Dark Lords, Witch Queens, and Snow: Sue Purkiss

It's just stopped snowing. We very rarely get snow in this corner of Somerset; last year was the first time for many years that we'd had more than a sprinkling. Today, it seems we are in what for us is the extraordinary position of having some of the heaviest falls going. I don't think I've ever seen so much - certainly not here; great mounds and billows of the stuff.

A couple of weeks ago, we didn't have much, but it was so cold that what there was stayed on the ground. And then one day there was an amazing hoar frost. The hut where I write was festooned with cobwebs (outside, not inside, I'm happy to say) that looked as if they were made out of silver string. Here's one.

I took our dog, Jessie, for her usual walk up on the Mendips. We went up through the woods, then looped down over the hill, so that we were facing the view which stretches out across the Vale of Wedmore to Glastonbury Tor in the distance. (This is the view that's described at the end of my book Warrior King, through the eyes of King Alfred. The peace between him and the Danes was finalised at Wedmore.) There wasn't so much frost in the woods, but out in the open every tree, every twig, every blade of grass was thickly etched in white; it was magical. The sky wasn't clear, it was a mixture of greys: the sun was a silver gilt disc behind thin pearly grey cloud.

I tried to pick up a stone to throw for Jessie, but I couldn't shift it; it was frozen solid to the ground. It reminded me of The Grey King, in Susan Cooper's series, The Dark Is Rising, where the dog Pen is fixed unnaturally and immoveably to the ground by the power of the Grey Lord, channelled through a warestone, which is also held tight to the earth. I heard crows calling, and took a picture of them when they perched like black cut-outs on silvery branches. They seemed the only things moving in the silent lanscape, and I thought of the title book of the same series, where rooks are messengers of the dark, inhabiting an unnaturally frozen landscape.

There's some sort of link I'm trying to find, something to do with the way snow changes the feel of a landscape, concealing what is normally there and creating something new - between that, and what makes some of the best-loved children's books work. (There's Narnia, too, when Lucy et al first enter it: a glittering forest, enchanted by the witch so that it's 'always winter, but never Christmas.') Snow changes what happens, we all know that: ordinary life holds its breath. You can't work any more, so you might as well play. But there's something else, something much deeper than that. We are taken back to an older time, when we were bound more closely to nature; to a time when people must have wondered if winter would ever end, and if they could possibly survive it even if it did. The children who are the heroes and heroines of all those wonderful books are not just fighting a dark lord or a witch queen - they are fighting the beautiful cruelty of a fierce winter.

And finally, just because I like it, one more picture.

Merry Christmas, one and all!

'Footfalls echo in the memory...' Sue Purkiss

I've just re-read Terry Pratchett's book, Lords and Ladies - such fun! Part of the renowned  Discworld series, it stars the three witches, Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick. It also features the wizards - in particular, Archchancellor Ridcully. At one point, a bandit chieftain foolishly holds up the coach which is carrying Ridcully, the Bursar, the Librarian and Ponder Stibbins. The chieftain sees the wizard's staff poking out of the window.

    
'Now then,' he said pleasantly. 'I know the rules. Wizards aren't allowed to use magic against civilians except in genuine lifethreatening situa-' 
    There was a burst of octarine light.
    'Actually, it's not a rule,' said Ridcully. 'It's more a guideline.'

How familiar was that? It's almost exactly what Captain Barbarossa declared in Pirates of the Caribbean, when Keira Knightley called on him to stick to the terms of the Pirates' Charter. I think that bit was used in a trailer; it was certainly quoted in reviews as one of the funniest lines in the film. But here it was: Lords and Ladies was published in 1992. Terry Pratchett wrote it first.

I'd be willing to bet that whoever wrote the script didn't realise the line was second-hand. For some reason, it resonated, as it did with me: it lodged in the scriptwriter's mind, and out it popped when it was needed. He probably had no idea he'd first seen the line in the book.

It made me think about why it is that some combinations of words are persistent, echoing in the memory long after what surrounded them has been forgotten. I haven't come up with any answers so far, but I have come up with some examples. Here are my first ten. They're in no particular order, and they're not necessarily accurate - they're as I remember them. Incidentally, I don't have a good memory for quotes - or for jokes - so if I remember something, it must have very considerable staying power!

'Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams...'
(W B Yeats - the whole poem is gorgeous. It's lovely as a song, too.)

'Christ if my love were in my arms'
And I in my bed again!
Anon (but very old!)

'Today was bad, but tomorrow will be beyond all imagining...'
Susan Cooper: The Dark is Rising

'Je crains notre victoire, autant que notre perte.'
This is from a French A-level text, Horace, by Corneille. It means 'I fear our victory as much as our defeat'. I think the speaker had a lover on one side of the battle and a brother on the other. Beyond that, I remember nothing about the play, and I've no idea why this phrase has stuck. Mind you, now I come to think about it, there are all sorts of situations to which it could apply.

'The drunkenness of things being various.'
(From Snow, by Louis MacNeice)


'We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.'
(The Sunlight on the Garden, also MacNeice)


'I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams...'
(Shakespeare's Hamlet)


'Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine...'
(Casablanca - like Shakespeare, the source of so many resonant quotes.)


'I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not like this. Not on the cess of war.'
(Wilfred Owen: Strange Meeting)


'Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.'

(From T S Eliot's Burnt Norton - as is the quote I used for the title of this post. And here's a picture of a rose garden, just to remind us of summer. It's at Hestercombe, in Somerset)


Do you have any similarly sticky quotes? Or, to borrow from Eliot - footfalls which echo in the memory, as these do in mine?

The arts - who needs them? Sue Purkiss

Somerset, where I live, is a very beautiful county. (See picture of Glastonbury Tor for example of beauteousness.) It's also very rural. Its only city, Wells, is a pocket Venus, with a population of 10 500. The county town, Taunton, is just that - a town. It is one of the few counties which doesn't have a university. (Bath and Bristol are nearby, but they're not in Somerset.)

So it doesn't have the usual springboards for the arts; it doesn't have very much money. Despite this, there are several small theatres, in Frome, Taunton, Street and Yeovil. There's a group called Takeart, which takes drama round to schools and villages. There are stacks of amazing artists and craftspeople, drawn by the magical landscape of the levels, the hills, woods and streams of Exmoor, the Somerset coast, the Quantocks. And there are writers, of course.

Up until now, the County Council has helped to support the arts. The amount of money involved wasn't huge: £159 000, or 0.0004% of the total budget. (There has never been enough for luxuries such as a literature development officer.) But two days ago, the Conserative led council voted not just to cut the budget by 26% over four years, as had been anticipated: with a fine sweep of the pen, they have decided to cut the arts development budget completely. The only arts projects which will have any support are those which will be able to show a direct economic benefit for the community. Imaginative as they are, organisations such as the theatres and Takeart will find it difficult to plug the holes in their budgets - difficult to persuade other hard-pushed organisations such as the Arts Council to take up the slack.

