I
think I write the kind of books I do because, when I was five years
old, World War Two broke out and everything went mad. Perfectly sane
neighbours began crawling about in the field by our house with bushes
tied to their heads, training for the Home Guard. The time was
dangerous as well as mad. Aeroplanes, barrage balloons and
searchlights filled the sky. People you knew died suddenly when a bomb
hit the end of the street. Ordinary life became unsafe the whole time.
Anything could happen.
Our family life became just as strange. I was sent with one of my sisters to Wales, where my grandfather was Minister at a Chapel in Pontardulais, but this didn't last long because - as far as I could tell - there was a massive family row and my mother went back to London with us. But London was very unsafe by then and we were sent with a school to a big house in the Lake District. This was not safe either. When the docks over the mountains were bombed, a German plane was shot down and the pilot baled out and hid in the mountains for weeks. One night he raided the pantry of the house where we were and stole an enormous cheese. This was enough for the school people. They left, but we stayed on with my mother and the mothers of some of the other children.
This house was the home of the children in Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome (they were real people) and Arthur Ransome himself lived in a houseboat on the lake nearby. He got annoyed by the noise some of the smaller children made playing on the lakeshore and stormed in to complain. This is how I learnt that writers were real people (up till then, I had thought books were made by machines in the room at the back of Woolworth's). Beatrix Potter lived not too far away and she was real too. She smacked my sister and her friend for swinging on her front gate. But the same house had also belonged to the secretary of the writer and artist John Ruskin - and John Ruskin was obviously real too. The lofts were stacked with thick paper on which the man had drawn pictures of flowers, hundreds of them. Now, at this stage in the War everything was in short supply and there was no drawing paper. So one afternoon I climbed into the loft and fetched down a big pile of the drawings and started to rub them out so that I could use the paper to draw on myself. John Ruskin drawings fetch thousands of pounds these days. I must have rubbed out several hundred pounds worth before I was caught and punished.
When, after a bit more wandering in York, we went back to London, I realised that I was real too and knew I was going to be a writer - though I hoped I would be nicer to people than the writers I had so far run into. Two of those writers continued to haunt me. My father was so mean about money that he wouldn't buy books for his children, until he happened on a bargain offer of the entire set of Arthur Ransome books. He locked them in a high cupboard and gave us one between the three of us every Christmas. There was no television in those days and we suffered from book-starvation all the time. This is what started me writing, because I wrote stories to read out to my sisters at night. And when, much later, I became a student at Oxford, the room I was given was John Ruskin's old studio. It was the coldest room I have ever had to live in.
But before this we had moved to a totally crazy village in Essex where my parents ran a Conference Centre. As examples of the craziness, there was a man who went mad at full moon, another who made life-size walking elephants and several women who said they were witches. The gardener at the Conference Centre used to tell everyone how he had had a vision on the Sampford Road, where an angel descended to him and told him never to belong to a Trade Union. Add to this a swarm of American GI's coming out of all the pubs to be sick and doodlebugs and rockets going overhead most nights and you can see I had every reason to think the world was a mad, unsafe place.
I started writing when I was married and had children of my own, and I think one of the things I wanted to tell people in my books was how to cope with the world when it goes crazy around you. It does that even without a war on, of course.
