Nicola Davies – Children's Author |

LIVE, WITH LOVE

By Nicola | Published: September 15, 2014

It’s been so beautiful this week. Perfect weather, warm and still, like a blessing. Thanks to a shoulder injury that means more than 4 hours at my computer is agony, I’ve been out in it too, far more than I would have been normally. Normally I would have been frantically working, trying to Get Everything Done because from next week I’m not really at home until the middle of November.

This is the calm before the storm. Next week I start six weeks of almost constant travel. Italy for the pordenonlegge festival, http://www.pordenonelegge.it/it/index_inglese.htmlthen Scotland for a Scottish Book trust tour, then sundry UK festivals (Bath, Cheltenham, Wells)followed by a tour of schools in Boston and New York State. I really love this part of my work – talking directly to children and to adults, reading my work, talking about the stories behind my books (as I always tell children every story has a story of how it became a story). So I’ll be telling audiences in Italy at the Pordenonelgge Festival about the real conservation stories behind each of the four ‘Heros of the Wild’ books, and about the people I met and the places I visited in the course of researching them.

I love taking photographs when I travel so I like to share those too sometimes, as long as technology – ipads/ projector screens – doesn’t take over. What’s most enjoyable for me, and seems to work best for my audiences, is the simplest of connections – talking, listening, answering questions without anything even approaching a power point presentation!

Answering questions is actually one of my favourite things. Of course I often get asked the same ones – particularly as I talk about animals, I get asked ‘whats the biggest/smallest /scariest/ ‘ type questions and every writer gets asked ‘where do you get your ideas from’. I can honestly say with my hand on my heart that I NEVER, EVER get tired of answering the same things, because for the person asking, it’s a new question and I’m giving new information. The opportunity to deliver information to a young person who really wants to hear it is so precious, and inspiring the desire to ask questions is kind of the whole point of my writing life. I don’t want any book to be a dead end – whether its non fiction or fiction – I want my readers to know more, think more, ask more, imagine more, when they get to the end of one of my books.

One of the other things I love about working directly with live audiences is it gives me the chance to present things straight to audiences, without the gatekeepers of publishing getting in the way. I’m hugely grateful to my publishers – they make it possible for me to do what I do – but there are some things they don’t want to publish. So I can tell stories to live audiences that will perhaps never make it onto the published page. (The swift story that I wrote about in a blog earlier this year is one of those: kids love it, teachers love it, can I get it published? Nope.) I can road test things too, and see how they work, and I can try out ideas that may then work their way back into a book. One thing I’ve been doing with live audiences for more than 20 years now, is teaching kids how to sing like a humpback whale. The crazy thing about this is, that although humpbacks were the first whale I studied, I’ve never written about them. There’s so much more known about humpback song than when I saw my first humpy in (gulp) 1979 I really do want to do a book. It would be great to have a book to back up all those noises that kids all over the country and now all over the world have learnt in one of my sessions.

Writing is solitary and often dispiriting. Getting anything published is a struggle. Your best ideas are rejected. You favourite books fail to sell. But when you are in front of an audience its just you and them, nobody to get in the way, nobody to tell you what readers like. You can find out immediately for yourself and get instant feedback – and happily for me that feedback is always really good, really encouraging. And once in a while it’s astonishing, once in while I see the lightbulb coming on in the head of a child, and I know I’ve sparked something important that they are going to remember for a long time. Seeing live audiences of children, listening to their questions, seeing them taking in what I have to say reminds me of WHY I do this.

So here’s a little list of places where I’ll be over the next few weeks where you can come and say hello!

September 17th http://www.pordenonelegge.it/it/index_inglese.html

September 21st to 26th touring schools in Argyll and Bute with Scottish Book Trust

BATH CHILDREN”S LITERATURE FESTIVAL

October 3rd 10 -11am Toppings Bookshop in Bath

13.15 A Natural History Of The Unmentionable, The Guildhall, Bath.

October 4th 11am Natural Inspiration, Prior Park College Bath

SOCIETY OF BIOLGY CHILDREN’s EVENT

October 6th 5.30 The ICK Factor , Ipswich Museum

CHELTENHAM FESTIVAL

October 7th 13.30 School’s Event The Inkpot, Imperial Square Gardens

16.00 Fun at Four Picture Book Event The Studio, Imperial Square.

READING AND PAINTING, WITH JACKIE MORRIS

October 9th 12 noon onwards Number Seven bookshop and gallery Dulverton, Devon

WELLS FESTIVAL

October 16th 14.00 – 15.15 Wells Town Hall

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FACT AND FICTION and STORY SPACE

By Nicola | Published: August 6, 2014

As the author of books that are put in non fiction and fiction sections of libraries I don’t see that there is a hard boundary between fact and fiction. Look at any great works of fiction and you find truthful information about the real world – portraits of Victorian poverty and social injustice in Dickens or the pin sharp critique of the Russian revolution in Orwell’s Animal Farm. Photography, supposedly the most ‘non fictional’ medium of all, but you only have to reflect for a moment about how you’ve cropped your own pictures on facebook to know that photography’s credentials as non fiction are not impeccable. Robert Capa’s photograph of the Spanish Civil War ‘Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death’ is one of the most famous documentary pictures of all time not for what it’s supposed to portray, but for the debate about whether or not it was staged.

My point is that the line between fiction is and non fiction is at best made with wiggly crayon and that trying to draw it with an indelible marker is actually getting in the way of children’s learning, reinforcing gender stereotypes and undermining libraries. Instead of dividing non fiction and fiction, we might do better to talk about different kinds of narrative, drawn from different sources.

I’m interested in igniting the spark of curiosity in my readers. My aim is to start a fire so big it can consume world of information and experience and burn for a lifetime. And the best way I know for doing that is using narrative. It’s an incredibly flexible and robust device – it can hold information about the deepest tides and currents in our nature, the instructions for making a soup or the life history of a polar bear. Narrative is good at providing combustible material in exactly the right form to get those sparks crackling away. A search engine provides you with a whole freshly cut tree. Just ask Ray Mears how good that is for firestarting. Narrative breaks knowledge into nice dry twigs and feeds them to the flames at exactly the right rate.

Narrative works by creating story space, which I would argue is perhaps the most important and powerful invention of human culture. Story space is a liminal region, a territory between the exterior world and the interior world of emotion and reflection. In it, boundaries are dissolved, the real and the imagined are combined in unique cocktails of experience, allowing us new insights into the world and our place within it. Story space allows us to to see things differently; it facilitates fresh thinking and helps both artists and scientists to formulate new questions, theories, new ways to investigate and describe the world. It is the business of the writer to create the narrative, to shape the story space; what goes in that space is information, either drawn from imagination or evidence from the real world.

