Bog child

I've been reading the late Siobhan Dowd's Bog Child in preparation for a Carnegie Medal shadowing event at Burntwood School in South London tomorrow. That's a great cover by the way, isn't it?

Bog Child is very good - very well written - though I do wonder at what the average fourteen year-old will make of it. It is one of the things I am looking forward to finding out tomorrow. The book is set on the border between the South and Ulster during the Troubles. I read a review on the US Amazon site that said US teenagers would not understand the background, but are British teenagers (outside of Northern Ireland of course) any more familiar with the Troubles or Bobby Sands?

It is 1981 and the brother of the main character, Fergus, is on hunger strike in the Maze. The story of Fergus and his struggles to come to terms with the political reality of Northern Ireland at that time and how it affects him and his his family is compelling, but I do wonder if the references will mean as much to the audience it is aimed at. It had a lot of resonance to me, because my generation (which included Dowd) grew up with the IRA and Northern Ireland as daily news items. I certainly know that my son would be mystified. But then that is the problem with all historical fiction for children - whether it is 1891 or 1981 - as I know all too well.

The politics of Ulster is not all that is happening in the novel of course - not by a long way. It starts with the discovery of a well-preserved Iron Age body in the peat - the bog child of the title. This turns out to be - well, I shouldn't really say too much more for fear of spoiling it for you. Suffice it to say that Fergus appears to have a strange connection with this 'Mel'. He also falls in love with the daughter of the archaeologist called in to investigate and forms an unlikely (possible a bit too unlikely?) friendship with a British soldier.

I'll let you know what the students at Burntwood have to say about it in due course.

Father's Day

Father's Day today and my son brought me a cup of tea in bed, followed by The Observer and even went a long way towards making me blueberry pancakes with maple syrup (and helped me do quite a lot of the eating).

Then I was taken to Audley End. I had never been there before. What an amazing house. It is Jacobean with corner turrets and gold weather vanes, and is stuffed full of the usual expensive but tasteless clash of styles and ornament that is the mark of the English stately home. It has some nice paintings, but they are hung so bizarrely - often twenty feet up in the air - that it is impossible to appreciate them as art. The grounds were amazing though, with gigantic trees (possibly planted by Capability Brown when he landscaped the place) and there were terrific clipped yews that bubbled up like a great green amoeba.

We had a picnic on the field overlooking the pond in the vast grounds, while every now and then a First or Second World War aircraft would growl past, very low, on its way to Duxford. There was something vaguely disturbing about being buzzed by a Messerschmidt.

Parts of Audley End was so very like the image I had in my mind's eye for Hawton Mere, the house in The Dead of Winter, that I would have taken lots of photos had I been allowed. The only place I could manage this was the working area of the house - the kitchen, dairy and so on. These rooms were fascinating and peopled by actors in costume, flitting among the visitors like ghosts.

After Audley End we went to Saffron Walden to visit the Fry Gallery. The Fry Gallery contains an archive of work connected with the brilliant artist, illustrator and designer, Edward Bawden and his circle. The catalogue is edited by Martin Salisbury from Anglia Ruskin here in Cambridge. Martin is a big fan of that period of English illustration (as am I) and very knowledgeable.

The gallery is very small and so some of the work is hung just as bizarrely as the paintings in Audley End; some of them so high that stepladders would be needed to see them properly. They have some nice things though. There was a particularly good Bawden painting done in Sicily (that I think I have in a book somewhere) and a big linocut of Liverpool Street Station.

Sadly, there is a room given over to exhibitions and the exhibition at the moment is John Bellany and contains some of the worst paintings I have seen in a long time. I have never been a fan of Bellany, but even by his standards these are eye-wateringly garish. What they are doing here, sitting like an old drunk in a clown's outfit, next to the tasteful restraint of Bawden and Ravilious, heaven only knows.

My weird ways

I had the following conversation with my wife the other evening:

'I'll go and make a cup of tea,' I said.
'Don't touch the oven door whatever you do.' (she was making a Pavlova)
'Why would I touch the oven door?' I asked.
'I don't know,' she said. 'It's the sort of weird thing you would do.'

There are so many ways in which I thought I was weird. Now apparently I will have to add the weirdness of willfully tampering with oven doors.

Will Hill and Jane Bigger came round last night. Jane does archive research for TV and her job sounds fascinating. Other people's jobs often do. Will is off to Athens, for instance, as an external assessor at the art college there.

I had a long chat to Philippa, my agent, yesterday. We spoke at length about what I'm writing now and what I'm hoping to write. We also chatted about the possibility of an Italian deal on my some of my Random House books - Death and the Arrow, The White Rider, Redwulf's Curse and New World. More of that if and when it happens.

The dead of winter

One of the reasons I downloaded Windows Live Writer is because I was trying to copy and paste some large pieces of text into Blogger and it just did not like it.

After doing a little bit of Googling I found someone who was recommending Windows Live Writer as a solution. Blogger is full of all sorts of strange glitches, so it will be interesting to see if this makes life easier when it comes to writing and editing my posts.

I thought that I might share some of the work that I have been talking about on the blog but has not as yet been published. Here is the beginning of The Dead of Winter. As I have mentioned before, it is set in Victorian England and is the story of an orphaned boy who goes to stay with his strange guardian in a moated manor house in the flatlands of East Anglia during a cold and snowy Christmas. Just as they are approaching the house at night, the boy sees a woman loom out of the darkness towards the carriage. . .

We are still at the final edit stage, so this is not necessarily the exact version that will appear in print. It may even have the odd spelling mistake or grammatical error in it. It will be published in 2010 by Bloomsbury. Hopefully this won’t put you off buying it!

