The Map That Came to Life by Paul May

I've always loved maps. W G Hoskins, who wrote a wonderful book entitled The Making of the English Landscape, sums it up very well:

'There are certain sheets of the one-inch Ordnance Survey maps which one can sit down and read like a book for an hour on end, with growing pleasure and imaginative excitement.'

Hoskins writes in some detail about one particular OS map that shows the area around the Wash. I have a 1934 edition of that map, so here's a small part of it. One of the notable features is a complete lack of contour lines. This part of England really is very flat. 

When I was still at school I travelled all over the UK by hitch-hiking. Just imagine! My mother dropped me off at the beginning of the summer holidays at Junction 6 of the M1. I was with my mate, Chris, and we thought we'd go and look at Wales. This was 1968 and our parents were quite happy for us to be travelling around the country in this way, with no particular destination in mind. We just had a Youth Hostel handbook and a road map. And it was the road map (without contour lines) that gave us the idea in the first place.

One of the things I love about maps is that they tell you enough, but not too much. Nowadays you can use Google maps and street view to see just about anywhere you want to go before you go there, which, for me, takes away half the fun of travelling. A road map tells you almost nothing about the countryside and the towns and cities you're about to see. You know there is a town, you can see rivers and the sea, but only a certain scarcity of roads indicates the presence of open moorland or mountains. For cycling, my favourite maps always used to be the Bartholomew's Half Inch series. The older versions of these were revised with the assistance of the Cyclists' Touring Club and they remained in production almost throughout the twentieth century, although from 1975 onwards they were rebranded and published at a scale of 1:100,000. Maps of the most popular areas were still in production until 1999.

Map owned by Mary Yellowlees CTC 1909

My very favourite Bartholomew's maps, of the ones that I own, were once the property of one Mary Yellowlees of the Cyclists Touring Club. The earliest of these is dated 1909 and shows the Fort William district. On these early maps the high ground was coloured in shades of brown, the darker the brown, the higher the mountain. Maps with brown bits on were always exciting to me, and the more brown the better. This map of Fort William is almost entirely brown, where it isn't blue for the lochs and the sea. I hope that Mary Yellowlees found all that brown as exciting as I did, and still do. Back in 1909 roads were not like they are today. The road through Glen Coe for example was graded in places 'indifferent' but 'passable'. And bicycles were still in their infancy. They had only settled into their modern form with a diamond frame and pneumatic tyres in the final decade of the previous century. Mary would probably have been riding a heavy bike (compared to modern ones) with no gears, or at most two or three. 

In the 1970s and 1980s I always used the Bartholomew National Series, the half-inch maps reprinted at the 1:100,000 scale. I have one here of Skye and Loch Torridon which has just about survived repeated soakings on the handlebars of my bike. The one problem with these maps was that the contours were at 50 metre intervals, so you could hit a fairly substantial hill without realising it was coming.  And of course maps never warn you about the weather. 

My much-soaked map of Skye and Torridon. The updated maps have
land over 900m coloured a kind of blue/grey. I prefer the old style.

I learnt about contour lines in geography lessons at school, but I could equally well have learnt about them from The Map That Came to Life. It's possible to view a PDF of this remarkable book online. When I first saw it a few years ago the thing that most struck me was how cleverly it integrated the drawings of landscape and the features on the map. The illustrator, Ronald Lampitt, had worked in RAF Intelligence during WW2, creating drawings for pilots and navigators from aerial photographs, and he put this skill to brilliant use in this book. The story, 'described by H J Deverson',  is straightforward: two children are staying with their uncle and aunt on their farm and after their uncle teaches them about the One Inch Ordnance Survey map and its symbols, they set off to walk into the nearby town. Each double-page spread contains text, a small section of map, and a detailed illustration of the area shown on the map. This may not be quite as good as taking a map and going out into the real world but it does a great job of, for example, showing how a small section of map represents a large area on the ground. We learn about many map symbols, and about contour lines, about footpaths and roads, canals and rivers. But there's another way in which this isn't the real world.

This book was published in 1948, just three years after the end of the war in Europe. As I was growing up in the 1950s there were still plenty of bomb sites in London and I can remember seeing barrage balloons flying. I doubted myself about this, but on checking I discovered that they were still used for training purposes until the end of the decade. The world of The Map That Came to Life shows no trace of war and, as others have noticed, this is an English landscape that probably never really existed. The roads in the book are beautifully signposted, so you'd never know that tens of thousands of signposts were removed during the war to avoid helping potential invaders, and many weren't put back for years, if at all. 

