My love of islands has played a huge part in my life and the stories I’ve created

Islands have been big in my life. I was born on a big one, in St Albans, nearly 76 years ago. I met my wife, Clare, on a littler one, on Corfu, 57 years ago. I have holidayed on Bryher, on
the Isles of Scilly, every year for the past 45 years or more. I went to Ithaca last year, and am going back again this year. I left Clare there last year, to go off to the Trojan wars. I have had word that she has been knitting feverishly to ward off the unwanted attentions of numerous suitors.  I’m not waiting 10 years.

I’ve sorted out Troy, so I’m heading back there soon with murder and mayhem in my heart, to sort out those suitors, and to try on the jumper she’s been knitting all this while. I love islands, go back to them again and again, whether by boat or plane, or in my mind’s eye, because they are, and always have been, to me, places where stories happen, fictional and nonfictional. The two are, happily, easily confused.

The first book that I ever read and could not put down was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. I was Jim Hawkins hiding in the barrel of apples on the deck of the Hispaniola, overhearing in horror the murderous intentions of Long John Silver. I was behind the barricades on Treasure Island, fighting off his villainous cronies.

I was marooned with other choirboys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. I was Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, I was Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver. I was with Prospero
on his island in Shakespeare’s The Tempest; with Odysseus as he got himself into all sorts of heroic scrapes and troubles, usually on islands, as he journeyed home from Troy to Ithaca, to his long-suffering and ever-knitting wife.

So this is a chicken-and-egg story. Was it events in my life that drew me to this fascination with islands, and to write my own island stories, or was it the stories that I read as I was growing up? Well, who knows? And, actually, who cares? All I know is that my life and my islands are so intertwined, woven so tightly, that my favourite jumper has no holes, still keeps out the wind all these years later. It was, in fact, made on Orkney from Soay sheep wool.

Clare didn’t knit this one. Another knitter knitted it, but that’s another story, and not one I’m going to tell you or her or anyone.I seem so often to find myself sitting down and writing another island story, many set on the Isles of Scilly. Why the Whales Came, The Wreck of the Zanzibar, Arthur High King of Britain, The Sleeping Sword, Listen to the Moon. Kensuke’s Kingdom takes place on an island in the Coral Sea – my version, I suppose, of Robinson Crusoe.

And now I have just finished Boy Giant, Son of Gulliver and, of course, much of it happens on Lilliput and among the little people who live there. But my Gulliver story happens today. My Gulliver is not a stranded sailor in silver-buckled shoes and britches and a tricorn hat, but an Afghan refugee who is washed up on a beach in Lilliput more than 200 years after Swift’s Gulliver left.

The story owes a great deal to Swift, but much more to the plight of millions of refugees the world over. I shall say no more except that the book is very much inspired by the words of George Whitman, the founder of Shakespeare and Company, a celebrated bookshop in Paris, words that introduce Boy Giant to the reader: “Be not unkind to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.”

I write books, tell stories that I hope young people are not going to want to put down, that might enrich lives (as the writing of them has enriched mine), that have helped to make readers of them. I pass on to them what I know and care about.

If I have a gift for storymaking at all, it was handed down to me by those who passed on to me their own love of stories, of poems, of the music in words, by a mother who took the time to read to me, by enough great teachers, by fine writers and wonderful illustrators.

Libraries were there for me, and devoted librarians, and there were often children to listen to me reading, who seemed lost in the story I was telling or reading, and are there still.
I did not become a writer without the help of others. As John Donne wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself.”

 

Enjoying…
A trip to the seaside to the folk festival in Sidmouth to meet old singing friends and to go to their concert. But the town was empty of festival-goers, no Morris dancers or fiddlers in the streets, no pipers, no drummers, no funny hats.

Plenty of room to park. Something was wrong. Turned out we had come a week early. Had a lovely crab lunch, sat on the beach and watched families eating dribbly ice creams fast so the gulls didn’t get them, listened to the shrieks of children dancing back from the tumbling waves, witnessed humanity at play, just having the best of times. Had the best of times myself being among them, and all a happy accident.

Eating…
Kale. I’ve become over recent times a dab hand at making it taste great. I was told by someone who knows that you live longer and happier if you eat kale regularly. So this week, and every day of every week, I make a kale smoothie.

We grow kale in the garden, along with spinach, mint, berries and apples. I’m out there in my jimjams every morning picking what I need. I add some concentrated sour cherry juice and cold water from the fridge. Hey presto! Kale tastes fantastic, I discovered, if you keep it well hidden. It’s powerful stuff. I feel as fit as a flea and twice as jumpy.

Watching…
Gentleman Jack, and loving it. Really sad it’s over. Missing it. A wonderful company of actors, all a delight to watch, a script as sharp as you like. Suranne Jones as Anne Lister is utterly compelling, totally convincing.

And she does that thing of flashing you a look from time to time, which makes her performance suddenly personal – and she is, of course, at that moment reminding you that it is a performance, just in case you had forgotten. And her coat and her hat and her walk! She strides through the story, bestrides her world, breaking hearts, breaking moulds. There’s been nothing as good as this to watch for a very long time.

Bravo her, bravo all of them!