This seems to be part of a general drift towards a society where the arts are valued only for their direct contribution to the economy. So - universities are to be encouraged by means of funding to favour science over the arts. Students are to pick up the tab for their studies because, after all, they will get a better job because of their degree. There seems to be a notion that artists and thinkers are a luxury, not a necessity in these difficult economic times. Well, I don't believe this is so. Let me quote this, from www.takeart.org:

In Somerset we believe in the transformational power of the arts, their capacity to fire the imagination, their ability to give meaning to our lives and our relationships with each other, a language to enable us to celebrate our common bonds – they empower and enable the 'Big Society'. We also believe all groups in society should be able to access the arts, such as those living in isolated, rural communities or children and young people living in difficult financial circumstances.

Wednesday was a sad day for Somerset. Maybe it's worth considering: why do we remember Ancient Greece? Worthy and important as they no doubt were, is it because of the tax gatherers? Probably not...

A Dream Imprisoned: Sue Purkiss

Five years ago, I wrote a book called The Willow Man. It was about three children who were 'stuck' in different ways, and it told the story of how they became unstuck. The catalyst in this process was the Willow Man: a figure forty feet tall, woven out of willow.

I knew children who were stuck in the ways I describe in the book. And I knew the Willow Man. Ever since the year 2000, he had stood beside the M5, just outside Bridgwater. Thousands of people drove past every day, and like me, they gazed at him and marvelled. This is how I described him at the beginning of the book:

His powerful torso was twisted at a slight angle to his massive thighs, so that his small head gazed with a mixture of defiance and contempt across the concrete ribbon of the motorway. He seemed to be perfectly balanced on one leg: the other was bent, as if at any moment he might choose to complete the step and take his freedom...

He was created by Serena de la Hey as part of the millenium celebrations. She knew he wouldn't last forever: how could he, when he was made out of living willow? I don't think she guessed what an iconic figure he would become: the north of England had the great metal figure, the Angel of the North - but now we had our own angel, the Angel of the South. He stood outlined against the sky, emblematic of the power of life and nature.

About a year later, I was driving down the M5 and I saw that something terrible had happened. All that was left of the Willow Man was a steel skeleton. Vandals had set fire to him, and all that careful craft, all that artistry which had been woven in with the willow - all of this was turned to ashes. There was a public outcry, a positive howl of sadness and outrage: the Willow Man must be rebuilt. And he was.

He became an emblem of Somerset; his picture has appeared on leaflets, on posters, on the sides of trains. He was a part of the landscape - an expression of the landscape. But now the Willow Man is under threat from another direction. Well - from all directions. In fact he's not just under threat: it seems as if the battle is already lost. Developers have succeeded where vandals failed. On one side of him is a massive complex of warehouses, belonging to the supermarket, Morrisons: on the other, a housing estate. Instead of a proud figure silhouetted against the sky, a focus for wonder and imagination, he's hemmed in and imprisoned - you can scarcely see him. Look at the pictures: look at him as he was, and as he is.

It seems like the death of a dream.

Houses matter: new jobs matter. But something that makes thousands and thousands of people pause, and reflect, and experience the power of the imagination, every single day - that matters too. Would it be beyond possiblity to set the Willow Man free and rebuild him somewhere else? He cost in the region of £15,000 the first time round. Surely, even in these times perhaps especially in these times - that's not such a great sum for something that delivers so much?

Words and pictures: Sue Purkiss

I have a friend, Sara Parsons, who is is an artist and a potter. She lives on a farm, and a few years ago, she, her husband and sons converted an old barn into a studio, where she does her own work and has art classes.

Not long after the studio was finished, I was looking for somewhere to have a launch for my first longer length book, The Willow Man. Sara offered the studio, and it was brilliant - the perfect setting for people to come and buy the book and have a chat. In the afternoon, Sara looked speculatively at an expanse of bare stone wall. "Hm," she said. "I'll do a picture for that." By the time evening came, it was there: a powerful sketch of the Willow Man, and underneath, a quote from the book. That's it in the picture. Sara uses calligraphy in a lot of her work: it pops up in all sorts of unexpected places. Words loop gracefully under glazes, around figures, are etched on the beach by retreating seas.

So this September, when I decided to start up a creative writing class in Cheddar, the studio seemed the perfect place to have it. I haven't taught creative writing to adults before, and I really had no idea how much fun it was going to be. We've only had three sessions, but already, so many good things are happening. There is a good mix of people, with an age range of about forty years. Already, we are learning to expect the unexpected: we listen eagerly to each new piece of writing. We have been moved, astonished, intrigued; we've laughed (a lot); we've been thrown off-balance; we've been entranced by something in a particular combination of words. In just three sessions, writing has revealed things in us that we hadn't realised were there.

The studio provides an extra element. All around us hang pictures and rough sketches, which change from week to week. One wall is mirrored, and we don't like this, because we're shy writers - so Sara covers it with an opulent red velvet counterpane, glittering with embroidery and sequins: a rich background for our imaginings. Last week, I went over to the flip-chart easel, and there on the ground were six glistening red drops, the first just underneath where the bag of one of the students hung from her chair. Just paint, or...? Da da DA!! The story begins...

Half way through the session, the students were working on a poem. At the beginning of each line were the words, 'You are...' I went over to put the kettle on, glanced up idly, and noticed a sketch of Sara's pinned to the wall. (There it is in the second picture.) There were words on it. The only ones I could read were... 'You are...' Reader, a shiver ran down my spine.

It's lovely having books published. But there is a down side. Once you've crossed that threshold, and once the first euporia is over, you find that there are things to worry about. You still enjoy it, often revel in it - but there's always another step to climb. You've got a book published. How can you make it sell? It sells reasonably. Why didn't it sell better? You're on a long-list. How can you make it onto a short-list? You're on a short-list. Why didn't you win? The dark side edges in...

What's lovely about this class is that the focus is purely on the craft - the pleasure of writing something as well as you can; finding the best words and putting them in the best possible order, and then sharing them. I'm loving it.

And I can't wait to see what the studio is going to offer up for us next.

http://www.suepurkiss.com/

http://www.saraparsons.com/ (This is a great website!)

Strictly very-little-to-do-with-children's-books: by Sue Purkiss

Now - some of you may well spot the fact that this post has very little to do with children's writing. My excuse is that I wasn't expecting to be writing one for today, so I think that gives me lots and lots of leeway. So - put on your dancing shoes, and off we go!

Because, yes - Strictly Come Dancing started yesterday. I'm a fan - a BIG fan - and having cleared the room last night of all uncommitted parties, I settled down happily to watch it. And as I did so, I idly pondered about why I like it so much. Of course, there are all kinds of answers to that, just as there are all kinds of people who are similarly addicted. But in my case, there is a thread that leads way back into a rather long-distant childhood.


