It was a very vivid and often very distressing time for me. Just for starters, the Second World War broke out when I was five and the whole world went mad. Some of the time it was terrifying. The adults I knew were frightened, which is something that pulls the rug out from under any childhood sense of security, guns barked in the night, and searchlights crisscrossed looking for raiding bombers—to this day, a low-flying airplane makes me nervous—and nowhere seemed to be safe. Some of the time it was plain crazy, like the time I encountered one of my father’s friends crawling about in the next-door field with a bush tied to his head. “Hallo, Mr. Cowey,” I shrilled innocently. “What are you doing crawling about with that bush on your head?” He rose up, bush and all, and tried to shout at me in a whisper, bright red in the face. “Shut up and go away, child! You’re spoiling the exercise!” He was in the Home Guard, you see. Dad’s Army.
The war caused complete disruption in what promised to be a peaceful suburban childhood, though, knowing my parents, I doubt the “peaceful.” My father, for instance, carried financial economy to a new and zany art form. My mother enjoyed quarreling. She did it with everyone all the time.
At the start of the war we were hurried away first to Wales and then—after my mother had quarreled with her in-laws—to the Lake District, where, coincidentally, we were lodged in the house that belonged to the Arthur Ransome children. One of the things that I gained from this, which I have only recently realized, was a very strong sense of the changing seasons of the year, and the effect the season has on the way you think and act. With the increasing urbanization of children’s lives, I find this more important every year. Children need to be kept in touch with the cycle of the seasons. Every one of my books has its own season, or seasons. It is part of the feeling they bring with them when they are ready to be written—Charmed Life is an early autumn book, Black Maria takes place in the raw new weather of spring, Fire and Hemlock goes round the seasons several times—and this is as important to each book as the characters or the landscapes.
We were in the Lakes long enough to have a taste of each season, by which time my mother had quarreled with all the other mothers evacuated there. We moved to a nunnery in York, another strange interlude, and then, after a brief stay in London amid the bombs and gunfire, to a village in East Anglia. There my parents had the job of running a sort of conference center. Both of them found the fact that they had children an extreme nuisance and preferred to forget about us. We ran about on top of roofs and once nearly hanged my sister. My youngest sister tied her hair in knots to keep it out of her eyes, and this was not noticed for six months.
In my only attempt at semi-autobiography, The Time of the Ghost, I found I had to tone down both the hanging incident and the knots-in-the-hair episode. No one would have believed the reality. And this is true about the whole of this part of my life. I don’t ever really write about it, but on the other hand I write about it all the time. What I do is a sort of translating. Every time I get a notion that might start a book going, I find I ask myself, “Will this idea translate my experience into something of value for people today?” For the experiences were much wider than mere neglect.
The first, outer layer of what I knew then was the global violence and insanity of the war and later the Cold War, which had a sort of icy saneness that was even more insane. I have never really lost this sense that the world is basically thoroughly unstable. I think this is why I tend to write about multiple parallel worlds—anything can happen and probably is doing somewhere. The next layer inward was the village itself. It was beautiful and full of eccentrics. At the more normal end of things I might cite the extremely refined and tweed-suited local nymphomaniac. You were liable to stumble over her in a ditch at any time, in her twin set and pearls, having it off with one of the bus drivers.
A wealth of material, you’d say. But I have never wanted to put this in a book directly. It just lies behind the slightly more normal things I do do. This sense that most people are crazy, if you look deep enough. Adults particularly, and children have to deal with them.
Encapsulated in this craziness, and crazy too in its own way, was the grand and beautiful old house that contained the conference center—it was haunted, by the way: one of the cleaners met the ghost and left in hysterics on the spot. But the fact about it that lives with me and truly does provide the basis for all I write is that this house had extensive grounds, divided into three sections. The first section was a huge graveled yard. It was where the nitty-gritty everyday things were, like our outhouse and the kitchen, and it had a lethal clothesline permanently and mostly invisibly in place halfway up, just at throat height. I have seen people felled there like oxen, and been felled myself. This yard was where all the cat or dog fights happened and was the site of all my mother’s best quarrels. It was also where the gardener once cornered me and showed me a small, wicked yellow revolver, which he invited me to hold. It was heavy. As soon as I had hold of it I was seized with total horror. “This thing is Death,” I thought. But I tried to seem brave. I looked at it and sort of tweaked at a little metal bit hooked on to one side. “What’s this?” “No, no, no! Don’t move that! That’s the safety catch!” he snapped. “That’ll go off, that’s loaded, you know.” I gave it back to him. But ever since then, I have thought of that yard as the place of ordinary life and death. The place where everything starts when I’m writing a book.
The next section was a brick-walled formal garden, consisting mostly of a large lawn sedately surrounded by shrubby borders. The part farthest from the house was raised and made a good stage. This was where the village and the conference people interacted, either to watch plays or operas put on by the house inmates, or to folk dance, and many a crazy thing went on there, including the time one of the county music advisers got carried away and sang a tenor aria from the top parapet while he rained confetti on the audience. It turned out he’d used all the toilet paper in the house. When this garden was not in use, we children tended to play the make-believe kind of game there, the kind where you walk about inventing it as you go on—the yard was where we mostly did the run-about-and-shout stuff. And this seems entirely fitting. With this garden you moved into the formal patterns of fantasy, the place where stories get made or adapted and most of the quieter fun or lunacy happened. I suspect this is the place where the central part of what I write gets made.
