Members' News March

 No news to report for March. Wishing safe and happy travels to everyone doing school visits or going to the London Book Fair. If you have any news you'd like publicised in April, please send it to Claire Fayers.

Teaching and Learning by Paul May

I've been dreaming a lot lately about teaching. I don't know why, because It's more than ten years since I was last in a classroom, and the children I dreamed about last night were in a class way back in the 1980s. I taught in primary schools for about 30 years in the end, despite the fact that I never enjoyed school myself as a child. And, probably because I didn't enjoy school, I've spent most of the rest of my life teaching myself to do various things. 

When I started making jewellery, a friend showed me how to solder silver, and after that I was on my own. I bought a book the friend recommended, Metalwork and Enamelling by Herbert Maryon, and that book became my bible. I taught myself to make chains and rings, to set stones and forge shapes and eventually made a precarious kind of living from doing it. I can see now that I would probably have been a far better silversmith if I'd signed up for a course and learned in a more systematic way. Who knows? I might have become rich and successful and never become a teacher or a writer.

I taught myself to play the guitar and the banjo, too. That was the way most people did it with those instruments back then. It was kind of a rebellion against the kind of music you were taught at school and against the way most people learnt to play the piano. I still kind of hate the idea that schools today often teach rock music. Half the fun was doing something teachers hated. So, as with the jewellery making, a friend showed me how to play a chord on the guitar (A minor, probably) and then we'd just strum the chords and make stuff up. I've had the odd lesson along the way since then, but if I want to learn new stuff I mainly learn it from books or people I'm playing with or, these days, from YouTube.

What else have I taught myself to do? Well, there's plumbing, car maintenance, carpentry, house painting, gardening, bicycle maintenance and, oh yes, writing books for children. Of course, my education extended beyond school. I spent three years studying English Literature, which may or may not have helped with the children's writing. I used to say that spending years reading long and often difficult novels gave me a taste for fast-paced thrillers and children's books, but the truth is that I went to university to get away from home and studying was a very minor part of my time there. 

After university I spent a couple of years travelling around the UK on a bicycle, and then working on farms before I decided to do a PGCE in primary education. Back then the PGCE included courses in the sociology, psychology and history of education. Among other things, we were expected to read Rousseau, Freud and Ivan Illich. Illich's book, Deschooling Society, was published in 1971 and was highly critical of institutionalised state education. It wasn't just critical, though. Illich proposed solutions. He suggested that networks might be developed whereby individuals might use the telephone to find teachers, and that they'd be able to seek out teachers who could teach them just what they needed to know, and with whom they were in sympathy. In those days, before the Internet existed, Ivan Illich was imagining YouTube.

I thought Illich was right about the pernicious effects of state education but, at the same time, it seemed as if English primary education at least was doing a decent job. My friend, Derek, who was a GP, told me he'd become a GP because general practice was said to be 'the last refuge of the English eccentric.' I felt a bit that way about the world of primary education. I even thought we'd be able to survive the National Curriculum when it arrived in the late 1980s, but I was wrong. Luckily, YouTube and the Internet arrived just at the right time, especially for confirmed self-educators like me.

Now, before I proceed to give instances of the wonders of online education I'd better tell you what my local bike shop owner said about YouTube. 'It's been great for business,' he told me. 'People watch a video and think, I can do that. So they take the thing to bits and then can't get it back together again. That's when they come to me' What this tells you is that it's essential, if you're going to teach yourself to do something, whether with the help of the Internet or with the help of books, that you learn to follow instructions carefully. Actually, that's true of any situation where someone's trying to teach you something. But, having said that, I use YouTube to do all kinds of jobs on my bike, to learn new things on the guitar, to solve plumbing problems, to fix a variety of different broken household items, to sew neat seams, to grow new crops on the allotment, to cook . . .