Children understand the nature of story space and what can happen there. They are happy with narratives – both visual and verbal – that convey all sorts of information, factual, emotional, spatial, real and imaginary. This was vividly demonstrated to me a few years ago when I was working with Tate Modern, talking to groups of children about particular works in its collections. The work ‘Gothic Landscape’ by Lee Krasner, was particularly popular with the children with whom I worked – I probably should say here that these children had never been to any sort of art gallery before. A little girl said ‘This painting is about a bird landing in a tree. It’s about how the wings beat and how it feels to land in the tree going fast and then slow’. I think it’s telling that she used the word ‘about’. Not this ‘painting is a picture ‘of’ or ‘this painting shows’ but this ‘painting is about’. So this little girl was perfectly happy that the painting was a narrative that told a story about space – the tree and the bird; about time – the bird going fast then slow, and about emotion– how it feels to land in a tree. All real things, represented in an obviously fictional, abstract painting. (Jake Chapman put that in your ready-made-pipe and smoke it).

My narratives hold information about the natural world. Sometimes those narratives are found stories – real things that I pick up off the ground and sometimes they are entirely invented, poems, myths, made only from a weave of words. Sometimes the information I put in the story space is factual – the diet of a bat, the number of eggs a turtle lays – and sometimes it’s emotional – how you feel when you are close to a wild animal, or when you have promised to plant a whole forest. What this combining of fact and fiction offers me is the opportunity to convey the emotional roots that every natural history fact has put down in my own soul.

What I’m making the case for here is narrative non fiction with attitude, with voice with personality. Somehow we are familiar with the value of this kind of writing for adults, but not for kids. And far, far from being obsolete in a world where information is just a click away, passionate narrative non fiction has never, ever been so important. The division of non fiction from fiction, and the lack of attention to the role of narrative in conveying information about the real world has eroded the status of libraries particularly in schools. The line of thought goes something like this . Learning is about putting facts in your head. Facts are things you look up, and you used to look up facts in a library. That’s what libraries are for. But if facts come from the internet, why then do you need a library? With so very much information easily available a child is at risk of being swamped by an overload of facts, demotivated by over exposure (see Ray Mears and the tree above). What narrative non fiction offers is a route, a guide a companion, a means and motivation for finding out, and structure in which to place new information. A good narrative doesn’t carry all the facts – just enough to make the reader want more; it infects the reader with curiosity, the most virulent and powerful way to create self motivated learners, who will become the curators of their own minds throughout life. And at the moment good narratives are not the strong point of google search.

In America this is understood. I think the tradition of narrative non fiction there, of nature writing in particular is stronger. What they found was that high school graduates raised on an exclusive diet of fiction did not have the skills to interrogate a text – pretty essential for any university course. In the US they now place the reading and writing of narrative non fiction at the heart of their curriculum. This teachers children how to process information in one form, and present it in another – about the most transferable skill set you can acquire.

Writing non fiction based on personal observation of the world around them hones children’s ability to look, and to question; it gives them something to write about and helps them to find the power of their voices as writers, speakers and human beings. I represent this process through reading non fiction to writing non fiction very simply like this

your world into your words into my brain

my world from my brain into my words

my words into your brain you see my world

This seems so obvious, yet some children go through the whole of their education without understanding what words can do, what their words can do. Reading narrative non fiction models it; writing narrative non fiction teaches it. Simples.

Somebody asked me the other day if I’d ever written ‘a real picture book’. This question embodies the attitude to children’s non fiction in the UK. Frankly its a ghetto created by dividing fiction from non fiction and forgetting about the existence of narratives and the creative role of the writer in their creation. There is a perception that children’s non fiction books aren’t proper books and that the writers of children’s non fiction are not proper writers. I once heard a librarian tell children not to look in the non fiction section but to look for a ‘real book’ and I’ve frequently encountered teachers who encourage the reading of fiction but don’t count non fiction reading at all. I think this is at least in part a gender issue: women tend not to read non fiction and most teachers and librarians are women. But ladies, we need boys to read too, and what men and boys like are stories drawn from the real world. And girls need to read about more than fairies and witches if we are to raise female scientists and engineers.

The last twenty years has divided the world into Harry Potter on one side and google search on the other. Fantasy is not the only kind of narrative and ramming in lists of facts is not how we learn. We don’t even learn only with our brains, but with our bodies, our hearts, our souls. We need to rethink our concept of learning, and of how we learn best. We are, to paraphrase the conclusion of Phillip Reeve’s marvelous science fiction story cycle ‘Mortal Engines‘, ‘engines for making stories’. We are made of story, our very lives have a beginning, a middle and an end and to learn about the world, to learn how to be the best of ourselves we need all sorts of stories – real and imagined and mixtures of the two – and that’s what writers, and publishers and libraries are for.

Insect Story for Insect Week: Richard’s Bug

By Nicola | Published: June 30, 2014

Armenian Dreaming

By Nicola | Published: June 20, 2014

Ararat

Driving up the steep red-rock track to the FPWC eco centre lodge on Caucasus Wildlife Refuge near the village of Urtsadzor, in the dry mountains of central Armenia, was like arriving on the set of a spaghetti western: the light was harsh and the rocks were stacked like giant building blocks 2000m high. I expected Sergio Leone to appear at the top of ravine at any moment. The landscape looked as if the rigors of the minus 32 degree winters and the plus 40 summers had simply leached the colour out of it. The dry slopes appeared denuded and the rocky heights bleached into the pale sky.

Eco Lodge at Caucasian Wildlife Refuge

We dumped our bags in our very nice rooms (I think I’d expected some sort of hut with three wall and a semi functioning roof, not a triumph of modern sustainable architecture) and then sat on the terrace.

Bill Oddie, Simon Barnes and WLT (World Land Trust) CEO, John Burton were soon birding away… black headed bunting, black wheatear, lesser grey shrike, short toed eagle…. Within seconds they were having recreational arguments about the true identity of bird shapes too distant and too fleeting for me to even see. Really, I just can’t keep up.

Bird disputes

So I pootled to the edge of the terrace and looked down, and this was the moment that the magic of Armenia really began to work on me, because in the space of a square meter there were maybe fifteen or more different kinds of plants. As I sat puzzling them out in my Caucasian flora (using the time honoured non-botanist technique of flicking-through-the-pictures-till-you-find-a-match) I realized that the half the plants I was looking at were endemics, species found no-where else on earth. I began to be enchanted.

