I was interested that early on in your career you were directed to write about animals because kids like animals. But there seems to me to be a great strength in your books about families, about those familial relationships with Charlie and Lola and of course Clarice’s family. It strikes me that families are quite a strong point in your books, about those dynamics and so on. Even “That Pesky Rat” is about finding a family.
Yeah, it is. I’ve always been much more interested in the ordinary
things that happen in your life that are funny, and I was always more
interested in the forms of TV series where you had something extraordinary
happening in the ordinary ? of your life. A film like Freaky Friday I
loved, because — a domestic somehow — and so things which
are about magic where it doesn’t really relate to my home life never
really appealed to me quite so much. So watching something like I Dream
of Jeannie, where you can imagine, oh, how would it be if you actually
did have your own little genie… and how it relates to you…
So fantasies that existed within the real world would have appealed rather
than, say, Narnia.
Yes, it does really, although I loved those books, but I liked them more
when they… I guess I liked the first one the most because they were
surprised by it. I love Woody Allen, because he’s always talking
about very, very usual things in life, they don’t go off into mad
fantasy, they tend to be more about conversation. And in some ways nothing
really happens.
Well, conversation, that goes on to voice. The voice of… well, again,
it’s interesting, because Lola’s kind of channelled through
Charlie, although Charlie’s a good character in his own right, a
lovely character in his own right, he’s so kind of, I don’t
know, stoic almost!
Right.
But Lola and Clarice both have really particular voices. I particularly
notice with Clarice, and I think you’ve developed it in the novel,
because obviously you’ve got room to, there’s a kind of a
wonderful blend of how kids really talk, like she says something about
her “best thing”, and I was showing you the magazine where
I work. We get letters from the kids, and they talk about their “best
story” or their “best..”, you know, rather than their
“favourite”, so I thought that was a really well observed
— children’s usage of language. There’s also her, kind
of, appropriation of language, that she’s heard adults say which
she doesn’t always quite get on the mark, it’s almost the
right context to use it, and then there’s her own language…
Are you a listener? Do you people watch?
Yeah, I do, I do. I mean, I think adults say as many funny things like
that as children. You hear it a lot. My sister does a bit, in fact, where
she’ll get the words wrong, and I’m sure I do it all the time.
And if you listen to people, their voice pattern, the way they construct
their sentences can be very charming. I heard a friend of mine, it was
just a slip, he’s a really great guy, and he’d been very ill,
and someone said to him, how are you now? And he said, well, it’s
all worth it for that, the adolescence makes it all worth it. I just loved
it, he didn’t notice he’d said it. You get this kind of really
brilliant thing where people put things together in such a funny way.
It’s like a fraction off, and yet it works.
Yes, it’s very funny. I remember I phoned my aunt. She was staying
with her nieces, little girls, and I phoned her and I said, Oh, I’m
just ringing up to say hello, how are you, and she said, Oh, well! A bit
tired. We were up looking for spiders at two o’clock this morning.
She meant that the children had obviously woken up in the night and there
was a spider, and she had to get up, but it sounded like they’d
all been up just looking for spiders as if it were a perfectly normal
thing to do.
Clarice does that all the time, she repeats things her father says in
the business context, but out of that context, and so — they’re
almost clichés that people rattle off without thinking, but when
you put them in her mouth they become — well, funny, but also quite
pointed sometimes. Did it come quite easily, her voice?
Yes, I just kind of wrote, and I didn’t really know what age she
was when I was writing, but I’d drawn a few sketches of her, but
I just kind of wrote and wrote and wrote and little bits about each family
member. So this is pretty much how it was. I edited out I think two pages
on her father and one ended up being in What Planet Are You From…
because I wanted to put in that whole bit about him cooking, but it wasn’t
really appropriate for this book. And I’d written something about
her mother and what she used to before she became a mother, and I’ve
never used that. I might do. I really want to. Most of it, it was just
pages, like this, and I gave it to an editor, I’d taken it round
to several people and they all for one reason or another didn’t
feel they could publish it. Then I gave it to one editor and she really
wanted to do it and what she did was, she just switched round the passages
of text. Because they were all written on separate pieces of paper, so
“I want to put this here, this here and this here. What you’ve
got is a kind of quest for peace and quiet.” So it’s less
just like, you know, anecdotes, it actually makes sense of something.
