'Things Aren't Untrue Just Because They Never Happened.' by Dennis Hamley
The Hare Trilogy by Dennis Hamley |
At
last I’ve managed to republish three novels, Hare’s Choice, Badger’s Fate
and Hawk’s Vision, in the form they
should have been years ago, as a single volume, The Hare Trilogy.
These books were published as
children’s books and children remain their primary intended audience. But is it
still a relevant one? Can present-day children identify with these fictional
children living in a sort of vanished Neverland, with their unfashionable names
and their eighties, smartphoneless preoccupations? I don’t know. And perhaps it
doesn’t matter so much. Because I always had a different purpose. These are
books for children. But they are also
books about children. The difference
is significant. They become books for adults as well.
They are also about something
else, which provides the whole impetus. They are about stories: how they
work, how they are composed, how their composition embodies the whole creative
process, what they mean, what they are for. And even more importantly, what
sort of truth do they embody?
The three stories together can be
seen as a meditation on the nature of truth. ‘Things aren’t untrue just because they never happened,’ the
overseer tells Hare after she is dead. Elsewhere, I have described my first
example for this. Let us take a place which many people know about and have marvelled
at – the Cob at Lyme Regis, that probably medieval stone harbour quay which
juts out of Lyme Bay and gives marvellous views of the Jurassic Coast. In all
the centuries of harbour activity there, what do we really know about it? What
actually happened on it? Unless we’re long-term natives of Lyme or local
historians, we have no idea. But we all know of two ‘facts’ about it. First. a
girl called Louisa once fell off it. Second, another girl called Sara Woodruff
once stood at the end day after day looking out to sea waiting for her lover
to return. They stand in our minds like myth, with a real sense of actuality
and significance. So though they never happened to us they are in a real sense true. It’s a fictional truth, yet real
to us, which we can have real-seeming memories of. And yet Sara Woodruff’s long
wait is founded ironically on a lie – so that subtilizes this concept of truth
even further.
I have considered this concept
now for many years. And now I found a way of examining it properly. Hare’s Choice is about children in a school making a story about a dead hare found
by the road. In their story, the hare is personified, lives, performs great
deeds. And in the afterlife she is presented with a choice. Does she enter the
limitless place where all living creatures, from insects to eagles, go after
death – or is she admitted to a tiny exclusive Heaven inhabited by story
characters – Peter Rabbit, Hazel, Fiver, Mr Toad? She has had two lives, one as
a real hare, one as a Story Hare. Which is she to choose?
You can have no idea what a relief
final publication of this book is to me. These three short children’s books
were published in 1988, 1992 and 1993 respectively. The long gap between Hare and Badger is significant. When I wrote Hare’s Choice I intended it to be a stand-alone. Hare makes her
choice but I could not, would not, even attempt to say what it was because I
couldn’t presume to speak on behalf of this wonderful, inscrutable animal. For
three years, I stubbornly refused even to speculate on it whenever I was asked.
Then
two things happened. A primary school head wrote to me saying her pupils loved
the book but were ‘very distressed’ not to know where Hare went. There was more than a hint in the letter that
to tell them was my duty. Then, the
wonderful and much lamented Meg Rutherford, who did the marvellous
illustrations, rang me to say that there were badgers digging in her garden and
she wanted to draw them. I said ‘Great, can I have one of the pictures?’ and she
said ‘No, I want you to write about them so I can make an illustration.’
So
I wrote her a pretty awful poem about a badger, which compared shamefully with
the poems of the real poets who contributed to her book. It was published as Meg Rutherford’s
Book of Animal Poems (Simon and
Schuster). To think this comparison was laid bare for the public to see was
really quite embarrassing!
But
it made me realise that a Hare sequel was necessary because a different possibility
in the nature of the Choice had occurred to me and perhaps I might eventually
have some idea of what it really meant. Meg had given me a clue: I had to
consider what the Choice involved for different creatures and what stories
involved for the people who heard them and composed them. This new book would
have to be about Badgers, animals which have fascinated me for many years,
almost as much as hares have.
So
I set about writing Badger’s Fate. This is a much darker book than Hare’s Choice. The first book is about
the ‘truth’ of stories. The second deals with the paradox that if stories have
‘truth’ which is validated by our own experience and empathy then it follows
that they must be true to themselves,
even if what we find out when their logic is unveiled is not what we want to
hear – or even think about.