Very many children's books of this era were set in a world that never actually existed. Think of Enid Blyton or Richmal Crompton or even Arthur Ransome. William Brown's rambles through the woods and fields around Hadleigh could easily have happened in the world of The Map That Came to Life. It's a world where friendly farmers provide cake and glasses of milk, and friendly vergers show you round the parish church. But although it is an idealised and unreal world it has real similarities to the world I grew up in. I grew up just down the road from where Enid Blyton and Alison Uttley lived, and after all this time I find it hard to distinguish between my real memories and the memories of places and events I read about in books. I must have been very young when I read Alison Uttley's Sam Pig stories, but they remain incredibly vivid in my mind, perhaps because they are set in a countryside that was so familiar to me.

Fourteen years after they wrote The Map That Came to Life, in 1962, Deverson and Lampitt wrote a kind of follow-up called The Open Road. This book is a paean to the motor car, praising its ability to transport everyone through the open countryside. In the book, the same Uncle George  transports the same children on an adventure in a Hillman Minx convertible. They even travel in style up the brand-new M1 Motorway, the same bit of road where me and my friend, Chris, started our own adventure a few years later. It really was a different world.

If you want a copy of Reading the Carnegie, my illustrated compilation of posts about Carnegie winners, I have copies available. You can order them via my web page here. A PDF of the book is free.

Free-wheeling and Unfettered - Joan Lennon

Let me share with you some structures, made by a child, before the tidiness and homogeneity of the world's expectations have come in and said, NO! That's NOT how you do it! It won't be long before the flamboyance is lost and the complete and untrammelled ignoring of physics and general laws of architecture are suppressed.

I'm not dissing physics or the laws of architecture - I'm not an idiot! - I'm just celebrating imagination that is free-wheeling, unfettered and unselfconscious. (Apparently, my room is the one with the blue triangle and the view. I'm chuffed to be invited and will stay as long as it lasts.)

Sir Ken Robinson has insightful things to say about this kind of creativity in children and in human beings generally, which you can access on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/SirKenRobinson) or Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/sirkenrobinson/) and longer talks on Youtube.

And thank you to children for reminding us.

Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram

APRIL & NATIONAL POETRY WRITING MONTH by Penny Dolan

Today, April 1st, is the start of National Poetry Writing Month, which celebrates its twenty-fifth birthday this year. Hooray and well done!

Personally, I rather wish that the acronyms – NaPoWriMo or GloPoWriMo in the worldwide version, or even that Na/GloPoWriMo version - sounded more poetical. They remind me, spoken aloud, of a vocal exercise, good for ten repetitions as a warm up before giving a poetry performance. But that’s acronyms for you.


This year I feel a little bad, not about the daily writing prompt but because I have two boxes of poetry books in the hall, both on their way out of the door. They will be going to a nearby Oxfam shop or similar: one box is full of children’s poetry, while the other holds ‘grown-up’ poems. But now, both are sitting in the hall sulking, reminding me of that statistic that shows more people write poetry than read it, and silently asking me why I am getting rid of them now, eh? But I have read them, I have used them and now they need to go.


Several were really useful when I was part of a monthly Poetry Reading group, which had some great sessions. We met with the simple aim of reading other people’s poems, never our own. This meant that the group could also include friends and partners who simply enjoyed poetry. We began with a list of named poets, set one per month and used the four weeks to find out more about their life and work, both through books or online. Then we met, bringing our thoughts and favourite poems to share at the next meeting. Occasionally, we chose poems around a theme instead, bringing four or five poems to read aloud and share. I must say that hearing the lines that you’d read and knew inside your head suddenly voiced and out there in that shared room could be magical. Ah well, that was then - and the small group is now a memory: a social casualty of the Covid era. Moments of the past, as the boxes of books will soon be.


I still have a lot of poetry books and anthologies here: mostly old favourite poems and poets where the language or spirit spoke to me, or to the person I was at that time, and still does. Rather like favourite song lyrics, I suppose. Can't let go.

   

But as for today, the first of April, and that daily poetry challenge? Will it be a good idea for me or not? As soon as I have a ‘Hmm, this is me sort of writing a poem’ thought in my mind, the old poetry worries start muttering.

