The children are about ten years old at the start of the series and in their teens by book four. Does this mean you were writing for an older reader by the end of the series?
V
Not really. Young readers often do prefer fictional characters close to their own age, so I understand that some children might be put off. But the language and sentence-construction in the fourth book is not very different from the first. If it is more suited to older readers, it’s more likely to be because of the structure. There are several sub-plots and a lot of characters, as well as a number of ‘flash-forwards’ to the year 2006. So I was not writing for older readers, but I was aware of the possibility that readers would be older.
G
Tell me more about the ‘flash-forwards’ in Everyone A Stranger when the children are in their sixties or seventies.
V
I tried to avoid changes in style. But the flash-forwards in Everyone A Stranger had to be thought out very carefully. My editor was very unhappy with them, and I saw her point. I addressed her concern by shaping them so that the first is very short and comes quite late in the narrative; the second is a bit longer; the third is longer still; and so on, until the last is the longest of all and concludes the novel. The idea was that the reader would be taken gradually into this new set-up and grow accustomed to it by the end. Margaret Meek once said that often a book for children has its own built-in lessons to teach the child how to read it. She was referring to Rosie’s Walk, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t also be true of novels.
G
I know you go into schools a lot, which age group do you talk to if there is this age span?
V
Year 6 children are the ideal audience, but I often talk to Year 5s as well. Year 7 children are excellent too, but because they are usually in secondary schools I rarely get a chance to talk to them (except in middle schools in Suffolk). Sometimes Year 4 children can be very responsive and engaged if they have studied WW2. Year 3 children are usually a little out of their depths.
G
Barns are fascinating places for children to play in. As a child my favourite book was Eleanor Graham’s The Children who Live in a Barn and also the film Whistle Down the Wind with Hayley Mills and Alan Bates. Were these barns at the back of your mind when you created your own Paradise Barn?
V
I too loved The Children Who Lived in a Barn but I didn’t know the Alan Bates film until I was an adult. The barns that influenced me most, I think, were actual barns I knew as a boy. Wonderful magical playgrounds, with places to hide in and old machinery to mess around on. Bliss! In fiction and films, they are usually places where dramatic things happen and important learning takes place.
G
One of the characters is an evacuee named Adam. Were you drawing on your own WW2 experiences when you created him?
V
Very little! I do remember the night the evacuees arrived in my village. But Adam himself is an entirely made up character. I built up Molly and Abigail systematically, but Adam leapt into my mind like a picture, ready-formed, with most of his characteristics. I have no idea why he was an artist and so good at drawing (I’m not!). On one school visit I met a mother who asked me if I knew that Adam is autistic. Her son was autistic, she said, and he and she both knew at once that Adam was too. I’m not sure I agree with her, and I certainly didn’t intend him to be.
G
I like the Author’s notes at the end of each book saying where you found your material but there were also some very vivid wartime cameos that made me wonder whether these were your own experiences. For example the sirens in The Deeping Secrets:
‘As she awoke. The air-raid siren was finishing its weird up-and-down whooping and was beginning its dismal fade out. It always seemed to Molly that those final growling notes made the saddest sound in the world.’
Also, the school assembly and the description of the blitz in Paradise Barn.
V
The sirens; having to get into the air-raid shelter; the constant passing overhead of bombers and fighters; military convoys passing through country towns; and a thousand other small details – these are all things that I remember clearly. And as for school assemblies – I have been present at so many, as a child, as a teacher, as a teacher-trainer. They have been a central feature of my life! An assembly today in a small village school in East Anglia is not very different from one in the 1940s. But I’ve never been bombed; the blitz in Paradise Barn and the V1s and V2s in Everyone A Stranger were all made up.
G
Which aspects of WW2 most interest children of today?
