Tapping into the intensity of being young and curious
With a childhood in Angus like the Durrells, but with ‘fewer scorpions and more thermal vests’ Abi Elphinstone credits her adventures with inspiring her children’s books
I’m sitting inside my writing shed in my garden in London and with the ivy creeping over the door and the ceanothus in bloom outside the window, the scene looks almost idyllic. Until you notice the grass in the garden is the type you Hoover rather than cut, there is more concrete than flowerbeds and the sirens from the surrounding streets are steadily drowning out the birdsong. This is a world away
from where I lived as a child, at the foot of the Angus glens in Scotland, but time and again I return to the landscape of my youth when writing my books.
I grew up in a farmhouse outside a village called Edzell and every day my siblings and I rushed home from school to tear through the steading opposite. We claimed empty cattle sheds for secret meetings, we built dens in the bales and we swung from the rafters. Permanently barefoot, covered in bruises and late for mealtimes, my siblings and I were relentlessly curious about the natural world – like the Durrell children but with fewer scorpions and more thermal vests. Our weekends were spent scrambling over the moors to look for golden eagles, jumping into the ice-cold Westwater river, skimming stones across Loch Lee and exploring the ‘haunted’ cave on St Cyrus beach.
North east Scotland proved to be a landscape rife for exploration but out of all the wild places I explored as a child, there was one that stuck out: a walk just north of Edzell and a few miles from our house. After you leave the village, you cross an old stone bridge and then, on your left, there is a little blue door. You could miss it if you didn’t know it was there but my parents knew about it and they pushed it open. And what lay beyond could well have been Narnia. On the left, thundering through a steep gorge, the North Esk River browned by peat from the moors and on the right, above the gorge, a path that wove alongside rhododendron bushes, beech trees and a long-forgotten folly. The gorge opens up eventually, then the lochs, moors and mountains take over. I didn’t know it back then but years down the line I was to borrow the entire world behind that door for the setting of my third book, The Night Spinner.
As a child, I disagreed with my parents about many things – namely vegetables and bedtimes – but I knew that when it came to nature they had got it right. My siblings and I were encouraged to spend time outside every day, regardless of the weather, and in doing so we explored the world deeply, thoroughly, with an intensity that perhaps only children really know: I brewed potions from wood sorrel, pine needles and puddle water; I traced the bark from silver birches into a notepad; I dropped notes for fairies into the well at the bottom of the garden; I camped on the lawn under a full moon. And these experiences fuelled in me an indestructible sense of wonder at the natural world.
When I was 19, I left Scotland to complete a degree in English literature at Bristol University. Shortly afterwards, I started a job in PR and marketing in London. The city felt exciting and new but saddled with student loan debt and disillusioned by the increasingly vacuous nature of my job, I felt myself craving the wild again. Unable to afford a return fare at the time, I booked a one-way ticket to Tanzania to take up a teaching placement in a small village called Mvumi, just north of Dodoma. And it was there – amidst the baobab trees and the cicadas – that I
It took me seven years, three failed books and 96 rejections from literary agents to secure my first book deal
thought back to my childhood adventures in Scotland and I began to use them to build the setting of a children’s book.
A while later, I returned to England to teach in a secondary school and to submit my completed manuscript to literary agents. It took me seven years, three failed books and 96 rejections from literary agents to secure my first book deal with publishers Simon & Schuster. And the difference between my published books and the unsuccessful ones that came before them was the way in which I recalled my childhood. My rejected manuscripts were vague recollections of childhood adventures out in the Scottish wilds; my published, and now bestselling, books reached back to the intensity of these experiences, to the sense of awe at the root of them. Because for me, the best children’s books are written by authors who can remember vividly what it felt like to be ten years old again: the fears, thrills, mystery and wonder of being alive.
My first memory of being truly afraid was when I climbed the holly tree in my garden as a child. I’d climbed all the other treess – the wellingtonia, the beech and the sycamore – through the maze of jutting branches until I emerged into a world of buzzards and owls. But the holly was my nemesis – all prickled leaves and branches just beyond my reach. I remember the failed attempts – the bruised shins and grass-stained jeans – but I also recall the feeling of forcing back the nerves, of steadying my weight and hoisting my body up through the branches, and as I gazed down at the garden having made that climb, I felt invincible. I felt, at ten years old, as if I could climb anything.
Years on, my characters encounter the same fears and thrills in the fictional trees I invent. My first series, The Dreamsnatcher trilogy, see the main character, Moll Pecksniff, encounter tree ghouls, enchanted oaks and witches who nest in silver birches. My next book, Sky Song, sees eagle huntress, Eska, discovering a secret hideaway of treehouses up in the canopy of Deeproots forest. And in my latest book, Rumblestar, 11-year-old Casper Tock stumbles across a girl from a magical kingdom inside a Neverlate tree (a tree which, very conveniently, grows excuses).
When we’re young, we see the world in ferocious detail, partly because we’re at our most curious then but also because we’re smaller so we are, quite literally, closer to the insects burrowing under logs and the butterflies resting on leaves. As adults, we grow busier and, inevitably, taller so our gaze becomes more distant, less focused. With my new series, The Unmapped Chronicles, I wanted to build a world with the same sharpness of eye and sprawling possibility that permeates a childhood immersed in nature. So, I thought back to all the incredible skies I’d seen growing up in Scotland – pink sunrises, orange sunsets, rain that summoned rainbows and made waterfalls roar, and snow that built jewellery out of spider webs – and I imagined a child’s what ifs bound up inside them: what if all the grown-ups have got it wrong about our skies? What if it isn’t science and geography behind the weather but magic? What if there are four secret kingdoms – Rumblestar, Crackledawn, Jungledrop and Silvercrag – filled with fantastical creatures who conjure weather for our world? Perhaps drizzle hags brew rain and snow trolls beaver away with moon syrup and cloud wisp to make snow?
The first book in this series, Rumblestar, is a story about cloud giants and magical hot air balloons, unexpected friendships and learning to be brave. Above all though, it is a story about wonder – about the mind-bending beauty of the natural world, which I grew to know and love through my childhood adventures in Scotland.
● Rumblestar by Abi Elphinstone is out now in paperback, priced £6.99 (Simon & Schuster); www.abielphinstone.com, Twitter: @moontrug