As a child, I was fascinated by ballet, and absolutely longed to be able to have lessons. I'm not sure where the fascination came from; I'd certainly never seen a ballet. In fact, funnily enough, I see there actually is a link here with children's books and comics - because all my knowledge of ballet must have come from these two sources. There was one comic that each week had a gorgeous picture of an incredibly graceful ballerina in a glorious costume with layers of tulle and scatterings of sequins, in an impossible-looking pose - perhaps that was the start of it? And there were books from the library: Noel Streatfield's Ballet Shoes, and a series set in the Sadler's Wells Ballet School, featuring someone called Lorna, or was it Drina? Not sure, but they certainly featured a hugely talented girl from an impoverished background whose talent was eventually recognised, despite numerous setbacks. Oh, and of course she was also beautiful, with dark soulful eyes, high cheekbones and slender limbs.

I had some of those characteristics. Well, one: we didn't have much money. And as a result of that, I never had any ballet lessons - we couldn't afford them. I did my best: I got hold of a book called Teach Yourself Ballet, and tried to do just that, learning the five positions and to do pirouettes without getting dizzy. I read about the history of ballet, and about all the famous ballerinas - Anna Pavlova, Alicia Markova, Margot Fonteyn, Lyn Seymour. I drew pictures of dancers, copying from magazines and Degas reproductions.  My friend Hilary and I used to put records on - The Hall of the Mountain King was a particular favourite - and galumph around to the music in her front room like a pair of gangly elephants. And Mum acquired from somewhere a second-hand pair of real ballet shoes - they were red leather, shabby but beautiful. I used to put them on and lovingly tie the ribbons and admire the way they made my feet look.

Of course, even with money and lessons, I wouldn't have stood a chance. I was tall, bespectacled and geeky without a graceful bone in my body. But never let reality get in the way of a good dream! Mum couldn't manage ballet lessons, but she did track down some old-time ballroom lessons. They were in the Co-op Hall, and I think they were five shillings a throw. The teacher was Mr Bradshaw, who looked and I think probably was fairly ancient, with white hair and thick black-framed glasses. He always wore a dark suit, shirt and tie, and when he was giving instructions had a a trace of a French accent: "Forward, side, together, toe to 'eel - TURN!" We learnt the waltz (not the version they do on Strictly; our waltz had more twiddly bits), the Military Two Step, the Veleta, and even a tango - imagine that, with a bunch of clumsy pre-teen girls in the back streets of a Midlands mining town! It was a long way from the bars of Argentina, I can tell you that. 

Probably the best thing about ballroom lessons, though, was the shoes. Here was a time when Mum made us a new dress for summer and another for winter, buying the material at Griffin and Spalding or Jessops in Nottingham. Similarly, you had sandals and a pair of white shoes for summer, and dark shoes for winter. Cardigans were hand-knitted and there was no such thing as a t-shirt. So a pair of silver shoes - silver! - all straps and twinkly - goodness, what heaven! And there was even the prospect, if you carried on for long enough, of a strappy dress with an enormous skirt made of layers of net, just like the ones they wore on TV on a a programme called Come Dancing. There was an older girl who helped at the classes sometimes who had dresses like that. Oh, how we envied her!

Well, I took a few exams and got a couple of medals. But then it was the sixties, and suddenly the formal dresses looked a bit old-hat, and there were new dances like the Twist and the Shake and the Locomotion and - well, basically the world changed. So I stopped going to ballroom classes, and that was that.

But I never lost the fascination with ballet, and went to see performances when I could. There was a wonderful one called Ghost Dances, to

Ghost Dances, by Christopher Bruce

South American pan-pipe music, and a marvellous version of Dracula and another of Carmen; I don't live in London, but the Ballet Rambert and the Northern Ballet toured, often with narrative ballets that I loved, and abstract ones that fascinated me. Strangely, although as a child I read the stories of all the classical ballets, in performance they left me a little cold.

And there were the films: Dirty Dancing, West Side Story, Strictly Ballroom. (Particularly Strictly Ballroom. It's probably surprising, but I have no trouble identifying with the clumsy ugly duckling who eventually blossoms!)

So, for me, there's all that at the back of it when I settle down for the new season of Strictly. In a way, I suppose I can watch the participants living my dream. And my favourites for this year? Too early to say yet - though I would place a small bet on the first three to go out. And I do love the shoes - though they really aren't as gorgeous as that first pair of silver ones...

Truth - stranger than fiction? By Sue Purkiss

Today I set my weekly writing class off on a story. We started off by looking at some pieces of jewellery I'd taken in - a complete mixture, ranging from a glittery owl brooch my daughter bought me when she was quite small, through a simple one made out of pewter set with an oval blue stone which my mother made at school, to a carved ivory necklace which Mum often wore when she was younger. I didn't tell them anything about the pieces. Everyone chose something and began to think about who might have bought it and why, whether it was a gift and if so what was the occasion and to whom might it have been given - and so on.

This was leading up to a story, which would involve a character which I would help them to build and a piece of jewellery - probably the one they'd been looking at, but it didn't have to be. 

They like it when I give them clues which help them to create a character. There are different ways to do it. Once, I took in a selection of objects; they had to choose three or four and imagine who might have owned them, how they'd come by them, what kind of person might have ended up with this particular selection. Another time, we did something similar using a random list of ten objects, cutting it down to five, and doing the same thing.

My own favourite is using pictures, like those above. I spread out postcards, cuttings, reproductions of paintings etc. They choose the one that interests them and then invent a name and a back story - or maybe write a monologue to explain what's behind the image.

But quickest and easiest, and probably the method most of them prefer, is Character Consequences. Each of us has a piece of paper. At the top, you write a first name. Then you fold the paper over and pass it on. The next person writes a surname. Then it might be the thing the person most wants, or their favourite piece of clothing, or their most noticeable physical characteristic - or the kind of house they live in, or the job they do. They can change or just not use one element, if it really doesn't fit in - but they tend to take pride in managing to finagle all the ingredients into the mix.

I think it was Alan Sillitoe, a lad from a working class Nottingham background, who found success as a writer after someone advised him to write about what he knew. It certainly worked for him, and it's a piece of advice that's often given to aspiring writers. I think there's a lot in it, but like most of the advice writers and writing tutors hand out about their craft, it's not the whole story. The exercises I've described above produce a surprising variety of entertaining work. I think that's partly because they provide a bit of a shortcut, a scaffold, a way in - but I think it may also be precisely because they introduce an element of something outside the writer's easily available normal environment.

What's led me to this earth-shattering conclusion? Well, I've just been away for a few days, staying with relatives not far from a small town in rural south-west Ireland. (I don't think the place is necessarily significant: it's just that it was a different place to the one I'm used to.) They told stories, one after another, about themselves and the people they knew, and I listened, fascinated. The stories - and the characters who peopled them - were dramatic, funny, fascinating - and different. I wish I could tell you some of them, but... best not!

