Authors Electric

  The sheer beauty of the underwater world is amazing I taught myself to read in secret whilst sitting on the lavatory. The girl next door was six months older than me, and started school six months earlier. She lorded it over me, saying she could read but I wouldn’t be able to until I went to school, so I felt I wasn’t allowed to tackle books yet although I really wanted to. I would struggle through a sentence of Brer Rabbit until it made sense, and then the next time I locked myself away in the only room in which that was permitted I would read my practised sentence, and then struggle through the next one. Consequently, I could read before I went to school but I kept it very quiet. The very first book that I couldn’t stop reading was The Deep Sea Horse , by Primrose Cumming. I don’t know how old I was, probably about six or seven, but I remember my mother saying “Put that book down now Elizabeth, it’s tea time”, and my father (noticing how engrossed I was) shaking his head at her...

    The first time I actively set out to research something was when I was writing a play about an escaped tiger, for Radio 4’s Afternoon Theatre. Up until then I’d written about what I knew, but when you’re in your twenties you run out of stuff pretty quickly unless you live in a small village filled with single men in possession of a good fortune who must be in want of a wife. All I knew about tigers was what I’d read in books, principally Jim Corbett’s Man-Eaters of Kumaon . In those days Chessington World of Adventures was Chessington Zoo, and they had tigers, so I rang up and asked if I could talk to the tiger keeper. I think I expected an animal lover who was both entranced and obsessed with his charges, so the first question I asked was, “How long have you worked with tigers?” The answer was rather unexpected – “Too long.” He regarded tigers as the most dangerous of all animals in the zoo, and was looking for another job. He seemed to think he was living on borrowed tim...

These days, we can all update our online books, and customers will get the newest version free of charge. However, when do you do it? Those writing for young people probably have the hardest job, as slang changes year on year, and you can sound like the fustiest old has-been very quickly and a laughing-stock amongst the super-trendy. Do people still use the word trendy anyway? The other big issues are contemporary settings (remember when mobile phones looked like bricks?) and scientific discoveries. When I was a kid, no one thought for a moment that dinosaurs had feathers, or that women guards on the Underground should be paid the same as men.    Climate change is going to present even more problems, I suspect. I haven’t actually updated any of my books, as I’ve always been very careful to make the date in which they’re set a bit ambiguous. This means stating that something costs the same as a four bedroom house in Surrey, rather than the £60,000 it would have cost thir...

Truism (Chambers) – a self-evident truth; a commonplace or trite statement. Cliché (Chambers) – a stereotyped phrase, or literary tag; something hackneyed as idea, plot, or situation. Old Wives’ Tales (Brewer’s) – superstitious stories and beliefs such as are kept alive and spread by credulous old women. There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray you love, remember. So says Ophelia, in Hamlet, and like me you may have just thought it was one of those things like wearing a posy to ward off the plague, or throwing salt over your shoulder for good luck. Not so. A study found that pupils working in a room with the aroma of rosemary, in the form of an essential oil, achieved 5% to 7% better results in memory tests, and the findings were consistent with tests on adults. Rosemary has been associated with memory for hundreds of years, and Ancient Greek students wore garlands of rosemary in exams!             We all try t...