Nowadays I could even use YouTube to find valuable advice on how to write books for children. I just checked and there's plenty there. But I never asked anyone's advice about writing children's books. It was another one of those things that I taught myself to do. The only writing experience I had was writing essays at school and university, and keeping a sporadic diary. As I was thinking about this I remembered that when I was at university I used to ignore the essay titles I was given and make up my own. Unfortunately, this gave me some problems when I came to do my Finals, but it does indicate that I was always determined to do things my own way.

I figured that I'd read a lot of children's books and I knew what I liked, so therefore I should be able to write one myself. It was a slow process. Maybe here too I could have cut some corners, and saved a lot of paper, by doing some kind of a course, but I don't think so.  I think the years of writing and throwing away were a crucial part of the learning process. And I also know that in everything I do I'm an improvising, trial-and-error kind of a person. (I don't like the modern version - trial-and-experience. The errors are essential.) My approach wouldn't work for everyone, but it worked for me. I might have gone on a course and not got on with the teacher, after all. It might have been like my swimming lessons.

When I was 40 I decided I ought to learn to swim, so I signed up for adult classes at the local pool. The instructor walked up and down the side of the pool calling out things like 'two widths of front crawl leg kick.' Then, while we did it, he called out, 'Well done, well done!' There was nothing more to his teaching than that. The experience peaked when he decided one week that we should all get in the deep end and tread water. I said I hadn't done that before, but he ignored me. He looked on, calling out, 'Well done! Well done!' as I slowly sank.

After that I bought a book of swim tickets, found a time when there weren't many people in the pool, and taught myself to swim.

There are good teachers in the world, of course. I was taught to drive by Lawrence 'Max' Bygraves, my next-door-neighbour's cousin. He had long, straggly hair and glasses, drove school buses morning and evening, and spent the days teaching people like me to drive. He was very calm, very patient, and very surprised when I passed my test first time. 

What the no-longer-small boy said - Joan Lennon

I'm looked back a lot lately, reconsidering my writing life. Twelve years ago, this happened:

'The author was packing up after a boisterous session with 5 classes of 8-9 year-olds in a large, echoy gym.  She became aware that someone was quietly trying to get her attention.

It was a small boy.

The boy was bespectacled, goopy-looking, earnest. A boy who did not now, nor probably ever would, find the world his oyster. The author looked at him. It was like looking at a small boy version of her own small self.

The boy looked at the author, as the noise of the dispersing classes swirled around them.  "I keep your books in a box under my bed," he said.  "And when I can't sleep in the night I take one out and read it." 

The author babbled.  She thanked the small boy for saying such a lovely thing and that he couldn't have said anything nicer to her.  Ever. 

"That's all right," said the small boy, and walked away.

The author knows that she cannot go round schools and libraries and festivals saying, "Hello!  I'm an author and I'd like to live under your bed."  But in her heart, she thinks it would be the nicest thing.  Ever.'

What the small boy said to the author - 20 May, 2014

He's 20 now, that small boy. He'll have forgotten that day years ago. But I haven't. Thank you, no-longer-small boy, for letting me be for even a moment a part of your life, and I'm wishing you all the luck in the world.

Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram

WORD POWER by Penny Dolan

Today is the first day of Spring, which always feel hopeful. The crocus are already out, and the other spring bulbs are appearing in the tubs and pots in the garden, though I’m not sure what or which they are, and winter has destroyed any labels. The leaves will soon tell tell me which will be bright blue grape hyacinth and which will be King Alfred’s golden trumpets. As long as I am not too distracted.

For - lo! - a new distraction has come to my devices. I can now almost ignore Facebook, with its images and variable information. I can, on Instagram, skip through favourite people’s posts, while Threads and Bluesky were quick pop-in visits. All, mostly, under control.

However, Substack has now appeared on my screens and it is a far worse temptation. Why? Because Substack is made of words, and words have power. Their hypnotic symbols offer such a range of thoughts, ideas, facts, interest, emotions. Words can have the power to simply say anything and everything. When words appear, it’s impossible for me to ignore them!

