After she had read the first book in my Arthur trilogy, a distinguished writer-friend wrote to me saying how surprised she was because she didn’t think I had it in me to devise an intricate jigsaw or to lead readers on the elaborate dance of a novel. I couldn’t have put it better myself!
True, I did write one-and-a-half novels as a student (one was about Anglo-Indian relationships) that remain in a bottom drawer; and true, my first two books for children were such free retellings of the medieval romances Havelok the Dane and King Horn as to justify being called fiction. But their plots and psychological dramas were the making of their 13th century authors.
In 1968, Jill Paton Walsh and I wrote Wordhoard, a collection of ten Anglo- Saxon stories for children, and were bucked by Alan Garner’s praise for them. And then, in my early thirties, I wrote three short stories about an Anglo-Saxon boy (The Sea Stranger, The Fire-Brother and The Earth-Father), subsequently published as one (still short) novel, Wulf.
My next excursion into fiction was a short ghost story, Storm, set on the north Norfolk coast. To universal astonishment, this was awarded the Carnegie Medal. My great good fortune was to be in the right place at the right time, when there was a powerful lobby for the recognition of writing for younger children. What this unexpected recognition gave me was confidence – the self-belief to go further than before, and the knowledge that people would be likely to read what I wrote. But not, for all that, the confidence or even the desire to write full-length fiction.
So I came to the fiction table late, and somehow despite myself. I wanted to find a way of approaching Arthurian romance that seemed to me valuable and revealing and my solution was the Arthur trilogy: historical fiction incorporating, anticipating and reflecting legend.
So purists could well say that Gatty’s Tale is really my first full-length novel.
Waterslain Angels - will by my first full-length novel set in north Norfolk. Two children set off in pursuit of the angels missing from the hammerbeam roof in the local church.