Prologue

My name is Michael: Michael Vyner. I am going to tell you something of my life and of the strange events that have brought me to where I now sit, pen in hand, my heartbeat hastening at their recollection.

I hope that in the writing down of these things I will grow to understand my own story a little better and perhaps bring some comforting light to the still-dark, whispering recesses of my memory.

Horrors loom out of those shadows and my mind recoils at their approach. My God, I can still see that face – that terrible face. Those eyes! My hand clenches my pen with such fearful strength I fear it will snap under the strain. It will take every ounce of willpower I possess to tell this tale. But tell it I must.

I had known much hardship in my short life, but I had never before seen the horrible blackness of a soul purged of all that is good, shaped by resentment and hatred into something utterly vile and loveless. I had never known evil.

The story I am to recount may seem like the product of some fevered imagination. But the truth is the truth and all I can do is set it down as best I can, within the limits of my ability and ask that you read it with an open mind.

If after that, you turn away in disbelief, then I can do naught but smile and wish you well; and wish too, that I could so easily free myself of the terrifying spectres that haunt the events I am about to relate.

So come with me now. We will walk back through time and as the fog of the passing years rolls away, we will find ourselves among the chill and weathered headstones of a large and well stocked cemetery.

All about us are stone angels, granite obelisks and marble urns. A sleeping stone lion guards the grave of an old soldier, a praying angel that of a beloved child. Everywhere there are the inscriptions of remembrance; of love curdled into grief.

Grand tombs and mausoleums line a curving cobbled roadway, shaded beneath tall cypress trees. A hearse stands nearby, its black-plumed horses growing impatient. It is December and the air is as damp and cold as the graves beneath our feet. The morning mist is yet to clear. Fallen leaves litter the cobbles.

A blackbird sings gaily, oblivious to the macabre surroundings; the sound ringing round the silent cemetery, sharp and clear in the misty vagueness. Jackdaws fly overhead and seem to call back in answer. Some way off a new grave coldly gapes and the tiny group of mourners are walking away leaving a boy standing alone.

The boy has cried so much over the last few days that he thinks his tears must surely have dried up for ever. Yet as he stares down at that awful wooden box in its frightful pit, the tears come again.

There are few things sadder than a poorly attended funeral. When that funeral is in honour of a dear and beloved mother, then that sadness is all the more sharply felt and bitter-tasting.

As I am sure by now you have guessed; the lonesome boy by that open grave is none other than the narrator of this story.

Naturally Speaking

I had a very annoying day yesterday. I have been having problems with pain in my right hand, wrist and arm, especially when I'm using the mouse. I tried very hard to ignore it and just carry on writing, but it had become just too painful.

If I was working in an office, then obviously I could just take some time off and give my poor hand arrest, but I simply can't afford to do that.After some deliberation, I decided that I would give speech recognition software a try.

And so I bought and Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 10. I installed it on my laptop, but it refused to accept the microphone provided with the software.

It's my own fault really: I was bragging to Peter Kirkham about the reliability of my Dell computers in a conversation about Apple owners and their dogged belief that contrary all the evidence, Apple computers are perfect, and everything else is rubbish.

This argument of mine was undermined rather by the fact that I was forced to accept my laptop is faulty and a man from Dell is coming to pick it up today.

I then installed Dragon on my desktop and after training it to understand my voice, the software works pretty well. I have a written on this blog using Dragon and it has only made two or three errors. I make more than that when I type.

I'm not sure that it could ever be a complete replacement for typing. It does feel a little odd talking to yourself. Having said that, I think you will certainly work for me in the short term, writing longhand and dictating.

The voice training was fun. I had to read, President Kennedy's inaugural speech. It was quite difficult to keep reading it and not start doing some terrible Kennedy impersonation.

All in all, the software is pretty accurate, although amusingly, the first time I said ‘new paragraph’, it typed out ‘new Arab's ass’.

I have also written this using Windows Live Writer, a free download, which I hope is going to solve some of the problems I've been having with Blogger.

Fireworks

I went into the studio again today. There are the usual signs of John having been in but I was on my own for most of the day until Lynette popped in briefly. On the way in I nearly rode my bike over a sparrowhawk as it collected its prey in the gutter in Hope Street. Not much hope for the blackbird it was flying away with.

BBC Audio wants to do Tales of Terror from the Black Ship which is great. Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror was done very nicely. It is always fascinating to hear your work read by someone else.

And speaking of the Black Ship, I heard from Sarah that it is shortlisted for the Salford Children's Book Award and I'm invited up to the awards ceremony in January 2010. I'm already looking forward to it.

I've got a few school visits coming up. I'm at Burntwood School in south London next week where the librarian Taskeen Siddiqi has organised a shadowing event for the Carnegie Medal. The week after I am off to two schools - Oundle in Peterborough and Parkside here in Cambridge.

I went for a drink with Peter Kirkham. We talked about music mostly, which is a shared passion of ours and then we wandered up to the top of Castle Mound and watched the St John's firework display, which clearly cost several thousand pounds. It was a spectacular viewpoint looking out over Cambridge and the fireworks were great.

Poetry champ

We watched the BBC4's Book Quiz poetry special last night on catch-up. Helen Szirtes had told me at the wedding that her dad had done rather well and so he did. I was very pleased to see that I would have done pretty well myself had I been on the programme. I was on fire.

Having said that - it's a lot easier coming up with the answers sitting on the sofa than it is when you are frightened of looking like an idiot on TV. I was particularly impressed at George Szirtes' listing of Poet Laureates (in reverse order).