That first day, the enchantments went on and on: the nosferatu shapes of lammergeiers floating over cliffs whose height you didn’t appreciate until the vultures’ two and a half meter wingspan was as lost as an ant against them; clouds of wild roses, filling a gully with their scent; the voice of a herdsman defining the space and the silence of the valley as he rounded up his cattle ready for the night. (why? because Armenia is still properly wild, and their are bears and wolves that will eat your animals if you don’t pay attention). Then, as the sun sank and took a slant on the mountainsides, slopes that had appeared to be bare, raw-sienna scree, were suddenly shown to be clothed in a lovely blue-green peach-fuzz of vegetation. In the cooler air of dusk, the hardy little plants breathed out their scents – camphor, lavender and thyme, like sharp incense. For me, that moment when sunset revealed a truth about the life and diversity of the dry mountains, was when I really, really lost my heart to Armenia.

Hillside at Caucasian Wildlife Refuge

: Manuk, Bezoar spotting

I’d come to Armenia as part of my role as World Land Trust Ambassador, but also to research the location for my next children’s book, about the rare (rare to almost vanishing point) Caucasian Leopard. I knew the place and its people would give me the detail I needed to make a story live and breathe.

I knew of course I wouldn’t see a leopard – WLT’s partner organisation FPWC, (Foundation for the Preservation of Wildlife and Cultural Assets) only know they are there from animals caught on camera trap videos; I didn’t even expect to see the leopards favourite meal, the bezoar goat, almost as rare as its predator. But the next morning, as I sat in the daze of Armenia Love, Manuk Manukyan lynchpin of FPWC, and an extraordinary naturalist, looked through his binoculars and said ‘Bezoar!’

There, high, high, high on a rocky stage 1500 m up, a male bezoar goat was showing off his profile, with his curved horns the size and shape of a warlord’s sabres. We followed him up there, on horseback, picking our way up steep stony paths, one stunning, enticing new plant after another appearing under our horses hooves. The climb through the embroidered detail of the plants and rocks, in the still air caught between the peaks and in the canyons, to reach the stage where the

bezoars had stood, will always be one of the most wonderful and precious two hours of my life. At the top, we gave our sure footed obedient little horses a rest and looked out at a view the lammergeiers get. I collected bezoar goat poo, because not everyone can carry faeces of world class rarity in their pocket.

These are the places that are threatened in Armenia now, these transcendent mountain spaces, where plants from Europe and Asia mix to make a rich cocktail of biodiversity. (6500 plant species in the Caucusus). Once the junipers grew unmolested, slowly reaching the height of a hedge in 300 years, Bezoar goats grazed and clashed their sabre horns, lynx, wolves, bears and leopards hunted. Some of the most ancient churches in Armenia have stone carvings of animals that were once commonplace on the mountain heights. But now, the poorest people have been driven off their common lands by changes in ownership, the way the British poor were in John Clare’s day, and the mountain heights are the only place they can go to graze their stock, find firewood, plants to eat and animals to hunt. There’s poaching too – oligarchs with too much money and not enough sense drop in by helicopter to plunder the precious rarity of Armenia’s gorgeous big mammals.

So FPWC has its hands full. To secure the future of the leopard, a mountain corridor needs to be left undisturbed along the spine of Armenia, one day perhaps connecting with Georgia to the North and Iran to the South. Mountainsides, woodlands and alpine pasture must be relieved of their current heavy burden of human use. It’s a huge task, but FPWC, supported by projects manager for WLT Mary McEvoy, and CEO John, and by IUCN Netherlands, are stepping up to shoulder this massive burden. The 1701 hectare Caucasian Wildlife Refuge is just the start – Manuk and FPWC director Ruben Khatchatryan have plans to lease other tracts of land to set up reserves and work with villagers to reduce their impact on the landscape and its wildlife.

Luckily, Armenians are still close to their land. Most rural families depend on their gardens and their animals for their food so they are open to changes that can improve the way the land is used, changes that can improve their lives as well as having conservation benefits. Among FPWC plans are community woodlands to generate firewood and protect ancient juniper trees, sustainable energy generation and nurseries for native plants. FPWC has already had a direct practical impact by setting up the Caucasus Wildlife Refuge, protecting the wildlife within it from exploitation and poaching. It’s seeding the future of conservation too, by running eco clubs to educate children about environmental issues and training them to be the wildlife film-makers of the future.

In Nagorno Karabakh with WFPC

FPWC were the most wonderful hosts – they showed us so much of their fabulous country: ravishingly beautiful mountain scenery and huge variety of vegetation types from semi desert, to alpine meadow and lush forest; vultures hanging at the lip of gorges like something out of Game of Thrones; herds of sheep streaming into villages for the night; pink starlings flying over waterfalls; white storks on a backdrop of Noah’s mountain, Ararat. At the end of our week traveling round the country I was punch drunk with relentless loveliness, saturated with hundreds of memories to carry home, too many to tell. (and a camera full of plants that only the botanist Eleonora Gabrielian who I met on our last day in Armenia, could identify ) But there are four things that I will keep at the top of the file in my heart marked ‘Armenia’.

The first is a tiny seed head of a minute scabious, growing on the arid slopes around the Eco centre. Mary and I spotted it on our last morning and sat looking at its diamond cluster loveliness. It symbolised for me the endless detail in the Armenian landscape that I so adored, like a long, long series of secret spells waiting to be learned and chanted.

The second is a stop we made in village in Ngorno Karabash where I wanted to photograph the fifty or so beehives that stood to the side of a small house. (LOADS of beehives in Armenia). We drew up in our two landrovers and piled out, disturbing the quiet cultivation of a woman, her husband and little girl. Far from being put out, they were so welcoming. The woman particularly struck me, her open face with clear dark eyes under her sun hat, shone with warmth and a deep, sweet humanity. Although we didn’t share a single word of common language, and only spent a fragment of time smiling at each other, some small piece of real, true communication passed between us; not complicated but a simple acknowledgement of each other’s existence and the glory of being up from the dirt briefly together on this dear warm spring day.

The third is the face of the botanist Eleanora Gabrielian, who I was privilaged to meet at the eco centre on the last day. Dr Gabrielian has studied the flora of Armenia and the whole Caucusus for 60 years and described all 6500 species of its plants. She collected a whole pile of plant sprigs to share with me, and talked me through them all with a delight and heart popping enthusiasm that lit up the day. My notebook is bulging with the plants she gave me, still holding the incense smell of the mountains and carrying a cloud of her wonderful energy.