I began as an early reader. My eyes spied out words everywhere, scouring that familiar litany of domestic texts: the HP sauce bottle, the Weetabix box, the News of the World headlines, the cover of Womans’ Realm, the envelopes on the sideboard, a rare batch of comics from my cousin, and so on. A whole circus of interesting mass communication surrounded me. And, there was school too.

However, along the way I learned there were two kinds of reading. The everyday words around me were Lesser Reading, and, according to home and school, there was Better Reading: real reading, the words set out on a page. Real reading came from books and was definitely more important, and if this kind of reading was good, and if I was reading, I was being good.

So, for a while, the words on the page – any page – gave me permission to escape from the rages and silences going on above my head. Reading was a protection; the words on the page became a security blanket. Nothing bad could happen to you when you were doing something so enjoyable and also so intrinsically good and socially valued – and quiet! - as reading, could it?

All this was a lie, of course, but by then the child was wired to read. I was, and am, drawn to words, totally fixed in the habit and power of print and the printed page. I can't not read a word.

In many ways, this is fine: reading is good and wonderful. The reading process is fascinating from all sides and angles, and a thing of emotion too. I, like others, rage at the lack of understanding within the latest KS2 English tests, at the Govoid curriculum. I am delighted by children responding to a particularly lovely phrase in a picture book read out during Library Storytimes. Reading is never neutral.

Besides, what about the magic way that words work within the brain itself? In bed, here, each morning, we do a pen-and-page puzzle from The Guardian Quick Crossword book. A simple, non-cryptic and often witty one, not a big puzzle from the Times or Telegraph. 

However, I have noticed, in my fresh-from-sleep state, that somehow, the slightest, smallest pattern of the word – the one or two letter symbols visible, their position in the arrangement of the empty ‘boxes’ – often gives me the answer before my bigger brain has grasped it. I find myself saying the word almost before I can think it.

How amazing – in a totally non-personal way – is that? I’m not describing this moment to be all ‘special me’, but in astonishment at the way the alphabet pulls off this trick in our human brains. Reading is a miracle - and this is before we even get to the myriads of meaning, the cultural patterns, the history of the language, the pleasure of fonts and so on. Words are truly magical, irresistible, enticing things, with power for good, and for its opposite, and all between . . .

So back to the start of my post, and my problem: Substack, this orange-label-thingy, is appearing on my screens and the medium is almost nothing but Words and Writing! Pages and pages of words, and often so brilliant!

Remember, a small voice reminds me, words are for reading and reading is good, right? Words are an opportunity not to be missed, right? ‘Real reading’ words too, like pages full of interesting writing by people doing interesting things, brought by algorithmic power.

Just read this, says Substack. What about this person? You remember they used to write for this or that newspaper? Wouldn’t you like to read so and so’s expert and experienced viewpoint? To learn something quickly? Ah, you will, go on, you will, you will . . .

Substack. All of it wrought in words, words, more words. And words are good things, aren’t they? Especially that word I need to remember . . .

Which one? Ah, got it. Willpower! Yes, that’s the one. Good luck with it yourself!


Penny Dolan.

A Beginning

I've been working on a new story these last few weeks - years, actually, with all sorts of gaps and delays for all sorts of reasons. But the end is coming into sight. And since the writing takes up nearly all my concentration at the moment, I thought I'd offer the first chapter here rather than try to come up with some thoughts about writing in general. 

1 The White Wood

Before most of the characters in this story were born, a tree began to die in the north of England. Nobody noticed at first, because it was just one tree in a forest full of trees. But then a second one died. And a third. Only when all the leaves on all the forest’s trees had turned white and the branches and trunks had stiffened and dried into dusty husks did anyone pay attention.

But by then it was too late.

The whiteness spread. Nothing was immune. Grass, flowers and crops withered. Water turned the colour of milk and grew sluggish and oily. Cows, sheep and horses - all the animals we see each day in the fields around us – were led away to safer pastures. 

The land kept dying.

