Samhain and the Space between the Worlds - Holly Race

When I was ten (a very, very long time ago), my parents took me for a ride on Midsummer's Eve. My pony, an ageing but sprightly, speckled creature called Cobweb, was my best friend and one of my favourite pastimes was making up adventures for us to go on.

On this Midsummer's Eve, my parents told me that the fairies had heard of how wonderful Cobweb was, and left a present for us. I just had to canter up this hill and keep a close eye on the ground. Far from the main road, canopied by oaks and birches, Barrington Hill was a magical place for me anyway, but never more so than at that moment. That evening, as Cobweb and I cantered up the path, I dutifully kept my eyes peeled for signs of fairies.

Was that gold dust on the ground, or just the sunlight playing through the leaves?

What's that up ahead, on the side of the path? A tree trunk... but what's on it?

I slowed Cobweb to a halt and stared at the trunk. On it, amidst flurries of gold dust, was a tiny, golden horseshoe. A fairy horseshoe.

I can see now that it's plastic, but at the time it felt like fairy gold!

The horseshoe lives in a book of memories about Cobweb, but the item itself isn't what's important. I still vividly remember the heat of the evening sun on my back, and the way it sent its shimmer through the trees so that I felt as though I was riding through haze. It was a Midsummer feeling - that feeling that true magic is not far away, if only we could lift the veil between the worlds.

In a few days time, Samhain will be upon us. Pronounced Sauw-en, it's an old Pagan festival marking the start of Winter, and traditionally it is one of the times when the barriers between our world and the 'otherworld' are at their thinnest. Over the centuries Samhain has been amalgamated into All Hallow's Eve, and then into Halloween. Our calendars are peppered with the ancient ruins of pagan festivities. Some, like Samhain, have been commercialised. Some have been picked apart and used to create new celebrations, like Ostara - now Easter. Some remain only as a feeling - a change of mood as the nights close in or grow longer - like Beltane, which marks the beginning of Summer.

In my book, Midnight's Twins, the knights' calendars are still governed by these old dates. Samhain has particular meaning for me now because it is the day when new knights - and my main characters - are called to the otherworld, Annwn. Samhain is the start of my story, and Beltane marks the end of the book.

But really, we all tell stories at these times of year, don't we, in our different ways? Maybe we go out looking for pumpkins, or read ghost stories under the covers. In Iceland, 'jolabokaflod' is the simply excellent tradition of gifting books on Christmas Eve, then reading them through the night. One of Shakespeare's most loved plays is set at Midsummer, when the fairies come to the woods outside Athens to wreak havoc with mortals.

Maybe we're still trying to make sense of the changing of the seasons, in the same way that the Greeks told the myth of Demeter, Persephone and Hades to explain the oncoming of Winter and the dying of the crops. We may on an intellectual level understand that the rotation of the earth relative to the sun is what causes the seasons. On a primal level, though, we still fall back on old stories and superstitions as the smell in the air changes and our moods shift.

Cobweb inspired so many of my stories, both as a child and an adult.

Or perhaps we truly are sensing the fragility of the fabric between the worlds, and the stories at these times of year are summoning ghosts from beyond the veil. For me, I'll keep chasing those fairy horses.

Polishing Buttercups by Paul May

Over the last couple of months I’ve developed an unexpected obsession with Enid Blyton.  I think it may have started when I read Alison Uttley’s private diaries, in which she recounts a meeting with Blyton in the fish shop in Beaconsfield.  These were two of the best-selling children’s authors of their day, and Blyton, of course, continues to be a best seller. She is the fourth most translated author in the world – the three ahead of her being - according to Wikipedia - Agatha Christie, Jules Verne and William Shakespeare. 