And the fourth is a strong sense of the bonds built across countries and cultures by a shared passion for the natural world, and the joint enterprises of trying to protect it. Time and again I witnessed the strength and warmth of the professional friendships between FPWC rangers and staff and their visiting colleagues from WLT in the UK. One evening Ruben played an Armenian tune on bagpipes, the mayor of Urtsadzor raised toasts to, in succession, ‘beautiful ladies and strong men’, ‘friendship’, and ‘ Armenian nature’, Bill Oddie did a jazz drum solo, and the IUCN Netherlands contingent sang the Dutch version of happy birthday to you. This is what real, lasting conservation looks like, this is how it is forged, not in committee rooms, or on computer screens, not in the wording of treaties and laws, but in the relationships made between individuals who grow to know, respect and love each other and work together for the same thing.

On our last afternoon in the mountains Mary, Manuk and I visited the mayor in his Town Hall, (also Manuk’s grand parents for home made peach cognac…but that’s another story). He’s a larger than life character with a huge moustache.

Manuk and his mayor

If Stalin had had a sweet natured, very jolly brother, this is what he would have looked like. His intention, he explained, was to make his town into an ‘eco paradise’. As we toured the town hall we heard the girls choir practicing and peeped in. The girls sang us an Amenian song, linking little fingers and stepping in time to the music. There wasn’t a trace of pop music aping in their voices, nor of the childish piping UK children produce; they sang loud, low and strong, every note riven through with their identity as Armenians. This celebration of Armenian culture is an important part of what FWPC do – they understand that landscapes, wildlife and human culture are linked in mutual dependence; so it’s just possible that Ustradzoar, with FPWC help and WLT’s support, will become the mayor’s vision of eco paradise. But it will be homegrown, a paradise made in Armenia, dreamed with Armenian dreams, and all the better and more lasting, for it.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Armenia, Armenian Wildlife, Caucasian Leopard. IUCN Netherlands, FPWC, World Land Trust | Leave a comment

Flashes of Inspiration

By Nicola | Published: April 24, 2014

Arctic Willow shaped by wind and cold

When I lived in Bristol, there were pollarded plane trees lining the busy rat-run to the main road, down which I drove most mornings. Caught in a queue of cars one morning, I glanced up to where the branches just managed to link hands above the brow of the hill. Against the light sky was the un-mistakable outline of a nest among the bare, Winter twigs. The traffic began to move and I had to put my eyes back on the road, but in that momentary glimpse, I’d had a small but extraordinarily powerful experience – a clear flash of shifted perspective, as sharp and vivid as a sudden pain or a dip in ice water: a vision of the view from that nest. Inside my head a version of myself said ‘how would it be to be born in a tree?’ At the time, I had small children of my own, who were peeping over the edge of their own ‘nest’ and sussing out the world, so the image of that other baby’s perspective had a particular emotional power. Whatever the reason, that tiny, intense moment of insight comes back to me now whenever I see a nest, or a place in a tree where there could be one, and for a split second I’m up there, looking down.

I’ve had other fleeting flashes like this, sudden slips in the perceptual fault line, shifting me to another place in the human scheme of things, or a different location on the evolutionary tree. Each time it happens it feels like a blessed patch of coolness inside the hot chaos of my brain. Each time the image and sensations, the ideas, imprint in me in a way that feels much more than memory. Insight is the word closest to what these slivers are – but insight of a depth and clarity, and a pleasureable-ness, that transcends the usual meaning of the word.

Sometimes ‘insights’ are triggered by something in the natural world – a swopping of places with an animal I’m watching – and sometimes they come vicariously through someone else’s insight, transmitted by their writing. These second hand ‘insights’ are no less powerful and imprint on me in the same way. J.A Baker’s ‘The Peregrine’ gave me so many the first time I read it, that I never got to the end, my reading slowed and slowed, continually blissed out by a stream of intense moments of perception-slip. The narrative voice of Richard Holmes’ ‘The Age of Wonders’ was a such a neon of insight that I closed the book after reading the first page and hugged it to my chest, out on the deck of a small research boat in the Sea of Cortez, where I was reading at 2am, on watch. Book induced insights bind to things in my own life too: whenever I dig in the garden I’m digging Susan Garland’s wooden doll from Alison Uttley’s ‘A Country Child’; the Suffolk lanes where I grew up rekindle my own version of Alain Fournier’s ‘Lost Domain’, as alive inside me as my own blood, singing in me like a fever. My friend Julia Green’s dreamlike evocations of Scillonian beaches have melded with every Summer beach I walk on now. Occasionally, and especially blissfully, these insight moments can be shared, which feels like a mind meld. My son read ‘Matthew Kneale’s ‘English Passengers’ and for a while, the character Peevay was so alive in our house that all bad things were described as ‘Piss poor blunt spears’.

Some of the most intense fault-line shifts have come from the writing of my old friend Richard Mabey. Its the combination of the natural world, which already mainlines my consciousness, and his clarity of thought and effortlessly sharp imagination. I started a Richard book I hadn’t read beore, ‘The Ash and The Beech’, last night and, as always, from the first sentence I was beguiled, captured, transported. Within minutes I had my first splash of cold water ‘Trees…are what dry land aspires to become’. There, in that one little phrase is the whole of ecological succession, terminal moraine to ringing oak wood, time lapsed elegantly into one, portable sentence; a perspective bigger, longer, wider than my own, presented with surgical precision blended with poetic punch; meaning layered like the horizons in a deep soil.

Richard’s ability to step outside time, and give me this ecological history in a single heart stopping idea returned me, suddenly, to the nest above Berkely Road, and made me think again, ‘what would it be like to be born in a nest’. But this time I think I might be ready to do something more with that idea than hold it. I think the seed of a picture book just germinated.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Alain Fournier, Julai Green, Richard Mabey, Trees, writing for children | Leave a comment

Swifts, Creatures and Climate Change

By Nicola | Published: April 8, 2014

Glacia in Alaska 1989

When I was little, between nought and seven that is, I lived in Victorian house in the midlands. I look at photos of it now and it looks huge and posh. I’m really not sure how my parents managed to buy it. It had a walled garden which to me seemed enormous, and an old stable block with a apple store and a pigeon loft. I rode my trike around the yard under the cooing of the pigeons, I learned to climb trees on its apple trees and how to find nests in the bushes and borders. The place was my whole world, and when we left it, I would – at the age of 8 or 9 – announce sadly that my childhood had ended on that day. I think almost everything I feel to be at the deepest core of myself is rooted in that garden…the crocuses in spring, the bluebells under the pear trees, the raspberry canes, the blue tits nest, the tawny owls on the branches of the monkey puzzle tree. And the swifts.

