The children's laureate Jacqueline Wilson tells a story about being followed
into a ladies' loo in a shopping centre by a group of teenage fans. Giggling
outside her cubicle, one of them doubts it's her, so another gets down on
the floor and sticks her head under the door to check. There are many
celebrities who write children's books; there are few children's authors who
become real, worshipped, stalker-worthy celebrities.
As you walk in the shadow of a literary Beatlemania — fans shouting and
stamping as she walks on stage, assistants scampering, black velvet
swishing, fingers encased in seven huge silver rings of which Ozzy would be
proud (they even have bats on them) — you realise that this is the
rock'n'roll apotheosis of a Surrey pensioner. Wilson wears the chunky silver
laureate's medal around her neck like a hip-hop medallion. Inspired by the
New Zealand writer Margaret Mahy, she was considering a tattoo, but decided
in the end that, at 61, it could look a little (no, extremely) sad. She is
far from being a show-off (they do badly in her books): it is just that she
spent so many years not being noticed, now she's gilding her moment, donning
her glad rags, thinking of her idol Freddie Mercury, on whose death she
visited the wall of tributes by his fans, loving the performance and glamour
of it all.
She is massively successful. She has sold more than 20m books in the UK and
has overtaken Catherine Cookson in library borrowings. In the UK children's
market, only her friend J K Rowling beats her. Unlike Rowling, Wilson has
yet to crack America, but this May there will be a big US push on her novel
Candyfloss (with a glossary of Brit-speak in the back), and she will address
1,000 booksellers at New York's Book Expo on her way home from a tour of New
Zealand and Australia.
Even without global domination, Wilson is treated like a star: her publishers,
Random House, lay on champagne, publication parties at the Ritz and
Claridges when her sales rocket, hotels with pools, cars with bars, anything
she might like. She has judged the Whitbread prize and the Orange prize; met
Bill Clinton; was a star turn at Gordon Brown?s Christmas party. At the
Queen's Buckingham Palace children's party in June, it was the laureate's
duty to present 24 writers to HM. And for a TV show to promote reading, she
visited Windsor Castle and held a second-folio Shakespeare, Charles I's
personal, annotated copy. "Amazing!" Less regally (or maybe not),
she was persuaded by "lovely" Cherie to present the prizes at Leo
Blair's infant school. "There were prizes for Not Being A Daydreamer
and Clean Fingernails, and the poor thing got nothing, but sat there smiling
and congratulating others. Very well brought up, I?d say." Then there
was the "solemn do" of being made a fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature where she chose to sign the members' book with Dickens?s quill
rather than Byron's pen, which felt more apt for a moral storyteller.
She loves every minute. She's been poor, lived in police flats, struggled to
reach payday. In the interview at the private school where her clever
daughter was educated, Surbiton High, the head teacher looked her up and
down, remarking on what a "lovely change" it would be to have a
father who was a policeman rather than a company director. Her wealth has
brought her a lifestyle she can barely believe; she seems to exist in a
state of perpetual delight, reminding you of a schoolgirl on a birthday
treat with a rich auntie. "I've been lucky. People are so kind."
Indeed, everyone — editors, receptionists, waiters — is described as "lovely".
Our interview in her car is recalled as a "lovely natter", her
publicist is "the lovely Naomi", Jo Rowling is "exceptionally
sweet". After half a day with her I am dizzy with the niceness of the
woman, who I soon realise is dizzy with her own good luck.
She lives in a handsome Victorian villa in a smart road in Kingston upon
Thames, filled with books and accoutrements of affluent, old-fashioned
childhood; a rocking horse, antique dolls in perfect ensembles. The house
was a present to herself after 25 years of living in a little terrace house
nearby; since separating from her husband she has lived alone but now has a "housemate",
who cooks and is good company. "These houses were built by people who
did well in trade," she says in her gentle, surprisingly polished
voice. "And that is what I feel I am." She can never see herself
leaving her home town, with the children's library that got her through
childhood. She bought the outbuilding at the bottom of her garden, and made
it a library for her 15,000 books, and a house in Cambridge for her
daughter; she commissions dramatic gothic-looking jewellery, buys elegant,
flowing frocks from Liberty that suit her bohemian deluxe style.