V
The notion of children being taken away from their families is always of interest to them. They are often interested in quite technical matters too, to do with bombs, or aircraft. I often read the blitz episode on visits to schools, but I’ve noticed that the children always grow particularly quiet and still when it seems for a moment or two that Molly and Adam are going to be locked in a prison cell. I think they are more appalled by that than by houses being obliterated by falling bombs.
G
Besides Adam, the constant characters in the series are two girls, Molly and Abigail and baby William. Then in book 2 The Deeping Secrets Edward and Jo join them and in book 3 Hidden Lies, Cassie and Hamish.
Was it tricky making your series appeal to both boys and girls? What is the response of girls when you take the books into schools? There’s a lot about aircraft but you have Hilda Pritt in the ATA flying planes.
V
I can truthfully say that I have never given any thought to this. Children’s books when I was young usually gave all the action to the boy characters, and the girls got to watch! Or make the sandwiches. So I was determined to avoid that. But beyond that issue, I made no special provision. If the books appeal to both sexes (as they seem to do), it’s because it’s just happened that way. I enjoyed creating the character of Hilda Pritt, but she’s not there to make a feminist point.
G
There are some rip-roaring, fast paced adventures in the series: a tense ‘who done it’ with murder clues in Paradise Barn, a spy and train drama in The Deeping Secrets, the book in code in Hidden Lies, and an art theft in Everyone a Stranger. But there are also quiet passages and strands that explore the morality of war: betrayal, lies and murder in wartime:
‘The murder was incomprehensible. An impossible thought. Every night, enemy airmen flew over England intent upon killing thousands of people. Yet this one murder, this single death, stuck in the throat. It was unnatural, unthinkable.’
You have been praised for the pacing of your writing. Getting the pace right over a series of books must be challenging. As the characters grow older do you change the pace of the narrative?
V
There has been a change, I think. But it’s more likely to be because I’ve got better at fast-pacing, not because the fictional characters grow older. The trick is to move the action forward and to indicate the characters’ thoughts and motives without stopping to explain them. Some things have to be explained, but mostly I’m finding that less is more.
G
Returning to Adam, he is an unusual child with artistic talent and this art theme is woven into the wartime narrative when we read about the National Gallery pictures being hidden down the Welsh mines in The Deeping Secrets and culminating in Everyone a Stranger where his drawings in the style of Picasso are stolen and sold on the black market.
What prompted you to introduce the art theme?
V
I have no idea! When Adam first came into my head he was drawing a strip. I don’t know why. However, once the art idea was there, it seemed to attract other narrative ideas to itself – for example, the National Gallery, his ability to think through drawing (the gun in Cuffy’s pocket), and his ultimate defeat of Frosty Winters in the last book. This often happens: I have something new I want to include – and it brings in its wake a whole crowd of other possible ideas, some of which might be very exciting.
G
Did you plan from the start how the series would develop or did it simply evolve?
V
I didn’t ever plan to write a series – but I have been devoted to series fiction since I was a boy (Arthur Ransome, Malcolm Saville, Biggles). Later, in adult life, I wrote a book about series fiction. So perhaps it was inevitable that my first novel for children should lead to a sequel, and then another, and so on. I didn’t exactly plan the series, but at some stage I knew I had to take my three main characters right through the War to 1945. None of these decisions could really be called ‘planning’.
G
Were some books easier to write than others? Or as your characters developed did it become easier to write each new book?
V
I think the answer to this is No. You derive a confidence from the fact that the first book has been published and is being read by readers. That’s all, and it’s a help, though no guarantee of future success.
G
Everyone a Stranger is set in 1945 at the end of WW2: ‘a change from a world at war to a world at peace’ as the blackout ends and the street lights come back on.
Is this the natural end of the series or do you have plans for more books?
V
More books are planned, and they are likely to be set in Great Deeping. That seems now to be my preferred imaginative space. But I doubt if I’ll write any more about the War. I think I’ve finished with that. But any of my three main characters might make a guest appearance in a novel about other characters entirely. Who knows?