One of the great sorrows of ‘this wounded Earth we walk upon ‘ as Karine Polwart puts it is the declining numbers of swifts. In Bromsgrove in the sixites there were hundreds. Huge screeching flocks of them, mad and wild truly devil birds. I completely adored them. Even the thought of that sound, and their reckless, scimitar-winged, daredevil speed makes me happy. They nested under the roof and could be seen furtively landing and taking off as if dissolving into and materialising from the shadow under the eaves. They arrived around my birthday in early May and always seemed like a special personal present delivered by nature for me. I can remember watching the flocks of non breeding or at least non incubating birds, flying up and up into the dusk sky to disappear into the sky – swifts when they dont have eggs or young sleep on the wing. Fledgling swifts can’t practice flying all they can do is press ups in the nest – really they do- to get ready and then, out flight or fail, and they’re on the wing continuously after that for at least two years.

Late one Summer I found a fledgling, failed in its first flight crashed on the lawn. Seeing it close up was like being able to handle a fairy and see how its wings attached to its back. The feathers are oddly unlustrous, with a sooty, matt finish, bitter chocolate rather than black. The eyes are huge and look at you calmly. The beak is endearingly small, a little down turned smut of a thing, with a wide gape, and the legs a ridiculous afterthought, the claws tough but the leg itself puny and shorter than a single finger joint. My grandfather told me to carry it to the attic and throw it out of the window. I reached up with my swift in my hand and awkwardly poked my arms through the tiny space. Beyond was the stable, the gardens, the green of suburban England, far below, and curving as if matching the Earth’s shape. I hesitated.

“Throw him”. Grandpa told me. I’ve since found you should just hold them out and let them make their own minds about taking off. But i didnt know that then. Grandpa could find nests and mice and squirrels without fail so I trusted him. I threw the little black bundle. Its wings flickered and it was gone…just a speck in the sky within moments.

A couple of weeks back I told this story to the children in Southwold School in Hackney because they already seemed to know a LOT about the swifts that come to their part of London in the Summer. I pointed to the back of the class pretending to point at my freed swift and the kids were so with the story they all turned to look.

So I thought it was time to turn it into a story, a proper one.

The story I’ve written connects how broken the crashed swift looks with a childs perception of his new born sister…born with a disability, which makes the brother unable to bond with her. Until he sets the swift free…

I won’t jinx it by printing it here yet. It hasnt yet found a home and may never do, but it will get an outing here eventually.

So with that done…a story I wasn’t supposed to be writing, now I have to get back on schedule with the things I’m contracted to do. Next on the list is a wonderful project with the utterly fab Petr Horacek. It’s a book that’s simply about animals ‘A First Book of Animals’ – an introduction to the delights of zoology for the under fives. I’ve started mapping it out – and its SOOO hard to decide what to leave out. Do you go for all the obvious things? Do you include obscure things that are wonderful but even parents won’t know about? Do you include scary stuff or just the cute and fluffy? I’ve decided I’m going to go for the things I love best, which will include creatures that fall into all of these categories. Its a wonderful thing to think about, all the beautiful fascinating species there are in the world, but it also fills me with fear for their future. Climate change is like a dark cloud that’s coming to get us all – and no body seems to be doing anything. Radio four managed this morning to go from the latest IPCC report and back to the football reports without anyone thinking that it was weird.

We need a big government education campaign like the one we had about aids (well , no not quite like that cos it was rubbish) but that level of seriousness. There isn’t any more debate to be had. We just have to act. End of. And its the governments duty to tell us this, to explain what a serious threat this is so we can gird our loins for action. Not doing so is a failure of leadership and of care, in the same way that failing to tell us that there was a smallpox epidemic or an invading army on the Kent beaches would be. Without such action we’ll be engulfed by the cloud while the oil companies and the tea Party are still bleating about climate change being a communist conspiracy.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged climate change, Petr Horacek, swifts | Leave a comment

Sleeping Beauty Episode One

By Nicola | Published: April 1, 2014

This isn’t really a sensible post of any kind. It’s just playing. Almost all of the writing I do now is Goal Orientated Behaviour, writing to a deadline, writing with a definite purpose, usually to fit an idea I may have sold to a publisher months, or even year ago. Because I’ve always written for work, to make a living I hardly ever allow myself writing playtime, but today, after a long stretch of writing to contracts and visiting schools I’ve done a few hours of playing. Revising stories that I’ve posted before ‘Mother Cary’s Butterknife’ and ‘The White Hare’ and thinking about other ways of using that ‘fairy story’ space, maybe not as a way of writing for dosh, but as a playground I can run about in sometimes.

So here is something from the playground. It’s the start of a retelling of Sleeping Beauty. It’s written for grown ups because that’s another thing I don’t get to do much these days, write for adults. Retellings are total holiday to write because, rather like working with non fiction, you don’t have to invent the basic set up, all you have to do is decide where to place yourself in that set up, walk around and choose a place from which to observe, and speak. The other great thing about re tellings is that you can use the stuff that’s already inside your reader’s heads. This means you don’t have to write everything, all you need to do is remind them of what they already have lying around in their brains and they will do the work for you. There’s huge comedy potential in this too, and in the characterisation that’s available to you with well known stories – you can play with the stereotypes and mess with your audience’s heads in a way that entrtaining for you as a writer, and hopefully for them as readers.

Maybe one day I’ll give myself to do a whole series of these fairy story retellings and read them on camera and post on vimeo…maybe over the Summer.

But in the meantime here is Sleeping Beauty episode one

The thing about magic, real magic that is, not the stuff that exists in your world, the thing about it is that it’s practical. And specific. Very specific. Why? Well I don’t know why do I? I’m a witch, not a physicist. And the thing about witches is that they are very pragmatic. We don’t do theories. Most Witches are also old and female (most, I said not all) so their perspective on what is useful and practical, and therefore worth making magic about, is, well, old and female. When it comes to gifts, they tend to give the sort of gifts they wish somebody had given them. This can seem like the magical equivalent of the husband who gives his wife two litres of white emulsion or a a set of golf clubs for her birthday. It’s also how it all started – the forest of thorns, the economy asleep for a century, the whole Sleeping Beauty phenomenon.

It began with a very stylish seventeenth birthday party. You know the kind of thing, marquee in the grounds, seven hundred meters of colour coded fairy lights, mini burgers and thimble sized fish and chips, served on scrubbed roofing slates. A famous eighties band playing because a cousin had once snogged the drummer. This was a family with connections, fingers in a multiplicity of cultural and political pies.