But there was another garden, across a road, which was always kept locked, where the conference people were never allowed to go. And this one was truly magical. It was like that garden in the story where the king has counted all the apples, because my father had hung labels on all the apple trees and he kept the key.
This garden always seems to me the seat of the mystery and the beauty that should be, if possible, at the heart of every story. It stands to me for the old tales and the life-enhancing magics that ought to be there too. And no idea for a book ever seems to me good enough if it doesn’t have something of this at the heart of it. But it has to have the other two places in it as well. You can’t exist or write purely on this strange and elevated plane.
So what have we got so far? I am living in a place where I am not actually living, leading a double life, while doing two incompatible things at once. I am controlling characters that behave like real people, a story that behaves like a self-programming entity, a landscape in which the seasons change as seasons should. Beneath this is an underpinning from my own experience containing the nitty-gritty of everyday life, formally patterned fantasy, a dose of lunacy, and the deep magic of myth. Almost enough to get a book moving, but not quite. Along with the season(s) the book is set in, you need also a quite indescribable taste in the head, a feeling about this particular narrative that no other has. If this doesn’t come at once, or in the first few pages, I find you have to leave that effort and try again. But if you have that as-it-were taste, and with it a sufficiently dynamic idea, you are off.
It took me awhile to distinguish what is a dynamic idea. A lot o
f things seem to start stories, but not all of them go on. To find the right kind of motive idea, I found I had to go back once again to childhood, but this time to the sort of mistakes children make. The sort that make you very ashamed when you think of them, but are actually one of the ways children learn. Everyone must remember some of the dreamlike confusions of their childhood—they may make you squirm in the memory, but if you look closely, you usually find that this mistake moved you on. Here is one of mine, from an article5 I wrote for Foundation in 1997:
A very good example is a baroque muddle of my own when, at the age of five, I was evacuated to the Lake District. . . . I was told I was there because the Germans were about to invade. Almost in the same breath, I was warned not to drink the water from the washbasin because it came from the lake and was full of typhoid germs. I assumed that “germs” was short for “Germans.”
Looking warily at the washbasin, I saw it was considerately labeled “Twyford,” clearly warning people against germ warfare. Night after night, I had a half-waking nightmare in which Germans (who had fair, floating hair and were clad in sort of cheesecloth Anglo-Saxon tunics) came racing across the surface of the lake to come up through the plug hole of this washbasin and give us all Twyford.
This has all the elements of something needed to start a book off, the magical prohibition, the supernatural villains, the beleaguered good people and, for good measure, the quite incommunicable fears that children have. . . .
And of course it was how I learned that germs were small and Germans were human size, simply from working out why I knew people would laugh at me if I told them my fears.
A mix-up of notions like that is nearly always dynamic. You’ve got it. You go. If it works, it is like a long fuse that has been lit in several places, so that it gives off at intervals sharp blotches of white magnesium light. Each white fluorescence illuminates—with luck—a ring of landscape or a room with people moving and speaking in it, scenes from the story that is making itself. Around it, along the rest of the fuse, the rest of the story occurs like a photographic negative of a foggy day—faint white objects against black. And what I do is rush from flaring point to flaring point along this fuse, often at top speed, like a fire myself. Except I am, of course, sitting down and doing it all with words. Word by word.
I don’t think I can find any other way to describe the way it feels, unless it is to echo poor Carol Oneir. “It is like a voyage of discovery. . . .” And if I’ve got it right, it should be. It is also my way of moving out of the past into the untouched future. This can be very scary.
The Origins of The Merlin Conspiracy
As with so many of her books, Diana Wynne Jones “germinated” the seeds of The Merlin Conspiracy, and released it only when the idea was in full flower. This piece is a longer version of an article that she wrote to promote the Japanese edition, produced by Tokuma Shoten Publishing Ltd.
It is hard to know where the idea for a book starts. But I do know that The Merlin Conspiracy was building in my head for more than ten years. It came in pieces and the pieces, at first, did not seem to add up at all.
Around the time I finished Hexwood, I was thinking I needed to write about a lone and powerful magician who lived on an island made of parts of several universes. But I didn’t know what this magician was like. The only thing I was sure about was that his island came apart if he got ill. I spent the next ten years in and out of hospital, and it was after I came round from the anesthetic the first time that I knew my magician was called Romanov and that he was thin and ferociously energetic.
But two years before that there was the elephant. I always knew there was an elephant in there somewhere. We took my two-year-old granddaughter to Bristol Zoo, where they happened to be exercising their elephant, Wendy. We were four adults looking after one tiny girl, but Frances all the same escaped and darted across the path just as Wendy came along it. The child ought to have been trampled; but Wendy did a wonderful, agile sort of polka step with her huge front feet and missed Frances completely. She waved her trunk genially at Frances and kept walking. Wendy, sadly, is dead now, but ever since then I have wanted to pay tribute to that kindly, agile elephant. I just wished I knew how she fitted in.
