Diary of the author

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April 2007

Something very sad happened this month.   I’ll get it over with first before talking about happier things. Emily, the last of our many cats, a beautiful Siamese, has had to be put to sleep.   She was just three months short of her twentieth birthday, so she had a long and lovely life and even had a story written about her (in Meg Rutherford’s Book of Animal  Stories, published by Simon and Schuster in 1994).   She had not been well for some time because, as usually happens when cats get very old, her kidneys were going..   Then, a week before the end, she became very thin and could hardly stand up.   I knew the time had come.  The flat still seems very quiet, even though she spent much of her time during her last months asleep.  I miss her very much.   I shall have no more cats.

The visit to Prior Weston Primary School in London, just off Old Street, was lovely.  I was talking mainly about non-fiction to Year 4.   I had three groups who were all very good, lively and keen.  We had a great time – well, I did, anyway.   

The Oxford Literary Festival was a very interesting experience.  It was held in Christ Church, the largest Oxford college.  All the Festival rooms seemed incredibly far apart: I felt as if I had walked ten miles a day by the end. – which can only have done me good.   I had several authors to look after.  The most intriguing were Jo Tatchell and Nabeel Yasin.  Nabeel is an Iraqui poet, expelled from Iraq nearly thirty years ago by Saddam Hussein.  Since then he has written many poems of protest.   Jo is a British journalist who wrote the book, Nabeel’s Song, which brought his name forward to people in the West and tells his amazing story.   The strange thing was that Nabeel didn’t turn up.  But when we knew the reason, nobody minded.   He had been invited back to his homeland, the first time he had ever been back, and even as he was supposed to be speaking in Oxford, he was having an audience with the Prime Minister of Iraq – which proves he wasn’t skiving off.  I should love to have been a fly on the wall and heard what they said, because though Nabeel is thankful Saddam Hussein has gone, he is very, very unhappy about what is now happening to his country.

Most of the authors I looked after and introduced to their audiences were children’s writers.  Ian Beck talked about his terrific book Tom Truehart (OUP) and later, as the illustrator, joined JM Trewellard, whose new book Butterfingers is published by David Fickling Books.   Then Nick Sharratt and Giles Andreae, talked about and performed (twice) the wonderful Pants! (David Fickling), with a lot of audience participation, and finally James Carter, a poet and performance artist (Cars, Stars ad Electric Guitars published by Walker Books) really charmed and fascinated his audience.   Altogether a great four days.

I’m having very great difficulty in setting up the big finish to Bright Sea, Dark Graves.   Sometimes books flow really well: other times you can get completely stuck – you know where you want to go but suddenly the map is very hard to read.  It’s a matter of getting the characters into the right places at the right time in a way which seems to flow naturally.  Whatever you do, you mustn’t be like the writer in the old story.   At the end of one episode he had the main character tied up at the bottom of a lift shaft.  The lift was slowly descending on top of him, while water was rising up to his chin.  At the beginning of the next episode, still unable to work out how to get him out of there, he sinply wrote “With one bound our hero was free.”  Rest assured, I shan’t be doing that!

Meanwhile, we’ve changed the title of Ellen’s Children.  It’s now Divided Loyalties, which gives a much better idea of what the book is about.   I hope you’ve looked at the terrific cover for the new edition of The War and Freddy which is on the home page.   I think it’s great: I’m really pleased with it.

Two more meetings with Writers in Oxford, one a lovely supper and a fascinating talk abut latest ideas on how the brain works, the other a meeting with drinks and food and good conversation, including a very good comparing of notes with another author who is tackling the First World War.

So April closes with not a great deal happening.  The writer’s life can be very uneventful sometimes, just the daily tussle with the computer and the blank page..   The final, final rewrites for Divided Loyalties are now, I sincerely hope, done, Bright Sea, Dark Graves still awaits its big finish and I’m planning two short stories, one about a school, the other about a family, for some new story collections.  So I’d better get on with them.