My Symbolic Life

Yesterday, I had to go into hospital for an operation to repair an inguinal hernia. Today is one of the days my wife and I look after our grandchildren. My daughter emailed me to say that she had explained to two year old Noah that they wouldn't be going to grandma and grandpa's today because grandpa was poorly.

Naturally, Noah wanted to know why. With admirable matter-of-factness my daughter told him that my 'guts were coming out' and I 'needed an operation to put them back in again'. He replied, 'Oh, is that grandpa's hernia?' He had been hearing with interest about this hernia for some weeks. (He is completely fascinated by the workings of the human body.) When my daughter confirmed that this was indeed, the much-discussed hernia he wanted to know whether Grandma also had a hernia and was most disappointed to learn that she didn't.

I can clearly recall how I spent all of my childhood and young adult years in a furious battle to be seen as an individual, someone with his own distinct identity who would be taken seriously as a person. Now I find I am delighted to be regarded as part of a 'set', like one of a couple of senior dolls with matching repairable hernias.

For me, being a grandparent means existing in a state of barely-subdued ecstasy and not even being cut open with a knife and then used as an example in an Early Years biology lesson can diminish that.

There Is No Such Thing As An Ordinary House

One of my students asked whether she should describe the ordinary house in which her character lives. She could see that somewhere exotic like a fairy kingdom needed describing but the house in her story was more or less like her own childhood home and she was afraid to bore the readers with it.

Whenever I get a practical question like this, I try out the solution before offering it. It’s surprisingly easy to tell people to do something and then find you can’t do it yourself. So I looked around at my own house to see how easily it could be described.

It is some years since my children left home. In their absence the house became very neat, very tidy, very professional-looking. The walls were all painted in Farrow and Ball colours, a grandfather clock ticked comfortably in the dining room. There were flowers in a vase on the bureau.

Then the grandchildren arrived. Very soon there were crayon marks on all those white-with-a-hint-of-posh walls, hand prints on the windows, face-prints on the mirrors. Alcoves where reading lamps had stood were now stuffed with garishly-coloured plastic toys, wooden bricks poked out from under sofas. Children’s beakers littered the sink.

The house could very easily be described, I realised, though it would not necessarily make the kind of picture I had aspired to when I had imagined the calm waters occupied by those happy individuals whose children have reached maturity and are at last able to arrange their own affairs.

I stood in my living room recalling the way our youngest grandchild had repeatedly puked up her milk in her first few months and I knew exactly what I would tell my student – that every carpet has its own stains, that even the hieroglyphs that decorate the Egyptian pyramids do not have a richer story to tell than the crayon on the walls of my hallway, and that, however familiar it might seem to you, there is no such thing as an ordinary house.

Whispering To A Boy Who Imagines He Is Clever

Once upon a time, if I were at a party, someone might say, ‘So what do you do for a living?’ and I would say, ‘I’m a writer.’ They would look very interested and say, ‘Really? What sort of thing do you write?’ to which I would reply. ‘Children’s books.’ Whereupon they would immediately look disappointed and change the subject.

This reaction changed completely after the success of J K Rowling. Nowadays everyone always wants to know everything about the business and, above all, how they can get published. I am constantly coming into contact with people who are consumed by the desire to be a successful children’s writer.

What surprises me is how few of these people have actually read any children’s books since their own childhood. I’ve taught courses on writing for children only to find that ninety per cent of the students, who have usually paid substantial fees to be there, have scarcely read anything except the first Harry Potter title and one or two of the Narnia series. So what is going on here?

It seems to me that people are seduced by the glamour that has somehow attached itself to children’s writing. This is laughable since if you were to be a fly on the wall at a meeting of children’s writers you would witness a singularly unglamorous bunch of people. For the most part we aren’t young or sexy or well-dressed. We are people with holes in our sweaters, people in need of a decent haircut.

So where does this illusion of glamour come from? I think it arises from two sources: firstly, there is the glitter of wealth; secondly there is the mystery of creative fulfilment.

The notion that writing children’s books might be a way to get rich quick is, as anyone who knows anything about publishing will tell you, entirely ridiculous. The truth is that only a very small proportion of children’s writers even make a living out of their work.

The promise of creative fulfilment is a more substantial attraction and it’s undeniable that fulfilment is to be found in practising any art from. But you have to ask yourself this question: why children’s books? If you’re not already reading them then possibly that’s an indication you’re not really interested in this field - and you won’t get fulfilment from trying to succeed at something that doesn’t interest you.

