boy would dream of reading a book with a girl as the main character. My children were all boys, so I had ample evidence of this. But the reverse was not true. When
Eight Days of Luke
was published, I did a radio interview with some Oxford schoolchildren—four boys and a token girl—and the interviewer kept saying that this book was an exciting read for boys. And the token girl said each time, louder and louder, “
And
gurrls!” in a vehement Oxford Town accent. This was 1975. The impact of feminism came later than that, and very slowly. I experienced it mostly as a slow easement—a sort of growing feeling that I wouldn't automatically halve my readership if I had a female central character.

But to get back to my juvenilia in its dozens of music books. Neither narrative was a fantasy. I can see now there were two reasons for this. The first reason is a bizarre reversal of the usual situation. If you are living the life of Cinderella, in a village where there are witches and ghosts and someone who howls like a wolf in the church porch at full moon, you are not going to want these things in a book. In a sort of way my narratives
were
fantasy, except that they were fantasies about what I conceived to be normal life. The second reason is more important, and it has nothing to do with assumptions about Real Books or anything like that. It was that I knew proper fantasy was the really difficult thing to write and that I wasn't ready to try. I had one model for what this difficult thing was—that was a book by Elizabeth Goudge called
The Little White Horse
—and it was clear to me that it would be years before I could even try to do anything like that. I had no illusions about my narratives in music books. I knew they were no good, and I cheerfully abandoned them in another haunted house near Nottingham where we moved after my father died. My feeling was that, as narratives about normal life, they were as forgettable as yesterday's newspaper.

This feeling seemed to be borne out by my own children. When they were old enough, they responded fervently to any kind of fantasy. Mindful of my own deprivation, I bought them book upon book, and I had all the pleasure and astonishment of discovering almost a hundred excellent books for children, but as an adult. It was quite a bitter discovery that most of these hundred books had been available during my own childhood and that I could have read them then; but, looking back on it, I suspect it was a great advantage to read them with an adult and analytical mind for the first time, to discover how they were put together and to be able to watch three young children's response to these books. When they were older and about to leave school, I asked my sons to make a list (before they forgot) of all the most memorable books of their childhood. All three responded with a list of fantasies, except the middle one put in Rudyard Kipling's
Kim
, and, when asked about that, said he thought it was set in an alternative world. He had had no idea Kipling's India was real.

All the books on the lists were nearly as old as
Kim
. The huge resurgence of children's books that happened mostly in the 1970s was then only beginning, and it was a sad fact that most of the newer books were hardly worth reading then. My sons complained vociferously. I suppose it was quite natural for me to try to write something they might like better. It was something my childhood had trained me to do. I knew by then the kind of book I wanted to write, but it proved quite as difficult as I had supposed in my teens. I had been brought up, if you can call it brought up, reading and writing from the wrong model, you see, and I had really to think through
and
to practice doing it in what seemed to me the
right
way—no, worse, I had to
discover
the right way for me. It took years.

Meanwhile, as I said before, I assumed I would also write for adults. It seemed easier. The trouble was, what I started writing was what is now called adult fantasy, and there was no such thing in those days. The
only
adult fantasy was Tolkien's
The Lord of the Rings
, and that was not considered a Real Book at all. Whenever it was mentioned there was a chorus of people saying “Why can't he stick to what he's good at—being an Anglo-Saxon scholar?” And, besides, what I was writing was not at all like Tolkien. I have always been very determined to do my
own thing
. I wrote a long adult novel called
The Incubus
,
³
about a young wife and mother who was having the sort of terrible time women were
expected
to have in those days, who as a sort of defense created this fantasy that she had hired a devil from hell—by the usual means of selling her soul—to be her ideal lover. Or
was
it her fantasy? I remember when about a decade later I read Germaine Greer's
The Female Eunuch
, I was crying out at almost every page, “But this is just what I was saying in
The Incubus
!” And I really was, but, it seems, rather before the proper time. At any rate, I sent this novel to an agent, and it was very clear she thought I was deranged. She summoned me to London to have a look at me, and the moment I saw her expression, I remember thinking “She believes I'm mad!” and I remember trying very hard not to appear even neurotic—which was very difficult, because I was extremely nervous. I have no idea how well I succeeded, but she agreed to try and place the book. She was an odd woman with a way of proceeding which was extremely strange, although at that time I thought it was normal. She sent me a carefully escalated series of publishers' rejections. When I didn't seem to be discouraged by one, she sent me another that was nastier, and so on. (As my present agent does no such thing, I conclude this lady was unusual.) The letters were to the effect that “Women don't
do
this! This mixing of make-believe into real life is preposterous, and besides, it's rude to men! This is not a Real Book.”