Reflections (22 page)

Eventually I did become extremely discouraged and withdrew the book, concluding that events were forcing me toward writing for children. Here at least, women were allowed to operate. It seemed the only thing I was allowed to do—and it had the advantage of being an infinitely open and versatile field, where, at that time, there was, as I said, a dearth of good books.

You can probably see by now what I meant when I said that the entire shape of my early life seemed to be pushing me toward writing unreal books. But I would not like to give the impression that my decision to write solely for children and young adults was either a gloomy one or a cynical one. I had started off by writing for my sisters, and I had always intended to write for people of this age
as well
, and events seemed to push me steadily that way. You will have noticed how the ingredients of my nonreal books simply seemed to gather as I went along. In order to show you how very uncynical the whole process was, I would like to add one more ingredient, again from my childhood.

The conference center had two gardens. The one beside the house was empty and formal, and this was the public one that everybody used. The Other Garden, as it was called, was beyond this, across a road. This garden was kept locked and no one from the house went there. The county council, which ran the conference center, employed a gardener, who would periodically emerge from this Other Garden, very grudgingly supplying the minimum of the vegetables and flowers from it. He attended to the public garden, but only briefly, and always retired back to the locked garden after he had had his morning cup of tea. Over this cup of tea he would tell anyone who cared to listen about the mistakes of his youth. As a young man, he said, he had been very worried about whether he would get to heaven when he died, so every Sunday he was accustomed to go first to church and then to chapel. Then one day he was cycling on the road to a village called Great Sampford and an angel descended to him in a blaze of light and told him two things: that he should always go to chapel and not church, and that he should never, ever join a trade union. He was very matter-of-fact about this. I have noticed since that everybody who has had a vision always speaks about it in this matter-of-fact way.

Anyway, whenever things got difficult for me—and believe me they do if you are the least wanted of three unwanted children and the wrong sex into the bargain—I would go and beg the key of this Other Garden from my father. He would give his ritual response: “Don't bother me now, child.” And I would persist. Eventually, if I didn't get hit, I got the key, and could go into this amazing, deserted, utterly beautiful garden, where most of the time I was completely alone and totally removed from the lunacies and the unhappiness in which I normally lived.

Someone is going to say that this was like Frances Hodgson Burnett's
The Secret Garden
, and I must say at once that it was not. Not at all. I got hold of that book when I was fourteen—begged a loan of it from someone, I think—and it never occurred to me
once
to identify that garden with the Other Garden. The Secret Garden was a wild garden. Overgrown, and moreover rather obviously symbolic. The Other Garden was lovingly cultivated, perfectly maintained. It was crowned with well-pruned standard roses and apple trees of every kind, and soft fruit and vegetables in rows behind espaliered pear trees. Every so often you came across strange little shrines made of broken pieces of Venetian glass that had been built by the gardener—oddly pagan things for such a God-fearing man. The gate opened on a half-circle of perfectly tended, shaven lawn, which was so unused that it was usually covered with dew, in which the only footprints were mine, and a further avenue of lawn led under rose arches right to the other end, where there was an ivy-covered, octagonal summerhouse. I usually went there when the gardener had gone, so I only once saw the marvelous sight—which I was told happened almost daily in summer—of the gardener racing down this central aisle in a crowd of angry bees, trying terribly hard not to swear (for, as I think I have made clear, he was a godly man). Those bees lived in hives by the summerhouse, and they were of a strain notorious throughout the county for their aggression. My father could only approach them wearing special clothes and waving a smoke maker. But the real marvel was that they never went for me. Ever. The hives stood in a wide patch of weeds, because the gardener had only to go near for them to attack him, but I used to be able to go right up to them and watch them landing and taking off. I had read that you should always tell the bees your news, so I told them things. They never seemed to mind.