I am a children’s writer because childhood is the place where I reside most naturally. I watch as the youngest of my grandchildren begins to learn to crawl. I see her rocking back and forth on her hands and knees, practising the movements that will soon allow her to move across the room and I find myself propelled back into my own childhood, recalling the way the paving stones rolled away before me as I sat in the push-chair.

Or I do some drawing with my older grandchildren and out of the corner of my eye I see the tall, shadowy figure of a nun standing over me, regarding my clumsy efforts with disdain. I know what she thinks of me. She thinks that I am a boy and, a such, an entirely undesirable object. Worse than that, I am a vain, talkative boy who imagines he is clever and does not listen to what he is told. This understanding renders the drawing that had pleased me so much a moment ago, nothing but a worthless scribble.

I want to reassure that boy. I want to tell him that one day this woman’s disdain will not matter so much; but even as I stand beside him and whisper, I know that he cannot hear me.

For me, therefore, writing is not primarily about money or about creative fulfilment. It is a story being told to a child who no longer exists.

Waiting For The Roar

Looking after my grandchildren is sharpening my understanding of story structure. The current craze around here is Hide And Seek. It works best when I hide and they seek because they’re terrible at hiding. Another adult has to help them find a hiding place but they can’t stay put in it for longer than a few seconds.

So most of the time they seek and I stand behind the door or crouch behind a chair. (I don't have to hide very well - they're not much good at seeking either.) Then I suddenly spring out and roar like a lion. This is the bit they love best. They know the roar is coming, they know I’ll be the one roaring but it still scares them silly.

It seems to me that the same principle is at work in that dependable genre of fiction, the thriller. It's just Hide And Seek for adults without actually having to get out of your seat. I’ve just finished reading Before I Go To Sleep by S J Watson and it’s as fine an example of spine-tingling story-telling as you could look for. The architecture of the plot depends on that old literary chestnut, amnesia. In this case a trauma has left the protagonist unable to form long term memories. So she wakes up every morning with no idea who the man in bed next to her is and has to learn her life story anew each day. But it’s more complicated than that, of course, because the life story she is being told is neither complete nor accurate.

It’s a terrific piece of writing, all the more impressive because it’s a debut. It always cheers me up when someone writes a novel that is beautifully crafted. It reminds me that stories are meant to be enjoyed not endured. I’m not saying I learnt anything new about myself from reading it, or about other people for that matter. It taught be nothing at all about the meaning of life. But it did keep me awake until the small hours desperate to find out what would happen next, waiting for the villain to spring from his hiding place and roar.

The Tug At My Finger

I have been in Ireland for a week, in North West Leitrim to be precise, in the house my father built on the land on which he grew up. It's a modern house standing on a hill and on a clear day commanding a view of three counties but it is dominated by the fallen stones of the old house further down the hill and the memories that they hold.

The leaves were turning and everywhere the countryside was coloured gold and umber. As usual at this time of year, flocks of fieldfares wheeled across the sky in search of berries, settling here and there on tall fir trees and chattering noisily among themselves before suddenly erupting again in ragged solidarity.

I spent much of my time watching the clouds marching across the sky in innumerable variations of grey tinged with cream, rose and purple. However, all the while I could feel a tug at the index finger of my right hand. Normally I spend two days a week looking after my grandchildren and it is this finger that the middle child takes hold of whenever he wants something. 'Come!' he commands with all the confidence of eighteen months. And I follow him to the toy chest or to the kitchen cupboard where the biscuits are kept.

I was supposed to be on holiday this week but instead I simply felt bereft. I kept imagining what my grandchildren might be doing. Would they wonder where I was this week? Or would they, in my absence, forget my existence entirely?

Outside the land was very wet. Trees dripped. Leaves clogged and mashed underfoot. The sound of running water was everywhere. I thought about the generations of people who had struggled to make a living from this boggy, stony ground and how unbelievably easy my life would seem to them by comparison. I doubt whether they would recognise anything I do as work.

But they would recognise the tug at my finger.

photo: Kenneth Allen

The Fallacy Of The Dedicated Agent

I have been up since three o'clock this morning looking after my very excited and slightly apprehensive grandson while his mother went, with her husband, to the hospital to have a baby. Consequently this blog post may not be my finest piece of prose. However, it is with immense pleasure that I can announce to the world the birth of my third grand child, and my first grand daughter. I know that medical experts will tell you that new born babies can't smile but I swear she smiled at me.

