Weatherhouses and hearthstones by Sandra Horn

What is pc when writing for children? I was struck by the woman on a recent programme about children’s television who said that the early programmes were ‘too middle-class.’ They were certainly voiced by people with impeccable diction and no trace of regional twang. Now, one thing that seems to unite most TV presenters, whatever they are presenting, is an inability to pronounce the letter ‘t’. It has become a glottlestop. Oops, I’ve digressed into a personal gripe. Sorry. Where was I? Yes, this woman on the TV made me think about whether we should write from where people are (or where we think they are) or from where we would like them to be.  

          Aspirational, that’s the word. Is it wrong? The woman of TV mentioned Grange Hill as more appropriate to the needs of modern kids. Well, I’ve been there; spent two long terms in a local secondary school trying to interest and enthuse 14-year-olds in writing stories for younger children, while they surreptitiously played on mobile phones and plugged their ears in to MP3 players or similar. The teachers couldn’t hope to control it all. So, no, I didn’t start from where they were. I vetoed stories about Michael Jackson for a start – and anything else from that kind of pernicious, sexualised culture. Am I showing my age? I expect so. The stories they were working on were aimed at 5-year-olds, after all.
          In the end, 95% of the kids produced gorgeous, colourful , age-appropriate books and produced them with great thoughtfulness and care. We used a chunk of the budget to have the books colour-printed and bound and had an exhibition of them in the library. It was the hardest work I have ever done and by the end of each day I was so tired that I lost my way home twice (the school is about half a mile away from my house!). BUT what I hope and believe is that, for that one day each week, those teenagers were encouraged to come out of their cocoons and fly. Grow. Shine. Be proud. If this all sounds too, too middle-class, well, I didn’t start from there and I won’t apologise for wanting the same chances that I was given,  for those kids, so there. 

Now I’m going to write what I’d planned before the TV programme started me off on a rant. It’s not quite the same issue, but not entirely different either. Many, many moons ago, I wrote the first The Hob and Miss Minkin stories, set in and around my fictionalised home in darkest Sussex (dubbed Cold Comfort Farm by my husband). Someone in my writing group objected to the hearthstone where the cat and Hob meet each night, as ‘children in tower blocks will never have seen one or know what they are.’ 

 

Similarly, when I wrote the very first version of Rainbow! The response from a publisher was ‘children won’t know what a weatherhouse is’.  I’m not sure where or when I first saw one of those quaint little houses with two doors which were supposed to predict the weather depending on whether the man or the woman came outside. I do remember being enchanted by them. We were once given a ghastly version with a plaster ‘Red Indian’ wearing an apron bearing the inscription ‘Apron blue, sky is too. Apron pink, weather stink.’ Yuk.

          In the end, in my stories, the hearthstone stayed and the weatherhouse is there by implication in Samuel Sunshine and Rosina Raindrop’s world. DIY publishing – love it!

My latest WIP is about a silver cruet set in the form of a ship with a Phoenix figurehead. No, I’ve never seen one either.

          Children won’t know about X or Y or Z? They will after reading about them.  Isn’t that what stories are for?

          Lifting us from where we are to a new and different place – isn’t that what stories are for?