Do you... well, I find that, I mean, I said this earlier, it's the ideology that's often addressed, rather than the quality, and I find it really intriguing that adults will get very het up about books for kids and the ideology and what they think is appropriate, and yet they don't apply those same sorts of criteria to the films children watch, the videos they hire, and the television they watch.

Absolutely not, no, it is very strange, isn't it. Well, I think one of the things is, and they're right in this in a way, that books can be much more immediate, because they can show you, I mean, television or comic shows you sort of two-dimensionally, out-there what happens, whereas a book is inward-looking, so in a way it's more insidious, and I think this is why, and they're probably right, I mean books are worthy of more respect in this way.

I suppose that's what it is, it's just a sort of perverted way of showing the respect.

Well, it would be nice to think so, but I don't think that it is. If they're right at all, that's where they're right.

We had a case here earlier this year, there was a children's television show called Fat Cat, and Fat Cat was a costume character of a fat cat, there was a body which was part of the broadcasting... I'm not sure of the title... that was specifically, their specific job was to accredit programmes as suitable for children. They weren't a censorship body in terms of they couldn't say "this show can't be shown", all they did was give it a classification and say either this show is suitable for children or it's not suitable for children. They stated that Fat Cat; they decided that Fat Cat was not suitable for children, and it had been on television for some years, when it came up for review they said, "look, no, this programme is not suitable for children, we will not classify it as suitable for children", and the grounds were, not that he's racist, or he's violent, or he's any of those perhaps unpleasant sorts of things that people tend to want to protect children from, but the grounds of their not classifying it as suitable for children was that the character of the cat which was the main focus of the programme was ill-defined, very vague and hard for children to respond to as a real creature of any kind, and so basically what they were assessing it on was the quality of the writing of the scripts and performances and the overall presentation as being appropriate for the age of children it was aimed for. And the stink that was kicked up in the press was phenomenal, and it struck me as really bizarre that for the first time where a group of people had sat down and intelligently thought through quality, standards of quality for children, and had based a judgement, not on politics or ideology or whatever, but on quality, all hell broke loose, and the body was disbanded.

Really, good heavens.

They no longer have a body that has the power to classify those programs.

Oh, that really is rather tragic, isn't it? I reckon that maybe they made a mistake there, because to sneak a whole lot of stuff past the crass adults by it being "only fantasy", so that they don't take any notice. I reckon I've got away with, well probably literally murder on one or two occasions. Certainly, quality on the whole isn't questioned as a rule, is it. No, that is pretty extraordinary. And I believe very strongly in quality, actually, I mean, this is one of the things where it seems to me where children's books excel, precisely because there are so many adults concerned in the producing of them. Well, you can get away with lousy stuff...

Oh, happens all the time.

Yes, but if you're at all responsive to most of the adults, the right-thinking adults in the business, you don't, you know, it keeps you up to the mark, like anything.

That leads on to, I think the expectations on authors for children are different in that people believe that you have certain responsibilities because you write for children. I wonder if you feel that you have certain responsibilities because you write for children, and whether or not they are more important than your creative responsibilities as a writer.

I reckon they're about equal actually, because one of the things that's been slowly born into me over the years is that people might read one of my books at the point where they're truly impressionable, and it might actually influence them all their lives. I was shaken completely to my socks about 5 years ago now, I went to a fantasy convention, a big one, a world one, and I was suddenly accosted by this very interesting Canadian writer whom things I'd admired, I'd been sent them, you know, for comment on the back. His name's Charles de Lint, and although he was at the convention, I never saw him you know, to speak to again after that, partly my fault because I was so staggered, and he said he wanted to tell me that he wouldn't be writing now as he does had he not read my books when he was a teenager. He said they completely revolutionised his way of thinking. And indeed, I could see why I liked his things so much, because, probably, it was the sorts of things he'd got from me.

What did he get from you?

This blending of the fantasy very closely with sort of normal everyday life, he's very good on that, he being Canadian sets it in Ontario, somewhere like that, so you have this sense of a city, and then you know sort of things get weirder and weirder and you move out to another world. Since then, I realised, "My God, you can actually influence people really rather profoundly", and of course, this feeds back into your duty to the book, and if you're not careful it completely hamstrings you, because you get sort of backwards and forwards between these two things, and worry, so I don't worry, but I mean, this does make me very very careful, particularly in the second draft, you know, to get it right, because you do feel that actually somebody maybe, somebody in the future who may be extremely important, you know, for everybody, is going to have me behind them, and this is…

Daunting!

Yes, daunting, it's a responsibility, a huge one.

