Non-fiction books

 

Cars was the first non-fiction book I wrote. It was an odd subject for me to write about because I much prefer bicycles. You can probably work that out from reading the book. I enjoyed the challenge of getting a lot of information into a very few words and making it into a kind of story at the same time. I also found out a lot of things I didn’t know about cars.


Illustration: Emily May


The Mini in the picture was blue and rusty. All of Emily’s friends thought I drove too fast and she says they were scared to come in the car. The thing about a Mini is that it is very low down and that make it seem as if you are going very fast. Also you are very close to the engine and it can be quite noisy.


There’s another thing about Minis. If the road is even ever so slightly wet the water gets in through the radiator grille and makes the electrical bit of the car stop working. Then the car stops and you have to get out and spray the engine with WD40. I prefer modern cars!


***

I have a theory that almost every house in Great Britain has an image of an elephant in it somewhere. The elephants in this picture are on my mantelpiece. They’re made from a wood called ebony and they’re quite old. They only have one tusk left between the two of them.



People love elephants but, sadly, the world is running out of space for elephants to live in. In many parts of Africa elephants and people find it hard to get along together. People need land to grow food on to feed their families.



So, elephants are in danger. And the worst danger comes from ivory hunters, and from the people who buy the ivory. An ivory hunter will shoot an elephant and hack its tusks from its face, then leave the elephant’s body to rot. So please don’t ever buy ivory. As long as people keep buying it elephants will continue to die. You can learn more about African elephants at this website.

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When I started writing about dinosaurs there was a big argument going on among scientists about whether birds were really the same as dinosaurs. I thought it was a great idea that you could look out of your window and see real, live dinosaurs walking around, so I used that as a starting point for the story.





Scientists are always finding out new things about dinosaurs, so books about them very quickly become slightly out of date. Luckily, you can find out all the latest information by looking on the internet. The first link is to the dinosaur pages of London’s Natural History Museum...






...and this link is to the Paleontology pages (designed for young people!) at the American Museum of Natural History.



You can impress your teachers, parents and friends by learning lots of long words!

***

That’s me at the top, playing football with Tom in the back garden when he was about 5 years old.  I don’t do that any more, and Tommy May is a famous skateboarder now.  





Publishers used to think that boys who don’t like reading might like to read about football.  Eventually they realized that boys who like playing football don’t want to read about it - they want to play!





But if you are 6 years old and you want to know more about football and you want a book you can read on your own - this is it!

***

I was born in the year that Tenzing and Hillary climbed Mt Everest. Did I mention that somewhere else? I think maybe that’s why I like going to the tops of mountains so much, especially Scottish mountains.





When I write a book like this I like to do a lot of reading first. You can easily find some of the books I read in charity shops or secondhand book shops, and they don’t cost much either. The most useful of these to me was Man of Everest by Tenzing Norgay. The publishers wanted me to tell the story of the first ascent of Everest, or Chomolungma, as Tenzing would have called it, from the point of view of Tenzing. I thought it was wonderful that, as a small boy, Tenzing had seen the mountain in the distance and decided he wanted to climb it. I also liked the fact that he buried sweets on the top of the mountain as a gift to the goddess who lives there. She has an even longer name than the mountain - Miyolangsangma.


***

This book is all about Joshua Slocum, who built his own boat and then sailed around the world in it on his own. Rather surprisingly, he couldn’t swim. This caused him one or two problems.





I love swimming, but I only learnt to swim properly when I was in my forties. I think all teachers should be made to go and have lessons in something they’ve never done before in their spare time. It would help them to remember what it’s like for the children they teach.





The worst thing that happened to me when I was learning to swim was when the swimming teacher made me go in the deep end and try to tread water. “I don’t know how to,” I said, sinking gradually lower and lower as my feet thrashed away below me. "Yes, you do,” said the teacher.


But I didn’t.





Maybe Joshua Slocum tried to learn to swim from someone like that and just gave up trying.

***

When I was growing up in the 1960s everyone was fascinated by the space race.  It was Russia v USA to try and get the first man on the moon.  The USA won! On 21st July 1969 I sat in my front room and watched Neil Armstrong land on the moon on our black-and-white TV.





At the time I had a Saturday job as a gardener for some quite rich people who lived near me.  They were so rich that they still had servants and a gardener (and a gardener’s boy - that was me).  They also had a very old cook called Dorothy.  In fact, if you want to get a good idea of what this household was like, try reading one of the William books by Richmal Crompton.  It was just like William’s house.  Anyway, Dorothy was very old and quite mad.  She was absolutely certain that all those people walking around up there on the moon had made the weather go funny, and she went on about it all the time.





The funny thing is, in a way she was right, because all those millions of gallons of rocket fuel they burnt must have helped the greenhouse effect to happen!





If you want to find out more about space travel, try the NASA website.