Books sometimes need input from many different people as they make the journey from idea to reality. I am tempted to begin this piece with the words Once upon a time . . .
It was 1974, and I was a student at UEA in Norwich, but living in a shared house in the town of Hingham, about 12 miles from the city. More than 100 Puritans emigrated from Hingham in 1638, among them one Samuel Lincoln, the ancestor of Abraham Lincoln. This has nothing to do with the story I'm about to tell, though it did mean that we'd quite often meet people from the USA wandering around looking lost. Hingham was once a market town and has a marketplace surrounded by fine Georgian houses, but now feels more like a village.
One summer afternoon we returned home to find a small bird fluttering in the bushes of our small and unkempt back garden (it was a student house, remember). I managed to catch hold of the bird, took it into an open area and let it go. It flew across the garden, crashed into the bushes, and tried to flap its way over the grass. We put it in a box with a bowl of water and wondered what to do with it. We couldn't think of an answer, so we went to the pub. We told the landlord about the bird and he laughed. 'That's a swift,' he said. 'You take that up on the roof and let it go. That'll fly, you'll see.'
So that's what we did. Back home, I took the bird out of its box and climbed out of an upstairs window onto the flat roof of the kitchen extension. I threw the bird into the air and it was gone. We all felt a little stupid, because one of our favourite activities that summer had been lying on the roof in the early evenings watching the aerobatic displays of the swifts as they fed on insects above the rooftops of the town. We didn't know then that swifts almost never land on the ground and that they feed and sleep on the wing.
Fast forward 20 years or so and I was sitting thinking about stories that might make a good picture book when I remembered the incident of the swift. I very quickly scribbled down a couple of paragraphs describing a small boy sitting in a garden as a bird crashes into bushes, the boy picking up the bird and his mum (I think) telling him to throw it into the air. There were some very quiet picture books around at the time, and I thought that with the right illustrations it might work, so I sent it off to my agent. She got some positive feedback (ie polite rejections) from editors, along with the suggestion that it might be a bit slight for a picture book, but could maybe be expanded into a short chapter book.
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Some things stayed the same from beginning
to end. Apart from the first two lines the rest
of the page is unchanged from the first hastily written text. |
Some time later there was a lunch with editors and my agent and we got to talking about this. I can't now remember whose idea the cat was, but I do know that without that lunch, without the collaboration, Cat Patrol would never have existed. The 'something else' that was needed to make the story work had its origin in that meeting, in the idea that the boy wanted to protect the birds from the new neighbours' cat, but there was still a very long way to go before we had a complete text. There are about 2,000 words in the book's five chapters and those 2,000 words took me as long to write as a full-length novel.
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Peter Bailey did the lovely black-and-white illustrations which fit the story perfectly, but the publishers weren't happy with his cover and asked another illustrator to have a go. There was some back and forth about the next version but in the end that was rejected too, and the final cover was drawn by a third illustrator, Guy Parker-Rees. The funny thing about it is that Guy Parker-Rees's cover depicts a cat and a bird who seem to be in a kind of 'Tom and Jerry' relationship rather than the life-and-death one which appears between the covers. As Ben says in the book, 'Cats kill birds. You know they do.'
Ben was right. Cats kill up to 55 million birds a year in the UK. The cat is, in fact, the villain of this story. The new neighbours introduce Ben to their pedigree Siamese, Samuel Pennyfeather Lexington Star the Third, or Sammy for short:
'Ben was horrified. Sammy was a cat - the most enormous cat he had ever seen. It stared at him through the wire of its basket. Its eyes were cold and blue. It yawned, and its teeth were like razors.'
It's a lovely cover, but it has nothing much to do with the story.
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Robin collecting food for young.
Maybe male . . . maybe not. |
One of the difficult things about writing this book was the pronouns. Ben calls the cat 'it', though his sister, who doesn't believe the cat is dangerous, calls it 'he'. But then there was the bird. From the moment he sees it, Ben calls the bird 'he', and everyone else in the story takes their cue from him. I considered using 'it' for the bird but 'he' seemed the most natural thing for an 8-year-old boy to say. And, in case you're wondering, male and female swifts look exactly the same as each other. And, as I'm handing out information here, male and female robins also look identical. I say that because I've met many people who just assume that the male robin is the only one they ever see. The adolescent Robin is a very different thing!
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| Young Robin |
Anyway, I'm telling this story just to indicate that books don't just appear out of nowhere and that often the input of an editor is crucial. I would add that when an editor or an agent tells you, 'this needs work', they don't mean, 'you're a terrible writer and it would be best to give up.' A friend of mine who wrote plays sent some work to a Radio 3 producer a lot of years ago and they INVITED HIM TO LUNCH! Then they told him they liked the play but IT NEEDED WORK. Being who he is, he took this to mean that he was wasting his time and his play was rubbish.
If my agent hadn't seen the potential in those early paragraphs and sent them out they'd probably still be sitting in my drawer today.