And their only child was a daughter, Beauty. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was too good for their special little girl. Especially on her birthday.

But Beauty had been doing some freelance, off piste growing up. She wasn’t what you’d call a straight A student. In fact, the only letter of the alphabet in which she had expressed consistent interest was e. She’d climbed out of so many of the upstairs windows of both her parents’ house and her very exclusive school, that she could easily have been apprenticed to a cat burglar. Often, when Mummy and Daddy thought she was safely tucked up with her teddies, she was either pole dancing, or in bed with something a lot more anatomically correct than a genderless furry animal.

Of course, none of us knew that, not then. And on the afternoon of her birthday party Beauty was being the perfect daughter. Fresh-faced and mascara free, in a demure little linen frock and flat pumps, she greeted Aunts and Uncles, and the stream of old family friends – potters and musicians, radical backbenchers and actors who you thought you remembered seeing in a TV drama three years ago. She wasn’t just pretending either, because, whatever anyone says about her, Beauty wasn’t a bad girl and she really did love her parents and her family. So, on that afternoon her manners were perfection. She smiled at every single one of the Senior Coven members and treated them with charm and grace. She didn’t turn a hair at the eccentric behaviour exhibited by a bunch of women who spend much of their time alone And Don’t Get Out Much, and managed to be complimentary about outfits that would have made Vivienne Westwood and Zhandra Rhodes blanch.

All of us brought gifts for Beauty. Terribly carefully chosen – like I said, this was a very connected family – and of course, as is the case with all magical gifts, hand made. You can’t schlepp into Harvey Nicks and buy an off the peg spell! Each one must be tailor made for the recipient. It must also be formally accepted within twenty four hours of it being crafted and given, or it simply goes off, like pears do in the fruit bowl the moment you turn your back.

The gifts we brought were particularly good, taking into account Beauty’s particular strengths and weaknesses as we then knew them. And they were very, very specific, because one of the reasons that magic is specific is that it guards against the evil of unforseen consequences.

The gifts we brought included a charm against stretch marks, another to prevent bingo wings and still another to allow lifelong sunbathing without getting a decolletage like a crepe bandage by the age of fifty five. There was a lovely little spell to keep black spot off your roses and a perfectly made pelvic floor charm that meant that Beauty would never have to visit the Tenna Lady counter in Boots. (I must say, when I saw that one on the pile I was tempted to take it home and modify it for myself. No, no, I really mustn’t laugh!)

So all fantastically valuable and useful presents, that any woman with good sense and foresight would be delighted to receive. But at seventeen, who has sense and foresight?

The gifts lay displayed on the dining room sideboard, while we made free with the champagne, hoovered up the smoked salmon and moaned about the VAT on wands. And while we were not paying attention, one last guest arrived; a guest none of the witches expected, but, had we had the sense and foresight we later berated Beauty for lacking, we should have.

A male guest. A male witch. Yes, most witches are female, but not all. He arrived, snake hipped in the levis he’d been wearing since 1976, still with most of his dark, wavy hair and eyelashes like a paintbrush. His hooded, green eyes peeped over the top of his Ray Bans, and his mouth, even embedded in dodgy white stubble still made you think…well, really, do I have to spell it out?

He brought a gift that was neither practical nor specific, but it was fresh; hot, you might say, from the oven. Rushed to the door on the back of his Italian motorbike, wrapped in scarlet paper and tied with a lizard-skin thong: speed. A gift dripping with unintended consequences. And like all hand crafted spells, made to last a hundred years, because a fifty year spell just makes you look like a cheapskate or a pessimist.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged children's books, Fairy Tale, Real witches, Sleeping Beauty | Leave a comment

Khartoum and Addis Ababa: KICS and ICS

By Nicola | Published: February 6, 2014

I’ve just come back from two weeks working in international schools – one in Khartoum (Khartoum International Community School) and one in Addis Ababa (International Community School Addis). I can’t begin to describe the welcome and warmth with which I was received. I had the most wonderful time, woking with children, teachers and librarians, and being shown a little of two amazing african nations.

I’ll write properly about it soon but in the meantime here are some pictures from Khartoum and a poem I wrote in response to the many things I saw and felt, and the responses of pupils at KICS, to the city and to the experience of coming to a new place, a new language and a new culture…at first unfamiliar and then, beloved. From a distance the impression of Sudan can be negative, but up close it is a wonderful, an extraordinary country, with the friendliest, kindest people.

More about the delights of Addis when I’ve downloaded my pictures!

Sudan

From the air Sudan shines, but on the ground you see the dust….

At first the new apartment stank of loneliness.

We slept under one blanket,

We were not ourselves –

I hit my brother with a golf club,

Not quite by accident.

Outside the streets made no sense.

There was rubbish in the treetops,

And the heat felt like a punishment,

A brutal weight of light.

I stumbled, blinded in new language

With nothing on my tongue but dust.

And then, like camels walking from a mirage:

Words and meaning,

‘Friend’ and ‘welcome’ and ‘hello’

From the haboob of the strange and new,

A pattern grew:

Everyday the same man and his donkey,

His feet kick, kick, kicking;

Everyday the dawn light slanting

To make the colours sing;

Everyday the mid-day spiral kites,

The chairs waiting on the riverbank for dusk;

Everyday, the calls to prayer

Naming, then, now and tomorrow.

Everyday, everyday, everyday

Until Khartoum was beating in my heart.

From the air you smell the smoke of burning tyres;

You hear the gunshots;

But on the ground, green shoots through the desert’s crust,

The people smile, ‘Peace be upon you.’

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Shaped By Nature

By Nicola | Published: January 8, 2014

Arctic Willow shaped by wind and cold

Outside there’s a brief hole in the rain, but by this evening South Wales will be lashed again with the kind of downpour you only used to see in tropical monsoons, although here of course the deluge comes at an angle and at a lower temperature! On the other side of the Atlantic, Eastern Canada and the midwest suffer temperatures twice as cold as the shelves inside my freezer.

The radio this morning broadcast an interview with a guy from ‘Hell’ Ilinois where the unprecedented low temperatures have allowed newspaper editors the indulgence of the headline ‘Hell Freezes Over’. The Hell resident said the low temperatures made him doubt ‘global warming’, and I’m sure climate change skeptics will be using the cold weather as ammunition. But whatever the doubters think, both storms and cold and all the other incidences of weird weather I’ve come across this past year or so, from unseasonal rain patterns in Malawi to late freezes in Italy – are manifestations of climate change. ‘Global warming’ doesn’t mean avocado trees in the back garden in Surrey, it means a loss of seasonal predictability, a messing up of the pattern to which plants and animals are adapted, and that includes the plants and animals that are our crops and our food.