"I don't believe in fate," she says, "and I get very irritated
in Hardy novels when something happens and it goes all dark. But you do
start to see that your life has a shape and a sense and a reason for the
good things At Derry's Guildhall, scene of the Bloody Sunday inquiry, the
statue of Queen Victoria is missing a hand from some sectarian fracas. This
afternoon, however, the issue of crowd control is a matter of teenage
hormones, as 600 schoolgirls (mainly) surge on the tiny figure of their
heroine to get books signed, and take a picture of a woman they love more
than Justin Timberlake. Wilson amiably chats to an endless stream of fans in
sparkly Alice bands and falling-down socks as the deafening, and vaguely
threatening, chaos swells all around her. She will smile nonstop for two
hours; not in a rictus of fake bonhomie, but because not to do so, to look
tired or fed up, would ruin the day, if not the year, of children who have
spent hours queuing to meet her. For some she's just a writer; for others
she's the custodian of their fears, their ambitions to write, and their need
of rescue.
A bulky girl of about 14 steps forward. "You know how much you love me,"
she declares to Wilson, and then quietly: "Nobody loves me."
Wilson can?t place the child, who isn?t one of her regular correspondents,
but she talks warmly to her about clothes and school so that she might
return to her family upheavals or playground traumas with her belief in a
special relationship confirmed. In Wilson's fictional world, children have
problems — parents die and divorce, and siblings are separated — but there
is always at least one good, strong, reliable adult. The sadness is that for
some, that person is just a name on a book jacket, a stranger with a
mischievous and motherly face (with her cropped silver hair and owlish
spectacles, she avoids resembling anyone's grandma — except perhaps Ziggy
Stardust's) and silver "witch boots". She cannot mend marriages or
make bad mothers try harder, but she can be a sort of long-distance auntie
in whose stories there is identification and comfort and humour.
She tells me a sweet story (against her own forgetfulness) about Pixie Geldof
once asking her at a signing before her mother's death if she had read any
books "by someone called Paula Yates". "My mind went blank,
except for Rock Stars in Their Underpants!" Then she had a flash of
inspiration, telling Pixie that she had read a book about the wonderful
times Paula had with her family and how much she loved her daughters. "It
was lovely. She was young enough to believe me. The grin was ear to ear."
This January morning, at Derry's Verbal Arts Centre, Wilson had met the
young winners of a writing competition. One runner-up, an elfin
nine-year-old called Sara, confides that Tracy Beaker, Wilson's star turn
and a TV series, is her favourite ever character. An angry, stroppy,
touching girl in a children's home, and every parent's nightmare, Tracy
makes Sara count her blessings: "She does bad stuff and tricks, but I
think it's because she is sad. Everything's good for me, but Tracy doesn't
have a mum or dad." I had asked Wilson, whose detractors find her
stories gloomy and insufficiently escapist, if she worried that she might
cause children to fret about family breakdown. She answered that they just
got caught up in the story, but she edited out images of abuse or misery
that might "linger in their heads", and didn't dwell on the
upsetting bits. The issue of responsibility to an audience of vulnerable
minors, however, hangs like a guillotine over her career. In one of her
books she had a child sniffing glue, until an editor warned her that it
might encourage solvent abuse. "It did make me think, and I took it
out.