And then I just had to write the ending for it, which is when I came up
with some of —this — had been written, but it wasn’t
at an ending, and she suggested I write a bit more about that and make
that the ending. And then in the end she couldn’t publish it, but
it really helped. It showed me how you can actually use what you’ve
done and regroup it.
Well, that extra eye looking at it…
Yes. It’s really interesting. I was always a bit daunted because
I suppose plot’s not really my thing, probably because I’m
not all that interested in it, but you do need something.
Y ou’ve written a novel which does have much more in the way of a plot, with the mystery of Betty Moody’s disappearance, and the book project and K? and is he going to come through with the goods and so on, and Mrs Wilberton! I mean, I’m an ex-teacher and I sometimes feel a bit, you know, defensive on teacher’s parts, but she’s such a wonderful creation. You know, it reminds me a little bit, and I think there’s a bit of a — I don’t know, it’s like I was saying about all the Lemony Snicket type books… I don’t know if you know Angela Anaconda? The teacher in that reminds me a bit of Mrs Wilberton.
I was actually quite worried about that, because I’d written Mrs
Wilberton, and then I’d had all that, and I thought, oh no!
But those things happen all the time…
You have to have your kind of ogre person, and — both my parents
are teachers, so I didn’t feel that bad about doing it.
She’s not despicable.
No.
She’s not completely unjust and vicious and malicious, she’s
just fed up!
She’s fed up, but she’s also uninspired. I actually got the
idea for her — I was watching a documentary which was following
a class of seven years olds, that transition from the infants into the
juniors, and the children actually get— I can’t really remember
that feeling of how scary that is, when you’re going up a level,
and they feel terribly grown up suddenly, and they don’t feel they
can cope with the work, and they kept talking about it all the time, it’s
too hard, and you’re thinking, oh, you don’t know you’re
born! But of course when you’re that age, it’s really daunting
how much you’ve got to learn, and it all feels terribly important.
Anyway, there was a woman in it who was rather like Mrs Wilberton, who
was a real, kind of —
Been there too long…
Yes, all the time she was droning on at them. There was this real chatterbox
called Roland in the classroom, all the time he got it in the arm. The
whole thing of her just going on and on. I played it to my mum, and I
said what do you think about her, and she said well, she’s an old
bully, isn’t she, because that’s really what she was doing,
she’d lost the whole thing. You don’t need to treat children
like that to get them to do things. And so I thought it’s fine to
have Mrs Wilberton in so long as I have Mr Pickering as being rather nice.
Yes, and Clarice isn’t completely virtuous in all of this.
No she’s not!
She falls off her chair on purpose…!
Yeah, I know! I want to show, I wanted them all to be rather rounded characters.
So in the next novel I’m introducing one of the teachers that you
think is marvellous.
So there is another Clarice Bean novel?
Yes.
More picture books?
Yes, we’re just sort of discussing that, because I was going to
write another picture book, while I was in New York, which would be set
in New York, and then I got really into doing the novel. But I would like
to write a series of Clarice picture books which are set abroad, you’ve
got that kind of feeling of coming back a little bit more to the feeling
of the first one, where maybe there are less plot points, but we were
just talking last night about doing one in Australia, because actually
Australia is a fascinating country…
You’ve been here before.
Yes, I’ve been here before, but it’s sort of when —
I don’t know if this is a British thing or a European thing, or
what, but the distance, when we were little, thinking of Australia, it’s
one of those places that seems so unimaginable, would you ever go there?
And you’ve got wombats and possums and kangaroos and things that
we just don’t have, and so it’s fairly amazing on that level.
The books have a slightly international flavour anyway. I wasn’t
sure when I first read it whether you were English or not. The imprint
didn’t necessarily mean that you were, it might just have been an
English edition, and then when I read “My Uncle is a Hunkle”
I got completely thrown, “Is she American? I thought she was English…”
so there is a bit of an international flavour anyway. I was thinking as
you were talking earlier when you were talking about voice… I interviewed
David Almond earlier this year, and I’d read his books, and my brother-in-law
comes from Newcastle as well, but when David read his books in his northern
accent, it had a whole different feel to them. That interested me, to
have read them and had one relationship with them, and then to hear them
in his regional accent and to get a whole other feel to the characters
and the setting and the book. It’s just an observation. Do you see
Clarice as being from a particular place? Or any of the characters, in
fact?
