I’d go and whisper to her at every opportunity, imagining her so fiercely she seemed to wriggle out of her wrapping paper, slide out from the pile of Biddy’s scarves and hats, and climb all the way down her quilted dressing gown to play with me. My imagination embellished her a little too extravagantly. When I opened her up at long last on Christmas Day, her bland sewn face with dot eyes and a red crescent-moon smile seemed crude and ordinary. How could she be my amazing teenage friend?
Another Christmas I had a more sophisticated teenage doll, a very glamorous Italian doll with long brown hair and big brown eyes with fluttering eyelashes. She wore a stylish suedette jacket and little denim jeans and tiny strappy sandals with heels. When I undressed her, I was tremendously impressed to see she had real bosoms. This was a world before Barbie. She must have been one of the first properly modelled teenage dolls. I was totally in awe of her.
I had been reading in Biddy’s Sunday Mirror about Princess Ira, a fifteen-year-old precociously beautiful Italian girl who was involved with a much older man. I called my doll Ira and she flaunted herself all round my bedroom, posing and wiggling and chatting up imaginary unsuitable boyfriends. I shuffled after her, changing her outfits like a devoted handmaid.
I had one real china doll from Biddy. She saved up ten shillings (fifty pence, but a fortune to us in those days) and bought her from an antique shop in Kingston. She wasn’t quite a Mabel. She had limp mousy hair and had clearly knocked around a little. She was missing a few fingers and she had a chip on her nose but she still had a very sweet expression. I loved her, and her Victorian clothes fascinated me – all those layers of petticoats and then frilly drawers, but she was difficult to play with. She was large and unwieldy and yet terrifyingly fragile. I could move her arms and legs but they creaked ominously. I brushed her real hair but it came out in alarming handfuls, and soon I could see her white cloth scalp through her thinning hair.
I wish Biddy had been fiercer with me and made me keep her in pristine condition. She’d be happy living in my Victorian house. I’d never let some silly little girl undress her down to her drawers and comb her soft hair. She never really came alive for me. I can’t even remember her name.
The best Christmas dolls ever were my Old Cottage twins. Old Cottage dolls were very special. I’d mist up the special glass display case peeping at them in Hamleys. They were quite small but wondrously detailed: hand-made little dolls with soft felt skin, somehow wired inside so they could stand and stride and sit down. One Old Cottage doll in little jodhpurs and black leather boots could even leap up on her toy horse and gallop. The dolls were dressed in a variety of costumes. You could choose an old-fashioned crinoline doll, an Easter bonnet girl, even a fairy in a silver dress and wings. I preferred the Old Cottage girls in ordinary everyday clothes – gingham dresses with little white socks and felt shoes. Every doll had a slightly different face and they all had different hairstyles. Some were dark, some were fair; some had curls, but most had little plaits, carefully tied.
Biddy knew which I’d like best. She chose a blonde girl with plaits and a dark girl with plaits, one in a blue flowery dress, one in red checks. Then she handed them over to Ga. She must have been stitching in secret for weeks and weeks. When I opened my box on Christmas morning, it was a wondrous treasure chest. I unwrapped my Old Cottage twins and fell passionately in love with them at first sight. Then I opened a large wicker basket and discovered their clothes. Ga had made them little camel winter coats trimmed with fur, pink party dresses, soft little white nighties and tiny tartan dressing gowns, and a school uniform each – a navy blazer with an embroidered badge, a white shirt with a proper little tie, a pleated tunic, even two small felt school satchels.
I was in a daze of delight all Christmas Day. I could hardly bear to put my girls down so that I could eat up my turkey and Christmas pudding. I’d give anything to have those little dolls now with their lovingly stitched extensive wardrobe.
* * *
There’s a Christmas scene at the start and end of one of my books. Which do you think it is?
* * *
It’s Clean Break.
I was getting too big to believe in Santa but he still wanted to please me. I found a little orange journal with its own key; a tiny red heart soap; a purple gel pen; cherry bobbles for my hair; a tiny tin of violet sweets; a Jenna Williams bookmark; and a small pot of silver glitter nail varnish.