I have to be careful. I don't write about that dreadful game where children
try to be last across a road, or ride on trains. No matter how much you show
it as bad, if you encouraged one to have a go you couldn't live with
yourself." In her personal favourite among her books, The Illustrated
Mum, where the bipolar mother, Marigold, is covered with tattoos, she had to
ensure that her readers didn't equate tattoos with weirdness and
unpredictability. This is a testing discipline to apply to books that are
also striving to be realistic. In fact, of course, they are not sharply,
worryingly real, only pretending to be. There is a reasonable chance that a
true-life Tracy Beaker would be sexually active, or self-harming, and
smoking at least the odd joint, but Wilson's rebel is naughty rather than
alienated, ultimately redeemable on delivery of love and security. "You
can't give them the worst-case scenario, and I'm not in the business of
depressing the nation's children. A lot of kids in care write to me, and
Tracy has raised their status. Suddenly it's become cool to be in a home or
fostered, it helps kids feel they are okay." Having grown up not far
from Wilson's home, in a southwest-London tower block, on an estate with its
share of rough boys but also its house-proud, unpaid polishers of landings
and lifts, her world feels familiar to me. Wilson imports the moral code of
40 years ago — the one that pertained to her own working-class childhood,
and to mine — and uses it to make sense of more unsure and chaotic
contemporary situations. Hers is a fictional world where children get hurt
or scared, but not one where names like James Bulger and Sarah Payne could
ever resonate. It is volatile but essentially decent. Like one of her
characters, I was caught shoplifting (a novelty eraser, for a dare) in her
local department store, Bentalls; I thought I was a bold, lippy kid, but
when the strong arm of the store detective came down on my anorak I was
terrified, and that is the emotional truth Wilson captures: the fear, the
embarrassment, the babyish longing for home felt by the bravest junior
miscreant.
Wilson's own life is a source of unfailing interest for her fans, and her new
autobiography, Jacky Daydream, the story of a dreamy, clever only child, is
written for them, linking episodes in her life with those in the books they
know inside out. For all its anxious, tense interludes, her story is a
comforting slice of post-war British life that feels as distant as the
Victorians. Her family's council flat was a source of pride, even of
one-upmanship; when her grandfather performed a citizen's arrest on a
burglar, the criminal willingly complied; teachers kept control with
entertaining eccentricity and vicious insults. The mortified Jacky, given a
pair of Dame Ednas by her ladylike mother, was "four eyes" to Mr
Branson ("Brandy Balls"), her teacher at primary school, frankly
the last straw for a serious-faced child with a wild perm. "They would
clip you round the head," she laughs. "But at least it was
interesting to be at school." In kinder moments, it was Branson who
called his ace story writer "Jacky Daydream". She might have been
sensitive, prone to throwing up from excitement, and self-conscious about
her looks, but Wilson was never the class misfit; she wasn't shunned; in
fact, she rarely lacked a best friend and even had a boyfriend at primary
school. She was just a natural empathiser with the lost and lonely — the one
who secretly befriended the class's chubby girl, "fat Pat", who
died in the school holidays — whose maturity may have been a product of her
book-a-day reading habit.
In this world where parents stayed together, and teenage girls feared the
stigma of pregnancy, Wilson's mother, Biddy, imposed cast-iron standards of
cleanliness, manners, conduct.
The sort of golden-hearted, slutty mothers Wilson sometimes writes about (Sue
in The Diamond Girls , for instance) she would have called "as common
as muck"; a tattooed specimen like Marigold in The Illustrated Mum
would have horrified her.
Biddy and Wilson's father, Harry, were unhappily married, but rubbed along
somehow, "trading terrifying insults" so that as a teenager she
wished they would divorce, which they eventually did. Now in her eighties,
Biddy still lives around the corner, and Wilson doesn't seem much bothered
about how she might react to her portrayal in the new book, for Biddy has
never read any of them. She is no doubt proud, but her reticence, while the
rest of the nation applauds, must be frustrating for her only child. There
is both attachment and exasperation between the two, nothing like the
intimacy Wilson cherishes with her own daughter, Emma.
Little Jacky Aitken failed the 11-plus and went to Coombe Girls' Secondary,
seemingly incapable of maths and all sport except swimming (she now swims 50
lengths before breakfast, her therapy), but she shone at creative writing,
calling her first novel, a school project, The Maggots, inspired by Eve
Garnett's The Family from One End Street. Jacky Daydream ends before her
teenage years, for fear of describing mild misdemeanours her readers might
copy.
After school she attended a secretarial college, worked briefly for the
publisher J M Dent, saw an ad in the London Evening Standard — "Wanted!
Teenage Writers!" — soliciting romantic stories for an all-colour
teenage magazine. Her story about being a wallflower at a "posh dance"
earned her three guineas, and at 17 she left home to work for the publishers
D C Thomson in Dundee. As the youngest member of the editorial team, they
named the new and soon to be generation-defining magazine after her: Jackie.