To
my mind, there is a great difference between ‘ending’ (or ‘conclusion’) and
‘closure’. Stories, as we know, never
really end: there always seems more to
say. Yes, the badger-baiters should be caught, stand trial, be sentenced. This is a logical consequence which might seem to
settle the whole thing once and for all. But it is not really part of the
story. Emma alone knows this – because she discovered the badger and so has seen the real conclusion for herself. So
the story-teller, as well as being the
creator of artifice, is also the truthteller.
The story is about the badger: after the badger is dead, all which follows is
irrelevant, even the attainment of justice.
Which
led to another consideration of the nature and necessity of stories. In Badger’s Fate, Kirsty and Derek both
provide their own endings. One, more typical of boys, leads to a fightback by the animals armed to the teeth and the
death of the evil leader of the human
invaders. The other had a more obviously feminine emphasis. The badgers escape
and find safety beyond the range of the humans. Then each child points out the
fatal flaw in the other’s version. One ending has had the class standing up and
cheering, the other brought out sighs of relief and satisfaction. But we know
that neither is sufficient for logic or truth. Emma alone is the truthteller.
But
under what circumstances can all the
children be the truthtellers? This leads on to another aspect of stories: why can
they be not so much important as necessary
for people? Perhaps it is when the subject is close – even vital - to the tellers and they have
to work the ending out for themselves in
an intimate and personal way – in the face of a crisis, perhaps. The closure of their little school, perhaps,
and the break-up of a little society, self-renewing each year, which stood
almost like a collective character in its own right?
Well,
these stories sprang from real-life situations in schools in which I was
closely involved. I wrote them soon after I was, as County English Adviser for
Hertfordshire, taking part in an inspection of all the really small primary
schools in the county. Those who don’t know Hertfordshire tend to think of it
as an extension of London, full of motorways and railways and far too many people.
Not so. After all, it stretches from London’s suburbs in the south to
Cambridgeshire and nearly to the Fens in the north. There are great tracts of
countryside full of lovely villages, farms and gentle and sometimes almost
spectacular, scenery. And nestling in between them are, or were, dozens of tiny schools. In 1984, their future,
in an atmosphere of value for money and economy of scale, was being questioned.
Our task was to test if they really justified their continuing existence.
Our
answer was pretty well unanimous. We felt they offered pupils a unique and
precious experience which was not necessarily qualitatively different from children’s normal experience in schools, but
certainly unique, different and worthy to be perpetuated. And, in those now
far-off days of wisdom in education, our opinion was accepted. Later on, after
I had left the County, a colder wind was blowing and, one by one, the little
schools were being closed and their organic, self-sufficient groups were being
scattered to the winds
Now
I realised where my stories should be
set. One such tiny school with barely fifty children on the roll, with just two
teachers and the whole natural world round them as a constant stimulus.
The
stories have a similar form and structure. I didn’t have to work this out; it
was there already in the very concept. I didn’t have formal plans before I started.
I knew the sequence of events but their consequences and implications almost
formed themselves. I don’t think I have even felt such satisfaction in writing
as I did with these.
Hawk, by Meg Rutherford |
So
the end of the trilogy is the end of the school. And the children’s group story
is about the possible destruction of the animals’ home and their escape to a
new home – which means adaptation and, if possible, acceptance. So in this
story, Hawk’s Vision, the main creature, in this case a hawk, is not
the victim but the enabler and is still flying at the end. Shiva, both creator and destroyer. The class itself is now the main character
and the actual destroyer and creator are both embedded within it and between
them provide the story’s central conflict.
In
some ways, the ending of Hawk’s Vision
is simple - sadness, regret and loss, especially for the teachers. In others,
it is deeply ambiguous – not from design but from inevitability, because the children’s
futures, though superficially destined, are not emotionally settled in what
might yet turn out to be hostile environments. The use of the word ‘ separate’
in the very last sentence seemed suitable at the time. Only later did I find it
contained several implications which I
hadn’t considered or even realised but
which gave it an extra resonance.