Iceberg, Spitzbergen 1995

No matter how divorced we may feel from the natural world, the fact is we are still utterly, utterly dependent upon it for our survival, so this muddling up of weather matters: when do you plant a crop if you don’t know when it’s going to rain? how do you keep animals healthy if the cold snap that usually kills off pathogens, doesn’t come? So there are aspects of this current extreme weather that I like. First of all it should be a wake up call for governments still whining about the jury being out on global climate change. Second, it reminds us that our techno world doesn’t protect us from everything nature can do, and that however much our activities are messing things up, we are still not the biggest show on earth. This I think is a very, very good thing for our mental health. The big absolutes of nature show us our place and help to keep our priorities in order.

I always think a lot about human relationships with nature – of course, that’s my life’s obsession – but I’ve

Spitsbergen

been thinking recently about the most extreme, hardcore version of those relationships, that of subsistence hunters in the Arctic. I’m researching a new title in my Heros of The Wild series, stories for 8-12 year olds that tell a real conservation story through the medium of fiction. I wanted to do something about the bowhead whale refuge set up by the WWFN on the coast of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. But as bowheads have a long history of exploitation by both aboriginal and commercial whalers, people and hunting are right at the heart of the species’ story. So I’ve been reading a lot about Inuit culture – the ingenuity and community that enabled human beings to survive in minus 40C with nothing but bone, stone and sinew to help them. Just as with all things shaped by natural selection, I’ve been astonished at the beauty of the objects made by Inuit invention – flint harpoon heads, waterproof parkers made from seal gut, skin boats, snow houses, polar bear trousers. But it isn’t just the objects that were made lovely by the ruthless pruning of absolute necessity, it is the people themselves. Time and time again in interviews I’ve read and watched on film of Inuit, Saami and other native people who still live by hunting or herding in that most demanding of all environments, the Arctic, I’ve been struck by their gentleness and quiet – not passive at all, a kind of dynamic still ness. I think that just as the cold flow of polar water moulds the fat streamlines of a seal, the stark necessities of working to natures agenda mould human behaviour. All that is not adaptive is simply stripped away. Impatience, anger and stress over small things, inability to defer gratification – all these make a poor hunter. A hunter who doesn’t share doesn’t get shared with. Both poor hunters, and selfish hunters end up starved to death.

Inuit were traditionally held in tight communion with nature. The tension in the binding between humans and the natural world was kept by a life and death necessity, daily apparent in their every action in reaction to the natural world around them.

In the last fifty years that tension has gone. For the vast majority of Inuit the encroachment of a cash economy has slackened the rope tying them to nature. They are no longer pruned into shape by a constant ruthless negotiation with the wild. Many communities are consumed with problems – alcohol, drugs, violence and horrific suicide rates among the young men.

But in reality that tight binding between humans and nature is still there. It’s just moved so its harder for Inuit and for us to see it. The rope is longer, it twists around and through many more things. It runs back and forward through time – back millions of years to the forests that created the deposits of petroleum, and forward to the future climate that we are creating through releasing millions of years worth of photosynthetically fixed carbon from those forests, in a few centuries.

The new behaviour that we must learn is to find new ways to feel that old connection, that links us to nature as surely as the chord tied us to our mother’s womb. We need to feel its tautness and let it shape our lives and our being. We need to re learn the old ways, the old respect that the elders of the Inuit and the Saami held deep in their hearts.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bowheads, children's books, climate change, Inuit, Non fiction, subsistence hunting, weather | Leave a comment

THE KING OF THE SKY: Coming to a theatre near you?

By Nicola | Published: December 10, 2013

This time last year I had flu. It knocked me entirely off my legs for ten days. I lay in bed worrying about the deadlines I was missing until my head hurt so much I couldn’t even worry any more.

The day I felt better was full of that lovely washed clean feeling that you get after illness. I suppose just simple gratitude that nothing hurt any more. I got up, sat at my desk and wrote the text of a picture book in, a day, two maybe?

The story I wrote the day my head stopped pounding was supposed to be about pigeons, but the story I actually wrote was about a lot more than birds.

Mark Hearld LOVES pigeons and had asked me to write him a book about them. I’d been thinking about them for months, in fits and starts, in the background of other things. I’d read about them- wild ones, domestic ones, message carrying ones, racing ones. I watched videos of tough northern blokes cuddling their racing birds with heartbreaking tenderness.I revised all the stuff I’d learnt as a student about how they navigate – learning the shapes of their local landscape by that characteristic flying in circles thing they do; recognising the characteristic smells of home, so that downwind they can follow the scents to their loft. And I remembered holding the babies of the pigeons that lived in the loft over the garage when I was little; exquisitely ugly-beautiful, like tiny dodos with yellow fluff that looked stuck on by a ham fisted toddler.

Somewhere along the line something else got in to the biological information in my head – belonging and the nature of what makes a place ‘home’. The book about pigeons became a story about human displacement and migration.

One night I heard a friend of mine Shani Lewis singing the song written about the real Sheffield racing pigeon “The King Of Rome”. For an hour or two I thought the lyrics had give me a ready made story shape, but the story of the pigeon who raced back from Rome to his owner in a Sheffield back street somehow wasn’t enough. The race was useful, but only as a part of the story I was going to tell, whatever that was.

I began to look at settings, places where humans had been displaced from home. I watched videos of refugees in conflicts all over the world.Then something else came to the top of my heart: my mums stories about sitting in the Italian ice cream parlour in Gowerton when she was a girl in the late 1920s. I read about Italian families coming to Wales and finding a culture centered on family, where singing and high emotion are both valued. ‘The Welsh’ one newly arrived Italian said ,’are just Italians in the rain’.

So when I sat at my desk the day my flu stopped the story I wrote was set on my own doorstep, and connected with my own family history in South Wales, the miners, the steelworkers of the 1920s. It’s about a child from Italy who is brought to the valleys when his parents come to establish a business, selling ‘gelati’ to the Welsh miners and steelworkers. Everything about the place is alien- the landscape, the weather, the smells.

All the things in fact that a pigeon uses to find its way home tell the boy this is not where you belong. One feature connects the sunlit Roman palazzos with the Welsh village: the cooing of pigeons, and that is the start of the boys journey, from displaced alien, to Italian Welshman.