This garden strikes me now, though it didn't at the time, as a perfect analogue of what a good book (as opposed to a Real Book) should be, though I must confess I'm not too clear as to how the gardener and the bees fit in. A good book should be another place, beyond ordinary life and quite different from it, made with care and containing marvels. But though it is beyond everyday life, it is by no means unconnected with it. You have to beg the key. And—maybe this is where the bees at least fit in—you can tell the bees things. The bees don't solve your problems. You have to do that. But the mere fact of having taken your mind to another place for a while, if that place is sufficiently wonderful, means that you come back with
experience
. I know I always came back from the Other Garden much more able to deal with what was sometimes truly frightful pressure.

My aim nowadays is to provide this kind of
experience
. I would like to provide it for adults too, but most of them don't seem to want it. But I can provide it at least for people on whom it may make a lasting impression. Taking someone
away
from the pressures under which they live is much more valuable than grinding their noses into the fact that they are, say, of the wrong race or that their parents are divorcing, or both; particularly if, while they are away, this person is given a chance to use their imagination. Imagination doesn't just mean making things up. It means thinking things through, solving them, or hoping to do so, and being just distant enough to be able to laugh at things that are normally painful. Head teachers would call this escapism, but they would be entirely wrong. I would call fantasy the most serious, and the most useful, branch of writing there is. And this is why I don't, and never would, write Real Books.

Inventing the Middle Ages

 

“Inventing the Middle Ages” was the title of a one-day conference organized by the University of Nottingham's Institute for Medieval Research on May 17, 1997. As Diana says in her preface, the organizer, the late Professor Christine Fell, hoped that Diana would have a fresh viewpoint on the topic. Diana wrote that her subsequent talk was about influences.

 

 

W
hen I was asked to speak at this conference I wondered if there was anything I had to say at all. I was rather off the whole idea of the Middle Ages, since I had recently finished writing a thing called
The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
which pokes fun at large numbers of adult fantasies set in what the writers fondly believe to be a medieval landscape. That is to say, all towns have the houses leaning out over the pavements so that the occupants can empty chamberpots on those below and contain lots of winding alleys heaped with refuse. In the countryside there is subsistence farming, if that. As
The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
says:

 

FARMING obviously takes place, since produce appears in the markets, and the Tour will sometimes take you past cultivated fields. But most fields will have been trampled and burnt by armies, or else parched by magical drought. Dairy farming seems very rare. This probably accounts for the extreme dullness of most meals in Fantasyland.

 

Or, again in the countryside:

 

HOVELS are small squalid dwellings, either in a village or occasionally up a mountain, and probably most resemble huts. The people who live in hovels are evidently rather lazy and not very good with their hands, since in no cases have any repairs been done to these buildings (
tumbledown, rotting thatch,
etc., are the official clichés) and there is no such thing as a clean hovel. Indoors, the inhabitants
eke out a wretched existence
(another official cliché), which you can see they would, given the drafts, smoke, and general lack of house-cleaning. This need not alarm you. The Tour will not allow you to enter a hovel that is inhabited. If you enter one at all, it will be
long deserted
(another official cliché) and there will be sanitary arrangements out the back.

 

And merchants tend to be rushing about the place with nameless merchandise in bales. And when the story gets to a castle, you will always find the occupants chewing chicken drumsticks and then throwing the bones to the dogs.

My spleen was aroused about this kind of thing while I was helping a friend compile an encyclopedia of fantasy. We were going through the possible entries alphabetically, and it was at the point when we came to the entry of Nunnery and both chorused “Nunneries are for sacking,” that I said, “You know, these books are all so much the same that I could write the guidebook for this country!” after which I thought, “Why not?” And did so. Here are the entries from
The
Tough Guide
for “Nunneries” and “Monasteries”:

 

NUNNERIES. The rule is that any nunnery you approach, particularly if you are in dire need of rest, healing, or provisions, will prove to have been recently sacked. You will find the place a smoking ruin littered with corpses. You will be shocked and wonder who could have done this thing. Your natural curiosity will shortly be satisfied, because there is a further rule that there will be one survivor, either a very young novice or a very old nun, who will give you a graphic account of the raping and burning and the names of the perpetrators. If old, she will then die, thus saving you from having to take her along and feed her from your dwindling provisions; if a novice, she will either die also, or else prove not to be as nunnish as you thought.