So
there we were. Three separate but linked novels, published in 1988, 1992 and
1993 respectively. And I longed for an omnibus edition. But four years had
elapsed between Hare and Badger and by then Hare, which had caused quite a stir in its first year or so, and
picked up an American publisher and even a translation into Spanish, had lost
its immediate audience who would have expected sequels. Scholastic did say they
would publish a single-volume version – but it was pulled because of some
rigmarole which seemed to involve money in some form or another! When Hare
was republished by Barn Owl my hopes were renewed – but Ann Jungman’s Barn Owl was a tiny, though
influential, publisher and did a
beautiful reissue of Hare in 2006, but couldn’t begin to even think about an
omnibus.
So
my ambition seemed gone for ever. Until of course Createspace and then KDP came
along. But there were obviously two main obstacles. Getting Meg’s beautiful
illustrations in was not going to be easy. But worse than that, there were no
digital versions of the books. Hare was typed out laboriously on a fairly
antique electric typewriter and the finished MS had pages which were like thin
solid slabs of white slate because of the layers of Tipp-ex - and is anyway now in the archives of Seven
Stories in Newcastle. The other two were done on an ancient Atari computer
given to me by my son after his university paid half the cost of an Apple Mac
for all its graduate students, using a long -defunct word processing program
onto floppy disks which I’ve lost anyway. So I needed them digitised. Who by? I
asked around, and David Penney of ALLI gave me the answer. Digitise my Books (www.digitisemybooks.co.uk).
Marvellous. I contacted Philip, who provided me with Word docs and PDFs out of
original editions of all three books separately and then as an omnibus, very
quickly and far more cheaply than I had expected.
So
shouldn’t everything now be easy? I soon found that trying to bond pictures and
text in a publishable form was as elusive and slippery as trying to write with
mercury as ink. Months passed and I was still no nearer. I nearly gave up and
turned to professional help. But this was a labour of love and a matter of
pride and I had to do it myself. One last effort. And in the end I managed
it. The paperback was published in September.
Even
so, I had doubts. To publish books which first appeared thirty years ago set in
an obsolete situation could be damningly interpreted as VANITY PROJECT! However, a critical remark I’ve always
cherished, first said, I think, by WH Auden in respect of Thomas Hardy’s poetry
– ‘If you think you have found a work’s
greatest weakness, please consider for a moment that it may instead be its greatest strength.’ And the more I
thought about it, the more sure I was that this very obsolescence was the best
reason of all to republish the books.
In
his School Librarian review of the
2006 reissue of Hare, Chris Brown,
himself a former primary headteacher, wrote ‘…it is
a timely testimony to the power and possibilities of a curriculum driven
entirely by empathetic encouragement and above all from first-hand stimuli.’
Perfectly put. And in his article on the Hare
trilogy in The Cambridge Guide to
Children’s Books in English, Victor Watson says ‘For adult readers aware of recent changes in British primary schools , the trilogy will read a little like an elegy.’ Dead right
again, because I realized that this
wasn’t just a reissue of three little
books. It was a howl of rage at what has been allowed – nay, forced - to happen
in primary schools – a rigid, top-down, tick-box mentality which values only memory
to recall disparate pieces of sometimes doubtful knowledge which won’t help anyone to live a more
fulfilled life (’fronted adverbials’,
anybody?). There is no particular educational rationale behind it, being mainly
intended, so it would seem, to determine school league-table placings.
And
I realized that reissuing these books might be a tiny broadside against the
mighty oaken hulls of these monstrous leviathans, so that whole generations of
children are not stunted by having their creative and imaginative qualities
developed or even recognized.
And
in that spirit I offer them again.
As
I was writing this, I read Sue Price’s marvellous review of the trilogy in her Christmas Day
blog. Thanks so much, Sue. And thank
you, Bill Kirton, for your lovely Hare
review back in 2017 on Eclectic Electric.
These
books are published under my Joslin Books
imprint for my own books, with its companion list, Joslin Specials, for books by writers I have mentored and edited, mainly for The Oxford Editors.
They are at present only on Amazon, though I intend to put them with Ingram
Spark as well, for wider availability – when I find out how to do it!
Not
yet an ebook. More trouble with
pictures. Soon, I hope.
I‘ve
also printed a booket, About the Hare
Trilogy, which ends with an angry rant about present-day education. If
you’d like a printed copy, send me your address (to dennishamley@yahoo.co.uk)
and it’s yours for £1 and £1 postage. Or you can have a pdf for nothing!
Have a look also at all six volumes of The Long Journey of Joslin de Lay as
well as Ellen’s People and Divided Loyalties, all in paperback and
also on Kindle.
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