Are you a people observer?
Not really, no, not in the sense that I’m looking out for quirks,
but I must pick things up I suppose. A lot of it comes from voices, but
sometimes the most profound affect can be had from someone you just glimpse
out of the corner of your eye, it can be the tiniest thing. Like in the
new novel, the fire-eater himself comes from a guy I saw when I was a
child on the quayside in Newcastle. So it comes from all over the place.
But I’m not a writer who sits and observes. When I’ve said
to people I’m writing a novel for children, a few people have said,
“Ah! So have you researched what young people are like today? Have
you listened to them? Have you watched them?” “No!”
Going back to my first question again—When I read Skellig, I don’t know if I consciously thought about this, but I would have imagined that what you “received” was that image of Skellig, that incredibly strong visual image of that creature, angel, man in the shed. If I’d written that book, that would have been my starting point. So I was astonished to find that you didn’t know he was going to be there. So is it voice? Is it character?
With Skellig I think it was the voice. It was like somebody saying,
“I found him in the garage”. I think instead of having an
image of Skellig as he was when he was found, it’s like... I think
when I’m writing I look for a tiny chink, an opening into something,
and that little bit of Michael saying “I found him in the garage”
was the chink to move through. So I think it often comes like that. Sometimes
it comes from—with Secret Heart it was the tiger, so that
was visual. In the first chapter of Secret Heart you look at
the window and you see the ridge of the tent, and that came as a really
powerful image, of a tent across the drab rooftops of an estate in England.
Helmouth.
Helmouth! Helmouth comes from, in mediaeval mystery plays, which used
to go touring around in cities in England, and set up a stage, and very
often at the edge of the stage there’d be a hell mouth, (and) the
bad characters would jump into it. So that came from that.
(A brief discussion of Buffy
the Vampire Slayer and the Hellmouth ensued!)
That’s one of the things that impresses me. In Secret Heart
I think the circus features largely because it has this mediaeval (feel)
and I’m interested in that, in things that are still extant now
but have got their roots way back and we’re trying to civilise them.
We’re trying to civilise the circus.
I remember somebody asking you about that at Reading Matters.
If you just say the word “circus” to some people in England—“Circus,
it’s a terrible thing.” And I agree with them, but—
There’s an almost surreal resonance about circuses, and the fascination
with that life, what it must be like.
Yes, yes.
I think I agree, it is a shame to have lost that—I suppose in a
way it’s a direct inheritance of the travelling players isn’t
it.
Yes, it is.
So talking of myth and what we inherit from our forbears in story and
all the rest, are you conscious—there’s a sense of a greater
myth underlying a lot of what you do. Are you conscious of that? Or is
it just your world view?
It’s my world view when I write. When I began to write these books,
I just found myself in a different place. I found myself in a place where
there was this mythology still going on. Karen
(Brooks) was talking about myth the other day at the (Reading Matters)
conference—it’s like (we hear) these stories and we know them
already. I remember when Freya, my daughter, began to hear fairy tales
for the first time it was like she (already) knew them. I remember reading
"Hansel and Gretel" to her a couple of times and the second
time around she said “You’ve missed out a bit Dad”.
It was the bit I’d missed out that was the scariest thing, when
the witch is going to eat them up. It was like she knew the story. She
loves the Greek myths and it’s almost like they’re part of
us. And when I began to write these books I found myself in that area
where it’s almost part of them. So the words are a way of getting
into that realm, my sort of modern language and modern world view is drawn
into that.
This is going off on a slightly different tack but it’s still very
much about language. Hearing you read aloud in your accent, and having
a brother-in-law from the same part of England, was a total revelation
to me. I’d read the books but hearing them read aloud — I
can’t quite explain it, but it was like really hearing
them. And then somebody very shortly after that asked you a question about
being a regional writer and I’d read the books and wasn’t
consciously thinking of them being set in Newcastle, but then I heard
you read them and got a whole other layer of response to it. So I suppose
I’m interested in that sense of where you’re from and …
It’s been great for me after Skellig. I spent ages trying
to get agents and publishers and I think one thing that worked against
me was that I lived in the north (of England) and wrote in the north and
writing a lot of the time about northern themes. But it’s a great
liberation to me to be able to do that. When people say “Oh, David
Almond, yes he writes in that kind of voice about that part of the world”,
and it’s really kind of undiscovered territory in literary terms.
