0 Mixing Up Settings: Town, Country and the Books of Lorna Hill

View towards Dunstanburgh Castle

Last week I was in Northumberland. It's only a couple of hours from Leeds, where I live, but it feels like a different world.

Leeds is a big, bustling, ethnically diverse Northern city. The Northumberland coast, with its empty beaches, fishing villages and old-fashioned pubs, feels like a journey away in time as much as space. Even the tourist hot spots – like Lindisfarne – are tranquil, the cars abandoned once the causeway has been crossed, the many visitors wandering the windswept island by foot.

Daffies at Howick

There are some other wonderful aspects of going back in time -  like bookshops! How is it that while most British cities (including Leeds) struggle to support independents bookshops, the market town of Alnwick can offer the stupendous Barter Books: an enormous secondhand bookshop where you can take your dog, eat superb creamed mushrooms, and pick up a copy of Robert Fagles' translation of the Illiad, all in one happy trip. (I mean, who doesn't want to munch mushrooms while reading an Ancient Greek Epic with their dog sitting on their feet?)

A recent edition - published by Girls Gone By

Other aspects of time travel feel a little strange. So many things I take for granted don't seem to have impinged upon this corner of rural England. It made me think (because that's the peculiar way my mind works) of the only children's books I know set in rural Northumberland – those by Lorna Hill. They are undoubtedly of another age – and yet I wondered how much had really changed. (Well, some things certainly have.  Like fifteen-year-old boys waving horse whips at thirteen-year-old girls, and telling them to scrub their face free of makeup AT ONCE.)  But other things remain the same: the lakes, woods, mountains and beaches of Northumberland, in all its beauty, isolation and essential wildness. Hill, a vicar's wife in an isolated parish, knew Northumberland intimately and used it as the setting for many books.  One of her  “Marjorie” series – Stolen Holiday - is set very close to where I was staying, towards Dunstanburgh Castle.

"Mile upon mile of wonderful deeply golden sand and undulating sand-dunes, some of them so lofty that they were like miniature mountains; mile upon mile of deep blue-green sea flecked with white horses (there was a stiffish breeze blowing); and, last but not least, seeming to float in the shimmering water, lay the Farne Islands..."   Stolen Holiday

Her most popular books though, and the ones I remember growing up, were the “Wells” books – a series which combined rural adventures in Northumberland with the unlikely world of the ballet. These books have been reprinted countless times over the years.  And yet, though I never thought about it at the time, it's a very odd mix.

Veronica Weston, the heroine of the first two Wells books, spends her time shuttling between London – where she has grown up in seedy lodgings, and subsequently trains as a dancer – and Northumberland, where she is the “poor relation” to the rich Scott family, who live in a big estate in the Cheviot Hills, complete with lake, boathouse, woods, resident nanny, chauffeur, ponies and a gate lodge – wherein lives the Scotts' intriguing, infuriating, talented cousin Sebastian. The first book, A Dream of Sadler's Wells, begins with Veronica, recently orphaned, on the train north – and ends with a ride through the snow to catch the train south, and to make her audition for the prestigious ballet school Sadler's Wells, in Covent Garden. In the sequel, Veronica at the Wells, half of the book is set in London, in her digs and ballet school – where the mean-spirited Marcia Rutherford is plotting to wreck Veronica's promising dance career – and half at Christmas in Northumberland, where Veronica rides out with her cousins across the moors to visit a fellow dancer and almost gets caught in a storm.

All of the Wells books that I've read feature characters torn between the tranquil, outdoor pleasures of the country, and the stage-paint, bright lights and glitter of London. And they were by far Hill's most popular books – the strange combination of professional ballet and rural adventure chiming with young readers far more than those novels which were simply set in Northumberland.  Maybe it's not so surprising.  Ballet, even more than it is today, was a world of fame, glamour and celebrity - and many young readers must have yearned for these things, yet recognised, like Veronica, that it could have its downsides too.

Often books do need more than one element to take off – in this case, it is an unusual combination of activities (horse riding and ballet) and settings (London and rural Northumberland) that produces a certain magic that lifts these books out of the ordinary. There have been lots of books about ballet, and lots of books about ponies, but few have been as beloved as Lorna Hill's Wells books, which so oddly managed to do both.

