Fiction Books

 

Troublemakers was my first book.  Like most of my books, it took a long time to write - more than two years from start to finish.  That’s partly because I started off writing about a girl and then I had to change her into a boy!





The idea for the story came from a girl at the school where I was teaching.  Some people came and did a beep test (if you know what that is) with all of the year 4 children, and this girl -let’s call her Sue - turned out to be the fittest child in the school. She was also dead keen on football, so I thought: what if someone like Sue turned out to be so good at football that a Premiership club wanted to sign her?  They’d have to change all the rules.  And she’d have to put up with lots of people thinking she’d never make it.  Maybe even her own family.





A little later I had the idea of Sue meeting Chester Smith, a black footballer who was having a hard time because of racist taunts from the crowd, and then I really got stuck in to the writing.





You probably wonder why I changed Sue into a boy - Robbie in the story.  Well, the publishers persuaded me that I’d sell more books that way, and I was desperate to get my book published so I made the change.  Actually, I made lots of changes, and the book was published, so it was probably worth it.  But I do still have a sneaking regret about Sue. 

***

I wrote Defenders soon after I finished Troublemakers.  My son, Tom, was playing for a Sunday League football team at the time, and I remember watching an eight-year-old boy who cared so much when he missed with a shot on goal that he knelt down and banged his head on the pitch not just once, but time after time after time.  





I also noticed how the attackers and midfield players always seemed to get all the glory, and always seemed to be the stars of football novels.  So I thought I’d try to redress the balance a little.





The other thing that found a place in the story was what radio commentators like to call “The magic of the FA Cup.”  Around the time I was writing the book I went to see Lowestoft Town play in the First Round of the Cup.  It poured with rain and four players were sent off - and it was kind of magical, even though Lowestoft lost.





Defenders was serialised on BBC7, but I think I must be one of the only people who heard it!

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The illustrations in Cat Patrol are by Peter Bailey, who is married to Sian Bailey, who illustrated Green Fingers.  When I was a student at the University of East Anglia I shared a house with some other students in a small Norfolk village.  We used to sit outside on summer evenings watching the swifts doing their aerobatic displays in the sky.  Then, one evening, I found a small bird fluttering about in the bushes.  I thought it might be hurt, or maybe it was a baby, so I took it inside and tried to give it some food, but it didn’t eat.  





We kept the bird in a cage for a day or two, but it still didn’t eat, and when we tried to let it go, it just crashed into the bushes again.





Then we went to the pub one evening and told the landlord about the bird.  ‘It’s a swift,’ he said, without even seeing it. ‘You take it up on the roof and let it go.  It’ll fly, you’ll see.’





So I took it upstairs and climbed outside onto the flat roof of our kitchen.  Then I threw the bird into the air.  I still think it’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever done, just like Ben in the story.  And it is true that swifts never land on the ground, but eat on the wing and drop out of their nests into the air.  If they do land they find it very hard to get airborne again.





There are swifts nesting in the tower of the Oxford Museum of Natural History and they have a webcam of their own!  You can visit them here... (but best wait for the spring!)  

***

This book was illustrated by Sian Bailey.  Her beautiful drawings help to make this, probably, my favourite book. One of the pictures shows an old farmhouse near where I used to live.  I’ve known a lot of people who have moved to the countryside from the town and tried to do up old places on their own.  It’s harder than it looks, as Dad finds out in the story.





Green Fingers went through lots of changes before it was finished, but one thing always stayed the same, and that was the character of Kate.  She’s someone who has great ideas but has always been in trouble at school because she’s not very good at reading.  I love Kate’s determination.  She just won’t give up, whether it’s hoeing a row of vegetables, or teaching herself to read, or making a garden for her mum.  





Kate is not based on any one person, but I’ve spent years teaching children who weren’t very good at reading.  Plenty of them were bright and clever, but simply found reading difficult. This book is for all of them, although, as one reviewer pointed out, they’re not likely to read it!

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When I was at Primary School I spent most of my spare time playing football or cricket.  We only played football in the football season.  It lasted from September, when we went back to school after the summer holidays, to Easter.  After Easter we played cricket.  People would have thought you were crazy if you kept on playing football after Easter - except for the Cup Final at the beginning of May.  I’m talking about the early 1960s here, long before England won the World Cup.





The spark that started me writing this book was an incident on a school playground.  A dinner lady foolishly walked across the middle of the football pitch and got hit by a football.  The headteacher banned football for the rest of the term.  It was very unfair.  I thought it was a good incident to put in a book, so I did!

***

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Rain is a story about a girl who has grown up living in a bus.  I always imagined the bus as a small, old-fashioned coach, and nothing like the one on the book cover.  I wrote the book because I knew lots of people in the 1970s who thought school was a bad idea.  Then they had children and the children sometimes wanted to go to school.  That’s the exact opposite of the way things usually are, with parents wanting their children to go to school and the children wishing they didn’t have to.  Plenty of people still do teach their children at home.  You can find out about that here.

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This book is about children being scared.  Most people are scared of something, and sometimes people are scared of things that seem daft.  But it doesn’t matter how crazy it seems to other people - if you’re scared of orange peel it’s just as bad as being scared of tigers or wasps or earthquakes.





I’m not allowed to tell you who it was who was scared of earthquakes, but she was a real person, and still is.  I have known people who were scared of all of the things that Billy is scared of -  just not all at the same time.





We used to have seagulls at the school where I worked.  Two of them liked to walk about on the roof looking down through the skylights at the children working.  But most of them have gone now.  They only came for the crumbs from the children’s crisps and biscuits, but nowadays only healthy snacks are allowed.  It seems that seagulls don’t like healthy snacks.  They turn up their beaks at apple cores and banana skins.





The funny thing is that although the seagulls used to swoop down right over the heads of the children I never once saw a child at our school who was afraid of them.  The children at our school were a whole lot tougher than Billy.





Both this book and Nice One, Smithy! have great pictures by Kate Sheppard

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I thought of the idea for this book while I was sitting in a supermarket cafe on the way home from work.  I’ve always thought that Goldilocks was just the kind of person you didn’t want coming into your house.  





I really love the pictures that Selina Young did for this book.  I especially like the bears’ jumpers.  People often ask me if I choose my own illustrators.  It doesn’t usually work that way. Mostly the writer sends the text to the publisher and then they find an illustrator.  I think I was very lucky with this book.





Sadly, Selina Young died in 2006.