INSPIRATION ON MULL
Benedict Blathwayt MOST of us have one special place – a place which glows always within us, like an ember, and can light us up creatively and spiritually, even when we are not there. Mull is such a place to me. I’ve had different lives there: as a child and as an adult, living, working, often in exile.
Over thirty-five years I have written and illustrated more than fifty children’s books. Mull is there, somewhere, in many of them: in the colour and the light; in the wildlife; in the outline of distant mountains and in the crystal clear water of rock pool and sea.
When I visit schools, children ask me where my stories come from. I tell them that stories come from things we have seen and experienced. For every story there has to be a spark, an ember. The ember for me is Mull, and in particular a large farm on the east coast of the island. My mother worked there after the war. I have early memories of the farm, the warm smell of cows and sweet hay. I worked summers on the farm when I was a teenager and when I got married I had a full-time job on the farm milking the cows, cartoning the milk and delivering it in crates to shops and hotels in Tobermory and Salen. I later wrote five books about a cow called ‘Bramble’. There’s two orphan lambs in Tig and Tag ; a goose called ‘Bella’; and a sheepdog called ‘Kip’. My illustrations are full of fishing boats and ferries; puffins and seals; sad ruined cottages and distant hazy islands. The vision and enthusiasm of Duncan Swinbanks and his bookshop in Tobermory, and of Hugh Andrew of Birlinn Books means many of my Mull-inspired stories are back in the shops. The call of seals; the strange Aurora Borealis; the autumn trumpeting of swans; the first snow on the mountains; stars so bright they seem to crackle like fireworks; the lonely bubbling song of the Curlew – these are among the elements, the embers, that make Mull a magical place for me.