By a strange coincidence Blyton and Uttley lived just a couple of miles from each other in Beaconsfield, where, in another uncanny coincidence, I also lived for a few years as a teenager. What's more, while Blyton and Uttley were meeting in the fish shop, Terry Pratchett may well have been beavering away, 'getting an education' in Beaconsfield Public Library. The fish shop meeting was recorded in Uttley’s diary:

'I was watching a woman ogling [the fishmonger], her false teeth, her red lips, her head on one side as she gazed up close – suddenly he turned to me and introduced her, Enid Blyton! The Blyton photographed and boastful! When I asked her which books she wrote, she replied "Look in Smith’s window" and turned away, and never spoke again.'

There is more to this than meets the eye.  W H Smith in Beaconsfield refused to stock Uttley's books because, according to the manager, they didn't sell. (Her Little Grey Rabbit books sold well all over the rest of the world.)  Uttley took him to task without success.  It seems likely that Blyton knew this, which made her remark about looking in the window even more pointed. To make matters worse, while Blyton had been rejected by the BBC for more than thirty years, Uttley was a regular broadcaster. Asking Blyton 'which books she wrote,' was wonderfully catty of Uttley. 

They never spoke again. And yet they had a lot in common.  Both were great nature-lovers and very knowledgeable about the natural world. Both were acute businesswomen who had achieved financial independence through writing for children, and both had an interest in fairies.  I say 'had an interest in' because, while Alison Uttley believed in fairies, and Enid Blyton wrote endlessly about goblins, elves, gnomes, pixies and brownies, I’m not convinced Blyton actually believed in them herself. 

But in one respect there was a huge difference between the two women – their relationship with children and with childhood. Although, even here, there is an odd, inverted symmetry. It was an account of a disastrous encounter between Alison Uttley and an audience of schoolchildren that led me, first to Uttley's diaries, and then to Enid Blyton. 

Uttley didn’t really get on with children, or maids, or milkmen, but she did have an intense relationship with her only son (it involved a lot of kissing) that resulted in many problems with her eventual daughter-in-law.  Blyton, on the other hand, while sharing Uttley’s problem with maids, did get on with children.  Or rather, most children, for she didn't have a lot of time to spare for her two daughters.  

Blyton also knew what children liked to read, and she gave it to them.  Hodder, in 2016, was still selling half a million Famous Five books a year. But it wasn’t Blyton’s sales that so caught my interest; it was a line in Barbara Stoney’s biography describing the way a room full of small children fell silent when Enid Blyton sat down to tell them a story, and then sat enthralled for half an hour or more.

There are other accounts that confirm this talent, and the accounts identify the key to Enid Blyton’s success.  She was a storyteller, an oral storyteller.  Her voice is always there, addressing the reader as if they are sitting right in front of her. The effect was instantly recognizable to me. I spent many years teaching small children and I know that telling children a story has an effect on them completely different from that of reading a book. After I've told them a story someone almost always asks, 'Is that a true story?'  I don't think I've ever heard a child ask that question after hearing a story from a book.

In the introduction to 'Modern Teaching in the Infant School', which Blyton edited in 1932, she quotes this advice to storytellers:

'Those who first memorise the words work from without inward, while those who visualise, using the imagination, work from within outward. . . Visual memory goes back of words to the cause, to the mental pictures for which words stand. He who deals with imagery is free. If he forgets one word he can use another.  He can tell the story in the simplest way and language to a little child . . .'

This could be a description of Blyton's writing method, which, as I mentioned last month, consisted in her closing her eyes and seeing the scenes of a story acted out in front of her eyes as she wrote them down.  And I think this is why her stories are best enjoyed silently, privately, possibly beneath the blankets with a torch. That way nothing gets between the storyteller and her listener.

The voice in Blyton's stories is the voice of the primary school teacher, and it comes through even more clearly in her nature writing.  Here she is in 'Round the Year with Enid Blyton':

'You will feel very pleased when you can actually cut a bunch of flowers to put in your schoolroom, or to take to someone who is old or ill.'  Or: 'Is it a windy day? I do hope it is, because I am going to talk to you about the wind and its work . . .'

