A recent posting about pastels got me thinking again about the one book I did using them. It’s a difficult story to tell, but here goes.
When my son was very young I enjoyed watching his observations of the world. I wanted to capture that in a book. To him, the world and its excitements was all new. I came up with a stone-age toddler, for whom the world really WAS brand new. The idea caught like kindling wood in my mind and before I knew it I had written a series of five or six stories. I was really excited as I felt certain it was absolutely beyond question the best set of texts I’d ever written (although Fatherly love may have clouded my judgement).
Called simply “BOY” I was a determined that the stories be accepted as a series. I didn’t want just one book published while the other stories languished. At the time I was working a lot for The Chicken House, the Somerset based near-cottage industry that purported to find new and exciting ideas; a fresh approach to publishing. etc
They liked the stories but needed a sample image – they were unsure how, with my “sophisticated” style I could create something for pre-school children. And so I began to experiment. I have never pushed myself so hard I truly left no stone unturned in my quest for a suitable visual language. In this task I was inspired and encouraged by the students I taught at Cambridge art school, who were similarly scared and excited about their work. 
Eventually I settled on pastels, and free from the constraints of Van Gogh, Monet or Turner (the Katie books) I was able to explore composition, mood, sequential image and pacing in a way I simply never had done before. And I loved it. I realised that the whole emotional sweep of a landscape could be changed by a single rock or a drawn line. I’ve rarely worked so hard on a picture book (the first Ella Bella is perhaps comparable) but I truly felt I had come up with something that was, for me (in relative terms) a genuine advancement and a bold new approach. Of course it raised issues of who I was as an artist: my visual language (style) has never been clear to me, my identity often hidden, especially in the Katie books. Was this, then, the real me?
I progressed rapidly and the Chicken House loved the art. I got a contract for the first two books – not quite the whole series but a realistic commitment. I happily threw myself into completing the book, and the sum of the parts was very pleasing to me.
Publication day came and soon after a review in Books for Keeps. Inexplicably the book was listed under “Information Books” . The reviewer proceeded to heavily criticise a book that ignored the scientific sequence of life on earth, for I had included a Woolly Mammoth, a Sabre-Toothed Tiger AND a dinosaur. In short, as a non-fiction title (as she saw it) it was worthless.
I was outraged because the book makes no such claim to being an “Information book”. It is quite clearly a work of fiction, a picture-book. The dinosaur is no more unexpected than those in The Flintstones. Interestingly my GP loved it for, as a man of faith, he felt it endorsed his view, that science doesn’t have all the answers and one shouldn’t close doors on theological explanations for these mysterious beasts. That openness is what makes him a really wonderful doctor.
But books for Keeps – when I wrote to them – were fairly unrepentant, the reviewer countering my complaints by saying the cave painting end papers suggested to her I was attempting a realistic account of prehistoric life (which I certainly wasn’t). What can you do with such people? The dinosaur was there to satisfy that childhood fantasy – of meeting a dinosaur. No harm was intended to the assorted scientific minds of the world, and the very controversy raised makes the book good for classroom discussion. But oh dear, how unimaginative these so-called experts and critics can be and I’m afraid I have no time for their narrow view of the world. That’s why I can write stories and they can’t I suppose.
But worse was to come. The Chicken House see themselves mainly as a publisher of teenage fiction. They put no real effort into their picture books. I did five for them and was never asked to promote one of them. So it was perhaps hardly surprising that BOY didn’t sell very well. It wasn’t a disaster, but The Chicken House had financial concerns at that time (they were subsequently bought out by Scholastic in America). They decided to cull several outstanding contracts. And one of them was for BOY.
The book remained in print for some time. They even produced a paperback. But eventually they sheepishly admitted that they would not honour their contract and publish the second title, even though they had approved the text before signing. It was appalling behaviour from any publisher, especially one that markets itself as friendly and approachable. Barry Cunningham (the “man who discovered Harry Potter” as he never fails to remind us all) treated me dreadfully. It took three years of negotiating to get a settlement. Prior to that I had been suddenly left with no work and no money and no immediate prospects.
Worst of all, I had no chance of ever publishing those remaining stories about “Boy”, an especially poignant situation as they were very much about my own little boy who was growing up so fast. The whole thing just about broke my heart and left me deeply distrustful of the whole industry. Thank goodness Orchard stood by me and in time Ella Bella flew up from the ashes. But it was a bleak, terrible time, frightening too with a family to support.
The rights in Boy are now back in my possession. The remaining stories are still unpublished and it’s hard to see how a publisher would want to take on the whole project now; it’s reputation has been rather tarnished. But I remain proud of the one book. It reads well in schools, it pushed me in new directions, it holds within it a precious memory of my son scrabbling in the mud in the garden like a prehistoric troll.
I think publishers are sometimes unaware of how much we writers and illustrators give of ourselves. This isn’t some egotistical self-indulgence, it is a sharing, a communicating. It is a giving of oneself. I can barely begin to describe the hours and hours of work and thought I put into that book. It deserved to be treated better. 
And to anyone with a manscript I would say: approach The Chicken House with caution – their contracts are not worth the paper they are printed on.
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