The Great Way Round by Dennis Hamley

The Great Way Round was the name cynics gave to the old Great Western Railway.  Despite his engineering genius, Brunel didn't seem to have an outstanding sense of direction.  I wanted to show a map of the early GWR so you could see what I meant.  But I couldn't find a good one and besides most of the kinks have been straightened out or closed by Dr Beeching. 

It's also a good way of describing the next episode in my life.  On December 9th we depart for New Zealand because it's Kay's turn for Christmas (anyone for a barbecue on Christmas Day?) and getting there, I can assure you, really is a Great Way Round.  We won't be back until January 20th and so I'm writing three blogs now and hoping I get the scheduling right so 2 and 3 really will appear early on the 14th of January and February.

There's a third Great Way Round to consider.  When I joined Authors Electric, Sue Price suggested to me that, as I had been in the publishing business for so long - I suspect longest of all Electric Authors - readers might like my tales of the dear, dead old days in the trade.  Good idea, I thought.  When I look back I can hardly believe the difference between what it was then and what it is now.  Was it better or worse?  I really don't know.  Perhaps my story, unique to me but recognisable to many others, may help me to decide.  But whichever it is, nothing can ever replace the mixture of expectation, fear, disappointment, heady relief and release and sheer delight which those early days possessed.

Did I always want to be a writer?  Well, yes.  The idealistic half of me certainly did.  But the half of me conscious of its working-class background in which the most common cry in my childhood was 'But we can't afford it, Dennis,' (and I'm none the worse for it, having kept my World War 2 mentality of ludicrous economy, even filching my wheelbarrow, a child's bike and a radiogram in perfectly good order from the local refuse tip) said that I had to earn my living and get a steady wage.  So that came first.

I did start a correspondence course on the short story.  But I soon decided it was rubbish and quietly dropped out.  RAF and university kept me busy enough.  When I got to university, I found that Cambridge was full of writers. Though I envied them, they seemed to me not only a bit scary but a right poncey lot and I didn't write a single word while I was there except for essays and occasional film reviews for Broadsheet.   I've already mentioned my love for the Middle Ages.  I didn't suspect it would lead to the eventual fulfilment of at least some my ambitions.

In those days, the mid-50s, you could teach with no qualifications whatever.  One vacation, when my usual sources of vacation jobs - building sites, farms, even a soup factory - seemed to have dried up, someone suggested I should cycle over to the Divisional Education Office and see if there was anything going there.  So I went and, almost before I had introduced myself, was asked to get on my bike and go to Newport Pagnell Secondary School, where there was a big problem to which I would be the ideal solution.  So I did and  two hours later found myself in front of forty rebellious 14 year-olds 'teaching' Art.  God help us.

Actually, I thought it was great.  I was there for a month.  I was appalled at how badly stocked the school was.  Par for the course in those days, I fear. Not that much better now.  I wanted to do some drama with the kids.  In those days, that only meant playscripts.   But there were none in the stock cupboard.  However, it so happened that one of the set texts that year for part 1 of the English tripos was The Wakefield Play of Noah and his Sons and I needed to turn it into modern English.  Why not, I reasoned, turn it into an acting version, complete with the distinctive Wakefield stanza, a complicated-seeming form but actually beautifully fitted to the human voice?  So I did - looking back on it now, incredibly quickly - with a stylus on Gestetner sheets (anyone remember them?) which next day I messily rolled off on the school duplicator.  

The Gestetner duplicator.  Prehistoric photocopier and source of inky fingers and bad language.

The kids really liked the plays and I felt vindicated because the rest of the staff had been gloomily forecasting riots and failure.   When term ended I took the copies away with me in case I ever needed them again (the school certainly didn't) and got on with my life.   Much later, I was on teaching practice in Bristol.  I didn't do the play there but one evening, at a loose end, I realised there was a copy of the Wakefield First Shepherd's Play in the Pelican Guide to Medieval Literature and. almost without realising what I was doing, found myself translating that too. I showed the  results to Dorothy Atkinson, English lecturer in the Bristol University Education Department (not the children's author of the same name) and she suggested I send them to Heinemann Educational Books.  So I did, with a third play, Cain and Abel, which I translated while still in the mood.  And, to my complete dumbfoundedness, they accepted them.

First book.  1962.  I was 26.  Not spectacularly young, like Sue Price with the Carnegie medal first go.  But young enough to be elated.  My first book.  I was on the way.