So a lot of the way I write is drawn from the way people talk, it comes
from an in some ways non-literary tradition. So I’m really interested
in that—the voice, use of language, storytelling, chants, ballads.
And yet, it comes from where I live, where I was born. It’s not
apparently sophisticated in the way that a lot of English lit is apparently
sophisticated, but there are some things I detest about English literary
sophistication because I think it becomes inwards and inbred. I think
a lot of writers like to be on the fringes of literature and I really
feel as if I’m on the fringes of mainstream English culture and
I’m picking up something that’s very old and hopefully helping
to make something that’s very new.
Do you think that your northern voice is more evident to English readers?
Oh absolutely. Certainly when I talk, of course, but even in the books
themselves I think it is. When I go on tour in some parts, I get into
groups of people, and I can tell you some people who’ve wanted to
meet me, and they meet me and they say, well, you’re not supposed
to be the person I’m meeting, because you talk like that (laughs).
From my experience, and it was a very brief time I spent in Newcastle,
I was there for a day two years ago, but even in those few short hours
I couldn’t believe how much the city has changed over the years
(since my first visit).
Oh yeah.
It was '88 that I there staying with my sister and her husband. I know
that the north and Newcastle is looked on as industrial and grubby, but
walking around Ryton-on-Tyne (a village outside of Newcastle)—and
maybe it’s just my romantic nature, but I had a very strong sense
of its history and there being something very—I’m using the
word resonant again. I can remember walking around the church there, the
Anglican church, and there’s the ancient burial mound there in the
church grounds and the village cross, and I was walking out, just a country
road out of the town and I got this really strong sense that if I kept
walking I’d come across someone from a past time! It’s really
kind of silly, but there was a very strong atmosphere that had nothing
to do with the reputation of the north as just being working class, industrial,
unpleasant, ugly, uncultured.
If you go to Newcastle now it’s just incredible. It’s probably
about to be the European city of culture. It’s filled with these
beautiful buildings—Newcastle’s always been a great city but
it’s becoming to be recognised more now, so kids look to go to Newcastle
University, it’s one of the most popular choices. But there is still
in English life this downward looking view of the north. It’s been
interesting coming to Australia, and going to America, saying to the audience
“Who’s been to Newcastle?’ Certainly in Australia every
time I’ve asked, there’s been someone who knows Newcastle.
But if I go into Surrey—how many people have been to Newcastle…?
I’ve read recently that there’s concern that young people
from regional England are losing their regional voice. They’re losing
their accent, they’re losing their dialect, they’re talking
like East Enders, they’re talking like the prevalence of
London English on television.
It’s true and in some ways it’s inevitable, with TV and travel.
When I was a kid, nobody really travelled (unless it was for an execution!).
Now it’s very common, so it’s bound to happen. But I’m
concerned—for me, as a writer, on the one hand I’m trying
to maintain something and say “this is what it was like, this is
the language”, but also it may well be lost, and there’s nothing
you can do, but as a writer you have to draw on the things that matter
to you. So it’s great for me to be able to use bits of dialect.
It doesn’t matter if nobody knows what it means.
Did you teach primary or secondary?
I started teaching primary, then I taught adults, then I gave up, then
I went back teaching special needs, which was like the main part of my
career. I taught special needs, and then for the past eight years my teaching
was part time, part time teaching kids with special needs, and that was
great, because I worked three days a week, so I had this money to pay
the bills, I had time… It was very interesting to work with kids
who found it difficult to articulate…
Like Joe (Maloney, in Secret Heart).
…like Joe, like Joe Maloney. And I think I felt as if I could do
it because the kids I was working with, it was like every time you set
out to write a book, it’s like you’re learning language again,
each new book’s new challenge. So the kids were going through the
same process as I was, so it was far more interesting working with them
than teaching literature. I never went and taught literature in a secondary
school.
