Land of adventures
The beautiful South Downs is the inspiration for the latest book from Cressida Cowell. The author says a sense of place, time and curiosity is essential for creativity and an important part of any childhood
The How to Train Your Dragon book series was inspired by the time I spent as a child on an uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland. To tell you the truth, it would be difficult NOT to be inspired by the staggeringly beautiful archipelago of the Inner Hebrides. These islands seem to demand to be written about. J M Barrie wrote the screenplay for the 1924 film of Peter Pan on the “Neverland” island of Eilean Shona. Mendelsshon wrote a symphony about Fingal’s Cave, Staffa, in the same year as Turner drew his painting of the same subject. And if ever there was a cave that looked like dragons must be living at the bottom of it, I would say that Fingal’s Cave, with its extraordinary tooth-like rock formations, and dark sea-filled interior, would be the number one, tip-top, dragon-seeker’s choice.
The landscapes of the British Isles are exceptionally bewitching, not just because of their beauty, but because they are old, old landscapes that have been inhabited by human beings and their stories for so long that you feel you would not be terribly surprised to meet a Roman legionary or two strolling over the hillside, or a Viking ship nosing its way down the coastline. It is no wonder that these landscapes have inspired so many writers, artists and musicians over the centuries, for you are never far from what Tolkien called “the heartwracking sense of the vanished past.”
My other holiday destination was the Sussex South Downs, and this was the landscape that inspired my new book series, The Wizards of Once. I explored this paradise alone on my bicycle, unhampered by adult intervention, for I grew up in the 1970s, where the notion of childcare was to open the front door and say to the children: “Bye kids, come back when you’re hungry. Don’t fall off a cliff…” Ah, what unimaginable liberty... “The past is another country. They do things differently there.”
The South Downs were as interesting as the Hebrides, although they had a very different feel.the earthworks and hill forts and pockets of uncultivated land were enormous and haunting. I played in a hill fort called Trundle Hill, first inhabited over three millennia ago, and from those chalky ramparts you could see all the way to the Isle of Wight. The sheer gargantuan size of these earthworks must have struck our ancestors as requiring such an extraordinary endeavour that you can see why they may have felt that the land was moved by giants, that the barrows were their graves, and that fairies might be hovering just out of sight among the wind-blown juniper bushes and the yew.
It is easy to forget how recently people truly believed in magic. For thousands of years, witches and fairies and giants and sprites were as real to people as the laws of physics are to us now. And although we have grown up in an age of science, the stories are still all around us, hardwired into our psyche by tales told to our grandparents and greatgrandparents, and in the landscape we played in as children.
The Wizards of Once issetinan imaginary Iron Age, a world so young that the British Isles do not know they are the British Isles yet, a time where giants really did stride through the wildwoods, and where my girl and boy heroes from opposing Wizard and Warrior Tribes ride on
You feel you would not be terribly surprised to meet a Roman legionary or two strolling over the hillside
enormous snowcats and have their own philosopher-giant, and a band of sprites and hairy fairies that follow them everywhere. I wanted to explore a lost time, where magic was still alive, but slowly being squeezed out by a more rational, scientific world.
One of the major themes in the book is the importance of children interacting with nature in a “wild” way. Children of today are not playing outside unaccompanied on their bicycles as much as they used to as when I was a child, and this is a concern when we face the threat of global warming, and the slow destruction of wild habitats around the world. For how are children going to appreciate the importance of looking after and preserving the natural world if they don’t spend enough time playing in it?
The world is not necessarily a more dangerous place than it used to be – but our reluctance to allow any possibility of danger in our children’s lives at all can in itself be dangerous. There have been reports of new university students being run over because they cannot cross a road, for example. Or other accounts of children in cities being unable to recognise a raspberry, or a carrot.
In his book Landmarks Robert Macfarlane explains how the 2007 Oxford Junior Dictionary replaced common words for landscape and nature, such as “bluebell” and “kingfisher” with words considered more useful for children, like “broadband” and “blog”. Such a change is significant because it indicates not only that children aren’t playing outdoors enough, but that they are also in danger of losing a precise and extensive vocabulary to describe the natural world around us. As a writer, and a parent, and someone who is concerned about the future of the environment, I find that a worrying thought.
In Landmarks Macfarlane collects old, very particular, words and terminology for nature and the countryside, that have gone out of common usage. Similarly, I have a “Lost Words” section in The
Wizards of Once, where sprites collect nature words that are in danger of disappearing. Some are real countryside words, such as “hair-ice” or “haeiris”, which is a particular fungal ice formation that appears on cold nights. By using words such as these I am trying to encourage children to look more closely at nature and wilderness, and feel a wonder at the breathtakingly beautiful environment we live in. Others are made-up words, and there I’m trying to encourage a child’s natural creativity of thought. Children are inherently curious, questioning, and capable of extraordinarily original ways of thinking, and this “explorer spirit” is something we need to encourage, both physically and mentally – and the two may be connected.
Because of course we human beings are not as in control of our environment as we think we are. We can circumnavigate the globe in a single day, we can go down to the bottom-most depths of the ocean, but one shrug of the earth’s crust, and our mighty cities are shaken to the ground, one little hole in the ozone layer, and the icecaps melt.
We are astonishingly fortunate in our wildernesses, and our countryside, whether they are the windswept Hebrides, or the haunting South Downs. We are also, as a nation, unusually creative, exporting more books than any other country in the world (and that is our only export of which that is true).
But we cannot take either of those things for granted.
What I am trying to encourage in my books is the natural creativity of children, their “explorer-spirit”, and also to awake in them an appreciation of the history and importance of the countryside around them. Landscapes that have inspired generations of writers and musicians and thinkers and artists. Landscapes of dragons and giants and wizards…
Landscapes that need preserving and looking after, so that they can inspire the generations of the future as well as the generations of the past.
The Wizards of Once by Cressida Cowell is published on 19 September by Hodder Children’s Books, priced £12.99.