Reflections: On the Magic of Writing

  My parents did remember birthdays and Christmas, but only at the last minute. That is how I remember that day peace was declared with Japan. It was the day before my eleventh birthday and all the shops were shut in celebration, so I got no presents that year. This left a void, for birthdays were the one occasion when my father could be persuaded to buy books. By begging very hard, I got Puck of Pook’s Hill when I was ten and Greenmantle when I was twelve. But my father was inordinately mean about money. He solved the Christmas book giving by buying an entire set of Arthur Ransome books, which he kept locked in a high cupboard and dispensed one between the three of us each year. Clarance House had books, he said. True: it had been stocked mostly from auctions and, from this stock, before I was fourteen, I had read all of Conrad, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Bertrand Russell on relativity, besides a job lot of history and historic novels—and all thirty books from the public library in the guild hall. Isobel and I suffered from perpetual book starvation. We begged, saved, and cycled for miles to borrow books, but there were still never enough. When I was thirteen, I began writing narratives in old exercise books to fill this gap, and read them aloud to my sisters at night. I finished two, both of epic length and quite terrible. But in case someone is tempted to say my father did me a favor, I must say this is not the case at all. I always would have been a writer. I still had this calm certainty. All these epics did for me was to prove that I could finish a story. My mother was always telling me that I was much too incompetent to finish anything. During her ugly, semidelinquent litanies she frequently said, “When you do the Oxford exams, you’ll get a place, but you won’t do better than that. You haven’t got what it takes.”

  In his stinginess, my father allowed us one penny a week pocket money. Money for anything else you had to ask him for. Looking back, I see I accepted this, partly because I thought it was normal and knew I wasn’t worth more, but also because asking for money at least meant he spoke to me while he was inquiring suspiciously into the use of every penny. He also allowed me to darn his socks for sixpence a pair (by this stage I was sewing clothes for myself and my sisters and doing the family wash in spare moments). My sisters, however, rebelled at their poverty and bearded my father in his office. Groaning with dismay, my father upped our allowance to a shilling a week when I was fifteen, on condition that we bought our own soap and toothpaste. A tube of toothpaste cost most of two weeks’ allowance. Isobel and I were by then civilized enough to save for it. Ursula squandered her money.

  Ursula always took the eccentric way, particularly over illness. The cardinal sin we could commit was to be ill. It meant that someone grudgingly had to cross the yard with meals for us. My mother usually made a special trip to our bedsides to point out what a nuisance we were being. Her immediate response to any symptom of sickness was to deny it. “It’s only psychological,” she would say. On these grounds I was sent to school with chicken pox, scarlet fever, German measles, and, for half a year, with appendicitis. Luckily the appendix never quite became acute. The local doctor, somewhat puzzled by my mother’s assertion that there was nothing wrong with me, eventually took it out. He was an old military character, and in keeping with the rest of his life, he had only three fingers on his right hand. I still have a monster scar. I had the appendix in a bottle for years, partly to show my mother the boils on it and partly to live up to the title of semidelinquent. But Ursula, having concluded that “only psychological” meant the same as “purely imaginary,” deduced that it was therefore no more wrong to pretend to be ill than to be really ill. She drew on her strong acting talent, contrived to seem at death’s door whenever she was tired of school, and spent many happy hours in bed.

  Diana’s sister Ursula

  Diana’s sister Isobel

  I put some of the foregoing facts in The Time of the Ghost, but what I think I failed to get over in that book was how close we three sisters were. We spent many hours delightedly discussing one another’s ideas, and looked after one another strenuously. For example, when I was fourteen, Isobel was told by the Royal Ballet School that she could never, ever make it as a ballet dancer. Her life fell to pieces. She had been told so firmly that she was a ballerina born that she did not know what she was any longer. She cried one entire night. After five hours, when we still could not calm her, I crossed the yard in my pajamas—it was raining—to get parental help. A mistake. My mother jumped violently and clutched her heart when I appeared. My father ordered me back to bed, despite my explanation and despite the fact that we had been ringing our recently installed emergency bell before I went over. I trudged back through the rain, belatedly remembering that my mother hated giving sympathy. “It damages me,” she had explained over my appendix. Ursula and I sat up the rest of the night convincing Isobel that she had a brain as well as a body. We were close because we had to be.

  This solidarity did not hold so well when our parents laughed at us. I became very clumsy in my teens and they laughed at anything I did that was not academic. Perhaps they needed the amusement, because, for the next year, my father sickened mysteriously. When I was fifteen, he was diagnosed as having intestinal cancer. To my misfortune, something painful went wrong with my left hip at the same time, so that I could only walk with a sailorlike roll, causing much mirth. It was the beginning of multiple back troubles which have plagued me the rest of my life, but no one knew about such things then. The natural assumption was that I was trying to be interesting because my father was ill. It is hard to express the guilt I felt.