You made the observation at Reading Matters that the importance of the
imagination is denied to children. Would you expand on that?
I think it possibly always is. It’s just a feature of children trying
to fit into a grown-up society. But in England—and in talking to
people here it seems like there’s much the same attitude here towards
the way children learn and what they’re allowed to do with their
own language—in England everything is seen as a task in school.
It’s a task that has to be completed and there has to be a positive
outcome—tasks, outcomes, tasks, outcomes—even for things that
have to do with the imagination like writing stories or drawing pictures
or whatever. And I mean great teachers, and there are so many, and somehow
they manage to work with kids… but also the political masters don’t
really want that. When I won the Carnegie
I made a speech in which I dared to use the words “creativity”
and “imagination” and it was just amazing, the response. The
next day I was attacked on page one of one of the papers by the education
secretary; the week later there was an article by the chief inspector
of schools, naming me; “People like Almond want to return to a free
for all, anything goes attitude to children which did so much to ruin
a whole generation.” It’s this fear, I think it’s an
English fear of chaos. If you take away the chains, if you take away the
targets and the tests and the scores, you’d just be left with chaotic
kids. Also what I found in Government statements was, I was asked on the
radio one morning, “So, why don’t you believe in grammar?”
Of course kids need to know grammar, we know this. And his response was,
“Kids need to learn grammar so they can function properly in this
society and get better jobs.” Why do we have language? We don’t
have language so we can get a job, we have language so we can think, so
we can be full human beings.
I was really astonished to hear that you got such a public response from
people like that.
It’s incredible. It was obviously a very raw nerve.
Did you get much feedback then after they’d come out and made those
comments?
From teachers, yeah, I still do, and what, it’s five years now?
And there’s a whole army of teachers who think I’m wonderful
because of what I said in that speech. I was invited to speak to the people
on the national literacy strategy, which I was amazed by, because it’s
a government thing, and the guy who invited me to do it said I was invited
because I made the speech. I think it’s not something that’s
just about now, it’s always the case when society wants to—that
sounds very Wordsworthian, doesn’t it—wants to pull us down,
our possibilities in order that society can function as an economic unit.
And it’s for other people to say no, we’re more than this.
And also, maybe now, I think the kind of economic strictures enforced
on children are very scary, like credit cards, student debt. Students
leave University in England with debts of 10,000, 12,000 pounds.
We were talking about voice before. Heaven Eyes voice is so different
from—and it stands out in that book but also in the whole range
of your work. Where’d she come from?
I had to invent a language that she would be able to speak, that I wanted
to be light and sweet, but also that it was a voice that was untutored.
All the influence she really had was Grandpa. I tried various times to
get it right, and I just couldn’t get it, and I kept trimming it
and trimming it and trimming it… I think it comes from—early
song. I really like early song, pre-Tudor times in England, and there’s
a kind of sweetness and lightness about early music which I am very fond
of. So I think it came from that, from the very early poets and ballads.
I think, but I don’t know.
Do you re-draft a lot?
Oh, constantly.
And do you over-write and cut back, or…?
I do sometimes. But when I’m doing well it usually comes out in
a kind of form that it emerges as, it finishes as, but with loads and
loads of constant re-drafting as I go along. I don’t write and then
re-write, I re-draft, re-draft, re-draft all the time. I usually spend
the most time on the first third of the book and throw it away, throw
it away, throw it away, and then find the proper form for it and then
it works.
You recently threw away an entire book that you’d spent a couple
of years on.
Yeah, called The Apprentice. That was just going up the creek,
going nowhere and I just woke up one morning and hated it. The pay off
was that in its place came this new book, The Fire-Eaters, out
of nowhere really. It just kind of burst into life, it was great, a lovely
book to write. And the other one kind of led me to it, so it wasn’t
a waste of time.
Well, it’s all process isn’t it. You were saying, again at
Reading Matters, that you started writing these books when you were nine.
So it’s been a long time!
And they’re on that shelf in your local library!
©Judith Ridge 2003