In a way I do. When I started writing I wasn’t quite sure where
she would come from, and my first instinct was to have her come from Shropshire,
which is where I come from, but it didn’t seem to fit with everything
that she did, and I was living in London, in north London, in a fairly
scruffy-meets-middle class area of London, where it still had that mix
of the different types of people which was one of the things I really
liked about it. Was living in this house and it kind of backed on, so
you could see all these other gardens and houses and things, you heard
lots of funny things going on around you. So Robert Granger, her neighbour,
is really based on this boy that was my neighbour and I heard him every
day calling over the wall to this girl next door and trying to get here
to notice him and engage in his very boring conversation. He was one of
those very loud children, they can’t talk in any other volume than
top volume. It was just funny, and so then I started to picture how I
was living in North London, and it was helpful, I sort of needed to know
where she lived, and there were certain things I guess I need to picture
while I am writing them, otherwise I can’t imagine how does she
go to the shop, how does she go to the ?, what can she do on her own?
I’ve probably shifted her now, from where she lived to somewhere
else which in truth is a lot more chi-chi than it should be, but I can
imagine the place and the streets and everything, but maybe if it was
ten years ago. That’s the kind of demographic you’d have,
it would be a much more Claricey land, not so posh. The problem is in
London most of the central London is quite posh now, you have to have
quite a lot of money. So I always imagine if people go, well Clarice Bean’s
family must be quite posh, they have such a big house, and I said, well,
you can have bought your house a long time ago…
It could be Granddad’s house…
Exactly. And I don’t actually think they necessarily are. They do
seem to be middle class, but I don’t think they’re especially
well off.
Well, to me, there’s enough gaps in the information you give, that
you can fill that in any way that makes sense to you. There was a bit
about their cranky next-door neighbour, I’ve forgotten her name,
complaining about the dogs through the walls, and I thought, oh, it’s
a semi. So you get a picture in your head, and you leave it open enough
for that.
Exactly, and her dad, I’ve always felt, we don’t really know
what his business is. I don’t think he works in such a posh office.
That’s her imagination.
Well, the world of grown ups and offices is very exotic, isn’t it.
Would you go back to illustrate someone else’s writing?
Yes, if I loved it enough.
I haven’t seen “Dan’s Angel”, I’d like to
hunt that down and have a look at it. But that was kind of a different
project…
Yes, that was I took on ages ago, really a long time ago I signed that
contract and it just didn’t seem as if it would ever happen, and
then finally it suddenly did and it was quite interesting to do. The work
was in black and white, for other people, I’ve not done colour.
And it was quite a problematic book, in that your really, the star of
the book really is the actual paintings. So I did it very very flat on
computer, and it was a sort of experiment of doing everything on computer,
so I’d draw, and then everything would be scanned in, which is completely
different to how I’d usually work. It was kind of interesting, seeing
if it would work. I was pleased in that the paintings do stand out. I
thought, if I work like I work in Clarice, it would get too muddly, there’d
be too many things going on. But I would illustrate for somebody else
again, but I would have to really feel I got the text, because I don’t
think I’m a natural at it. I think that so much of the time I spend
writing is also spent thinking about the image and you’re kind of
mulling it over all those months that you’re writing, and when you’re
handed a text by another author you don’t have all that time. I
don’t really necessarily know where they’re coming from, and
I think that some people are truly brilliant at taking someone else’s
work ad putting a spin on it that maybe the author didn’t realise
was there, and in a good way, not missing the point, not being lazy about
it, but someone like Quentin Blake or Edward Gorey, they add so much to
text and I think that’s a special skill. Don’t know if I have
it.
You’ve said you want to be more ambitious with your books for Penguin.
In what way ambitious?
I think what would be really interesting for me, because it was a bit
of a risk to take on a third publisher, and my agent and I thought about
it very hard, but I loved working with Francesca Dow so much on these
Clarice books…
Was she at Orchard?