But Em thinks it’s going to be the best Christmas ever, especially when her stepdad gives her a real emerald ring – but it all goes horribly wrong. She has a tough time throughout the next year, but it’s Christmas Eve again in the last chapter. Someone comes knocking at the door and it looks as if this really will be a wonderful Christmas.
21
Books
WHENEVER I READ writers’ autobiographies, I always love that early chapter when they write about their favourite children’s books. I was a total book-a-day girl, the most frequent borrower from Kingston Public Library. I think I spent half my childhood in the library. It meant so much to me to borrow books every week. It gives me such joy now to know that I’m currently the most borrowed author in British libraries.
In those other autobiographies people mention maybe six favourites, or select their top ten fiction characters. I can’t choose! I feel as if I’m juggling my way through thousands of books, standing in a stadium jam-packed with fiction characters. They’re all waving at me and mouthing, Pick me! Pick me!
I’ll pick Enid Blyton first. She wasn’t ever my favourite author but she got me reading. I pored over Pookie the white rabbit and the Shelf Animal books, but I couldn’t work out what each word said. Then I went to school in Lewisham and learned that the c-a-t sat on the m-a-t, but I didn’t really call that reading because it was so slow and laborious and there wasn’t a real story.
I can’t remember the magic moment when it all came together and I stopped stabbing the words with my finger and muttering each sound. I could suddenly just do it. Harry had read me all three Faraway Tree books and now I read them too. I spent months and months reading all the Enid Blytons I could find in the library. I didn’t have to think about it. I didn’t have to struggle with a single word. I didn’t have to strain to understand what was going on. I could just let my eyes glide over the comfortably big print and experience all her different worlds.
Unlike most children, I didn’t care for the Blyton mystery stories. I found the Secret Sevens and the Famous Fives boring. None of the children seemed to have much personality apart from George. I always like to read about fierce tomboy girls, though I was mostly a meek girly-girl myself.
I did rather enjoy some of the Adventure books. I owned a second-hand copy of The Mountain of Adventure. Somewhere in this book – presumably up the mountain – the children discovered a cave behind a waterfall and set up some sort of camp there. It seemed an incredibly romantic concept to me. I’d crawl under the living-room table with a doll or two and pretend the checked tablecloth was the waterfall. There was another underground cave in the book, filled with medieval religious figurines studded with jewels. I found this an awe-inspiring chapter too. We weren’t a religious family and I’d certainly never been in a Catholic church, but somehow I’d seen a statue of a Madonna holding baby Jesus. I thought she was beautiful. The idea of a whole heavenly host of Madonnas cradling a nursery of Holy Infants was captivating. I imagined them taller than me, with real sapphires for eyes and solid gold haloes on their heads like celestial hats.
Even so, I preferred Blyton in more everyday mode. She wrote a book I particularly liked called Hollow Tree House about two children who run away and hide in – where else? – a hollow tree. I longed passionately for my own tree house, and planned, down to the finest detail, the things I would keep there (my favourite books, my Woolworths notebooks, my drawing book and tin of crayons, my Mandy photos), as if I thought I could conjure a sturdy tree growing out of our concrete balcony. There were plenty in the wilderness behind the flats,
but I had no way of claiming personal ownership and no one to build me my house. Still, I was good at imaginary tree houses. Ann and I shared one in the playground at Latchmere, so it was not too difficult to pretend one for my own personal use at home.
I liked Enid Blyton’s St Clare’s school stories too. I had no desire whatsoever to go to boarding school myself. I was appalled at the idea of being in the company of other children all the time, with no opportunities whatsoever for private imaginary games, but it was fun to read about such a strangely different environment. The twins themselves were a little dull, but I liked Carlotta, the dashing circus girl, and Claudine, the naughty French girl – both apparently based on real girls.