 

MONASTERIES are thick stone buildings on a steep hill. They are full of passages, cloisters, and tiny cells, all with no heating, and inhabited by monks who are mostly elderly and austere, some rather addled in their wits. At the head of the monastery there will be an abbot, who is usually portly and sly. These establishments have three uses:

i) For Scrolls. Any Scroll containing information vital to the quest is likely to be jealously guarded in a monastery. It is not advisable to say you have come to look at this Scroll. In cases where the monks are willing to let you see the Scroll, you will find that the Keeper of Scrolls has recently lost his reason and the Scroll with it. . . .

ii) For sanctuary and rest. In this case you will come pounding up to the monastery at dusk, with the forces of Dark hard on your heels. You will have to hammer on the huge
oaken
(an official cliché) door, but they will let you in. Once inside, you are safe. . . . But the problem comes when you have to get out again. . . .

iii) For sacking. Here you come pounding up to the building with the forces of Dark half a day behind, only to find it a heap of smoking stones. But there will be one survivor. . . .

 

It is all very historical, in that all the characters wear cloaks and go round waving swords, and the only transport is horses. These effusions are mostly written by people in California, which probably accounts for the fact that all the inhabitants of the barbarian North go round in the snow wearing nothing but a fur loincloth, and the writers are quite frank about their attitude to historical knowledge. As
The
Tough Guide
says:

 

HISTORY is generally patchy and unreliable. Any real information about events in the past is either lost or in a Scroll jealously guarded by a monastery or temple. All that can be ascertained with any certainty is:

i) That there was once an Empire that ruled the continent from coast to coast . . . but this shrank to one city a long time before the Tour, leaving only a few roads. . . .

ii) That there was once a wizards' war that occurred earlier still . . .

See LEGENDS, as more reliable sources of information.

 

After all, what does any of this matter when the main point of the book—or books: they are nearly always trilogies—is a quest to conquer the Dark Lord and Save the World?

You can see that this left me with a jaundiced view. These writers are inventing the Middle Ages, all right, I thought, but this is very much How Not to Do It. But then I thought, “Oh come on! There is a positive side to the matter or I wouldn't have got so irritated.” What I, personally, think of as the Middle Ages has to have been an abiding influence on me—I know that, and it's not simply because I happen to be married to a medievalist. For instance, in the book I'm currently writing I called two of the characters—quite spontaneously—Kit and Callette. And it was only after a while I thought, “Those names are familiar from somewhere else,” and recalled they were the names of Will's wife and daughter in
Piers Plowman
. My two characters happen to be griffins, which rather hid the connection from me at first. But the influence is hard to pin down for one very good reason. I write mainly for children.

Children as a group have almost no sense of history at all. They are by their nature the most forward-looking section of the population. They are intent on growing up. Most of them can't wait to be adult. For this reason, they are not going to be very interested in books that are not about here and now and what is to come. When I first started writing for children, I made a conscious decision to write mostly about the present day (or a semblance of the present day set in an alternative world) and not to go out of my way to inculcate a sense of history that isn't there.

Now a lot of children's writers do write historical novels, and a lot more introduce people out of the past in the manner of Kipling's
Puck of Pook's Hill
. I don't find this easy to do. The one time I tried to write a historical novel—about tenth-century Iceland—I did quite a lot of research for it, until I came hard up against a fact I just couldn't get my mind round: there were no trees in Iceland at the time. I found I just could not conceive of a landscape wholly without trees. And I couldn't write the book, or any other with a proper historical setting. Those absent trees caused me to realize that there was always going to be
something
I couldn't get my mind round, whatever period I might choose. I do actually quite envy people who don't have this problem, but as far as I am concerned it is a complete block. Mostly it is that I suspect that my thoughts have been trained to run in certain grooves, according to the twentieth century, and the thoughts of people living at different times in the past would have been trained to run in quite other grooves. I wouldn't be able to get my mind round
their
minds, if you see what I mean.

