Hello I'm Nicola Skinner and I'm standing here in Waterstones in
Piccadilly. I'm here to talk about the three books that I read and loved as
a child which influenced me in turn to write my first children's book: Bloom.
Bloom is the story of Sorrel Fallowfield, an 11 year old girl who lives her
life according to a very strict timetable. She's very, very good at being
very, very good. She's the type of girl who irons her shirts and knows what she's
doing at any given time of the day. She wouldn't dream of stepping out of line
or questioning authority and her only ambition is to win her school's most
obedient child competition. Unfortunately for Sorrel, Fate has other
plans in store and on the day that the competition is announced
she's lured out into her backyard where she discovers or is presented with a very
old, very faded packet of seeds. And the moment that she finds them her carefully
laid plans go awry and all sorts of chaos ensues. At the heart of my book the
humour comes from the fact that Sorrel is a bit of a hapless protagonist who's
quite blind to what she really needs and she has quite misplaced ambitions which
aren't very good for her. And that's at the heart of some of my favorite books
of all time which are the Adrian Mole Diaries by Sue Townsend. I read the first
Adrian Mole book when I was younger than Adrian in the first book, so I think I
was about 11 and I picked it up off my parent's bookshelf and I had the honour
of living through the 80s and 90s when Sue Townsend was producing one of these
books every couple of years, so I watched Adrian Mole as he grew from a teenager
to a young man and finally to a middle-aged man. Through the eight
diaries we see him trying and failing again and again not just in his
professional life, he's desperate to become an author,
but also in his romantic and personal life. You could say that it's sort of
eight diaries of epic fails. And I think it's quite easy to dismiss Adrian Mole
as a sort of comical loser but as I read these books again and again he stopped
being a loser for me and he became a sort of accidental hero. I think there's
something incredibly noble and dignified in the way that he keeps on keeping on.
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh.
One of my favourite books if not my favourite book of all time. For those of
you who don't know Harriet the Spy is an 11 year old girl living in New York in
the early 60s. Like Adrian Mole she's an aspiring writer and she has notebooks in
which she writes about her friends and her family but she takes it one step
further than Adrian and she writes about complete strangers. Harriet
actively spies on people to write about them. She hides under windowsills, she
climbs up to the top of buildings and peers through skylights and in one
amazing scene she actually hides in a dumbwaiter which is one of those lifts
that goes between floors for food. She curls up in there to spy on a woman and
she does all of this because she's interested in people's secret selves. So
she recognizes that people are different when they're by themselves at home and
they don't think that they're being observed. From secret diaries to secret
notebooks and secret selves it's probably no wonder that my third book is...
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. This book has the most amazingly
dark and gothic beginnings of all children's books I've ever read.
It starts with a young girl called Mary Lennox who's born in India at the turn
of the 20th century to some rather useless parents who take one look at her
when she's born and say no thanks we don't want any of that.
So the first 10 years of her life she's basically by herself being looked after
by servants who don't love her and the book starts with us finding this out
about her as a cholera epidemic sweeps through her house. She's sitting in her
bedroom completely alone, very hungry and irritated that no one's
coming to tell her what's going on. And while she's sitting there she can hear
all these strange bumping noises of things being carried out which are
basically bodies. Unloved and unwanted she gets palmed off yet again to a
remote uncle who lives in this grand old shutup house in Yorkshire and when she's
there she has nothing to do but explore the grounds and she hears rumors of a
garden that's been locked away and this starts to work on her imagination. She
becomes obsessed with finding it. And those few chapters leading up to her
finding the key and unlocking the door, even though I know what's going to
happen I'm still in a state of sort of painful anticipation, urging her on to
find it. And I think that is the sign of really magical writing. Burnett's vision
of nature I find really radical and inspiring. She's very careful to have
the central characters describe to each other how the garden that they're
looking after must never be too tidy, must never be too spick and span and
can't be clipped. And I think that's her way of saying that children need places
that are wild and private and where children can't be straitjacketed by
society. I think this book is amazing because Burnett was born into a
Victorian era, one of the most repressive periods of society for children and to
come out of that and write this book sort of pleading for children to be
allowed to run wild feels incredibly important and even more relevant now
today and I'll always be in awe of it.