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PAM ROYDS 1924 - 2016

Pam Royds on Grasmere , 1971 with Sally Christie, children’s author and daughter of Philippa Pearce. I was just twenty two when I fir...

About Me

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My blog is about writing and illustrating children's books which I have been doing since 1974. www.gillianmcclure.com has all my books. I also have another blog: www.paulcoltman.blogspot.com where I publish my father's poems.

Saturday 31 May 2014

STEYNING FESTIVAL

One of my favourite festivals is the Steyning Festival because Steyning was where I was brought up. On the May Bank Holiday weekend, I did a children’s workshop based on my picture book We’re Going to Build a Dam in the lovely garden at the back of Steyning bookshop. Here we all are in the marquee; I had a great audience – very responsive and imaginative.
In this part of the workshop, after looking at original artwork, the children have puppet characters and are building a dam out of card cut-outs of boulder, driftwood, pebbles, sand and seaweed. The pieces have velcro on the back and stick easily onto a board covered in black fabric.
Then, after the crab has pinched the dog’s tail and the dog has grabbed its favourite piece of wood out of the dam, there’s the fun of the dam all coming apart.
At the end the children drew their own dams.This is Camilla Fielder’s beautifully drawn dam with the crab 

and this lovely picture was done by her younger brother, Oscar.

Monday 12 May 2014

GUMBLE'S YARD

Sadly, John Rowe Townsend has died; his funeral was on 3 April. He was married to Jill Paton Walsh. As their house is just a short distance along the bank of the Cam from my own, we regularly had tea together at 4pm and I’ll always remember John for his amusing anecdotes. He had a brilliant memory and could quote from books and recite poem after poem.
    John’s death prompted me to re-read his first children’s book, Gumble’s Yard (1961) 
The children in this story are poor, living in a deprived urban setting in the north of England. John was breaking new ground here, for until then children’s book characters were invariably middle class and living in pleasant settings. The Puffin edition has powerful illustrations by Dick Hart in a strong dark line.
     Gumble’s Yard is narrated in the first person by Kevin and starts with him walking, with his sister Sandra and their friend, Dick through a neighbourhood called the Jungle because all the streets are named after tropical flowers:
‘It was a fine spring day, not warm but with a sort of hazy sunshine. Summer was coming, and blades of grass were showing between the stone setts, and soon the weeds would blossom on the empty sites. The days were getting longer. Next week perhaps we would be playing cricket after school. There was a dog in Mimosa Row that I was getting very friendly with. I was going to make a soap-box car for Harold. Life was full of interesting things to do.
We walked three abreast, with Sandra in the middle. And as we turned the corner into our own street I felt happy and burst out singing.
‘Hark at him!’ said Sandra. ‘Not a care in the world.’
‘Where does it hurt, Kevin?’ asked Dick with mock sympathy.
‘I’ll hurt you in a minute!’ I said.
And we started a friendly scuffle, the kind that happens a dozen times a day. 

When their feckless uncle and aunt vanish, Kevin, Sandra and two younger children, with Dick’s help, are forced to do a moonlight flit to a deserted warehouse named Gumble’s Yard. 
    Stories about children fending for themselves and trying to avoid Social Services –
(‘the Cruelty,’ in John’s story) always fascinated me as a child. Eleanor Graham’s The Children whoLived in a Barn (1938) was a favourite book of mine but the children in that story were from a middle class family and the setting was much more idyllic than that of Gumble’s Yard. John’s book differs in another way from Eleanor Graham’s; the children in Gumble’s Yard find themselves caught up in a fast- moving mystery when they encounter a highly organised criminal gang operating at night in the deserted warehouse by the canal.
In both stories, the adults eventually return but while the children in Eleanor Graham’s story are returned happily to the comfortable existence they had known before, the children in John’s story are not so pleased to see their feckless aunt and uncle again and the prospect of returning to their old life is not appealing.
Kevin and Sandra have to come to terms with the fact that,

“Even an unsatisfactory family life is better than none.”

And accept their life as it is:

“So you see…we can’t always have what we want.”
“We can always hope,” said Sandra, in her matter-of-fact tone that often sounds so grown-up.

And the story ends as it began with the sunny optimistic refrain of childhood:
‘It was a fine spring day, not warm but with a sort of hazy sunshine. Summer was coming, and blades of grass were showing between the stone sets, and soon the weeds would blossom on the empty sites. The days were getting longer. Next week perhaps we would be playing cricket after school. There was a dog in Mimosa Row that I was getting very friendly with. I was going to make a soap-box car for Harold. Life was full of interesting things to do.
We walked three abreast, with Sandra in the middle. And as we turned the corner into our own street I felt happy and burst out singing.
‘Hark at him!’ said Sandra. ‘Not a care in the world.’
‘Where does it hurt, Kevin?’ asked Dick with mock sympathy.
‘I’ll hurt you in a minute!’ I said.
And we started a friendly scuffle, the kind that happens a dozen times a day.

I can hear John reading this passage aloud, with his quiet smile and a twinkle in his eye.