AS IN THE LONG AGO

  Jacket by Jim Russell Jan Mark's first novel,  Thunder and Lightnings , was published in 1976 and won the Carnegie Medal in 1977. It is, for several reasons, one of my favourite children's books. It's not perfect—Jan's scorn for certain idiocies of the English education system occasionally bursts out a little too obviously—but it is a condensed, often funny, and quietly moving study of an encounter between two boys from very different backgrounds: Andrew the child of middle-class, educated professionals, an incomer to the Norfolk countryside, and Victor,   a Norfolk farm-worker's son. I lived in the Norfolk countryside for forty years, and my mother lives there still. In fact, until recently she had her hair done every week in Coltishall, the village that gives its name to RAF Coltishall where the Lightning aircraft in the story are based. Generations of my mother's family come from Norfolk and I am still amazed that after such short acquaintance Jan Mark got ...

My daughter's paperback copy of HANDLES, nicely battered. It was because of Jan Mark that I became a children’s author. I didn’t realise it at the time but now, looking back thirty years, I can see that it is true. HANDLES won the Carnegie medal in 1983. Jan had already won the Carnegie in 1977 with THUNDER AND LIGHTNINGS. These two books, along with a third, UNDER THE AUTUMN GARDEN (which was highly commended for the Carnegie) were set in the Norfolk countryside. I had lived in that Norfolk countryside for a dozen years by the time HANDLES was published, and I had known Norwich since childhood. But I had never seen anyone manage to recreate the Norfolk experience so vividly in print.  Norfolk dialect is notoriously hard for any actor to reproduce on stage or screen if they are not a native, and equally hard to put into words. Jan Mark managed it, and in HANDLES she took it to a new level.  I knew the people, too. Erica’s aunt, uncle and ...