Geraldine McCaughrean's Blog

Preparing the sky-blue story box

Who wouldn’t pay good money to find themselves sandwiched between Michael Rosen and Philip Ardagh?  It has its drawbacks, though, as I discovered at the Pop-Up Story Festival this weekend. 

  Heroine of the piece, “Sleeping Super Princess”

Villain of the piece, “Jack Ginautibus”

I had been given a circus tent to mind for six hours and to fill up with story and children.    I’ve never done anything like it before, and arrived in fear and trembling.  As the crowd poured in on a glorious sunny Sunday, and the  Pop-Up team transformed my empty tent into a cosy myth-making opportunity (complete with sound effects) the noise built up and up.  Rock and poetry and hilarity from Michael’s tent on my left; oos and aahs from Philip’s tent on my right.

Michael is the consummate showman.  Philip’s tent was an illusory world of Victoriana boasting an upside-down room, a ferocious growwow in a cave, a magician, a hall of mirrors…. What chance did I stand?  For an hour  nobody set foot in my tent.  Then Beardy Ardagh lent me his walking hedge – I mean, who can resist a topiary that talks to you? – and the first brave souls were lured inside.  Others followed, and by midday storming along towards a new made-in-a-day myth.

 Shadows of their former sleves

It was a glorious summer day – a park full of people (not to mention walking hedges); parades and dancers, an igloo, face-painting and a wonderful bookshop.  But the three-day weekend event in Coram Fields, Bloomsbury, was only the kink in the tail of an astonishing tiger.  87 school evens had already taken place in venues all over London.  It has to be the most ambitious undertaking I have ever come across and it was really good to have been part of the very first Pop-Up Festival.

 Hanging the villain out to dry

I thought one tent was a challenge.  Head honcho Dylan Calder had a tent the size of London and not just six hours to fill but six week.  Rather him than me…

Still, I hope he pulls it off again next year.

(Oh, and thank you to the hedge, wherever you have put down root.)

Our monster and denizen of Indalia Island

For years and years I have been saying (when people asked what book I liked best when I was young) The Silver Brumby by Elyne Mitchell. 

So when last month Collins decided to publish a new edition, they asked me to write a note to go in the front of the book recommending it to a new generation of readers.  Naturally I re-read the book before I began writing my piece. 

Do you know, it seemed like a book I had never laid eyes on, let alone taken to my heart!  I remember vividly how it made me feel back then.  I realise how strikingly different from my other horsey books it must have been at the time.  I can quite see the power it had to turn me into a horse and show me the world through a horse’s eyes. But the words?  Strangers!   I was amazed at how completely I had forgotten a book so dear to me. 

Some readers, when they reminisce, remember minor characters’ names, plot twists, what they liked best, particular scenes, where they were when they read a favourite book….  Me, I just remember enjoying one.  Sometimes I go back to a best-loved book of childhood and cannot even see what possessed me to like it.  The Ship that Flew by Hilda Lewis seems quite ‘educational’ to me now, but at the time I read it, it left me thinking that at any moment I might find a shop with a model ship in it that would carry me to far off places and times.

 Nostalgia for books sent my daughter into mourning last week when she read of Brian Jacques death in the newspaper.  “A bit of my childhood has died,” she said.  The Redwall books were such a regular playground for her imaginings when she was – what? – 8, 9, 10?  I can sort of understand her sorrow, although it seems to me that Redwall did NOT crumble into dust last week simply because its architect died.  Brian even has another new book still to come out!  The great consolation for writers is that their worlds outlive them, just as the Greek myths outlived the Greek  civilization.

…Okay maybe some of us can’t hope for quite as long an afterlife as the Greek myths, but a couple of decades after the funeral would be agreeable.

Hopelessly in love, anyone?    7^th February

Lovely post!  I’ve just received my copies from America of CYRANO, recorded by Full Cast Audio. 

 As usual, they’ve done a terrific job, using a dozen actors to create an (uncut) cross between a play and a novel.   I’d forgotten: the book was originally published in England in time for Valentine’s Day.  And here it is again, publishing in time to make a Valentine present – but one you can listen to in the car.   Even I think it’s the ideal Valentine…short of giving someone a ticket to see the play.  Cyrano de Bergerac is such an absurdly, unashamedly, over-the-top salute to Romance, and I love it with a passion.

  Have you watched stage plays and had them pour in at the eye and singe themselves on to your brain pan?  It’s a rather desperate thing for a writer of books to admit to, but plays have done it more often to me than books have.  Particularly poetical plays.

  And Cyrano’s all about poetry – how, with well chosen words you can reach right inside someone else’s heart and plant there exactly what you mean.  As a lifelong specialist in unrequited love, and as someone who could never string three spoken words together whenever it mattered most, I wallow in that play like Cleopatra did in asses’ milk.

  I took a teenage daughter to see it at the National Theatre a couple of years ago: a rite of passage - a bouquet of flowers presented as a “welcome to romance, dear”.  But it was a terrible production and an awful translation and I wanted to throw things and boo.  Because it was mine, wasn’t it?  It was the play I’d seen when I was 21 and unrequitedly in love with the actor playing Cyrano. And when a play has climbed inside you and taken you over like that, you carry it away with you when you leave the theatre, don’t you?  It has downloaded itself on to your hard drive.    It belongs to you.

     Books are the same, of course: some of them get squatters’ rights.