Some anxieties spring from the host of poetic forms and rhythms and structures out there. Can one work on a poem ‘seriously’ without all that in your skill-set? Hopefully, if you are familiar with poetry at some level, the patterns and shapes reveal themselves as you think and voice the seed of the poem over and over in your head. Or so I hope and trust.

At a practical level, the daily NaPoWriMo email, once you have signed up for it, can be a useful source of inspiration and information. Each day brings a new writing prompt, which often links to a suggested structure, so gradually the month becomes a reminder of the variety of poetic forms, both traditional and contemporary. 

Of course, the email can simply be dipped into for any interesting knowledge, letting the writer carry on with their own ideas for the day. With no obligation, no posting poems online and no need to become ‘part of the community’, unless that is what is wanted. The writer can choose.

However, there’s another anxiety that comes with poetry for me: a fear of exposure, of being too seen. Fiction is wonderful for giving the writer a disguise, a way of hide themselves behind the clothes and the characters and story. Poetry often feels closer to the maker, gives more obvious evidence of their moods and thoughts, and there's the uncertainty. What will happen if my work reveal ‘louder’ voices than I use in my everyday person? Will the bare-faced writing reveal moods and thoughts I’d rather keep secret? Bring on an unfamiliarly confident tone? Will I even know who I am a month of focused poetry-making? Thank heaven one’s work can be kept private. 

For now, the focus is on Day One . . .


Hope you have a good April and happy celebrations, with or without poetry.

Penny Dolan


ps. I felt I should end with something to honour the day, so here are some thoughts on a particularly annoying poetic form. Are you ready? Here goes . . .


Ain’t gonna do one
Can‘t make me write one
Really, who needs one
Over-worked trick?
Show me no poet ways,
Throw me no poet praise,
I ain’t gonna go for it, ain’t gonna stick, ain’t gonna do that A-
Crostic.

Away with the facts. Think of the story.

I’ve been struggling with the last third of a story, much of which takes place mainly in the Lake District. I knew the ending, on the Scottish border close to Gretna Green, but I could never work out how I could find enough story for my 12-year-old heroine as she walked there from Lake Windermere. 

I spent hours studying books of photos and Google Maps, measuring distances, calculating how far she could walk in a day and trying to mould my plot around all those distances. Trying to be as faithful to the landscape as possible, I kept asking myself what she could do in all those miles. I ended up covering pages and pages with her walking and looking for food and water and shelter. And it was BORING! Nothing happened. There was no drama!

Then one morning I realised that I was writing a story. My story. And since it’s set in the future, in a landscape destroyed by pollution, I’m not exactly constructing a documentary. So if I wanted to cut the distance from Lake Windermere to the Scottish border in half, I could. And add a castle where there isn’t one. Which I did. 

Once I’d done that, the ideas emerged and everything began to flow. I was able to get a decent storyline down with little trouble. 

And it all became fun again.

'Our Story': David Attenborough exhibition at the Natural History Museum - Sue Purkiss

I recently ventured out of Somerset to go up to London for a day - quite the adventure for me! All those people... The lure was a meeting-up with old friends, one from Essex and one from Brighton. One of us has problems with mobility, and can't walk or stand for too long - so we decided to opt for a sit-down experience: namely, the David Attenborough immersive exhibition at the Natural History Museum. It's called Our Story.

I don't know if you've been to one of these immersive exhibitions. I had, to the Van Gogh one, so I knew roughly what to expect. A large space is lined with boards/screens, on which are projected a series of moving images. The audience sits in the middle, while the 'story' plays out all around them. There's also, importantly, a soundscape - so you are, indeed, immersed in the experience. I would dearly love to know how these things are put together, how they work: I have no idea, so to me it all seems quite magical.

I've been to the Natural History Museum many times before. But it really struck me this time what an extraordinary building it is. It's huge, for one thing. But - the detail of it! It's composed of differently coloured bricks, inside and out. This is practical as well as ornate - you don't have to repaint every few years. But the thought that must have gone into designing the patterns and the shapes - the arches, the cornices, the windows - everything - and the references to the purpose of the building: the carvings of animals, birds, everything to do with the natural world. And now it's all set off by planting which references the botanical history of life on earth - so clever!

