The fantasy fans bring in another aspect. What makes a book unreal for them is that it is not written for adults. I think the implication here is that no one under the age of, say, eighteen is a real person. This is a very common assumption, as anyone will agree who has stood in a shop and watched adults pushing aside any children waiting to be served. And the students, who have just attained the status of being real people, are worried about the fact that their chosen reading makes them unreal all over again. And they enjoy my books, which worries them on another account, because they think that at their advanced ages books are not to be enjoyed. (The teachers would back them up there.) Another thing that perplexes the students is that they are, at this late stage in their lives, getting new things out of the books, which they did not see as they read them as children—and they tend to find these new things supportive. Most of them write because they are feeling let down and disillusioned: university in your first year seldom seems anything like it was cracked up to be. The heartening thing here is that most of the students then conclude that they have made the wrong assumptions about what makes a Real Book. Even though some of them simply regard their first-year reading as regression, like thumb-sucking or a security toy, and grandly give it up in their second year, quite a few seriously revise their opinion and go on to write theses about children’s literature.
I get to know about the theses because they write to me again in their third year for further information.
But there stand the heads of two-thirds of British schools, like monuments engraved with what a Real Book should be. Implicit in their attitudes is the thing that causes the question to be put to me in the first place. I am a woman. The male head would not crunch the knuckles of a male writer; the female head would stand closer to him. Both might phrase their remarks more apologetically—at least without the of course—and they might even have had the politeness to skim through one of his books before meeting him. But with me they have the backing of all the other posers of the question, from my mother-in-law on: females shouldn’t really be doing this. This is particularly noticeable when, as quite often happens, one of my books is reviewed alongside a book by a male writer. He, being a man, is assumed to have powerful motives for writing fantasy for young people (for who otherwise would?) and the delicacy and power with which he conveys his message is most seriously gone into. The felicities of his language are remarked on and praised. Then the reviewer passes on to me: Jones always does this sort of thing—it’s in her chromosomes, she can’t help it, take no notice—but, really, as a woman, she should stop being clever. My brain hurts.
I think the hidden but constant assumption that, as a woman, I can’t help writing for children because it is a byproduct of my natural function as a mother, and therefore as meaningless as a lullaby or a nonsense rhyme, is the one I probably resent most.
Actually my Pig of the Year Award went to the male reviewer of Fire and Hemlock. I quote it here in full: “This is a girl’s book and I don’t see why I should try to understand it.” End review.
The same attitude is implicit in the teachers who want class discussion. They are prepared to notice that the fantasy element in the man’s book might be a metaphor for something else. At least I am spared this. When I wrote Witch Week, I was afraid my metaphor for oppression might be too transparent, and that teachers might notice and use the book for class discussion. But so far as I know, not a single one has noticed. Women’s books don’t mean anything. And I have noticed that the male fans of fantasy never seem ashamed to be seen reading Terry Pratchett’s Truckers, despite its juvenile jacket. As for the students, they write to me as a mother figure, trusting me to understand. The trouble is, I do. There seems nothing to do about the fact of my femininity except teach people to live with it.
Anyway, to get back to the Real Book as engraved in the minds of head teachers. It is written by a man. For adults. It contains only facts, or narrative purporting to be facts. It should appeal to few people. It should not be amusing. And it should contain a message, or at least a serious discussion of current problems, set out in such a way that this can be extracted for teaching purposes.
And there is a rider to this, or maybe it’s another underlying and hidden assumption: that any exercise of the imagination on the part of writer or reader instantly renders a book unreal.
Probably we should be thankful that there are so few Real Books around.
Put tendentiously like this, no one will wonder why I fail to write Real Books, but this definition of the Real Book was one I only arrived at after I had already decided not to write them, and in response to people asking me why not in all these protean ways. The true answer lies, at least partly, way back in the past and is probably almost as protean as the question. What I want to do now is to try to give you some of the answers anyway.
Looking back on it, I can see now that the entire shape of my early life was pushing me toward writing the kind of books I write, right from the moment in the middle of one afternoon, at the age of eight, when I knew I was going to be a writer. I went downstairs and made a solemn announcement of this fact to my parents, who responded with jeering laughter. At the time, I thought this was because I was wildly dyslexic and had the utmost difficulty writing—two lines at the top of the page took me most of a day. I now realize that this was my parents’ stock response to almost anything their children said.
I was the eldest of three girls, and my parents ran what would these days be called a conference center, in which they were occupied full-time, with no time for children. We were put to live in an unheated outhouse away across a yard, just the three of us, and largely forgotten. And I mean forgotten. Such clothes as we had, until I started being able to make clothes, were castoffs from the local orphanage, and the people in the main house were quite often too preoccupied to remember to feed us. Looking back on it, I often wonder how we didn’t kill one another in our outhouse, since the only heating we had was a crude paraffin stove which we knocked over daily, when it was alight, in the course of various games. In fact, at one point, my youngest sister and I pretty nearly hanged our middle sister—with two skipping ropes—at this sister’s own earnest request, I hasten to say; she wanted to know how it felt to be a pantomime fairy flying on ropes across the stage. This would have been a sad loss in every way, because this sister, under her married name of Isobel Armstrong, is now professor of English at Birkbeck College in London. But luckily we noticed she was beginning to die and cut her down in time.
Anyone who has read The Time of the Ghost will probably recognize this incident, and indeed quite a bit of the rest.
What you may not recognize are the various deeply ingrained lessons I learned from this life. For a start, it occurred to none of us then to question the fact that my father, as the son of a patriarchal Welsh preacher, had nothing but contempt for girls, or that my mother hated all females and regarded her daughters as rivals (to the extent of dressing us in rags). We speculate now, like anything. None of us can see why our parents went on and had three of us. We can only conclude they were trying for a boy. But at that time it was just part of normal life. So was all the rest of it. We just saw it as normal. I can’t stress this too strongly, how ordinary this seemed. If anyone showed us a factual story at that time in which our particular problems were represented, we were bored and disregarded the story as just ordinary, or, by the time we had reached our teens and were dimly aware that our life was by no means ordinary, we responded with acute distress. From this I concluded, very early on, that it was both unproductive and unkind to write the kind of book that was a factual presentation of any social problem. Either it passed you by, or it upset you because there was nothing you could do about it. I think teachers who demand discussion of such things are wholly insensitive to how helpless a child is before problems imposed by parents or society.
But where we did respond was to the same situations represented as fairy stories, or legends, or myths. My sister Isobel, for instance, was addi
cted 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 readin
g 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.