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| David Almond on Felling: ‘I didn't want to be a northern writer’ | David Almond on Felling: ‘I didn't want to be a northern writer’ |
| (7 months later) | |
| I recall a morning in my Felling childhood. I say to my best friend, Tex, that I want to be a writer. We’ve been serving on St Patrick’s altar. Bread and wine’s been turned to flesh and blood. I still taste the Host on my tongue. We’re on the High Street outside Myers pork shop. A severed pig’s head grins out from its window. There’s the distant din of caulkers from the shipyards far below. It’s a hot day and the sky above is eggshell blue. | I recall a morning in my Felling childhood. I say to my best friend, Tex, that I want to be a writer. We’ve been serving on St Patrick’s altar. Bread and wine’s been turned to flesh and blood. I still taste the Host on my tongue. We’re on the High Street outside Myers pork shop. A severed pig’s head grins out from its window. There’s the distant din of caulkers from the shipyards far below. It’s a hot day and the sky above is eggshell blue. |
| “A writer?” says Tex. “But you’re just you, Davie. And this is just the Felling. What the hell ye ganna write about?” | “A writer?” says Tex. “But you’re just you, Davie. And this is just the Felling. What the hell ye ganna write about?” |
| “Aye,” I sigh. “Mebbe I’m just romancing, Tex.” | “Aye,” I sigh. “Mebbe I’m just romancing, Tex.” |
| And we wander on uphill, past Dragone’s coffee shop, past the Blue Bell pub, past the allotments on Windy Ridge, and across the great playing fields towards the lark-filled sky. | And we wander on uphill, past Dragone’s coffee shop, past the Blue Bell pub, past the allotments on Windy Ridge, and across the great playing fields towards the lark-filled sky. |
| A life in writing: David Almond | |
| I don’t really recall the rest of that particular day, but all these years later I continue to wander back there, blending the adult David with the young Davie, drawing together memory, imagination and dream, seeking the tales that grow from that far-off northern corner of the world. | I don’t really recall the rest of that particular day, but all these years later I continue to wander back there, blending the adult David with the young Davie, drawing together memory, imagination and dream, seeking the tales that grow from that far-off northern corner of the world. |
| It wasn’t always so. For a long time, I shared Tex’s doubts. I didn’t want to write about that place. Didn’t want to be a northern writer with a northern voice. Thought I’d write about more interesting or exotic places, in some voice that was totally different from my own. | It wasn’t always so. For a long time, I shared Tex’s doubts. I didn’t want to write about that place. Didn’t want to be a northern writer with a northern voice. Thought I’d write about more interesting or exotic places, in some voice that was totally different from my own. |
| Then I was ambushed by a story called “Where Your Wings Were”, about the death of my baby sister in our little council house at the foot of the town. It generated a whole sequence of stories called Counting Stars. They were set in a Felling that was very like the real Felling but that was also a fiction. Real and imaginary people walked side by side. Real streets led to streets that were totally invented. | Then I was ambushed by a story called “Where Your Wings Were”, about the death of my baby sister in our little council house at the foot of the town. It generated a whole sequence of stories called Counting Stars. They were set in a Felling that was very like the real Felling but that was also a fiction. Real and imaginary people walked side by side. Real streets led to streets that were totally invented. |
| Those tales changed everything. I relaxed. Accepted my northern Catholic roots. Discovered Felling’s strangeness and exoticism. I wrote about people and events that might seem insignificant, about tragedies and joys that might seem ordinary. I wrote about a little damaged lovely town that stretches from the river to the sky, and found great beauty in it. I felt myself shifting towards a writing voice that felt something like my own. I began to understand that the extraordinary is found in the most ordinary of places and that the local really does contain the universal. It was only when I returned to that little place that my work began to be read around the world. | Those tales changed everything. I relaxed. Accepted my northern Catholic roots. Discovered Felling’s strangeness and exoticism. I wrote about people and events that might seem insignificant, about tragedies and joys that might seem ordinary. I wrote about a little damaged lovely town that stretches from the river to the sky, and found great beauty in it. I felt myself shifting towards a writing voice that felt something like my own. I began to understand that the extraordinary is found in the most ordinary of places and that the local really does contain the universal. It was only when I returned to that little place that my work began to be read around the world. |
| Counting Stars led to many other tales and novels inspired by Felling, by Tyneside, by Northumberland, the places that have become the geography of my imagination. I still write stories in the sequence. It’s a life-long project titled Stories From the Middle of the World. And in my new novel, The Colour of the Sun, a boy named Davie wanders through his home town, Felling, on a summer’s day. | Counting Stars led to many other tales and novels inspired by Felling, by Tyneside, by Northumberland, the places that have become the geography of my imagination. I still write stories in the sequence. It’s a life-long project titled Stories From the Middle of the World. And in my new novel, The Colour of the Sun, a boy named Davie wanders through his home town, Felling, on a summer’s day. |
| My journey away and back again has been taken by many writers. Flannery O’Connor, who struggled with regionalism and Catholicism, gave great comfort on the way: “The discovery of being bound through the senses to a particular society and a particular history, to particular sounds and a particular idiom, is for the writer the beginning of a recognition that first puts his work into real human perspective for him … The imagination is not free, but bound.” | My journey away and back again has been taken by many writers. Flannery O’Connor, who struggled with regionalism and Catholicism, gave great comfort on the way: “The discovery of being bound through the senses to a particular society and a particular history, to particular sounds and a particular idiom, is for the writer the beginning of a recognition that first puts his work into real human perspective for him … The imagination is not free, but bound.” |
| I didn’t know that, back when I was a kid with Tex outside the pork shop. I thought I’d be free as a lark, without understanding that the skylark’s song is sung above a nest that’s scraped into the solid earth. | I didn’t know that, back when I was a kid with Tex outside the pork shop. I thought I’d be free as a lark, without understanding that the skylark’s song is sung above a nest that’s scraped into the solid earth. |
| • The Colour of the Sun is published by Hodder Children’s Books | • The Colour of the Sun is published by Hodder Children’s Books |
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