Sometimes when you write something you know you’ve hit the spot. Like the sound a tennis ball makes when it hits exactly the right bit of the racket. That doesn’t mean it will work for everyone, but you know, at least, that it’s worked for you. And I got that hit the spot feeling the second I wrote the last word of King of The Sky. It worked on my editor too, and crucially it worked on Mark (who’s been toiling away with the illustrations ever since) I read it to the audience at the Spatialising Illustration conference in Swansea in January and two wonderful things happened: someone came and told me that I’d described the story of their family and another said “All my adult life I’ve thought my background in the valleys was something I had to get away from. You’ve shown me it’s my best material.”

That’s when I realised that this little story about a boy and a bird had done what I wanted, and told a bigger more universal story about belonging, and what that means. And I felt then, that it could have a bigger life, as a performance of some sort.

Music seemed the natural place to start the story on its journey into another form, so I sent the story to Karine Polwart – magical singer and songwriter whose lyrics take my breath away. It felt like the most risky, daft thing I’d ever done, sending somebody famous a story and saying ‘fancy doin’ some music or something?’. I expected never to hear another word so when the e mail from Karine’s manager came, and then one for Karine herself…well I actually danced around my study.

But how to make the next step when I don’t know anything about theatre? Fortunately I know a man who does: Derek Cobely ex director of the wonderful Swansea Wordplay Festival and veteran theatre director. Once again I sent off the story, and it did did the talking. Derek’s response was very positive, and when we met to talk before his production of Macbeth at Pontadawe, it turned out that the manager of Pontadawe Arts Theatre was positive too.

So that’s where we are. Derek and I have talked about staging, a bit. Karine and I have had a lovely conversation about music – about harps, about combining melodies from Welsh and Italian culture, about singing. Mark is quietly plugging away with the illustrations that might one day be sets or even puppets. All I know is this IS the start of something and I know it could be really, really beautiful, extraordinary even. But now comes the hard part, selling our unformed vision to enough people to make it happen. We need theatres to say they’ll have us, we need festivals to give us their support. Like a pigeon struggling, reaching with its wings, almost at breaking point, we need to get lift off.

So read the story and if you think you’d like to see it bigger, with music, in theatre, then let me know!

THE KING OF THE SKY

It rained and rained and rained.

Little houses huddled on the humpbacked hills

Chimneys smoked and metal towers clanked.

The streets smelled of mutton soup and coal dust

and no one spoke my language

All of it told me this is not where you belong

Just one thing reminded me of home –

of sunlight, fountains and the vanilla smell of ice cream in my granny’s shop –

Mr Evan’s pigeons, cooing in their loft, behind my house.

Purring as if they strutted in St Peter’s Square

Mr Evan’s face was crumpled and he could hardly walk,

but when his birds flew he smiled like Springtime.

I stood beside him watching

as his pigeons soared above the chimneys and the towers,

up to where the sky stretched all the way to Italy.

A lifetime down the mine had taken Mr Evans’ breath away.

So he spoke soft and slow, slow enough for me to understand.

“I like to see them fly, “ he whispered, “after so long underground.”

Every day I came to see the pigeons

“I’m training them to race, “ Mr Evans said “ and this one’s going to be a champion.”

He put a pigeon in my hands.

I felt its small heart racing underneath my finger,

and the push and power of its wings.

Its head was whiter than a splash of milk, its eye blazed fire!

“Name him and he’s yours!” the old man said.

I didn’t have to think: “Re del cielo!” I replied, “ King Of The Sky!”

Mr Evan’s showed me how to catch the birds, and slip them in a basket.

Then we’d wheel it to the station on a barrow.

“How far today then Mr Evans?” the railway man would ask,

My friend would name a station up the line: five miles, ten miles, twenty miles away –

a little further every time.

“They don’t need a map like we do see, “ Mr Evans told me, “they’re born knowing how to find their way. All they want’s a bit of practice.”

Back at the loft, we’d wait, eating Mrs Evans’ welshcakes

and squinting up into the light.

“Look out now!” Mr E would say “Keep those young eyes of yours well peeled!”

It never took them long.

From places far away, places that they’d never seen,

the pigeons flew home straight and fast as arrows!

But the pigeon with the milk white head was always last.

Still Mr Evans said he’d be a winner.

“He’s a hero,” the old man wheezed, “like the pigeons in the war, carrying messages when they were shot. Just you wait and see!”

Every day Mr Evans grew a little weaker.

By racing season he couldn’t leave his bed.

So I put the race rings on the pigeons legs and took them to the station.

I scoured the sky for their return and clocked them in.

Mr Evans’ bedroom wall was papered with their winnings.

But not one for Re Del Cielo, my King of the Sky.

“He’s got the wings for distance!” Mr Evans breathed, “Here’s the race he’s waited for!”

He handed me the entry form:

King Of The Sky would go to Rome by train

then race back a thousand miles and more!

I smoothed his feathers, looked into his eye and put him in the basket for the journey.

A part of me was going with him, I wasn’t sure it would come back.

The race day dawned.

A storm blew up.

Lightening, wind and rain.

I waited for two whole days and nights

but the pigeon with the milk white head did not return.

I sat beside my friend’s bed, and I told him

that perhaps the sunlight and the fountains,

the vanilla smell of ice cream from a thousand grannies’ shops

had made our pigeon want to stay

“No!“ said Mr Evans, “that will only tell him … this is not where you belong….”

The old man’s eyes blazed fire,

“Get out there boy” he said, “ and welcome him!”

The rain had stopped. I ran out to the loft

and squinted up into the clouds.

A speck….a blob….a bird

A pigeon with a milk-white head!

Twelve hundred miles he’d flown,

from somewhere far away he’d never been.

Steered North and West, finding his direction from the sun

and the force that guides a compass needle.

Flown until he saw the shape of humpbacked hills,

the lines of little houses and the chimneys,

heard the clanking towers, smelled the soup and coal dust

Flown down, a hero and a champion,

into the arms of the smiling, crying boy

The boy who knew at last that he was home.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged chikdren's theatre, Hay Festival, Karine Polwart, Pigeons; Italian Welsh, Pontadawe Arts | Leave a comment

LIVE, WITH LOVE

FACT AND FICTION and STORY SPACE

Insect Story for Insect Week: Richard’s Bug

Armenian Dreaming

Flashes of Inspiration

Swifts, Creatures and Climate Change

Sleeping Beauty Episode One

Khartoum and Addis Ababa: KICS and ICS

Shaped By Nature

THE KING OF THE SKY: Coming to a theatre near you?

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