Alex Nye's Blog: Life Through A Window - Posts Tagged "tolkein"
A 1970's Magic Portal
A plain brick 1970's semi. It might be just a house, but that is where I entered the worlds of C.S.Lewis, Enid Blyton, Tolkein, Joan Aiken, Mary Norton, Frances Burnett, Tove Jansson... et al... A house which my parents bought for £9,000 in 1970 and sold five years later for £16,000. From the ages of 7 to 12 I lived there, the most significant reading years in our lives, when books and stories lay the foundation work for our futures. Every beautiful story you can imagine - the sparkle and sinister-edged shadows of Peter Pan, for example - was opened for me in this plain 1970s semi.
When I went out to play under the streetlights, I thought of the children in Ballet Shoes for Anna, digging with their bare hands in the earth to find their parents and grandparents lost in an earthquake in Turkey - and I learned that such things could happen, that the earth could swallow people in some faraway country if it decided to heave up out of its volatile rest.
And I learned that small children worked and died in the factories and mills of Lancashire (Midnight is a Place by Joan Aiken) and their lives counted for nothing, and I wondered at the brutality and injustice of it all, while at the same time learning how a narrative could be structured and many-layered like an onion (which led me on, eventually, by degrees, to Wuthering Heights).
All of these worlds and more were discovered behind the facade of this plain 70s semi.
The door to the Secret Garden opened for me and I stepped through, and I read that same passage 30 years later at my Mum's funeral, because... well, just because...
And what thrills me even more is that the copy of Peter Pan I read when I was 8 is the same copy my Mum read when she was a little girl, and which my children later read - a beautiful old book with original illustrations, thick as a Church Bible, published before the invention of the mass-produced paperback and the Penguin revolution.
Never under-estimate the doors and windows and opportunities that open when you read a book as a child. The texture of the pages, the smell, the words and the worlds it creates, weave a magic spell... and I can still step inside those worlds with ease, even now, and see them all clearly in the light of day, as fresh as they were when I was 8. I wonder if playstation games can do that?
And without all of that, I would never have made my own teeny tiny contribution to children's literature...
When I was 8, a teacher, Mr. Grant from New Zealand (who was missing a finger, chopped off in a factory when he was a 12 year old boy) said to me, "What do you want to do when you grow up, Alex?" "A children's writer!" I told him. "Really? Not write for adults?" "Don't think so. Because I'm not an adult yet." Well, I like writing for everyone, adults and children alike, all ages, but a good children's book does have a special power.
And thank you Mr Grant - wherever you are now - for being that first significant teacher in my life who said, "Did you know you can do this?" He read my stories out to the rest of the class every fortnight, and we all sat and listened and the others generously encouraged me and seemed to genuinely look forward to the next instalment.
Of course, in the cruel and cynical publishing world we live in now, the competition for encouragement and captive readers is daunting, but at least I have a few...
When I went out to play under the streetlights, I thought of the children in Ballet Shoes for Anna, digging with their bare hands in the earth to find their parents and grandparents lost in an earthquake in Turkey - and I learned that such things could happen, that the earth could swallow people in some faraway country if it decided to heave up out of its volatile rest.
And I learned that small children worked and died in the factories and mills of Lancashire (Midnight is a Place by Joan Aiken) and their lives counted for nothing, and I wondered at the brutality and injustice of it all, while at the same time learning how a narrative could be structured and many-layered like an onion (which led me on, eventually, by degrees, to Wuthering Heights).
All of these worlds and more were discovered behind the facade of this plain 70s semi.
The door to the Secret Garden opened for me and I stepped through, and I read that same passage 30 years later at my Mum's funeral, because... well, just because...
And what thrills me even more is that the copy of Peter Pan I read when I was 8 is the same copy my Mum read when she was a little girl, and which my children later read - a beautiful old book with original illustrations, thick as a Church Bible, published before the invention of the mass-produced paperback and the Penguin revolution.
Never under-estimate the doors and windows and opportunities that open when you read a book as a child. The texture of the pages, the smell, the words and the worlds it creates, weave a magic spell... and I can still step inside those worlds with ease, even now, and see them all clearly in the light of day, as fresh as they were when I was 8. I wonder if playstation games can do that?
And without all of that, I would never have made my own teeny tiny contribution to children's literature...
When I was 8, a teacher, Mr. Grant from New Zealand (who was missing a finger, chopped off in a factory when he was a 12 year old boy) said to me, "What do you want to do when you grow up, Alex?" "A children's writer!" I told him. "Really? Not write for adults?" "Don't think so. Because I'm not an adult yet." Well, I like writing for everyone, adults and children alike, all ages, but a good children's book does have a special power.
And thank you Mr Grant - wherever you are now - for being that first significant teacher in my life who said, "Did you know you can do this?" He read my stories out to the rest of the class every fortnight, and we all sat and listened and the others generously encouraged me and seemed to genuinely look forward to the next instalment.
Of course, in the cruel and cynical publishing world we live in now, the competition for encouragement and captive readers is daunting, but at least I have a few...
Life Through A Window
Alex Nye writes about life at the creative rock-face, offering tips and remedies along the way. She writes about the books she loves, where she reads them, what they mean to her, and she writes about
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