Barter Books - photo credit wfmillar [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I went home reflecting that a bit of mix can be no bad thing for a novel – if you can get the mix right, and save it from turning into an incoherent mess. It made me wonder what diverse settings I might somehow put together in a book. All my children's books have been very firmly set in one locality - maybe that's something I could think about changing. I certainly plan to experiment.  I also felt comforted that if, despite the daffodils, the golden sands and cosy pubs, a little bit of me was craving my local Costa Coffee, a curry and a late-night convenience store (like Veronica hankering for Leicester Square), then perhaps that was OK too.

(Note: Some of Lorna Hill's books are still in print, and second hand copies are widely available - although I forgot to look for them in the excellent children's section at Barter Books.

More information on Lorna Hill here.)

Some more daffies!

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Emma's series for 8+ Wild Thing about the naughtiest little sister ever is published by Scholastic.
"Hilarious and heart-warming" The Scotsman

 Wolfie is published by Strident.  It is a story of wolves, magic and snowy woods...
"A real cracker of a book" Armadillo 
"Funny, clever and satisfying...thoroughly recommended" Books for Keeps

Emma's Website
Emma’s Facebook Fanpage
Emma on Twitter - @EmmaBarnesWrite

Detail: Mixing Up Settings: Town, Country and the Books of Lorna Hill

0 Twig by Twig

 My desk is near the window. I would probably get a lot more done if it weren’t, especially at this time of year. And right now I have such a deadline that I shouldn’t be looking anywhere but at the screen.

I have a garden. It’s not a particularly nice garden because I’m better with words than with plants. Mostly, since I stopped being a cat owner, my garden seems to be a bird feeding station.

I love watching birds. Recently I’ve been watching them gather the materials for their nests. Carrying maybe one twig at a time. One very large twig, often longer than the bird itself. In their tiny beaks. It takes them ages to lift it, and even longer to fly with it to where they want to go. It must be, for us, like hawking a huge tree trunk round in our teeth.

When I see a tiny sparrow with a twig I wish I could build the nest for it. The task looks impossible. It looks even harder than the book I am struggling with right now, the one that seemed like a good idea when I signed the contract, and now seems impossible to get done in the tiny amount of time left. Much easier to look out at the birds. How are they going to get enough twigs?  How are they going to know what to do with them? How are they going to be able to put them all together and make a nest and then lay their eggs?

It exhausts me to think about it and there is so much that can go wrong.

When I first moved to this small village in County Down, a pair of housemartins built their odd, mud-hutlike nest in the apex of the side gable of the house. They were charming, if a little bit annoying – noisy beggars, and I was forever cleaning their poo off the roof of the car. But I loved seeing them wheel around and hearing the tiny squeaks of their chicks.

Their nest was a preposterous thing – a sort of mud coconut-shell affair clinging upside down, held on by hope. Then one day I found it smashed on the driveway, the dead chicks spilt over the gravel. The parent birds wheeled and wheeled in shrill distress. I could do nothing. It was unbearable.

A few days later I saw them with bits of mud in their beaks. They rebuilt. They raised another brood of chicks. They, or their descendants, return every year. Their upside-down mud hut clings on. 

I still haven’t finished this book and I don’t quite know how it is going to end. I’ve been asked to write about the Easter Rising of 1916, and right now it feels too big for me, and much too scary. And I should be working on it right now, instead of looking at birds flying round with twigs in their beaks.

I don’t know how they do it. I wish I had the instinct for this story that they have for their collecting, and carrying and flying and building and rebuilding. But I will do it. Twig by twig.

Detail: Twig by Twig

0 The Spring of Ideas - Liz Kessler

A while ago, I wrote a blog about the Seasons of Writing. It was an idea that my good friend Jen Alexander shared with me, and I’ve loved it and referred to it on countless occasions ever since. The idea is that the process of writing a book is very much like the calendar of seasons in a year.

Well, if that’s the case, it is definitely spring right now.

I’m at the very start of working on a new book. It’s an idea that has been patiently waiting underground for quite a few years, and its time has now come. Just as I’m beginning to see snowdrops appearing in the countryside, and tiny shoots starting to come through the ground in my own garden, my new story is beginning to show its head. Little tiny shoots coming up, one by one, all pretty and fresh and exciting.

For over a decade, writing has been my job, and there are times when I’m very aware of that. I make myself sit at my desk for a certain length of time; I set targets that involve writing a set number of words; I organize events, I attend book festivals, I do publicity, I write emails, blogs, articles; I reply to lovely letters from readers. All of these things are wonderful, and all make me feel glad that this is how I make my living. But a lot of the time, my job doesn’t feel especially creative.

But it does now.