I knew this because I’d solemnly read Enid Blyton’s The Story of My Life. Some of the chapters were a bit of a struggle because I was still only about six or seven, but I found some passages riveting. I was interested to learn that little girl Enid had nightmares too, and she gave sensible practical tips on how to cope with them. She wrote about her own imaginary worlds. It was such a relief to realize that someone else had a weird vivid inner life like my own. It was fascinating learning about her writing routine. In those days children didn’t know very much about their favourite authors. Sometimes they had baffling names like Richmal Crompton or P. L. Travers so you didn’t even know whether they were men or women.
So Enid Blyton got me reading fluently and reinforced my desire to write, though I knew right from a very early age that I wanted to write very different sort of books. I wanted to write books that didn’t seem to exist yet – books about realistic children who had difficult parents and all sorts of secrets and problems; easy-to-read books that still made you think hard; books with funny bits that made you laugh out loud, though sometimes the story was so sad it made you cry too.
I took to reading adult books about children, like Catherine Cookson’s series about a tough little Tyneside girl called Mary Ann. She came from a very poor family and her beloved dad was a drunk, forever letting them down. Mary Ann was a devout Catholic and popped into the church the way other kids bobbed into the chip shop. She had Mary, Joseph and Jesus as her own personal ultra-good imaginary friends.
I envied Mary Ann and wished I was a Catholic too, especially if it meant saying prayers to beautiful statues of Mary. I’m not a Catholic, I’m still not at all religious, but gentle Madonnas – plaster, china, glass and wood – grace many corners of my house.
The only book written for children that struck me in any way as realistic was The Family from One End Street by Eve Garnett. It’s a story about a poor family. Dad’s a dustman, Mum’s a washerwoman, and there are seven children. I wasn’t so interested in reading about the boys but I loved the two oldest sisters, Lily Rose and Kate. Lily Rose was lumpy and helpful and took her responsibilities as a big sister seriously. She helped Mum with her ironing but had a terrible accident with the hot iron on a green artificial-silk petticoat. Kate was thin and clever and passed her exams to go to grammar school. She was so proud of her smart new uniform that she insisted on wearing it on a day trip to the seaside – a big mistake.
These girls seemed real to me, and they looked real too in Eve Garnett’s drawings. They had straggly hair that stuck out at odd angles, their dresses had saggy hems and they wore plimsolls instead of shoes, just like most of the children I knew. Not me though. Biddy would have died if I’d looked like a child from a council estate. She had my hair viciously permed so that I looked as if I’d been plugged into an electric light socket.
She struggled to buy me new clothes every year. She wasn’t having her daughter a Second-hand Rose with a telltale line around the coat hem where it had been let down. She certainly wasn’t going to let me run around in plimsolls. I had Clarks strapover shoes in winter and brown sandals in the summer to wear to school, and strappy black patent shoes and snow-white sandals for best. No child was better shod. If my shoe heels ever got worn down, Harry would squat in the kitchen with a little cobbler’s last and tap in ‘Blakies’ to make them last longer.
My favourite children’s book at that time – well, maybe first equal with Adventures with Rosalind, was Nancy and Plum by Betty MacDonald. I read it so many times I knew long passages by heart. I suffered with them at Mrs Monday’s orphanage, hurried anxiously beside them when they ran away, and celebrated when they met up with the kindly Campbells. They adopted Nancy and Plum and gave them lots of hugs and cuddles and chicken pies and beautiful dolls and lovely girly outfits.
I knew perfectly well this wasn’t likely but I didn’t care. I thought Nancy and Plum a perfect book. I also enjoyed a story by Betty MacDonald’s sister called Best Friends – now there’s a familiar title. In this Best Friends Suzie makes friends with Coco next door and they have fun together and share a tree house. Children’s books in the 1950s sprouted veritable forests of tree houses.
I didn’t only like books about poor or underprivileged children. I loved all the Mary Poppins books about the solidly middle-class Banks children, with their cook and their boot boy – and of course their magical nanny, Mary Poppins. I borrowed most of the Mary Poppins books from the library, reading them in reverse order and waiting weeks and weeks before I found the first in the series back on the shelf.
