This feeling seemed to be borne out by my own children. When they were old enough, they responded fervently to any kind of fantasy. Mindful of my own deprivation, I bought them book upon book, and I had all the pleasure and astonishment of discovering almost a hundred excellent books for children, but as an adult. It was quite a bitter discovery that most of these hundred books had been available during my own childhood and that I could have read them then; but, looking back on it, I suspect it was a great advantage to read them with an adult and analytical mind for the first time, to discover how they were put together and to be able to watch three young children’s response to these books. When they were older and about to leave school, I asked my sons to make a list (before they forgot) of all the most memorable books of their childhood. All three responded with a list of fantasies, except the middle one put in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, and, when asked about that, said he thought it was set in an alternative world. He had had no idea Kipling’s India was real.
All the books on the lists were nearly as old as Kim. The huge resurgence of children’s books that happened mostly in the 1970s was then only beginning, and it was a sad fact that most of the newer books were hardly worth reading then. My sons complained vociferously. I suppose it was quite natural for me to try to write something they might like better. It was something my childhood had trained me to do. I knew by then the kind of book I wanted to write, but it proved quite as difficult as I had supposed in my teens. I had been brought up, if you can call it brought up, reading and writing from the wrong model, you see, and I had really to think through and to practice doing it in what seemed to me the right way—no, worse, I had to discover the right way for me. It took years.
Meanwhile, as I said before, I assumed I would also write for adults. It seemed easier. The trouble was, what I started writing was what is now called adult fantasy, and there was no such thing in those days. The only adult fantasy was Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and that was not considered a Real Book at all. Whenever it was mentioned there was a chorus of people saying “Why can’t he stick to what he’s good at—being an Anglo-Saxon scholar?” And, besides, what I was writing was not at all like Tolkien. I have always been very determined to do my own thing. I wrote a long adult novel called The Incubus,3 about a young wife and mother who was having the sort of terrible time women were expected to have in those days, who as a sort of defense created this fantasy that she had hired a devil from hell—by the usual means of selling her soul—to be her ideal lover. Or was it her fantasy? I remember when about a decade later I read Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, I was crying out at almost every page, “But this is just what I was saying in The Incubus!” And I really was, but, it seems, rather before the proper time. At any rate, I sent this novel to an agent, and it was very clear she thought I was deranged. She summoned me to London to have a look at me, and the moment I saw her expression, I remember thinking “She believes I’m mad!” and I remember trying very hard not to appear even neurotic—which was very difficult, because I was extremely nervous. I have no idea how well I succeeded, but she agreed to try and place the book. She was an odd woman with a way of proceeding which was extremely strange, although at that time I thought it was normal. She sent me a carefully escalated series of publishers’ rejections. When I didn’t seem to be discouraged by one, she sent me another that was nastier, and so on. (As my present agent does no such thing, I conclude this lady was unusual.) The letters were to the effect that “Women don’t do this! This mixing of make-believe into real life is preposterous, and besides, it’s rude to men! This is not a Real Book.”
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. Th
ey 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.
When 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.