But it did just strike me that these little exercises do something similar. We get used to our own attitudes, assumptions and experiences, and it's easy to draw on them when we write. But a simple exercise like one of those above does what a trip to another community does: it takes you out of your comfort zone and helps you step into the shoes of someone you would never otherwise have known or imagined.

Now, to finish - a little story from Ireland which is nothing to do with characters, but which created a haunting image that will stay with me.

My brother in law lives on a farm which he bought thirty years ago from an old man called Jack, who had been born there. Jack was extremely generous with his time and experience, and he taught the young incomer all he could about farming. He also told him stories of course, and one of them was this. 

In the old days, when Jack was small, the children from all around came to a school in the middle of the countryside, called the Model School. For Jack, it was only a half hour walk across the fields - perhaps a little less. But some children came from the top of the mountain - you can see it in the picture, on the left. Their families were poor, and they walked barefoot, carrying their shoes so as not to wear them out. 

At the end of the day, they had to trudge home again, back along the valley and then all the way up the mountain. The path went past Jack's family's farm, and his mother felt sorry for them and so would come out with a potato or a piece of bread and butter to help them on their way.

Only sometimes, she didn't hear them, or for whatever reason didn't come to the door. And when this happened, they would walk round the farmhouse (on the right there), over and over again till she noticed them. And only then would they continue their long journey home.

And that's the picture that sticks.

Breaking the rules: Sue Purkiss

Many years ago, O Best Beloveds, when the world was young, sixth formers often used to do something called General Studies as an extra A-level. It was an opportunity for teachers to show their eccentric side, or to shyly brush off and dust down a special interest.

I can’t remember most of the things we studied, but for one term, we had a science teacher called Mr Spiby. He was small, with bright dark eyes and a mop of frizzy dark hair standing up around a prematurely receding hairline, like a sort of fuzzy tiara. And he was brilliant. Why? Because he made us think. And what he taught us has remained with me more than almost anything else I learned at school.

His method was this. He would come into the room and, for instance, scrape a ruler along the surface of the desk, so that it made a squeaky, scraping noise. Then he would look at us and grin. “Now,” he’d say. “What makes that noise?”

Blank looks.

He would lean forward confidentially. “It’s a race of tiny, tiny beings. When I scrape the ruler along the desk, it squashes them. Hurts them dreadfully. And so they squeal.”

From us, knowing laughter. From Mr Spiby, a raised eyebrow. “What? You don’t think that’s the case? Well then, prove it.”

We never could. Not even when he came in and announced that the world was flat and all this about it being round was sheer nonsense. We thought we were in with a chance on this one. “Astronauts have been up in space ships, and they’ve seen that it’s round,” we crowed.

He shook his head gravely. “No. The photographs are all faked. It’s not difficult to do, you know.” He had an answer for everything we could throw at him.

He was trying to teach us about the basis of scientific theory – to show us that you can assume nothing, that you must have evidence for everything. But in doing this, he also showed us how much we thought we knew – when really, we didn’t know it at all: we just believed what we’d been told. We thought ourselves so much cleverer than Galileo’s contemporaries, silly twits, who really did think the earth was flat – but actually, we were just the same: we believed what we’d been told, and we didn’t test the assertion for ourselves. (Or perhaps we were not the same: they believed the evidence of their own eyes – which perhaps makes more sense.)

Mr Spiby didn’t make me into a scientist. It was too late for that – maybe if he’d taught me further down the school, he might have managed it. But he did teach me to question: and he taught me that to prove something, you need evidence. It’s not enough just to make an assertion. So I’m very annoying in arguments: everything’s bouncing along in a delightfully fiery fashion, and then in comes me, with a little anxious frown and a: “But where’s your evidence?”

And I think this is one of the reasons – I can think of others – why, when I’m presented with a rule – or indeed, a regulation – I think: “But why? Where’s the evidence that this is the right thing to do?” So when someone admonishes: “Show, don’t tell,” or, “In a children’s book, the story must be seen through a child’s eyes,” or “Readers won’t put up with description” – I begin to frown. And I think it’s why, when I come across a book or a writer that cheerfully breaks all these rules, and yet still produces something that works wonderfully, I feel quite exhilarated.

Mal Peet’s latest book, Life: An Unexploded Diagram, breaks the rules. It’s been reviewed extensively, so I’m not going to review it again here. Suffice it to say that though the main character is a teenager, the adult characters are frequently a main concern; that he frequently has passages which are nothing much to do with moving the story on, but which the reader wouldn’t be without; that he has pages and pages of conversations in closed rooms between American politicians, which are of only tangential relevance to the main story – that he does all this, and the book is generally held to have succeeded magnificently. (Though for myself, I still think Keeper is his masterpiece.) Oh, and for evidence of that last point, just google reviews of the book. If it’s not on prize lists next year, then I’ve learned to like olives.

One last point about breaking the rules. Those of you who read my post for the ABBA Litfest will know that I’m on a mission to read Dickens, having avoided him all the way through an English degree and almost all the way through a fair few years as an English teacher. Dickens – who I think foreshadows a great deal in contemporary children’s writing (an assertion which – sighs sadly – I haven’t the space to back up here, but may come back to in the future) breaks the rules for a pastime. He spends ages on characters who are almost completely peripheral to the plot, he wallows in lengthy description just for the fun of it, and he leaps from one viewpoint to another.

And for evidence of all that, all you need to do is read the books!

Sue Purkiss

From D-Day to Gaugin, by story: Sue Purkiss

The first day of September, and the holidays are over - but here's a picture to remind you. Sea, sand, rocks, the smell of salt and seaweed, the sound of the waves...

And breathe...

The photo is of a beach in Brittany, where we've just had a sort of sandwich holiday; Normandy at either end, and Brittany in the middle. We went to Normandy to visit some of the beaches used to land troops at D-Day. I knew the outline of the story of the landings, of course - but there are lots of museums and other ways of remembering what happened there, and after visiting some of them, now I know a lot more.

The last place we went to was Arromanches. First we went to the museum on the sea front. It has two good films, and it's packed full of memeorabilia - physical reminders of that time; uniforms, weapons, pieces of kit, photographs - even an engine from a fighter plane. There's also a very good model which shows you what the floating harbour at Arromanches looked like; you can look up from this and see the remaining concrete caissons in the sea through the window; look up to a video screen and you can see footage of soldiers and tanks driving across the metal causeway which took them from the ships to the beaches.

There was lots of good stuff, but somehow I felt a bit dissatisfied, a bit short-changed. After looking round, I knew, for instance, which countries took part in the landings. I knew what kind of uniform each of them wore. I knew that airmen were given a special kit for if they were shot down, which included among other things a silk map, a hotel token, some currency, and a letter in Russian proving that they were with the allied forces. I knew all sorts of things.