The museum was last year the most popular visitor attraction in Britain, with over seven million visitors. It's certainly buzzing, and busy. But the Attenborough exhibition is a welcome haven of peace and quietness - only a few people are allowed in at a time. It starts with darkness. Then gradually things start to happen. Points of light expand and coalesce: stars and planets are born. Then, tiny at first, something new appears: a blue planet, wreathed in trails of white cloud, serene and beautiful. And there we are. The whole thing only lasts for about 45 minutes, so of necessity it's a rather hasty gallop through the history of the planet. But it's enough to showcase the extraordinariness, the sheer improbability of what we have - and what, at the moment, we seem hell-bent on destroying: some of us, of course, more than others. I was particularly drawn to an image of the handprints found in caves in France and Spain: I have seen some of these for real, and as I gazed at them in a cave in the south-west of France, I felt a tangible sense of connection - quite spine-tingling - with the individuals who were moved to make these marks, to leave these messages, thousands and thousands of years ago. ( Back to the exhibition - one thing surprised me: the dinosaurs didn't appear. Something stirred in a primeval forest, and we all watched with bated breath - but it was a gorilla, not a diplodocus. I couldn't help but feel that this was a missed opportunity: children, in particular, are fascinated by dinosaurs.)

At the end, Sir David appeared, and spoke, quietly but clearly, of the threats facing Earth. This was well done. He didn't sugarcoat the dangers. But he ended with a message of hope - that we are the ones who've messed up, but we are also the ones with capacity to put the brakes on and find solutions. We can only hope he's right. 

Sorry - this is not a very good picture of the outside of the museum, but it's the only one I took.

The red planet

Home

Handprints - greetings across the ages

The human race marches on.

Dear Diary - by Rowena House

It’s been full-on for the past week as I try my hardest to meet an academic deadline to get the development edit into my PhD supervisors by Easter, plus Draft 1 of a B-plot which, after five years of working on this one story, came to me last year.

My back can’t take much more sitting down, so here’s a selection of recent morning musings on my Facebook live diary about writing the seventeenth century witch trial work-in-progress.

Happy Spring Equinox to anyone else who’s always surprised when it’s not on the 21st.

March 20th. 05.58 approx. Today I'll attempt to pull together ideas for an All is Lost chapter for Tom's plotline out of the mess of multiple chapters I left as dross in Draft 1, with the new thoughts informed by my new fear that the Draft 1 ending is wrong. Not totally wrong. The basic idea is salvageable, I think, but it needs to be more nuanced if it's to be plausible. I'd like to type it, but I think that's just the urge to get it done. Rushing this won't solve the problem. My March ABBA post is due tomorrow so maybe I can think this problem through 'on paper' for that. Not yet six am.

March 19th. 06.58. A day of life jobs. I'll go back to Alys if I get a moment. Then I should write an ABBA post. Hmm. Not ideal if I'm still even vaguely thinking I might make the Mar 31 deadline, though the request was 'by Easter', so, what if I say Tom's development edit & Alys's Draft 1 will be done & dovetailed by the close of Easter Monday? Doable? Pic: yesterday's dog walk. Twas lovely. 

March 18th. 06.05. Woken to a desire to put the work-in-progress aside after yesterday's dismal discovery of yet more major revision being needed. After three months plus of solid concentration it felt like a kick in the teeth to find I'd left chapter after chapter essentially at the Draft Zero stage of meandering half-discovery with a veneer of nice writing that utterly fails to tell a story. I should have flagged it up as needing wholesale rethinking. Surely, I knew it did. That's the end-March deadline blown.

March 17th. 06.31. Waking up to a big question. Is this 'a' development edit or 'the' development edit? Unfortunately, the answer isn't the one I want it to be, nor the one my PhD timetable expects it to be. By definition, if I'm still writing Draft 1 for Alys (or horror of horrors, Draft Zero, fumbling more or less blindly towards her story) then this cannot be 'the' development edit, and whatever I deliver to my PhD supervisors will be preliminary.

Is that conclusion an opportunity to break free from the self-imposed pressure to get it 'right' right now or a threat of more (endless) procrastinating because I don't have a deadline? Is craft a strength (let's get this done) or a weakness (let's package Alys & Tom's stories into industrial-shaped containers)? I guess the answer is personal. The deadline is hugely motivating, but I am fumbling in the dark for the dovetailed ending, hoping my storytelling instincts are good enough. With The Goose Road the denouement was the thing that my editor said she bought the manuscript for. That's a truism for any book: it's only as good as its ending.