Villagers left villages. Towns were deserted. The roads and trains filled up with refugees heading north to Scotland and south to Wales and the rest of England. Many people fled the country altogether. So many that France blew up its entrance to the Channel Tunnel, to stop the migration and the threat of possible infection.

That wasn’t the only border.

Scotland built a new Hadrian’s Wall. A line of towers stretching from Port Carlisle on the west to Whitley Bay on the east. Between the towers came posts. Between the posts, a wall of electricity that incinerated anything – seed, leaf, speck of dust or animal – that tried to pass through it. 

England matched it with The Strip. From Liverpool to the Humber, the land was bulldozed, flattened and covered in a two-mile wide band of asphalt that smothered everything in its path. A fleet of drones patrolled both edges and destroyed anything living that tried to cross it. 

By the time all this was done though, the White Wood – it had a name now – had stopped growing. Nobody knew why. Nobody could explain. All they knew was that it was no longer spreading. But the borders stayed. And the land the wood had swallowed stayed white, choked and dead.

Two impassable borders on either side of a deserted landscape. A landscape with a core of dead whiteness in which nothing lived.

Or so people thought.

An Ordinary War 2

 One of the intriguing - and delightful - things about doing research, particularly, perhaps, when you're doing it, as I do, in a fairly haphazard way, is that often, serendipity steps in and points the way forward. 

I explained in last month's post what decided me to write An Ordinary War, and how I began to do the research at the Imperial War Museum and at the National Records Office at Kew. Now something happened which could not have been foreseen or planned, but which turned out to be enormously helpful. My son had a new partner - and she was Polish! Hitherto I had known very little about Poland and its turbulent history, but now I had a personal reason as well as a research-related reason to get to know much more. I talked to Richard and Joanna about what I had found out so far - including the location of the two main prison camps Dad had been in. Gradually the idea emerged that I would meet them in Warsaw and we would go in search of the camps at Thorn/Torun and Marienburg/Malbork. (Dad knew the camps by their German names: it's a feature of Polish history that the land changed hands over the centuries, and so place names changed too.)

The staion at Torun

It was in the summer, and it was a hot train journey from Warsaw to Torun. But, I reminded myself, Dad's train journey into captivity from Trier to Torun would have been infinitely more uncomfortable: he would have been in an overcrowded cattle truck, and he would have been utterly exhausted from lack of food on the long march across France to Trier. He wouldn't have known where he was going, or what was coming.

I thought the station at Torun probably hadn't changed all that much since 1940. (This was about seventeen years ago: it may well look different now.) I knew that the prison camp was not purely a purpose-built camp: some sections of it were based on old forts built during the Franco-Prussian war, many years earlier. I had a map of these forts which I'd printed off from the internet. As we left the station, I could see an old wall, which I thought was probably part of these same fortifications.

Looking over the rooves of Torun

Torun is a beautiful town, with copper-coloured rooves, built beside broad waters of the River Vistula. It's famous for being the birthplace of Copernicus, and for its delicious gingerbread. As we sat that evening enjoying a drink outside a cafe, it struck me that Dad would probably have seen very little of the actual town: I knew that from the station, the prisoners were marched across the bridge to the camp on the other side of the river. 

The next day, we set off in search of the camp. There was no mention of it anywhere: even today, if you look Torun up, you are unlikely to find any mention of it. We were at a bit of a loss - but then serendidpity stepped in again. Joanna suggested taking a taxi - and the driver turned out to know all about the camp and its different locations, because his father had been imprisoned there, as many Poles had been. Different forts were used for different nationalities. He showed us where the hutted camp had been. There was nothing there now. We looked across a barbed wire fence - not, I think, the original one - at the plain which rolled out as far as the eye could see. I imagined the winter winds driving across it straight from Siberia, finding their way through the gaps in the wooden huts.