Now it is six thirty in the evening and in a little while a builder is going to knock at my door and I will have to talk coherently to him about the work that we want done on our house. Also, I see from my emails, which I've only just had a chance to glance at, that my Mexican publisher has been experiencing problems making payments to my account. Oh, and a portfolio of work has arrived from one of the students at the summer school I have been teaching for the last couple of months.

All of this perfectly illustrates one of the points I was trying to get across at that summer school. It's a publishing myth that I have called the fallacy of the dedicated agent and it goes like this: the publishing world is full of agents who are constantly on the lookout for exciting new manuscripts by promising new writers.

In fact, agents, being human beings with complicated lives, have a great many other things on their minds. They may be worrying about whether their daughter's labour will go well, or they may be rejoicing that it has. They may be trying to remember the key points they need to make clear to their builder, or they may be trying to get hold of their bank to find out why their money isn't appearing in their account. They may simply be wondering whether there is anything even vaguely edible in their kitchen that they might somehow be able to conjure into a meal tonight.

Whatever it is that is filling those agents' heads, it probably leaves very little space for all those manuscripts that keep arriving in their postbags. That is why, if you want to get their attention, you had better be good. You had better be very bloody good indeed.

Because if you're not then they are just going to sit at their desk with a silly expression on their face, gazing at a photo of their newest grandchild, thinking over and over again, 'Isn't she beautiful!'

No More Choo Choo Trains

One of my students isn't very keen on dialogue. She writes beautiful vignettes composed of crystalline imagery and carefully observed detail. But absolutely no dialogue. Since it's obvious that she already knows how to do this trick and since she's come to Cambridge to learn something new, I set her a writing assignment with the instruction to include a decent chunk of dialogue.

She comes to our next session with another beautifully turned vignette. 'Hmm,' I say, after we have read it aloud. 'Tell me, what do you like about this piece of writing?' She picks out a piece of carefully observed detail. 'Yes, I can see how pleasing that is,' I agree. 'And what do you think is missing?' She's not sure. 'What about dialogue?' She points to a few lines of dialogue. 'Let's look at these, shall we?' I write them up on the board. Then I remove all the he saids and she saids. 'Okay, now what is it?' I ask.

It's a poem.

That's how the week starts. It ends with me looking after my grandchildren who are one and two years old. One of our regular outings is to the railway station to watch the trains which they are both very enthusiastic about. Each time a train arrives in the station, or rushes through without stopping, the older of the two turns to me and demands, 'More choo choo trains!'

'There will be more choo choo trains,' I tell him. And for the present he is satisfied. But at last there comes a time when I have had enough of standing there watching my grandchildren watching the trains. 'Time to go home,' I announce. Faces fall. Enthusiasm turns sour. But we cannot stay there forever.

The truth is that there is always a time when you must say bye bye to the choo choo trains even if they are beautifully composed with carefully observed detail and crystalline imagery.

In The Swim Of Things

My wife loves me. Indeed, as one of my less charitable friends observed, 'she must do to put up with you'. Nevertheless she does not jump up and down on the spot, flapping her arms about as though she were trying to fly, at the mere sight of me. And let's be honest, it would be distinctly worrying if she did. But my grandson does.

You can't beat that for appreciation. It's the sort of thing that makes looking after him and his younger cousin two days a week so immensely rewarding. But it's also immensely tiring. And until recently I was working at Goldsmiths College two days a week and trying to finish off a novel at the same time. So I was stretched. The end of that novel tantalised me like a mirage in the desert.

But I'm happy to say that I've finished it, edited it and sent it off to my publisher. Consequently, I am no longer going around thinking about it night and day. I am a free man and I couldn't be happier. In fact, I feel like jumping up and down on the spot and flapping my arms about. I'm not going to, of course, because at my age you have to try to preserve some small modicum of dignity.

The other day I took my grandchildren to a local aquarium. The younger one, who is just over one year old, was not particularly impressed. To him, I suspect, everything is bizarre, fish no more so than anything else. He wandered from tank to tank giving each one a cursory examination until he discovered a chrome rubbish bin that absolutely fascinated him. But the older one, who is just over two, was beside himself with excitement. In fact, he did that jumping up and down thing all over again.

Which rather put paid to my fantasy about being the best grandfather in the universe. The truth is that I am as good as a load of fish. But I suppose that's not too bad, when you come to think about it. As good as a load of fish who have just finished a novel. Glug glug!