A couple of months ago, I attended a writers’ retreat that I run with my author buddy Elen Caldecott. Four days where eighteen children’s authors come together to share thoughts, ideas, inspiration and workshops all about writing and creativity, set in beautiful countryside.

(I made a kind of slideshow of my photos while I was there. You can watch it here if you want to see why it’s such a lovely place.)

This was the fourth time we’ve run this retreat, and I have to say I think it was the best yet – especially in terms of creativity. But the point of this blog is to share what was, for me, the best thing to come out of this year’s retreat. And that was that my new book started to open up – yes, like a beautiful new crocus slowly unfurling its petals.

Part of the way that this happened was to do with my surroundings. Each morning of the retreat, I got up early and went out for a walk with my camera. The mornings were so quiet and the light was so soft, as a mist gradually lifted from the fields and trees. Something about the mornings felt right for my book, and started leading me towards the background mood and setting.

Then one evening, another writer buddy, Kelly McKain, and I had a wonderful couple of hours sharing music and downloading each other’s favourite songs. So on the final morning when I went out for my walk, I took my headphones and listened to these new songs at the same time – and the most amazing thing happened. As I walked, and watched the mist and the dew, and listened to the songs, I started almost seeing my book begin to take shape in front of me. I almost heard my characters singing lines from the songs as I listened to them. Almost felt their moods and their emotions, as I felt the mist rising on a storyline that was starting to take shape after five years of waiting in the shadows.

And it’s carried on like that for the months following the retreat. I’ve added more tunes and now have a playlist of about thirty songs. I play them when I walk the dog, trudging along a muddy coast path and hearing the characters singing the words. I play them in my study, writing away in my lovely new notebook, as I try to capture the feelings, the moods, the words and the moments in the same way as I saw them out on the cliff path.

I have written about fifteen books, and I can honestly say that I have never experienced anything quite like the process that is taking place with this book. It feels so creative, and such a journey of exploration. It’s intense, emotional, exciting and kind of magical. It reminds me that, after all, this isn’t just my job. It is my passion; it is one of the things that is at the heart of who I am, how I see the world and how I live my life.

The book is due to be delivered in September this year. I have two books coming out before then and a busy year ahead – but for now, I’m enjoying taking the time to nurture these seedlings of ideas that are popping up every day. 

So yes, this is work, and yes, sometimes it’s hard. But right here, right now, it feels like a privilege that I get to do such a magical, wonderful, creative thing and call it my day job. I hope that over the coming months, I can do my characters justice. I look forward to the rest of the spring, and am hoping for a summer filled with bright colours, delightful scents and a beautiful, blossoming story.

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Detail: The Spring of Ideas - Liz Kessler

0 The Great Outdoors – Children’s Books and Camping Out by Emma Barnes

Cover illustrator: Jamie Littler

I enjoy hiking, and love cross country skiing (on those rare occasions when I get the chance) but I’ve never been a great one for lugging around heavy backpacks full of clobber. I don’t like sleeping under the stars. Nor do I count among my skills lighting fires, pitching tents or rustling up something on a camp stove.

Yet my latest children’s book is all about camping. So what’s going on?

For one thing while, as a kid, I didn’t ever go camping I did enjoy reading about camping. There were quite a few books I came acrss on this theme – most of them already rather old-fashioned. In fact there’s even a name for this genre in Children’s Literature – “Camping and Tramping”.

 Here’s one I remember – Fell Farm Campers. Published in 1960, like a lot of books in the genre, it featured a family of bluff, outdoorsy upper class children, on holiday from boarding school (in this case in the Lake District) having outdoors adventures of the tent-pitching, map-following, mountain-climbing kind.

 I may sound snotty, but I enjoyed it.

I also read lots of Enid Blyton novels on the theme – her characters were forever pitching tents on Misty Moors, and tucking into picnics with the famous accompaniment of lashings of ginger beer. A lot of these books relied heavily on spies, smugglers etc for the excitement, but the one I liked best was about the day-to-day issues of survival. Jack, Peggy, Mike and Nora set up home on a Secret Island and even build themselves a house out of willow trees. And kidnap a cow. Which they hide in a cave.

It’s Robinson Crusoe for kids, and in my opinion beats the Famous Five hands down. I reread it recently and it still retained its magic.

The absolute classic of all camping books is Swallows and s. In this story, John, Susan, Tittie and Roger sail off on a yacht s during their summer holidays in the Lake District…and Roger can’t even swim. They camp out on Wild Cat Island and soon get into a feud with two more water-bound children – Nancy and Peggy Blackett: the s.