And then he took us to what looked like an old quarry. He said when he was a boy, he and his friends used to play here. We pushed open the tall metal gates - and there was the brick-built fort which I had read about in contemporary accounts: the place where Dad and many others had been imprisoned for part of the time. The place, surrounded by high banks, was dark and dreary. But at least there were trees there, and birds.

My son on the bridge over the moat surrounding the old fort, which his grandfather once marched across.

Torun and all we saw there made a great impression on me, and much of it found its way into the book. It was very moving to walk, at least partly, in the footsteps not just of Dad, but of all those other young men caught by the war, and to imagine something of the bewilderment and fear they must have felt.

We had intended to go on to Malbork, known to Dad as Marienburg. But our time was limited, and in the end we decided to head in the opposite direction, right down to Lublin in the south-west, where my small grandson was staying with his other grandparents. Lublin too has its camp, which I also went to see. But this was Majdanek, a concentration camp, and its story is far darker, and one for another day. Unlike the one at Torun, this camp has not been forgotten. And nor should it ever be. 

On dinosaurs and castles - Rowena House

 

Joan Lennon’s February post [link below] gave me a lot of comfort.

For a dinosaur like me, raised on traditional books – and still forlornly wedded to outdated notions about traditional publishing – it’s clear from commentaries such as hers that self-publishing is a rational and respectable choice for authors of repute and a solid backlist, and thus for someone like me with just one novel and a short story out there, it would be no shame at all. 

Thank you, Joan. Your post got me out of bed this morning.

That sense of relief follows two bruising encounters with reality this past month, both of which occurred during a research trip to locations where my seventeenth century witch trial work-in-progress is set. 

 

Touching the stones that imprisoned the people I’m writing about is depressing. I’ve been to Lancaster Castle three times now, and it is both extraordinarily useful inspiration but also a sobering reminder that real people suffered real horror there.

I’m co-opting their lives for my fiction in the hope that my serious intent justifies that decision. It’s a subject I’ll write about more another time, but mid-development edit, I found those sanitised glimpses of their reality demotivating.

It didn’t help that just before a tour of the former prison within the castle I had tea in the castle’s swanky modern café with its smooth music and yuppy feel to the clientele. It was jarring. The tone of the tour jarred, too, with the guide making light of ‘my’ prisoners, who as ‘witches’ belong to everyone.

Could they conceive of being tourist attractions?

Or characters in novels?

The second unpleasant encounter was with an old version of myself at a book launch event.

The event itself was lovely. Held in Heptonstall, Yorkshire, a large and friendly crowd gathered to celebrate Liz Flanagan’s adult historical novel, When We Were Divided, set in Heptonstall during the civil war. It’s compulsive reading & beautifully written. Congratulations again, Liz. 

Amid all the positivity and fantastic cake, I briefly met Liz’s publisher, and a former self – the pushy woman who got The Goose Road out there – materialised in the space where I’d been standing a second before, all forced smiles and anxiously friendly.

It felt horrible and fake and rammed home this truth: I don’t want to be a needy writer stereotype again. It was unpleasant enough last time around, when I was highly motivated to get published. It would be painfully shabby now. My apologies to the publisher who no doubt spotted the type straight away.

For the time being I’ve retreated to my comfort zone of writing and editing to a deadline. As a pledge that something will happen next, I’ve signed up for an Arvon short course about publication in May and vaguely started looking around at small independent publisher, the whole getting-another-agent thing being way too dismal to think about after mine retired.

Meanwhile, posts like Joan’s and others in the ABBA community have lit a torch in the dark cave of the future. There is another way. Sincere best wishes to everyone battling to get their beautifully crafted words seen.

Good luck and go get ’em.

Link to Joan's post: 

https://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2026/02/a-funny-old-journey-in-childrens.html

Wouldn't you know it. Google automatically hyperlinked a bunch of words in this post, but the link I want to be live, Joan's post, no chance. Google also refused to let me upload a photo of Liz's book cover. It might be my browser. Like I said, dinosaur. 

Rowena House Author on Facebook & Instagram