So, a lot to play for but how do I play it? Plough on or step back & plot? In other words, what have I learnt about myself as a writer since starting out seriously to write fiction in 2007?

March 16th. 06.55. NB, I need a table charting Tom's shifting opinion of the trials from brilliant examples of justice to fiascos by the time he meets Beth, and ultimately to examples of injustice by the end. I probably need to add an explicit statement about each change of heart to keep myself & the reader aligned with this arc [so that the Act 3 deviation between his beliefs and what he's writing is clearly shown, rather than the reader needing to be told].

NB 2, identify the exact point Tom's story enters its Act 3. There will be opportunities as well as constraints from Alys's story taking some of the weight of the James denouement. Keep an open mind where Tom act break might be [e.g. this chapter you're working on!!!] [NB it wasn’t. All is Lost & the Dark Night of the Soul chapters are still to come.]

NB 3. Don't get frustrated. Tom's story has changed a lot because of the introduction of Alys's plot. Don't expect it to be simple to dovetail the two.

Re the development edit in general, it's interesting that I remembered the current London sequence as being aligned with the Draft 1 denouement, but yesterday I found a whole chapter that make absolutely no sense. From memory, I'd layered into this chapter Tom's evolving thought process about the past, having not known what it needed to be in Draft Zero, the very first full draft in which I was working out what the story might be.

Basically, the story was more evolved in my head than on the page.

I'll have to be meticulous about expunging this old story DNA from the development edit lest it damages the beast that is 'becoming' on the page. It will almost certainly take a fast read through of a printed version to see if I have made this arc clear. But that will have to wait till after I've dropped this version into the PhD system.

Re writing in general, this story needed to be edited at speed to establish coherence. Hopefully, being forced to draft Alys's story at speed will limit its incoherence. Overall lesson about discovering a stream-of-poo when you thought you were almost 'there'? Don't be fooled into thinking any of this is easy.



Rowena House Author on Facebook.

Forget the news and think about sheds - by Lu Hersey

  Last night I dreamt an old journalist friend called me: Lu, did you know you're in the Epstein files?

No way!

Yes! Five times!

Don't be stupid.

Seriously, it's OK. If you're not in there, you probably don't exist.

I laughed myself awake. I've obviously been spending far too time obsessing about the news, which as we know is currently dominated by wars, genocide, sleaze, looming eco disaster and power-mad billionaires. It's difficult not to fall into a despondent, powerless slump just thinking about it. And now it was creeping into my dreams.

It was time to start concentrating on something positive instead. My campaign to bring down Elon Musk single handed on X wasn't going well, and the platform is full of hate and Nigel Farage, Time to stop going down that rabbit hole and write something new. (The essential first step on the road to getting something published.)

Which means this week I have mostly been thinking about writing sheds, on the basis it's nice to have somewhere to write. Who doesn't love a shed? Some of my favourite writers have enviable writing sheds and like every other shedless writer, I covet one. So what kind of writing shed to choose? A new rabbit hole opened before me as I created an entire Pinterest board devoted to the subject. I'll share a few with you here, so you understand the complexity of choice...

I really like this one. It has a face, and lets a lot of light in. Also I think it's by the sea, which would be nice

This one has a lovely aethetic but is also probably full of spiders. Good for horror writers.

This looks practical  - and I like the colour.

Good for hobbit fan fiction

Love this but would probably spend too much time staring out at the forest. Also, you'd need a forest to put it in.

Incredibly practical for any writer - and comes with its own outside bench for thinking

Peril at sea adventure stories? At least you wouldn't get interrupted much. Except possibly by passing whales

Definitely one for the fantasy writer

Nice design for those who like to cater for an unexpected turn of events

For those of us yearning to write romantic fiction

Great for the cosy crime writer

Here you could definitely write Great Expectations - if someone hadn't already written it 

Perfect for anyone planning train-based detective fiction. Or maybe another sequel to Thomas the Tank Engine

 One for me, and one for all of you. Perfect. 

You get the idea...

Just one problem. I couldn't fit even the tiniest shed in my tiny garden, so it's back to writing on the kitchen table. Though perhaps a little look at Rightmove first... Oooo!

Turns out I'm only £2 million short of being able to buy an entire Scottish island...

Lu Hersey

https://www.lu-hersey.com/