From 'Round the Year with Enid Blyton' originally
published as a series of columns in 'Teacher's World' in 1932

Many primary school teachers use a special voice for talking to children. I have seen newly-qualified teachers in their early twenties adopting a manner that seems to be based on Joyce Grenfell’s famous parody. Parody only works, of course, if it has a basis in truth.

I know that voice well. My mother was born in 1927, a year after Enid Blyton published 'A Teacher’s Treasury', a massive, three-volume compendium of source material for the Elementary School for which she wrote the vast majority of the songs, poems and stories. Blyton wrote prolifically for education in the twenties and thirties, and her stories and nature-study books were part of the scenery during my mum’s time at school. It’s not surprising that when she became a primary school teacher herself, the voice that she adopted was very similar to Enid Blyton’s.

Blyton has been heavily criticised and sneered at over the years, not least by the BBC, and she was clearly hurt by this.  More recently, following the publication of her daughter, Imogen’s memoir (1989), much was written about her private life, and a film, Enid (2009), portrayed her in a very negative way.  More balanced by far, and more interesting, was Anne Fine’s piece on BBC radio in 2008, with its account of her daughter’s surprising conversion to Blyton reader.

My exploration of Blyton’s educational writing took me to the Newsam Library at UCL where librarian, Nazlin Bhimani, had written a blog about Enid Blyton, Educationalist, describing the library's collection of Blyton material. Then I spent some time reading Blyton’s stories in 'A Teacher’s Treasury'. Most of these stories have simple morals.  Be tidy, kind, helpful etc.  Naughty children learn the error of their ways. Good children are rewarded. But one story, 'Peronel's Polish', was different.  

Peronel's job is polishing. He tries to impress the king, and when the king doesn't react as he hopes, Peronel starts playing tricks by polishing things to make them slippery. When everyone falls over after he has polished the ballroom floor, Peronel owns up in order to stop the king blaming the other servants. 

The king then offers Peronel an interesting choice.  He can stay in the palace and give up polishing, or he can be banished and take his magic polish with him.  For Peronel this is not a choice.  Polishing is all he knows how to do, so he takes his polish and goes out into the fields where he finds his true vocation, polishing the insides of buttercups.

Enid Blyton wrote this well before her first rejection by the BBC, but before she was twenty years old she had experienced hundreds of other rejections, including the most important of all when her father left the family home to set up with another woman. She then single-mindedly pursued her ambition to write. I'm sure she approves of Peronel and sympathises with his annoyance at not being properly appreciated. In most of her other stories a 'naughty' character tearfully promises never to do it again.  Not here. 

I was reading 'Round the Year with Enid Blyton' this morning.  'Do not forget that you can grow the seeds of wild flowers in pots too,' she tells her readers. 'A pot of sturdy, golden-yellow buttercups is a lovely sight!'

Buttercups on Maypole Green, Norfolk, 1985

Paul May's website is here.  He also has a blog about education, bicycles, trees and various other things called AS IN THE LONG AGO.

Wishing Chairs and Flying Bedrooms - Heather Dyer

 © John Atkinson Grimshaw

 

I suspect there’s a reason why fairies are found at the bottom of the garden: the bottom of the garden represents the limits of a child’s freedom. It is the furthest they can go from home without entering the big wide world – and it’s in this space between security and freedom that magic occurs.

Children have so little freedom. Freedom beckons, but is also frightening. Perhaps this is why I loved reading so much when I was a child. From the safety of an armchair in the front room or beneath the covers of my bed, I could escape safely.

When I was seven I loved books in which magical items transported children directly from the security of home into another world - stories like Enid Blyton’s The Wishing Chair, in which an old chair intermittently grew wings and carried the children off on fantastical adventures. There was also Nesbit’s Phoenix and the Carpet, in which an old rug turns out to be a magic carpet - and let’s not forget  that wonderful flying bed in Bedknobs and Broomsticks - or The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, in which an old wardrobe provides the portal to freedom.