I did some more plays, but production was costed at 10 shillings each and that, Heinemann decided, was way too expensive.  So I got on with changing jobs, getting married and having children.  I had tried starting an adult novel - very Angry Young Man (think John Braine and Kingsley Amis).  I bought a portable typewriter especially to do it.  I wrote the first chapter, thought it was ok and them wondered what happened next.  I had no idea, so I used the typewriter to type examination papers, as God intended.

Then I moved to a College of Education.  In the library I found a new world.  Children's Literature really seemed to be becoming an accepted art form in its own right, worthy of critical study and appearing in University English degrees.  Alan Garner, Philippa Pearce, Bernard Ashley, Rosemary Sutcliffe, Robert Leeson, Susan Cooper, Leon Garfield.  Writers of extraordinary talent and power.  Then  I read CS Lewis's essay 'On Three Ways of Writing for Children.'  It was, to me, mind-blowing.  'I could to this,' I thought.  'And I shall.'

The Middle Ages and the Wakefield Master came to my aid again.  I wrote my first novel, Pageants of Despair, at least partly to see if I had the stamina to write 60,000 consecutive words.  Well, it seemed I had, so I sent it off to my old editor at Heinemann Educational Books asking him to deliver it to the children's book department.  

Then I waited.  And waited.  A year went past.  I met an author who told me not to worry: the longer a publisher kept a book the more likely they were to take it.  So I went on waiting, full of a confidence very soon to be knocked out of me.  On Christmas Eve, 1972, the front doorbell rang.  There was the postman with a parcel.  I opened it and found my novel inside... WITH NO LETTER,  NOT EVEN A POSTCARD.

I was beside myself with fury.  I wasn't much fun that Christmas.  But as soon as 1973 started I plotted a revenge.  I divided the book into nine sections of two chapters each, sent each section to one of the nine publishers who seemed to me to be the best and enclosed a letter saying that if they wanted any more I'd send them the rest.  Three weeks later a letter came from Pamela Royds of Andre Deutsch asking to see the rest.  Next day a letter came from the Bodley Head.  Then Methuen.  Just savour all those great names from the past.

And then Pam wrote another letter, couched very circumspectly.  'I think I like this enough to make it worthwhile to meet.  Could you come to lunch on...?'  Slightly worried by 'think', I arrived in Great Russell Street far too early and spent half an hour walking up and down between Tottenham Court Road and the British Museum feeling more and more scared until it was time to enter the rickety Victorian house, home of Andre Deutsch, the small but influential literary publisher. I met Pam, we shook hands and then she said 'Come and have some lunch.'

Publishing was different in those days.  Andre Deutsch had a small dining room on the top floor run by a French chef.  The first thing I saw was a table loaded with every alcoholic drink known to humanity.  'What will you have?' asked Pam.   I didn't answer.  I just stared at it, realising what they meant about publishing being a career fit for gentlemen.

'Have a whisky,' she said.  'You're going to need it.'

As she poured it I wondered why.  Then she led me to a table, produced my novel and said, very severely, 'What do you think you've been doing? We editors stick together.  We could have put your novel together without you bothering to send the rest.  We don't like it.  We're busy people and you've wasted our time.  Don't ever do it again.'

I was quite cross and told her that I'd had my time wasted by them, over a year in fact, and at that rate I'd have my telegram from the Queen long before anyone published  Pageants.  Anyway, with any luck the day's outcome would mean that I wouldn't need to.

'Besides,' she said.  'The first three chapters are awful.'   Before I could say, 'Thanks very much.  I'll fetch my coat now,' she added, 'Get rid of them and I'll publish it because apart from them it's good.'

The first edition of Pageants of Despair published in 1974

The second US edition published in 2006 by Paul Dry Books

The first was published by SG Phillips in 1975.  The firm folded six months afterwards. Think what you like!

So that was it.  I left walking on air.  I was on the way.  What could stop me?   Awards, medals, prizes, riches - I was destined to get the lot.  Well, anyway....  What did come out of that unpromising start was a long relationship with someone who I regard as one of the GREAT children's book editors, Pamela Royds.

To be continued in our next.

PS.  Sorry.  I meant December 14th and January 14th.  We'll have been back three weeks before February 14th dawns.  Do keep up, Hamley..