She was the one who signed me up for Clarice and she moved to Puffin coming
up for two years ago. It seemed awful not to work with Francesca again,
we did seem to get on so well. So what I decided was, because I’ve
got the Clarice and the Charlie and Lola’s and the odd one like
That Pesky Rat, that all seem to have a very strong house style, I feel,
so if I continue doing them for Orchard. Then at Hodder I was doing, in
a way when I look at them, I’m just about to start another one,
and they’re all kind of boy characters so far, and they’re
narrated, they’re different, to not have that first person voice,
they look different to me, anyway, they’re more… they’re
less stylised, I think. So they have a particular kind of thing going
on. So with Puffin I felt what would be really nice is to maybe not have
a house style at all, so that we can do whatever we like. So there’ll
be one book which will be, maybe, one that we’re thinking of, maybe
will read much more like a comic book in a way, perhaps. And then I’m
doing a book with somebody else, in fact, I’m working with someone
else on this next one that will be part illustration and part photography.
I’m really looking forward to that, because that’ll a whole
different kind of book. So that’s sort of the idea really, and also
because perhaps maybe Puffin, because they’re such a big company,
they are able to do more with paper engineering, or extra pages that you
can use, things that perhaps someone else can’t afford to take those
risks.
Well, of course, you did The Dream Bed.
Exactly, but I know from doing that how hard it is for them because you’re
there every single thing is — and Hodder are a very successful company,
but every single thing is however many pence it’s going to cost
them, so you’re all thinking about that all the time. It’s
not that Puffin have limitless money, but I think that they can, perhaps
we can take a bigger risk with something.
And finally, do you go to schools very much, do you get much direct feedback
from kids and what sort of feedback do you get from them?
I’ve done quite a lot of school visits now, and I get quite a lot
of letters from them, which is really interesting. I think particularly
with the Clarice novel, that seemed to change things a lot, because although
I’ve had letters before, this was from a slightly different age
group, where on their own initiative they decided to write and ask questions
or tell me what they liked, or what they thought I should do differently.
And it’s really nice, too.
What do they like?
They like Ruby Redfort, which is really interesting. I’ve had stacks
of letters.
She is such an interesting creation! I’m reading Trixie Belden,
I’m reading, you know, as I’m reading Ruby Redfort, a whole—
reading it in bed last night for the second time, I can’t remember
them now, but I kept thinking, of there’s a bit of that and a bit
of that and a bit of that… you do seem to take things from lots
of different…
Yes, well, originally she was — I started writing Ruby Redfort pieces
just so I knew what Clarice was reading, not because I was really include
so much of it. I was going to have little tiny pieces and then I got really
into it. I remembered my sister reading all the Nancy Drew books and how
crazy she got about all that, reading series books, and especially because
that’s come back as a real fashion, hasn’t it, series books,
and so I wanted to be able to talk about that with children as well, without
always having to talk about Harry Potter. It’s great that they’ve
done that, but there are other books, and I thought it’d be really
nice to bring it back to those girl detective type of things.
Donna Parker, that’s who I was thinking of. Did you ever read the
Donna Parker books?
No.
She was a teenager, so she wasn’t a detective, but same sort of
feel as all of that, and as you’ve said elsewhere, 60s and 70s kid’s
television. I was also interested, visually, do you ever get inspiration
from — you’ve said you’re a collector, and that seems
really evident from the fabrics and nicky-nackys — do you ever get
inspired for something in a story by that, or do you start with the story
and then go to find your references.
I think it happens all at once, although no illustrating is done before
I’ve written the story, really, but I might make little visual notes.
But, yeah, it can be anything you know. I mean, I’ve loved looking
out of this window. I’ve always been fascinated by tower blocks
and things. All those windows, and they just make interesting patterns.
And it’s all — things like that, going into a shop, there
being — I’ve always been interested in furniture and fabrics
and things, so you can just see something that you think well, that makes
such a visual thing, and it maybe clicks, or the idea for a particular
character who would live with those kind of things. It’s funny,
but yeah — or going into a restaurant that you think, it gives that
amazing feeling when you walk into a particular place and you think, oh,
I’d like to live in this kind of world all the time, so you just
work that into a story, so it gives you that good feeling about something.