I begged Biddy to let me belong to a book club because Mary Poppins in the Park was the introductory book, available for just a few shillings. She gave in, so I got my very own yellow Mary Poppins book. I took it to school and carried it around with me all day. I then received a book club book a month, none of which were so much to my taste – Kitty Barnes, Malcolm Saville, Lorna Hill – all very worthy popular authors but they just didn’t do it for me. However, there was one Pamela Brown book among the book club choices and I’d soon read my way along all the Browns on the shelf in the library. I particularly liked her Blue Door series about a group of children who set up their own theatre.
Pamela Brown wrote the first in the series when she was only fifteen, a fact that impressed me greatly. I wondered if any of my stories in my Woolworths exercise books would ever get published. They were mostly family stories about misunderstood children (surprise!), but I also wrote about girls who could fly, sad Victorian tales about poor little beggar children, comical fantasy stories, melodramatic love stories, even a very long retelling of the story of Moses from his sister Miriam’s point of view. I didn’t really believe I had a chance of seeing my stories in print. It was a daydream, like some little girls long to be actresses or rock stars or fashion models.
* * *
In one of my books I pretend there’s going to be a special children’s television serial based on Enid Blyton’s book The Twins at St Clare’s. Who is desperate to get a part in it?
* * *
It’s Ruby in Double Act. But her twin, poor Garnet, is appalled at the idea.
I can’t act.
I don’t want to act.
I can’t go to an audition in London! I can’t say a lot of stuff with everyone watching. It’ll be even worse than being a sheep. Why won’t Ruby understand? She won’t listen to me. She’s riffling through The Twins at St Clare’s right this minute, trying to choose which bit we’ll act out.
Only I’m not going to act.
I can’t can’t can’t act.
I can’t act either, but I had a tiny part in the television serial of Double Act. When Yvonne, the producer, asked me if I wanted to take part myself, I thought it would be fun. I thought I knew the perfect part for me. Ruby and Garnet’s dad has his own second-hand bookshop. I am famous for my vast collection of books (around 15,000! There are shelves all over my house and a special little library at the bottom of my garden). I won’t be able to read all my books even if I live to be 500, but I still can’t stop buying them. So I thought it would be fun if I played a customer in the Red Bookshop. I thought it might make children chuckle if they spotted me in a dark corner of the bookshop, happily browsing.
Yvonne had other ideas. She wanted me to play the fictional cast
ing director who puts the twins through their paces at the audition. As she’s been drawn in the book with short hair, flamboyant jewellery and extraordinary boots, I suppose it’s easy to guess why Yvonne saw me in the part. But this meant I had to learn lines. I found this extraordinarily difficult. I just couldn’t remember them – even though I wrote the lines myself!
I managed to stagger through somehow, but decided I’d definitely stick to my day job – writing – in future!
22
The Boys and Girls Exhibition
I GOT TO meet Pamela Brown when I was nine. They used to hold a special Boys and Girls Exhibition at Olympia and Biddy took me one Saturday. I found it a very overwhelming day. The sheer noise of thousands of over-excited children in a vast echoing building made my ears throb. We were pushed and pummelled as we struggled round all the stands. Biddy was a pushy woman too, and occasionally batted a child out of her way. There was a lot of argy-bargy, mostly between mothers desperate to get their own kids to the front of each queue.
I wished Biddy had left me languishing at the back of the most popular stand, George Cansdale and his animals. George Cansdale was an animal expert and had his own programme on children’s television. I wasn’t as passionately fond of animals as most children, apart from my constant yearning for a dog. I didn’t like anything creepy-crawly at all, and kept well away from anything with beaks or sharp claws.
George Cansdale had a whole enclosure of animals with him. All the children at Olympia wanted to stroke the rabbits and guinea pigs and kittens. Biddy shoved me from the back until I was practically catapulted onto George Cansdale’s lap. He nodded at me as he sank his hands deep into a strange big coffin-shaped box.