But I didn't have a sense from this particular museum of the stories of some of the individuals involved, whereas from others, I did. For instance, there's one at Pegasus Bridge, not far from Caen, which was one of the first places to be re-taken from the Germans. Each display case had exhibits similar to those at Arromanches, but here, the story is told through the experiences of a particular person. So there are letters, photographs: there is a little doll, which one pilot officer carried in his pocket as a mascot - it belonged to his son. You are told about this man's life, as well as his involvement in the battle for Pegasus Bridge; you're told about what happened to him afterwards, and how his belongings come to be here on display. You can guess how he felt, the kinds of things he was thinking. You're told a STORY.

There was another place we went - Bernieres. We went there because my husband's uncle had told us just before we came away that he had landed men there - he was in the navy. It's a lovely little town. The way they remember the story there is that at key points, they have large photos from 1945. So, for instance, you see a picture of Germans firing from the church spire - and then you look up and see the spire today. peaceful against a blue sky. You see a picture of children milling round a smiling Canadian soldier - and you look up and see people walking along the street, who may quite possibly be those children's children. It's powerful; it brings the past alive. Like books, that's what museums can do.

One last museum - nothing to do with the war. The weather in Brittany wasn't always as sparkling as it is in the picture, and one rather chilly day my son found out about a little museum just up the road from this beach, in Le Poldu. We called it the Gaugin House - I don't remember if that was its proper name. Gauguin was one of a group of painters who lived and worked for a while in Brittany. He stayed with a couple of others in an inn run by a woman called Marie Henry. She was young and beautiful, and she was a single mother - not really what you'd expect in rural France in the 1890s, perhaps.
The painters painted on the walls, the doors, even on the windows, much to the amusement of the locals. Their work was painted over, but rediscovered years later, and now you can wander round the house in the company of gentle ghosts, and discover the stories of the people who lived there at that time. One of the most remarkable stories concerns Marie Henry - but I'm saving that one. It's a beauty. (A bit of serendipity: when I came home and looked through my emails, I found one from the Tate saying that there's to be a major Gaugin exhibition starting at the end of September. Brilliant! Now I'll be able to find out how this bit of his career fits in with the rest.)
So, stories. They are how we enter the lives , the thoughts, the experiences of others. Stories are important: stories work.

http://www.suepurkiss,com/

Emily's Surprising Voyage, and where ideas come from: Sue Purkiss

My new book came out this week. As you can see, it's called Emily's Surprising Voyage, and it's published by Walker Books. As you can also see, it's set on a ship. The ship is a real one, and you can go aboard it in Bristol - it's the ss Great Britain, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. (How could he not become famous, with a name like that?)

The Great Britain is a very special ship. She was the first to be made of iron, the first to operate by steam as well as sail, the first to have a screw propellor, and at the time she was built, she was the biggest and fastest ship in the world. Forty years ago this summer, she was brought home to Bristol from her resting place in a shallow bay in the Falklands, and since then she's been lovingly and beautifully restored.

My story is about two children, Emily and Tom, who travel on her when she's taking migrants to Australia in the mid nineteenth century, and about some of the adventures they have. Emily is from a family of mill owners, whereas Tom is from a family of mill workers. The ship is an important part of the story - almost another character - and James de la Rue has drawn beautiful illustrations which show the ship as it is and was, and the children just as I imagined them.

Last week I did an interview with David Clensie from the Bristol Evening Post - and it was only as we were talking that I realised that the ship was not the only source of ideas for the story. Another was Joseph Arkwright's cotton mill at Cromford in Derbyshire, which dates from the Industrial Revolution. A few years ago I visited it, and was struck by the accounts of the children who worked there, and how dangerous the work was. And there was another mill too. This was one I went to years ago, near Glasgow, when I was doing some copywriting for Patons. I remember the noise, the constant clatter of the looms, the tiny fibres glinting as they floated in the air, and the rainbow coloured hanks of wool.

I didn't consciously think of these experiences when I was writing the story, but they are part of it. So are the accounts of workhouses I've seen and read; so is a friend's pet rat. So is my father's passion for steam; so are the diaries of the passengers who travelled on the ship.

It's only a little story, and some of these things are merely hinted at, while others are much more significant. But it may serve as an example of the way writers draw on memories of which they themselves are only dimly aware. Yeats has a phrase that almost describes it (he has a phrase for almost anything!): in The Circus Animal's Desertion, he considers, as an old man, where he has found inspiration in the past, and where he must look for it now. He concludes that the only place left to find it is in 'the foul rag and bone shop of the heart'. I'd take issue with 'foul'; maybe he was feeling jaded, or maybe he just needed to make the line scan! But the rest's about right.

What the Dickens? - Sue Purkiss

I recently found myself reading a book I hated. Normally, I would have ditched it after a few pages – but this was for a book group, and moreover it was by an author whose work I normally enjoy and admire.

It didn’t get any better. In fact by the end of it, I disliked it so much that I felt the need to reach for an antidote. I wanted something guaranteed to restore my faith in fiction. I took a deep breath and reached for Great Expectations.

Now, I have always accepted that Dickens is a great writer. It’s just that I’ve never found him easy to get into. I have read some of his books; I once had to teach Our Mutual Friend, which obviously entailed reading it. (Though I did feel a sneaking sympathy for the student who confided that it was his aim to pass the exam without ever having read the book in its entirety – it is very long…) I read David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities back in the dim and distant past, and I’ve read the beginning of Bleak House lots of times – thoroughly admiring the amazing description of fog at the beginning, floundering a little at all the stuff about Chancery, and finally being too insanely irritated by the sweetness of Esther Summerson to carry on.

However, I felt that the time had come to try again. Somehow, I knew that right now, Dickens was what was needed. Plus, it’s the bicentenary of his birth next year, so it must be as well to be prepared for wall to wall Charles.

I was not disappointed. Great Expectations was a revelation. It was exuberant, it was funny, it had me on the edge of my seat; every character was distinctive and unique, Estella was far from sweet and Pip was an imperfect hero. The story rollicked along at a satisfying pace, but it also took the time to explore some interesting byways. And it made me think – about people, mainly, and how fallible but heroic they can be.

But another thing that struck me was that I have recently read a number of books for children and teenagers that have more than a touch of the Dickensian about them. I was interested to explore this: is it because Dickens – perhaps in the guise of film and TV adaptations – is so ubiquitous that his influence can’t be escaped if the setting is Victorian? Or were the writers concerned – Michelle Lovric, Penny Dolan, and Mary Hooper – conscious of his example? I decided to ask them.

Michelle’s book, The Mourning Emporium, follows the adventures of an extraordinary set of characters who we first met in The Undrowned Child, which was set in a sort of parallel nineteenth century Venice. For the second book, the action moves to London. Both books have for me the exuberance, the rich variety and the playfulness which characterise the master.