  My father, full of puritanical distaste, weathered that operation. He developed secondary cancer almost at once, but that was not apparent for the next three years or so. Once he had recovered, it occurred to him that I would need special tuition if I were to go to Oxford as planned. The Friends’ School was not geared to university entrance. Academic ambition vied in him with stinginess. Eventually, he approached a professor of philosophy who had just come to live in Thaxted with his wife and small children and asked him to teach me Greek. In exchange, my father offered the philosopher a handmade doll’s house that someone had given my sisters. My sisters loved the thing and had kept it in beautiful condition. But the philosopher accepted the deal, so no matter what their feelings, the doll’s house was given away. In return, the philosopher gave me three lessons in Greek. Then he ran off with someone else’s wife. I must surely be the only person in the world to have had three Greek lessons for a doll’s house.

  After that, pressure mounted on me to succeed academically. In my anxiety to oblige, I overworked. I did nothing like as well as was expected. I did scrape an interview at my mother’s old college. There a majestic lady don said, “Miss Jones,” shuddering at my plebeian name, “you are the candidate who uses a lot of slang.” She so demoralized me that, when she went on to ask me what I usually read, I looked wildly round her shelves and answered, “Books.” I failed. At the eleventh hour, I applied for and got a place at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, where I went in 1953.

  It was not a happy time. When I got there, I found that John Ruskin had taken belated revenge for the rubbed-out drawings: I had to share a vast, cold studio (which Ruskin had once occupied) with a girl who required me to wait on her hand and foot. And my father died after my first term there. I had to stay at home to see to his funeral, and spent the rest of my time at Oxford in nagging anxiety for my sisters, who were not finding my mother easy to live with. However, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were both lecturing then; Lewis booming to crowded halls and Tolkien mumbling to me and three others. Looking back, I see both of them had enormous influence on me, but it is hard to say how, except that they must have been equally influential to others too. I later discovered that almost everyone who went on to write children’s books—Penelope Lively, Jill Paton Walsh, to name only two—was at Oxford at the same time as me; but I barely met them and we never at any time discussed fantasy. Oxford was very scornful of fantasy then. Everyone raised eyebrows at Lewis and Tolkien and said hastily, ??
?But they’re excellent scholars as well.”

  Diana’s husband, John, with Diana looking on, 1955

  Let’s go back now to the empty swatch of time before I went up to Oxford, when my father was periodically at home between times of being a guinea pig at an early and unsuccessful form of chemotherapy. I have not said much about the young people who came to Thaxted on courses, because most of them were mere transients, but there were some who came often, some my own age, with whom we became firm friends. One was in love with Isobel (many people were), and he was coming to the house with ten friends to relax after doing finals at Oxford. Now this was an occasion comparable to the time when I was eight and knew that I would be a writer. As soon as I heard they were coming, I was seized with unaccountable excitement. I raced round helping get ready for them and made the tea far too early. They arrived while I made it. In the small hall outside my father’s office I ran into a cluster of them talking with my father. One of them said, “Diana, you know John Burrow, do you?”

  I sort of looked. Not properly. All I got was a long beige streak of a man standing with them in front of the old Arthur Ransome cupboard. And instantly I knew I was going to marry this man. It was the same calm and absolute certainty that I had had when I was eight. And it rather irked me, because I hadn’t even looked at him properly and I didn’t know whether I liked him, let alone loved him.

  Luckily both proved to be the case. The relationship survived two years at Oxford when John was a graduate student, and a third year when he was a lecturer at King’s College, London. It also survived my mother’s impulsive purchase, after my father died, of a private school in Beeston outside Nottingham, in a very haunted house. We moved there in the summer of 1956. I had been ill all that year, but after four months of listening to invisible footsteps pacing the end of my bedroom, I went to Granny, who was living in Sampford (near where the angel appeared to the gardener), in order to be married to John in Saffron Walden, in a thick fog, three days before Christmas 1956. There are no photographs of the wedding because, as my mother explained, her own wedding was more important. She married Arthur Hughes, a Cambridge scientist, the following summer.

  John and I lived in London until September 1957, where I seemed unemployable. I used the time to read Dante, Gibbon, and Norse sagas. Then we moved back to Oxford to a flat in a large house on the Iffley Road, with another family downstairs who became our lifelong friends. Meanwhile, Ursula failed all her exams in protest against academic pressure and made it to drama school. She is now an actress. Isobel was at university in Leicester, working grimly for a good degree, when my stepfather turned her out of his house. She arrived on our doorstep, shattered, around the time I discovered I was pregnant, and was living with us when my son Richard was born in 1958. She stayed with us until my next son, Michael, was born in 1961, and was married from our flat. Her husband is an identical twin. John, who gave Isobel away, was mightily afraid of handing her to the wrong twin. She is now one of the few women professors in England. Ursula and I always think we did a good job of persuading her she had a brain.