I have two other powerful reasons for not writing historically. First, as a child I hated overt didacticism in books. We had a long shelf of books that tried to teach you something under the disguise of a story, and we labeled that shelf
GODDY BOOKS
. My own children felt just the same. Second, one of my sons at about the age of twelve developed a total passion for Kipling's
Kim
, which he read over and over again. I was under the impression that, to him, this book was a historical novel re-creating an empire and an India which had disappeared long before he was born. Not a bit of it. When he was fifteen, he confessed that he had thought
Kim
was a fantasy set in an alternative world and that Kipling had made all the India stuff up. So much, I thought, for inculcating a sense of history. It's possible that many children regard historical novels as this kind of fantasy. In which they are not exactly wrong.

All the same, I have a strong sense that everything I do write is quite deeply influenced by what I perceive as the Middle Ages. I am grateful for having been asked to speak here. It has made me dig about and find out just what the influence is. It starts with two things dragged from memory.

First, when I was eight, I started reading Malory in the edition my mother had used as an undergraduate. My parents did not really believe in books especially for children, so the language was a bit of a struggle—and the small print—but I read with enormous enthusiasm. Things like “How Sir Lancelot slew three Giants and set a Castle Free” really turned me on. I had got to the middle of “Tristram and Isolt,” when my mother told me sternly that I must remember that knights didn't really wear armor in King Arthur's day. This totally bewildered me. “How did they
manage
then, when they were fighting?” I wondered, and pondered deeply. My ponderings led me to locate that sense that everyone acquires, that there is a “story time” which has nothing to do with history. Story time is when things bizarre or adventurous or enchanted can happen, as in the “Once upon a time” of fairy stories. So of course the knights could wear armor: they were in this story time and it didn't matter. (I was slightly irritated, as an adult, when I read T. H. White's
The Sword in the Stone
and found him painstakingly and patronizingly describing his “story time.” It is something everyone knows about. I just happened to know it consciously rather early on.)

Second, about four years after that, my father suddenly took it into his head to give his daughters an educational trip to the National Gallery in London. He did this sort of thing at arbitrary intervals and usually managed to arrive so late that wherever it was had shut for the day. On this occasion, his timing was off and the National Gallery was actually still open, and we went round. One picture caught my fancy. It was of a little bishop in pink robes appearing over and over again in a rocky landscape. He was obviously being in several places at once, the way saints and other supernaturally gifted folk can be. I was fascinated, because it was so clearly a story time picture. My father, looking over my shoulder, explained that the bishop was wearing the wrong clothes. He was dressed as a medieval bishop would be at the time of the painter, whereas in his real lifetime he would be wearing a toga. My father then led me in front of a huge painting of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian and delivered a lecture on the meaning of the word “anachronism.” I stared at the archer bending down in the foreground of the painting—who, my father stated, should really have been dressed as a Roman legionary—and I stared at the points stretching so tightly across his linen drawers between his hose and whatever held the hose up, and I couldn't help thinking how
uncomfortable
this particular medieval fashion must have been—he'd have been better off in a Roman tunic. But it was interesting. It was quite obvious that in the Middle Ages (whenever that far-off misty time was) people conceived of this story time as being contemporary with their own. That made me very wistful at the time because I couldn't imagine my favorite knight, Sir Gawain, in a suit or tweeds however hard I strained to see it.

This is actually a very important idea. If you are going to write for a non-historical, forward-looking audience, you ideally need the story time to be here and now. I took this idea up with enthusiasm. It is why most of what I write is set in this modern age whenever possible. For instance, writing an early book called
Eight Days of Luke
, in which the Norse gods appear as modern men and woman and Sleipnir—Woden's horse—as a large white car chauffeured by a Valkyrie, I was quite consciously imitating what I took to be a medieval treatment of story time.

Anyway, in due course I went up to Oxford and read English, where a large part of the course concerned itself with what was called Middle English—and it is a very odd thing that there were quite a few women who were there at the same time as me—none of whom I met—who all went on to write successfully for children afterward. I have never known what quite inspired them all, but with me I know it was suddenly being confronted with the way writers from the Middle Ages handled narratives. They were all so
different
, that was the amazing thing, and all so good at it.