A mourning emporium also features in Mary Hooper’s book, Fallen Grace – amazingly to me, since I’d never heard of one before. It’s a shop where gloomy Victorians could buy all their mourning clothes, jewellery, cards etc, and arrange elaborate funerals with professional mourners (‘mutes’, whose job it was to look sad and weep), horses with black plumes, etc etc. Whereas Michelle’s book is a fantasy, Mary’s is set firmly in a real world, a world with vast divisions between the poor and the wealthy. Dickens actually has a walk-on part in this book.

Penny Dolan’s book, A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E., concerns the adventures of a boy who loses his parents and is cheated out of his inheritance by his unscrupulous Uncle Scrope and his lawyer. He is sent to an appalling boarding school, Murkstone Hall, whose headteacher is called Bulloughby – as with Dickens, the names tell you a great deal. He escapes, but has a long journey to make, and many villains to deal with, before he can find his way home

I asked the three writers whether Dickens was an influence they were aware of, and what aspects of his writing they admired or felt themselves to have been influenced by.

ML: For me, the greatest compliment I ever receive about my books is when someone describes them as ‘Dickensian’… If it is ‘Dickensian’ to extract the maximum joy from the English language, to royally entertain while pricking the conscience as painfully as if with hot needles… then yes, I want to be ‘Dickensian’.

Another thing I love about Dickens is the way he breaks all the rules. He makes lists. He repeats. He digresses. He invents patently ridiculous names. And yet… he makes it all work. I’ve always suspected that some of his success is precisely down to the gusto with which he trounces the rules. I can picture him writhing with pleasure at his desk while he subverts all the antiquated courtesies and conventions of writing.

When you love a writer as much as I love Dickens, I think you inevitably do end up writing ‘tribute’ characters. In The Mourning Emporium, I have Turtledove, an English bulldog who speaks a Victorian cockney dialect. He is a kind of Fagin character, looking after a band of orphans. Unlike Fagin, his entire being is focused on the welfare and happiness of his ‘childer’. I deployed Turteldove as a foil to a female villain, who pretends to ‘mother’ children, but in fact inflicts outrageous mental and physical cruelty upon them.

PD: There was no influence at the start, other than a preference for writing about the past. The growing points for the book were: a visit to an ancient boarding school; watching young actors ‘fly’ overhead in a theatre production and a BBC R4 fragment about the working conditions of Victorian theatre children.

My agent picked up on the echoes of Dickens and Nicholas Nickleby in the first section of A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E. I hadn’t tried to do a Dickens, but am sure his work unconsciously primes the canvas whenever we try to picture the Victorian period. Although the Ackroyd biography (of Dickens) was part of my random ‘research’ reading, so were biographies of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry and a range of social history books.

Dickens, to me as a writer, offers an intense sense of the child or unformed hero struggling to make sense of an untidy and unkind world. To this he adds a variety of eccentric characters – likeable, silly, cruel or steadfastly brave. A whirl of other lives go on around the central character, enriching the story for the reader. And – is this Dickensian? – I often find myself thinking in terms of light and darkness when I’m picturing a setting as well as using emotional brightness and shadow throughout the story.

MH: I have read Dickens, of course (actually, not ‘of course’, because I only read him twenty years ago) but, knowing I was going to be writing a novel set in Victorian times, I deliberately didn’t re-read him when I was about to write Fallen Grace. I did read Ackroyd’s biography of Dickens, however, because I knew I wanted him to have a walk-on part and it was essential that I knew (a) he was in London at the specific date I wanted him to be and (b) how he felt about funeral directors! Of course, I must have been influenced by all the Dickens’ TV and film adaptations I’ve seen over the years, and quite a few have death/graveyards in them. Oh yes, and I knew Bleak House (my favourite) began with a massive pea-souper fog so I just HAD to have one of those.

I think what I admire most is the way Dickens manages to blend matters of great seriousness with humour. I also love his coincidences – I’ve got plenty of those in Fallen Grace but thought – well, if he can get away with them, then so can I.

SP: I’ve now moved on to my second Dickens – Nicholas Nickleby – and have been reading his account of the boarding school run by Wackford Squeers. (Oh, the names, the wonderful names!) It’s so horrifying I’m metaphorically hiding behind the sofa with one eye closed as I read it. (But I am not liking Dickens’ rendition of a Yorkshire accent. It’s very distracting.)

Many, many thanks to my panel. Oh, and a word to the wise; I’m told that there’s to be a new adaptation at Christmas on BBC of Great Expectations – no doubt the first of many tributes to the great man as his very big birthday approaches.

Sue Purkiss… whose most recent book, Emily’s Surprising Voyage, is set in Victorian times, and does perhaps have a very faint whiff of Dickens about it. For more information, see www.suepurkiss.com

Not the Glastonbury Festival: Sue Purkiss

Yes, it's that week in Somerset. The sky is full of helicopters, the roads are full of buses, trucks and cars, the supermarkets are full of people wearing multi-coloured wellies, the hotels are full of BBC staff. It's the Glastonbury Festival.

But more significantly for us, this is the week when authors and school librarians converged on Bruton (which is somewhere past Shepton Mallet, vaguely in the direction of Yeovil – I’m still not entirely sure where) for a networking event, organised by the fabulous Julie Hoskins, librarian at Bruton School for Girls. For some of us, converging was less easy than for others. A group from one school were swallowed up by the Glastonbury traffic and never made it at all.

And then there was me. According to Google maps, I only live 47 minutes away from Bruton. I spent six years in a job which entailed driving all over Somerset. How hard could it be to find the place? Well, very hard, actually. I think it’s something to do with the ley lines. Launch yourself onto the leafy lanes of Somerset, and you have no idea where you’ll end up. I had maps, I had directions, but none of this helped. WHY have I never got round to buying a satnav…?

So I drove round in a succession of circles. (Oh, here’s Wells again. Lovely!) Eventually, just as panic was beginning to flutter its tiny wings, I found myself on a lane which was getting steadily narrower, but which ancient signposts assured me was heading for Bruton. The car and I breathed in: we made it! Unfortunately, we hadn’t arrived by any of the routes described in the directions. Never mind, I thought, it’s only a small place.

A small place which is heaving with schools. I spotted a likely looking cluster of buildings, screeched to a halt and hailed a passing pupil. Oh no, he said, this is Kings School. He drew me a map. I can only think he was trying to sabotage all efforts to reach the girls’ school, because he sent me in completely the wrong direction. More circles. Eventually I sussed his cunning plan and decided the only thing to do was to find a main route into Bruton and start all over again. I broke out of the one-way system and headed out – and there was a school! Was this the right one? No, this was Sexey’s. Stop giggling at the back, Hugh Sexey was a sixteenth century philanthropist. I drove on, searching for a place to turn round – and suddenly, there it was – Bruton School for Girls!

I stagger in, feeling like Lawrence of Arabia when he spotted an oasis. There are signs, there is a large sunlit room, there is Julie Hoskins beaming a welcome, and I’ve allowed so much extra time (I know those ley lines) that I’m not even late. Things are looking up. I drink water, breathe deeply and find a desk to set up between Cindy Jefferies and Dave Gatward. I glance at Dave’s display – and jump: a trilogy entitled The Dead, The Dark and The Damned – the stuff of nightmares leap out from the covers. But the stuff of dreams is propped up against his desk – a skateboard advertising the books!