Part of the excitement lay in the fact that the children never quite knew when their adventure might take place. Nesbitt’s children always had to wait until their parents were out – and Blyton’s children had to keep going down to the playroom to see if the chair had grown wings. The appeal also lay in the fact that there was always the risk of mishap - along with the assumption that the children would return home safely.

When my friend’s daughter Elinor told me about a dream in which her bedroom flew, I was delighted. What a wonderful symbol her unconscious had conjured up to grant her both security and freedom! She could go wherever she wanted without leaving the safety of her bedroom – and what’s more, she would have everything she needed with her: a raincoat, a book to read, a sunhat or a swimsuit …

So, inspired by Elinor’s dream, I wrote The Flying Bedroom, a series of short adventures in which Elinor’s bedroom takes her to faraway places including a tropical island (from which her bedroom nearly floats away), the theatre (where Elinor reluctantly takes centre stage), and even to the moon (where Elinor helps a man called Niall fix his rocket). I’m hoping that The Flying Bedroom will satisfy children’s longing for both security and freedom – the tension that never really goes away, no matter how old we are.

 The Flying Bedroom is released on May 15th by Firefly Press

 

You can find more information about Heather Dyer and her books at www.heatherdyer.co.uk

How it all started by Karen King

I came across this poem the other day, it has lots of memories for me as it's one I used to read with my dad. When Dad read this poem to us he often said that it reminded him to try and take time in the busy day to notice what was around him. To look at the clouds in the sky, to smell the flowers, to listen to the birds singing. Especially good advice for a writer.

My dad loved books and he instilled that love of books in me. We spent many Saturday afternoons browsing through the dusty shelves of a second-hand bookshop, where my brothers and I would be allowed to choose a book each - and sometimes two - to take home. Oh the delight of being surrounded by so many books, and the agony of deciding which one to choose.

I still remember some of them now. The book of ballet that told all the stories behind the ballets and inspired in me the desire to be a ballet dancer -  two or three ballet lessons where I constantly danced out of step soon put me off that idea. The travel books that inflamed my desire to see as many different countries as possible - a desire I still have today, the poetry books which we all used to take turns to read, the story books about magical wooden horses, vengeful leprechauns and fairies, flying carpets and naughty schoolgirls which inspired my love of reading and writing. That's where it all started, where the budding writer was born, in those backstreet second-hand bookshops with their creaking shelves of passed-on books. So I owe my love of reading and writing to my dad.

Unfortunately Dad died when he was 51, he never lived to see me become a writer but I'm sure he knows and I hope he now has time 'to stand and stare.'

What about you? What inspired your love of reading and writing?



Karen King writes all sorts of books,  her latest one is Get Writing: Children's Fiction, published by How To Books. Visit her website at www.karenking.net for more details.

If You Go to the Bluebell Woods Today, by Saviour Pirotta

last year's bluebells

I'd planned to give you all an update on how my first ebook is progressing but I had a little mishap at the gym yesterday, which took up all of my time to sort out.  So instead, here's a post from my own blog  which, I hope, will do just as well. 

I live close to  Hirst Wood where you can normally do a bluebell walk at this time of year. The bluebells are late this Spring, in Yorkshire at least so there's nothing for it but to seek the flowers in books and  stories. 

Bluebells have always figured large in European folklore and fairy tales.  Known by various names, including the fanciful witch’s thimble, one of their scientific moniker is Endymion non-scriptus.  In Greek Mythology, Endymion was a handsome shepherd or, in some versions of the myth, a hunter. Selene, the moon goddess fell hopelessly in love with him and begged Zeus to keep him young and asleep forever, so that she could admire him from the sky.  Zeus granted her wish, and Endymion fell into a deep sleep from which he never awoke.  In the past, bluebells were believed to be so intoxicating, their perfume made anyone who walked into a field of them fall asleep. Hence the connotation in the Latin name.

Endymion and Selene, by Victorian artist J. A. Grimshaw

The idea of bluebells sending people to sleep also pervades Native American folklore. In a popular fable, a hummingbird and a crane race each other, much like the hare and the tortoise in the renowned fable by Aesop. Hummingbird, being small and light on her wings, assumes she will win – so she stops for a rest in a patch of bluebells.  With unfortunate results!