Poster for Swallows and s musical

I owned the whole series. Yet I never really got into them, beyond the first two books. I’m not sure why. Maybe the children were just too competent? Maybe their world seemed too distant from my own? Maybe the extraordinary detail about camping and sailing that many readers love was a bit overwhelming? (I’m still happy to leave the map and compass-reading to others.) Maybe the siblings were too well-behaved – why did they never squabble, like real children?

 I admit though that the first book is a cracking story – brought home to me when I went to the superb musical version a few years ago.

 By contrast, I never had problems identifying with pony-mad Jill Crewe. She was just my kind of camper – getting rained out and taking refuge in a barn, or becoming hopelessly lost after forgetting the directions and taking the wrong turn at a crossroads. She also knew that the ideals of the outdoor life didn’t always quite match the reality.

 “I lay in my sleeping bag and thought how pretty the stars looked, like a black spangled scarf caught up by the moon like a brooch. With such beautiful ideas in my mind, I fell asleep, and woke gasping as somebody began to throw water over me.
 “Stop it,” I yelled, “you beast!” 
“Get up quick!” somebody yelled, “it’s pouring!”

The US also has its classic outdoors books but of a  more perilous kind. Although much of the time she is living in a log cabin, or even a dug out, in between Laura Ingalls Wilder is on the wagon trail. At night there is only the fire, her faithful dog, Jack, and ever-resourceful Ma and Pa to look out for her, in a wild land of wolves, bears and panthers.

 Over half a century later, Vicky Austin travels across the American west with her family. And despite the elapse of time, it is still a potentially dangerous space:

 “I saw a bear!”
“Nonsense,” Daddy said.
“But I did!”
“It must have been a woodchuck or a raccoon.” Daddy spoke in his most reasonable voice. “Not a bear.”

 (The Moon by Night, by Madeleine L’Engle, chapter 6.)


When, a few decades later still, I visited the American wilderness I was just as dazzled as Vicky to spot a bear, on a mountain in Colorado, or coyotes at dawn, near the Grand Canyon. Maybe it was these memories which led to my own heroine, Wild Thing, being desperate to find a bear in the woods…

Yet all these books were written and published before I was born. Then…camping vanished from fiction. Vamoose. If there were such books published in the 1970s, 80s, 90s then I certainly haven’t come across them. I don’t think there are many now, either. A quick google search reveals only a few. Camping and tramping fiction would seem to be a thing of the past.

And yet I didn’t write a camping book from nostalgia for these titles but, because like many people, I’ve been swept up into the camping revival.  I reckon it was while I was camped out in a windswept Yorkshire field, contemplating dismantling my tent in the rain, that inspiration struck.  For camping is popular again part of the interest in getting back to nature and traditional leisure activities that has also fuelled the popularity of suburban hen-keeping, jam-making, hedgerow scavenging or allotment-tending. (Or perhaps it’s because tents are cheap, and more importantly, no longer take hours to put up before collapsing on top of you in the night.)

At least, that’s the appeal for adults. For today’s urban children, I’m speculating that it might be exactly the same reason as for the boarding-school educated heroes and heroines of 1930s fiction – it’s a way of escaping adult supervision and exploring the wider world in freedom. Even if that world is only a field with a stream in one corner, it’s still more than many kids are ever permitted to explore.

 And so, like a lot of children now, my heroines, Kate and Wild Thing, go camping. Though it takes some persuasion on their dad’s part to let them go. – but they do it in a very modern way. They are visiting a Rock Festival, where their Dad is performing with his band. In other respects, though, they are not modern at all. For, in the same way as countless children before them, the main attractions are streams (and falling in them), dens (and building them) and roasting things on sticks.

 It remains to be seen whether the new camping mania is a passing fad. Will x-boxes and the British weather win out? Will thousands of Halfords camping sets end up mouldering unused in the cellar? And are there any great tales of camping trips I’ve overlooked? Please let me know your favourites.


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Emma's series for 8+ Wild Thing about the naughtiest little sister ever (and her bottom-biting ways) is published by Scholastic. 
"Hilarious and heart-warming" The Scotsman

 Wolfie is published by Strident.  It is a story of wolves, magic and snowy woods...
"A real cracker of a book" Armadillo 
"Funny, clever and satisfying...thoroughly recommended" Books for Keeps


Emma's Website
Emma’s Facebook Fanpage
Emma on Twitter - @EmmaBarnesWrite

Detail: The Great Outdoors – Children’s Books and Camping Out by Emma Barnes