Never mind, I have fliers, and postcards which I'm particularly proud of, advertising a new type of session, on essay skills for sixth formers. I spread them out and give them a consoling pat.

On my other side, Cindy has the first book of her new series, Heart Magazine, on display. It strikes me that just the three of us show the variety of rooms in the house of children's fiction; sweet dreams, multi-coloured nightmares, and in the middle, me, with historical fiction, a willow man, and the occasional ghost. And of course there are many more. The room soon fills up, but when I get the chance, I wander round. From Bath, there's Julia Green, with her beautifully written coming of age stories, and Steve Voake with - well, masses of everything. There's Lynne Benton, whose dual language picture books attract a lot of interest, there's Julie Sykes and Linda Chapman (both of whom travelled a good deal further than I did and did not get lost) with their hugely popular series.

There's Gill Lewis, whose debut book, Skyhawk, has an arresting image of an osprey emerging from a blue sky, and sounds intriguingly off-trend. She has lovely posters...

Seeing a little cluster round my table, I head back. My postcards are attracting interest; people seem to like the idea of essay skills, and others are interested in writing workshops. I also have fliers from the blogosphere, about the fabulous online literary festival, and the forthcoming History Girls blog. I'm delighted to find that there's a lot of enthusiasm for historical fiction; it's really interesting to have the chance to talk to the gatekeepers, the people who really know which books are actually being read and which are staying on the shelves.

Finally, it's time for tea, delicious cake and a group photo. (Why didn't I think to take one? You may well ask.) It's been a great afternoon, and we are all very grateful to Julie Hoskins for organising it.

Now - all I have to do is find my way home. I do the by now familiar circle through Bruton, and spot a sign to Frome. It's not exactly in the right direction, but it'll do. At least it's nowhere near Glastonbury...

Sue Purkiss

Fiction for 7-9s: The Poor Relation? Sue Purkiss

On Tuesday this week, I went to a Society of Authors summer meeting. It was the first time I'd ever been to 84 Drayton Gardens, the socety's headquarters. The meetings often sound interesting, but it's a long schlep from the wilds of Cheddar Gorge - which, incidentally, will be coming to a screen near you next summer for all of 70 seconds in a blockbuster film called Jack the Giant Killer, starring Ewen McGregor, Bill Nighy, Ian McShane and Nicholas Hoult. They were filming here last week - oh, how excited we've all been! Anyway, that's completely irrelevant - back to Drayton Gardens.

The discussion was entitled Fiction for 7-9s: The Poor Relation? It was elegantly chaired by our own John Dougherty in a lovely flowered shirt, and the panel included Kathy Webb from OUP, Annie Eaton from Random House and Charlie Sheppard from Andersen Press.

First, John asked each of the panel members to give an overview of the market for this age group.


Kathy Webb

• One difficulty is the diversity of this age bracket, which makes matching the reader to the right book quite tricky.



• At this age, there are lots of other activities which take up children's time. On the plus side, they are open minded, they have great imaginations, and they recommend books to each other. Peer pressure is not a problem - it's okay to be seen reading!



• There are a lot of series. Kathy discussed this at some length, explaining that boys like the 'collectability' of series such as Astrosaurs, Beast Quest, Horrid Henry etc. She said that girls also like series, but they are much more author led. However - they like books by the same author to have a similar look and feel. Kathy stressed that they don't cut corners with series; each book gets the same amount of attention as a standalone. She would very much like to publish more standalones, but it's difficult to get kids to read them.

Charlie Sheppard

• Charlie said that this, at the moment, is the Cinderella age group, and is overshadowed by books for older children. Looking at the reasons for this, she said that they need more illustration and more design and are therefore more expensive to produce - and yet the price is the same as it has been for the last fifteen years: so it's difficult to make any money from them.



• Other problems: Smiths and Waterstones prefer series - books for this age group are usually thin. One by itself will get lost, whereas a series creates a presence on the shelf. Series like Yellow Bananas, which were standalones, used to have the same effect because they were strongly branded (ie they looked the same), but similarly packaged series are not being produced now.



• Usually, it's the books for older readers that glean reviews and prizes.



• Then there are the gatekeepers. Or not... librarians have had their budgets slashed, teachers tend not to keep up with recently published books (and so recommend classics, or the books they enjoyed as children or read as students): parents naturally buy what they see - namely, series.



• Another factor is that you can't sell translation rights for this age group, for some reason, so there's no money to be made there either.



• On the plus side, Charlie Has A Dream! She feels that change is in the air. That one day soon, out of the mists of Storyland, there will emaerge, clothed in white samite and gleaming in the sunshine - one book! One book to change them all, one book to guide them - a book so stunningly good that all shall raise their standards and declare, 'Lo! Now is the Age of the Standalone!' (Sorry, got a bit carried away there - my histrionics, not Charlie's. It's the proximity of blockbusters and men in black leather doublets that does it...)

Annie Eaton

• Very few junior fiction standalones sell well - they used to sell far better. Annie spoke tenderly of a particular success from a few years back - Cat Patrol, by Paul May.



• She laments the loss of the Smarties Prize, and would love to see another prize for this age group - prizes create a buzz.

(Annie would have had a lot more to say, but the others had already said it!)



What are they looking for?

• They all agreed that they want a great character - then there's the potential for series if the first one does well.



• They also agreed that humour is great for this age group.



• Kathy said she's seeing more fantasy.



• There was a shortage of 9-12s, but they're coming through now.



• There was some uncertainty about length. Annie said initially between 4 - 10,000 words, but some publishers apparently want longer. There was some discussion about the problem of short books getting lost, but someone pointed out that one way roiund this is what the Mr Gum books do - they have few words to a page, so they end up chunkier.

So there we have it. Many thanks to CWIG (Children's Writers' and Illustrators' Group) for organising the event, and of course to the panel - it was informative, thought-provoking and entertaining.
Now, just off to find me a great character. Yoo hoo - anybody there...?
NB If I'd had the organising ability of a gnat, I would have taken a camera and there'd be a nice photo of the panel at the top of this post. I didn't, so thought I'd find a picture of an arm in white samite. (Or some watery tart, for fans of Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail.) And then it all began to go sadly wrong, as I found a picture, but also found some evil bug that attacked my computer. So - sorry, but no pictures!)



