I have always loved travelling back in time on the wings of a really good book.
My interest in history started with Clive King’s Stig of the Dump. I grew up in Kent, so the Downs and the chalk pits, the beech woods and the standing stones that feature in the novel were very familiar to me. I spent my childhood desperately hoping to bump into Stig, and to meet the rest of his tribe.
Then there were the other wonderful time-slip books – Charlotte Sometimes (Penelope Farmer), A Traveller in Time (Alison Uttley), The Children of Green Knowe (Lucy Boston). I particularly loved Tom’s Midnight Garden (Philippa Pearce). There was something so poignantly sad about the contrast between the Victorian and the modern day settings. The house: divided into flats. The glorious walled garden turned into a backyard for dustbins, and a housing estate.
I adored Penelope Lively’s books where the past leaked into the present – to hugely comic effect in The Ghost of Thomas Kempe but more eerily in Astercote and The House in Norham Gardens. The terrifyingly magical The Whispering Knights was set in Oxfordshire but also featured a chalky landscape and ancient stones.
There were classics that gave a me a taste of how people had live in bygone eras - Five Children and It, The Secret Garden, Kidnapped. As a teenager I fell truly, madly, deeply in love with Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen’s world had a romance and an appeal that my humdrum present totally lacked. It had frocks. Horses. Carriages. Balls.
Growing up, the past seemed to me to be a place where adventures could happen. In comparison, the modern world was so restricted. We had rules. Regulations. Timetables. We were constantly supervised.
Nowadays, as a novelist, the past appeals to me because it offers so many possibilities.
Every writer who creates a child protagonist faces the same problem: how to get rid of the parents. Essentially, your character needs to be alone because otherwise – faced with danger – they would turn to the nearest responsible adult for help and the grown up would sort out the problem. That’s wonderful in real life, but would make for a very short story.
So parents need to be killed off, or sent away, or put out of reach. But if your setting is the modern day UK , that still leaves you with all the other support networks that are (in theory at any rate) there to protect the vulnerable. There are teachers, social workers, emergency services. Your protagonist would only have to dial 999 and help would be on its way. I have tied myself in knots with some books, having to invent places with no phone signal, or mobiles whose battery is about to die, just so my characters can be put in mortal peril. You don’t have this problem if you set your story in a place where mobile phones don’t exist.
It could be a dystopian future. But – for now at any rate - I like to go back to the dangerous past, where there were no rules, no safety nets and where anything can – and will – happen.