And before the elephant, I had a repeated dream of a line of bright islands, which were universes, hanging in dark blue nothing. If you wanted to get to another universe, you jumped from island to island—and they dipped and turned sickeningly. Terrifying. In one of these dreams I jumped to a city that was built up the sides of several canyons; houses stacked on houses in a most peculiar way. I knew that this city was connected to Romanov and the elephant in some way, but it didn’t add up to a story. Maddening.
Then, more recently, I had a strange experience in Cornwall. Exactly like Roddy in the book, I met a woman out of prehistory who dumped all her magical knowledge in my head, neatly filed under the headings of different flowers. Unlike Roddy, I couldn’t use these spells, but I could put them in a book for everyone to see. It was then I realized that I was going to be writing two intertwined stories about two people with different kinds of magic.
All these things suddenly added up to a proper book when I was doing a signing in Ross-on-Wye. A boy there told me—very firmly—that he wanted to know more about Nick Mallory from my book Deep Secret. And I realized that I did too, and that Nick was the person who met Romanov and the elephant. Roddy was to tell the other part of the story. My only problem then was: where did Roddy come from?
A chapter in a learned book gave me the answer. I’d only read it because it was written by one of my sons. In it, just in passing, he remarked on how difficult governing the country was in the Middle Ages, because the king always kept moving from place to place, taking with him—in a vast campsite—all his courtiers and officials. And I thought: Suppose the king did that these days? With cars and buses and lorries, and the civil servants and the media following along in coaches too. Then I knew what Roddy’s life was like. I knew all about the conspiracy, and I started to write the double story at once.
Review of Boy in Darkness
by Mervyn Peake
Knowing that Diana admired Mervyn Peake’s work, Books for Keeps commissioned this review for issue number 102, January 1997, to mark the first publication of “Boy in Darkness” on its own as a children’s book. Diana’s review was published alongside an article by P. J. Lynch on the challenges of illustrating Peake’s story.
Books for Keeps was a British bimonthly print magazine for thirty years and is now online. Its readership is primarily teachers, librarians, and children’s book professionals.
This is a frightening book. Having said this, I must add that a large number of readers, whatever their age, actively enjoy a frightening book and find that it speaks to them. Furthermore, Boy in Darkness is the work of a genius and, as such, should not be withheld from anyone, even if that genius is twisted and baroque. Mervyn Peake always seems to me to start where Lord Dunsany and James Branch Cabell leave off, and neither of these writers can be read with perfect composure. From the very first page, when we are told it is the Boy’s (Titus Groan’s) birthday, and he is therefore at the mercy of rituals which “lead him hither and thither through the mazes of his adumbrate home” eventually to receive gifts presented by “long lines of servants, knee-deep in water” (gifts which are promptly removed again), Mervyn Peake is working to discompose his readers.
Part of the discomposing is done with words. “Adumbrate” is only the first of many peculiar words, used peculiarly. Later there is an “oleaginous river.” “osseous temples,” “an ulna between his jaws,” and many more, all used to strike you between the eyes, not only because you have to consider what the word means, but also how well it sounds and how intensely accurate it is in its context. This kind of thing is wonderfully good for children. Those who are brave enough not to give up should gain a spectacular insight into how wonderful words can be.
Insights are what all this discomposing is about. On the
face of it, this story is an adventure in which the Boy, sick of the lonely, ceremonial life at home in the castle, runs away at night and finds himself in a region of pure damnation, from whence he barely escapes with his life. But from the moment of the “long lines of servants, knee-deep in water” (at which we are meant to ask “Why?” and to conclude that the Boy was quite right to escape from something so senseless), Mervyn Peake is leading the Boy beyond a mere adventure story, and into seeing and understanding. With an acute draftsman’s eye, and in sentences which vary from stabbingly simple to complex and meticulously punctuated, he has the Boy pursued across the “oleaginous river” by hounds “cocksure of themselves” (that have eyes of “that kind of bright and acid yellow that allowed no other color alongside”), where the Boy encounters the odious Goat.
Here is the first major insight. The Goat walks like a man, only sideways, on hooflike shoes, and wears clothes, old and dusty and smelly, and the Boy knows there is something terribly wrong here. “But why? The gentleman had done nothing wrong.” But he will do. The Boy is fatally polite, the way children can be (and this, in the normal world, can lead to another small corpse in a hidden ditch), purely on the grounds that the Goat seems civilized. After that it is too late. The Hyena arrives and the Boy is caught. The Hyena is a horrid masterpiece of perfectly described body language. “The shirt he wore was cut off very short in the sleeves so that his long, spotted arms could be readily appreciated.” (For “spotty” read “tattooed” in the mundane world?) “His trousered legs were very narrow and very short, so that his back . . . was at a very steep incline.” We all know men like this. The two insights here are that the look of a person is important, and body language even more so.