I think it’s inevitable
that readers conjure a picture of the author from the characters and events
they choose to write about. I think this perception can also hamper writers who
are starting out, that people will confuse them with the things their
characters do. I was lucky to have this association broken early, by one of my
favourite writers as a child.
I loved John Gordon’s books, but they terrified me. The
Giant Under the Snow was one of those novels which absorbed me so
completely that, when my dad opened the door to tell me to switch the light
off, I screamed because I thought he was a leather man, come to get me. Men
made of leather, the giant Green Man lying just under the surface of the
landscape, the black dog - I can see now how the folklore of East Anglia underscores
Gordon’s novels, but then it was all terrifying because it was set in the
present. School children on trips came across powerful icons of past
power. In The House on the Brink,
something which seems to be a log is moving silently and relentlessly across
the fens. I see now that they were intended for teenage readers, not
ten-year-olds, which makes sense.
I was terrified by these novels, and yet compelled to read
just one more chapter. Maybe I just didn’t want to switch off the light. Surely
the author would be suitably disturbing too.
But he wasn’t. I met him a few times, between the ages of
five and ten in the late 70s and early 80s, and he wasn’t scary at all. In
fact, at our last meeting, he gave me the idea of a story, involving a
mummified hand in a museum. I started to write that story, but never finished
it. Yet I can see in my own writing a strong interest in another, ancient world
just under our own, one that we know without realising it. The banshees and
fairies of The Insect Rosary, and the devil and shaman of The Devil
in the Snow are almost slippages between that world and this. Folklore
links history with beliefs and threats and curses, and our local tales in the
east are faithfully recorded by people like the Foxearth and District Local
History Society. Our giants, walking corpses and dragons live on, even ‘The
Naked Ladies of the Melford Disaster’.
I get the impression when teaching that some readers still
believe that the writing reflects the author, and some writers who believe that
a writer must exclude themselves from the ordinary world and immerse themselves
in a different way of living. From an early age I saw that writers of the
stories which most disturb us were real, and often very nice people - the
uncanny can be accessed by anyone. However, as I become older, I have to admit
to a growing fear of the countryside, the open spaces and the hidden past. I
think John Gordon might have to take responsibility for that too.
Sarah's second novel, The Devil in the Snow, has just been published by Sandstone Press.
"Shona has a dysfunctional relationship with her husband, Maynard, and when their daughter goes missing she knows that he’s behind it. Gradually she grows to realise that there is a bigger truth behind everything that is going on, and she has the very thing her husband is after."