  Diana with her Anglo-Saxon tutor, Elaine Griffiths, and John, 1955

  My third son, Colin, was born in 1963. My aim, from this time forward, was to live a quiet life—not an easy ambition in a house full of small children, dogs, and puppies. During this time, to my undying gratitude, John and my children taught me more about ordinary human nature than I had learned up to then. I still had no idea what was normal, you see. After that I found the experiences of my childhood easier to assimilate and could start trying to write. To my dismay, I had to learn how—so I taught myself, doggedly. At first I assumed I would be writing for adults, but my children took a hand there. First Michael threatened to miscarry. I had to stay in bed and, while I did, I read The Lord of the Rings. It was suddenly clear to me after that that it was possible to write a long book that was fantasy. Then, as the children grew older, they gave me the opportunity to read all the children’s books which I had never had as a child, and what was more, I could watch their reactions while we read them. Very vigorous those were too. They liked exactly the kind of books—full of humor and fantasy, but firmly referred to real life—which I had craved for in Thaxted. Somewhere here it dawned on me that I was going to have to write fantasy anyway, because I was not able to believe in most people’s version of normal life. I started trying. What I wrote was rejected by publishers and agents with shock and puzzlement.

  In 1966 we moved briefly to a cold, cold farmhouse in Eynsham while we waited for my husband’s college, Jesus College, to have a house built that we could rent. There Colin started having febrile convulsions and almost everything else went wrong too. I wrote Changeover, my only published adult novel,2 to counteract the general awfulness.

  In 1967, the new house was ready. It had a roof that was soluble in water, toilets that boiled periodically, rising damp, a south-facing window in the food cupboard, and any number of other peculiarities. So much for my wish for a quiet life. We lived there, contending with electric fountains in the living room, cardboard doors, and so forth, until 1976, except for 1968–9, which year we spent in America, at Yale. Yale, like Oxford, was full of people who thought far too well of themselves, lived very formally, and regarded the wives of academics as second-class citizens; but America, round the edges of it, I loved. I try to go back as often as I can. We went for a glorious time to Maine, and also visited the West Indian island of Nevis, where, to my astonishment, a number of people greeted me warmly, saying, “I’m so glad you’ve come back!” I still don’t know who they thought I was. But an old man on a donkey thought John was a ghost.

  Diana’s three sons—Richard, Colin, and Michael, 1964

  On our return, now all the children were at school, I started writing in earnest. A former pupil of John’s introduced me to Laura Cecil, who was just starting as a literary agent for children’s books. She became an instant firm friend. With her encouragement, I wrote Wilkins’ Tooth in 1972, Eight Days of Luke in 1973, and The Ogre Downstairs the same year. I laughed so much writing that one that the boys kept putting their heads round the door to ask if I was all right. Power of Three came after that, then Cart and Cwidder, followed by Dogsbody, though they were not published in that order. Charmed Life and Drowned Ammet were both written in 1975.

  Also on our return, we acquired a cottage in West Ilsley, Berkshire, as a refuge from the defects of the Oxford house. The chalk hills there, full of racehorses, filled my head with new things to write. It was at this cottage that John was formally asked to apply for the English professorship at Bristol University. He did so, and got the job. We moved here in 1976 and were involved in a nightmare car crash the following month. Despite this, I love Bristol. I love its hills, its gorge and harbors, its mad mixture of old and new, its friendly people, and even its constant rain. We have lived here ever since. All my other books have been written here; for although the car crash, followed by my astonishment at winning the 1978 Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, almost stopped me dead between them, I get unhappy if I don’t write. Each book is an experiment, an attempt to write the ideal book, the book my children would like, the book I didn’t have as a child myself.

  I have still not, after twenty-odd books, written that book. But I keep trying. Nor do I manage to live a quiet life. I keep undertaking things, like visiting schools and teaching courses as a writer, or learning the cello, or doing amateur theatricals, or rashly agreeing to do all the cooking for Richard’s wedding in 1984. Every one of those things has led to comic disasters—except the wedding: that was perfect. My aunt Muriel came to it just before she died, wearing a mink headdress like a cardinal’s hat, and gave the couple her blessing. My mother also came. She was widowed again in 1975 and keeps on cordial terms with the rest of her family. She thinks John is marvelous.

  Another thing that stops me living a quiet life is my travel jinx. This is hereditary: my mother has it and so does my son Colin. Mine works mostly on trains. Usually
the engine breaks, but once an old man jumped off a moving train I was on and sent every train schedule in the country haywire for that day. And my books have developed an uncanny way of coming true. The most startling example of this was last year, when I was writing the end of A Tale of Time City. At the very moment when I was writing about all the buildings in Time City falling down, the roof of my study fell in, leaving most of it open to the sky.

  Perhaps I don’t need a quiet life as much as I think I do.

  Diana with her faithful dog Caspian, who inspired Dogsbody, 1984

  The Girl Jones

  A humorous autobiographical anecdote, this story was previously published in Sisters, edited by Miriam Hodgson (Mammoth, 1998) and in Diana’s collection Unexpected Magic (Greenwillow, 2004).

  It was 1944. I was nine years old and fairly new to the village. They called me “the girl Jones.” They called anyone “the girl this” or “the boy that” if they wanted to talk about them a lot. Neither of my sisters was ever called “the girl Jones.” They were never notorious.

  On this particular Saturday morning I was waiting in our yard with my sister Ursula because a girl called Jean had promised to come and play. My sister Isobel was also hanging around. She was not exactly with us, but I was the one she came to if anything went wrong and she liked to keep in touch. I had only met Jean at school before. I was thinking that she was going to be pretty fed up to find we were lumbered with two little ones.