Because it seems to me that children's writers are frequently told what they should be writing, and what they shouldn't have written in a way that adult writers would find...

Impertinent.

Absolutely insulting, and completely insulting on a creative level, to be told what you should write.

Oh yes, that's right, I mean, the review that prescribes what the book should have been is really maddening, and I've actually had to stand and have somebody tell me too, and at this point I wasn't confident enough to hit the woman in the eye, actually. The fact that she was rather a sinister creature and said she was a witch didn't help either!

What, didn't she think you'd got it right or something?

I don't know, she tore strips off Dogsbody, she said I shouldn't have done it with a dog. In fact, she didn't approve of using animals...

There wouldn't quite have been a story if there hadn't been a dog...

Yeah, well, quite. No, she was terrible, and she went on for about twenty minutes, and I couldn't see any way not just to stand there if I wasn't going to sock her in the eye, so I stood there and said "thank you" and then left.

You've talked also about that adults see your work as complex and too difficult for children, and I love that little anecdote in one thing you wrote where the mother berated you for making—I forget which one, Howl's Moving Castle, was it?—too hard.

It was The Homeward Bounders. Yes, that's right, that was really funny. This confident small boy in glasses naturally, with that sort of keen intellectual look, "Ow, don't take any notice of her!"

Understood every word.

Understood every word, you could see he did, I mean no doubt when he got older, he was only nine I think, he was a phenomenal intellect, that child, I think, actually, because it was full young to understand the book, but when he got older he would have probably got a lot more out of it.

Oh, certainly.

I really do like to make sure there are layers so that people can...

But that doesn't mean that it's inaccessible, it doesn't necessarily mean that.

I work very hard to make things accessible, you know, to make it very clear what is going on at every stage. Well, the trouble is, all I , what I can say about his mum is that I didn't tell her over and over again what was going on, I only told her once, you know.

I have actually read in one of those, you know those twenty volume "Meet the author" things... I think it was in one of those volumes that somebody who was writing an over-view of your work and so on, claimed that you had created a limited audience for yourself because of the complexity of your ideas and...

Someone whose brains hurt, I think.

Well, I wondered if you'd found that, or if in your experience of meeting children in schools and so on, you'd found that a breadth of children, in terms of their cultural backgrounds and their reading ages and all of that sort of stuff, whether you'd found that to be true.

Not at all, I don't think. No, not in the least. No, I think that's pure nonsense. I think it must be an adult whose brain hurts. No, I really, that does surprise me, but...

Well, she doesn't sat where she bases this assertion on, what she bases this assertion on.

One or two adults have told me this, I mean, there was a spectacular occasion when Gillian Rubinstein and I were supposed to be being interviewed together, this was when she was in England, and this man came, and half way through the day, I should have smelt a rat actually, he took me aside and said he'd read Charmed Life and he couldn't understand it, and he thought it was far too difficult for children, and then when it came to the actual interviewing he turned himself towards Gillian, to her enormous embarrassment simply interviewed her, and the publicity lady who was with us said "Now look, hey, you were supposed to do an interview with both of them" and he said, "But I'm not going to, because children can't understand her books." It was quite extraordinary.

People are constantly making assertions about what children can do, children can read this book, children can't read this book, as well as "shoulds."

This is ridiculous, I mean, wholly ridiculous. It never did any child any harm to have something that was a tiny bit above them anyway, and I claim that anyone who can follow Doctor Who can follow absolutely anything. And children are so good at doing this now, and children are used to using their brains.

Do we underestimate kids?

Yes, I think so, every time. I really do. I think it was absolutely typical, I remember once, I mean, kids can do anything, get anywhere, understand anything provided they've got sufficient curiosity, and the motives. It was absolutely typical once, the British Television programme Blue Peter, which does all sorts of things... well, every so often they take and do something rather out of the ordinary, and on this occasion they photographed the Severn Bore, which is this gigantic wave that comes up the river at high tide, and they rather underestimated the height of the Severn Bore that particular time, with the result that the camera and the camera-man and everything was completely overwhelmed, and the film and the camera was lost, I mean, it just rolled over in the wave and was gone, and they pulled the camera-man out and gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and felt that they'd got away lightly, and they said, "the camera's gone for good", and they did a programme on this, making the best of a bad job. Then about three weeks later a child found the camera, and it would be a child, you know, and knew what it was he'd found straight away, and took it into the police or something and they showed the film after all.

Oh goodness! That's wonderful!

And I feel only a child would have done this, I mean, an adult would have stolen the camera or simply not known what they'd got.

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©Judith Ridge 1992