Woods have always been considered enchanted places in the collective imagination. They are dark, mysterious realms which teem with unseen forces and magic beings. As bluebells grow mostly in the woods, they have been associated with fairies, and woodland creatures. In The Fairy Caravan, Beatrix Potter’s only chapter book, which is inspired by Celtic folktales, the author describes wild dwarfs called oakmen living in a forest full of bluebells.  In other European tales,  unwary travellers wander into clearings full of bluebells, often encountering fairies, or incurring their wrath.  Popular legend had it that blundering into a patch of bluebells broke the fairy spells hung on them to dry.  

The Bluebell Fairy – C. M. Barker

Fairies were believed to be summoned for midnight revelries by the pealing of bluebells.  But beware the hapless mortal who hears the sound. He will die by morning.  Unless, of course, the fairies had rung the bluebells to summon him. Which does happen a few times in fairytales.

In a German folktale, a goldsmith and a tailor travelling along a country road are lured into the woods by the enchanted sound of bluebells ringing in the breeze.  The music leads them to a group of dancing fairies, who ply them with treasure teach as well as teaching them the importance of not being greedy.

Some country folk considered growing bluebells in your own garden, or bringing a bunch of them indoors, incurred the ire of the fae folk. They would be dogged by bad luck.  Others thought clumps of bluebells outside the front door brought good luck, and tinkled to warn when unwanted visitors approached the front door.  Wearing a bracelet of fresh bluebells around your ankle, especially on the eve of Beltane, summoned the good fairies to protect you.

Such beliefs, of course, died a long time ago.  But the association between bluebells and fairies remains in folktales and literature.  Here is a sweet poem that I learnt as a child, and has endured the test of times:

THE BLUEBELL

BY Emily Bronte

The blue bell is the sweetest flower

That waves in summer air;

Its blossoms have the mightiest power

To soothe my spirit’s care.

ceramic tile by Victorian artist Walter Crane

Where did that walrus come from? - Anne Rooney

 Stories don't always do what you think they're going to do. At least, they don't always do what I think they're going to do.

Some writers construct detailed plans before they start writing, and they know exactly what's going to happen. It might change a bit as it goes along - maybe the superhero's cape turns out to be blue instead of green or something - but the essentials are mapped out and obedient. I doubt those writers ever find themselves stuck in a corner with a walrus in a tiara. And I can tell you, a walrus takes up a lot of space in a corner and it's not very comfortable here. If that walrus would just budge over a bit and give me space to write...

I met a nice editor at the London Book Fair (*waves to nice editor*). She asked me to write for her list. She wanted a story for 7-9-year-old girls.
 "I'm not writing about fairies," I said in my best Stroppy Author voice. "Or ponies, kittens, puppies or unicorns, and probably not mermaids either."
"OK," said the patient editor. "Whatever you like. But remember it's for girls. And not too scary."
 She added that last bit because she knew I'd spent the last twelve months cloistered with vampires.

Knowing what you aren't going to write is not quite as useful as knowing what you are going to write, but it seemed better than nothing. Typy typy, all going well... Until the second character to turn up  was a very stroppy Jamaican er, fairy.
"I don't believe in fairies," I said. "Out."
"I don't believe in authors. So?"

I tried to get rid of her, but she was having none of it. I put in a fairy-hating character to drive her out. She turned the fairy-hating character into a walrus. And that's where I am - bullied into a corner with a walrus in a tiara (that's from the fairy, too) by a stroppy fairy.

It's not that unusual. I mean, people get bullied in the workplace all the time. There are probably zoo keepers all over the place who are cornered by walrus and the like. And there are laws to protect us from workplace bullying, aren't there? Perhaps there is even a helpline. Anyone know the number? Because this walrus is getting a bit heavy.

Anne Rooney
aka Stroppy Author
Vampire Dawn