Sue Purkiss

Rambling in the Ramblas: Sue Purkiss

I was going to do reviews for today's post, but all of a sudden everyone's doing reviews. This is no surprise: someone else always seems to get there first. In the immortal words of ABBA (the supergroup, not the blog). 'If I tell a joke, you've probably heard it before.' So in the interests of variety, I won't do reviews this time. But in the interests of recycling, I'm going to use one of the books I had planned to write about as a rather convoluted springboard. Could you have a convoluted springboard? It would probably be lethal, or at the very least extremely painful. But I'm going to do it anyway. Yes, that's how incredibly daring I am. Here goes. The book in question is The Book of Human Skin, by Michelle Lovric. I got this after I'd read and by wowed by her two books for children, The Undrowned Child and The Mourning Emporium. I have to be honest - the first time I tried it, I didn't get into it. It was in lots of different voices and I couldn't see where it was going. But don't do as I did, do as I say. Read it. It's brilliant, a dazzlingly colourful tapestry of mystery, humour, romance, strong characters, exotic settings - everything. (But you probably do need a fairly strong stomach. If the thought of a doctor scraping smallpox scabs off dead patients and storing them in a jam jar concerns you, then this book is possibly not for you.) Anyway, let's not get carried away - this isn't a review, it's a springboard. So - after I'd read it, i tried to think of anything else I'd read that was similarly gothic and gripping, and I thought of Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I read Shadow of the Wind soon after it came out and was entranced by it. If you haven't read it, it's a darkly funny tale of love and mysterious villainy - and books - set in mid 20th century Barcelona. Zafon's next book, The Angel's Game, turned out to be a prequel, and after I'd read it, I promised myself that some time, I'd re-read the two books in the correct order - which I've just done. Of central importance in both books is the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. If by any chance this place does not truly exist, then it should. It is a vast, labyrinthine space filled with 'passageways and crammed bookshelves... that presaged an immense library of seemingly impossible geometry.' It's a secret place, accessible only by personal introduction to people who love books. As the narrator Daniel's father tells him: 'When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands.' So - here is my question to you. What is the book you would place for safety in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books? It doesn't actually have to be forgotten - Great Expecteations is there , and so is Tess of the D'Urbervilles. (But so also is The Castilian Hog, That Unknown Beast: In Search of the Roots of Iberian Pork, by Anselmo Torquemada.) My own selection would be The Amazing Mr Whisper, by Brenda Macrow. I borrowed this from the library when I was nine or ten - time, after time, after time. It was the first book I'd come across where a being from legend entered and interacted with the normal world, and I was fascinated by it. I managed to get hold of a copy recently, and I have to say, it didn't stand up well to the test of time. But even so, I want it kept safe. Then perhaps one day, it will come into the hands of a child who will read it just at the time s/he needs it, and who will love it as much as I did.

Yes, but is it TRUE? - Sue Purkiss

I was a little bit apprehensive about going to see 'The King's Speech'. It had been so highly praised that I feared it couldn't do anything but disappoint. In fact, I loved it. For anyone who hasn't yet seen it, it's beautifully written and incredibly well acted. It illuminates a very particular and specific area of British society - the royal family; but it also explores what it is like for any human being who has to struggle against a profound difficulty or disability - or even a relatively slight one: who among us who has on occasion to speak publically has not felt cripplingly nervous at the thought?

You're presented with the horror of it right at the beginning. Here is a stadium full of people waiting expectantly for a speech from the King's son: a man who suffers from an appalling stutter. He cannot refuse to do it: everyone is waiting. He knows that humiliation awaits: he has no choice but to endure it. Why, he must think, why did I have to live in an era when someone invented the microphone?

I won't go on - there can't be anyone who doesn't by now know the story. The reason I'm writing about it here is because of something my husband said after we'd seen the film. He's a history teacher, and he noted that in fact, Winston Churchill would not have been so prominently involved in the abdication as he was in the film. And it struck me that - in fact - Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth would have been older at the beginning of the war than they appeared to be in the film.

There may be lots of other factual inaccuracies or grey areas - I don't know. But it made me think - does it matter? I write historical fiction. I spend a ridiculous amount of time researching, but I'm not a historian so I generally start from a position of profound ignorance. I try to check facts which seem to me important - but then I make up conversations, I ascribe thoughts and motives, I imagine how that place looked, at that time, to that person; how this one felt, what that one dreamed. I imagine these things - I don't know them. I have written about real people: in Warrior King, I was writing about Alfred, a Dark Age king. I found out a lot, but there was a point at which I realised that some very basic stuff - how old he was when his mother died, how his brothers died, for example - was shrouded in mystery. I contacted an academic historian, who cheerfully reassured me that as it was all in the Dark Ages I could really make up what I wanted - and I did. And I think that's okay.

But is it okay when you're writing a book or a film about people who are still alive, or only recently dead? I felt uneasy after I'd seen the film about the founder of Facebook, The Social Contract. It had a very clear narrative, which was not complimentary to the young man at the centre of it. And he is still young - very young. How must it be for him to see writ large this version of his own life?

Is it enough for us to say - well, everyone knows it's fiction? Isn't it natural for all of us to assume that if we see something or read something, it's largely true? - even for picky individuals like me, who always want to know what the evidence is?

I don't know. I really don't. It's not going to stop me writing historical fiction, or reading it - to me, it's such a brilliant way to explore the worlds of the past. But - what do you think? Am I right to feel just a little bit uneasy about what I'm doing with the truth?

Reading Allowed; Sue Purkiss

It's not absolutely definite yet, but it looks as though my local library, Cheddar, has been given a reprieve and will not now close. Eleven others in Somerset probably will, though; and so on Saturday our Love Our Library day was part celebration and part protest. There was coffee, there was cake, there were stickers and balloons, there was a colouring competition - but mostly there were lots of people, adults and children, there to raise a few cheers, to talk and to take out books: to make the point that libraries MATTER.

I was there with another local author, Michael Malaghan, writer of Greek Ransome, an action packed adventure story involving Greek legends, archaeology and nail-biting chases. We quite quickly saw that our audience was on the young side for most of our books, though I did read a bit of Emily's Surprising Voyage. Then we asked them to choose books for us to read. I was lucky enough to be handed Where The Wild Things Are.

It's a lovely book to read out loud. Every word counts, has the right weight in the right place. The buzz of chatter quickly faded as I began to read, and soon all the children were sitting perfectly still, eyes wide, lost in the world of Max, the monsters and the magical island.

I had a similar experience a couple of weeks ago, reading bits of Warrior King out to secondary school pupils. I'd been asked in to talk about Alfred the Great and the Anglo-Saxons, because they were studying them in history. Again, there was that hush, as we all entered a different world, a different time. That's one of the things reading does for you; it gives you a free pass to an infinite number of other minds and other worlds.

Long before there were printed books or Kindles, there were libraries. The great library at Alexandria, one of the marvels of the ancient world, was created 300 years BC, and was filled with papyrus scrolls. Hundreds of years later, it took a conquering army to destroy it. Now, it seems that all you need is a few politicians and the occasional meaningless soundbite.

In modern Alexandria, and in other cities in Egypt, the voice of the people is making itself heard. In a much, much smaller way, so it is here. It feels as if it just might be something of a turning point.