     I retold Cyrano de Bergerac in novel form on the grounds that far too few people will ever get the chance to see the play (and a book costs less than a theatre ticket).   Cyrano had to wait a lifetime to speak his love out loud.  I’m awfully glad Full Cast Audio have spoken them into a microphone.

MAKING HAY ON eBAY

You can get anything on eBay, can’t you?  Not sharp blades, of course (which is a pain when you need a kitchen knife) and not live animals.  But that’s alright because  I didn’t want a live animal.  I wanted a tortoise.  And last week I got one! 

I had vague hopes of maybe finding an empty shell left behind by an emigrant tortoise.  But no, I found the very thing I wanted: a plastic tortoise:  rugged, life-size, and quite jaunty, really.

 I wanted it for a play I am writing. I admit I did find myself wondering how the seller came to own it in the first place -  and why he no longer needs it.  (Maybe his play has finished its run. Or his other plastic tortoise wouldn’t share its lettuce.)  But I am delighted I own it now.

I can see this is going to be a year for props.  For book festivals,  school visits (and, of course, plays), props and costumes are a boon, and you can never have enough.  Honest.

  In today’s newspaper there was an article about Hay Festival and what marvellous presentations the various children’s authors put on.  I know they do. Anyone who has watched Antony Horowitz or Philip Ardagh or Chris Bradford doesn’t forget them in a hurry.  I can’t help thinking that the ADULTS authors at Hay – V S Naipaul, Howard Jacobson and so on – WON’T be dressing up, doing knockabout double acts, inviting small children up to try on their jackets, or answering questions about their pets and how much they earn.  Sometimes the business of children’s books and of adult books are very different worlds.    But since I fall into the ‘children’s author’ category,  I do really WANT to be entertaining when I talk about my writing.

  I already spend quite a lot of time roaming the country in Captain Hook’s  red frock coat or Peter Pan’s leafy waistcoat and long red boots.  Now I have resolved to branch out from Peter Pan and add a few props to the dressing-up box in the back bedroom.

  For instance, I’ve sewn a ragdoll Danae and baby Perseus this week (for the same play as the tortoise).

DANAE AND BABY PERSEUS – NOW ALL I NEED IS THE TRUNK

and bought tee-shirts for a story festival in the summer. I got the idea from  the National Theatre shop where they are selling “Villain” tee-shirts, the same as Rory Kinnear wears in Hamlet.

“one can smile and smile and be a villain”

Brilliant play, but the National theatre only sell VILLAIN tee shirts whereas I can now boast a VILLAIN  and a HERO.

Oh and what about helmets!  I’ve just discovered helmets!  Ancient Greek warrior helmets manufactured in India for re-enactments in the US and UK where people dress up in authentic armour and pretend to kill each other.  Rarely have I been so tempted to own something so entirely useless as a replica hoplite helmet dating from 200BC or a pig-faced bascinet of the 15^th century.  When would I wear it?  What would I wear with it?  But think how much it would liven up a talk in a tent at Hay Festival or a school visit on a wet Wednesday.

That’s the trouble with eBay.  It has things you never knew you wanted until you went looking for a solid plastic tortoise.

My husband stabbed himself today.  

Apparently you can survive on eating nothing but avocados without suffering malnutrition, they are so full of goodness.  But of course you do have to survive getting the avocado open with a sharp knife in the first place. 

Hence the festive trip to Accident and Emergency, and the pool of blood on the kitchen floor. (I thought the dog behaved with terrific restraint by not licking it up.)    I’m glad he waited until Just William was over because we were both enjoying it so much.     

The nurses were still in tinsel tiaras, probably because they hadn’t stopped since Santa’s reindeer called in with three hernias, two cases of vertigo, and a panic attack.    They stuck him together - my husband, I mean, not the reindeer - with superglue.  Please don’t think I’m married to Woody or Barbie’s Ken,: apparently stitches don’t take well in the palm.  My daughter gave me this blog for Christmas.  That’s to say, she opened it for me and put my name on it, as an encouraging shove in the right direction.  I am hugely intimidated by it.  Not being accustomed to standing in public places talking to myself, it feels very odd writing to nobody in particular.  I shall just have to imagine you at the other end and give you a face, a wardrobe of clothes, a dog,  few vices and a unisex name - Paris or Avril or Hilary or Nicky.   Should I lay out my wares?  I’m a writer.  (I love saying that: it sounds so good and it’s so wonderfully misleading!) 

I mostly write books that get published for young people, though I really write them for Paris, Avril & Co - i.e. anyone who might enjoy them. Unfortunately (from the point of view of blogging), my life tends to be a bit quiet.  As in: “How was your Christmas?”  “Oh quiet, you know.  Quiet.”   And I know how overhearing that always make me flinch for the person concerned, and wish they could have been visited by angels, or the Red Arrows at least, and truckloads of nomadic Lapps and a reggae band, and twin daughters missing since birth, and the Harlech Silver Band playing             Marchog Jesu, 

On thirty-seven shimmering instruments, 

Collecting for Caernarvon’s (Fever) Hospital Fund. 

Anyway,  in the absence of excitement, I may have to resort to fiction now and then if I am going to find things to say - or steal someone else’s life, like nicking a coat from a restaurant and leaving behind your own.  

At the moment, the book industry is so dire that I am working on projects regardless: regardless of whether they will ever see the light of day or earn me any money.  As my dear friend Jen says, “My whole career is regardless” - which is exactly how joyful, artsy jobs like writing ought to be.

HAPPY NEW COAT…sorry YEAR