At 19 she married a young printer, Millar Wilson; they moved south, where he
joined the police and she had their daughter, Emma, now a senior academic in
French at Cambridge. After 32 years of marriage, Millar left his wife, but
the mother-daughter relationship is tender and solicitous: while we are
travelling, her mobile buzzes with texts and calls from Emma.
For years Wilson's career was only moderately successful; in the 1980s she
wrote wordy teenage novels for Oxford University Press, but in a quest for
accessibility she began writing in the first person, cutting straight to the
sympathies of her readers with child-friendly vocabulary. She also found an
illustrator, Nick Sharratt, to cement what would become a brand offering
duvet covers, pencil cases and knickers. In 1991, Transworld published The
Story of Tracy Beaker, her turnaround book, which made her rich and an assumed,
though not self-appointed, expert on early adolescence.
Last year she was co-signatory on a letter denouncing the effect of a "toxic
childhood" sustained on the junk of fast food, computer games, TV,
parental neglect and celebrity. But isn't she part of the toxic syndrome,
the dumbed-down tastes of materially spoilt children for whom all pleasures
must be instant, all books easy? She answers that her fans read widely; and
for some children, reading anything at all is a marvel. Actually, Wilson
treads a fine and clever line between creating a daring frisson with her
gritty subject matter and eminent respectability; she was awarded the OBE in
2002, and for the past two years as laureate, she has led a campaign to
promote "good, old-fashioned reading aloud".
She doesn't seek to shock, is not naturally iconoclastic or even much of a
homespun rebel. She likes to please. Indeed, her special talent is to make
everyone — kids, parents, reformers — feel she is on their side. She
shudders at the memory of reading Melvyn Burgess's controversial children's
book about teenage sex, Doing It ("If that's what's in boys' minds, I
don't want to go there!"), though personally, of course, he is "lovely".
She is as comforting as her heroine Noel Streatfeild, and her heroine before
her, E Nesbit of The Railway Children, writing from the child's point of
view, true to the values of family solidarity, quick to see bullies and
little madams come a cropper, and to inspire children with disappointments
and dreams.
Wilson's books may feature social breakdown and bad behaviour, but she doesn't "do"
the glowering hoodies on street corners. She has never understood the gang
mentality, though she has encountered it. Walking home from the station
after a night out, she saw a group of boys on her road, looking sinister and
muttering. As she approached, one of them shouted: "Yo, Tracy Beaker!"
"I just waved!" More ominously, a few years ago a group of boys
gathered at her home, shouting through her letter box late at night; she was
alone and frightened. "It started off that they were fans, but it got
ugly. One little bastard picked up a stone and smashed all the glass in my
door. I was outraged but also scared. And I knew that if I gave one of them
a slap, and my ring caught him, I could be prosecuted."
She does fewer school visits now, and she probably doesn't miss them: she
narrowly escaped being hit on the head by a hurled milk bottle in one East
End comprehensive. She gets 500 letters week, however. What she grasps
better than most is how prepubescent girls are weighted with worry; all her
fiction respects the stalking monster of juvenile anxiety, irrational or
not. Her postbag is sifted for letters from any children with worries, which
are passed on for a personal reply. What does she say to the ones who tell
her their parents are getting a divorce? "Something bland and
comforting like, 'You're having to cope with quite a lot right now, but how
lovely that you still have your hamster.'" She shrugs. "You can't
write, 'Yes, your dad's a pig to go off with that woman,' can you?"
More usual, thankfully, are the cheeky ones. "Dear Jacky, I want to be
a famous writter [sic]. Send me your last six books." Then there was
the sweet girl who wrote asking for permission to send in her mother's
novel; it turned out to be "the hardest of hard-core pornography".
She laughs, but her real concern was for the child. "Imagine if she had
seen it." This deep, almost stifling immersion in the lives of her
readers takes more time than the writing. She addresses groups of bereaved
children, works for charities, hands out prizes for "best improved
behaviour" to those in care. She has no training in what to say to sick
or grieving children. "You just chat to them, and if you've been told
it's a terminal illness, you have a quiet weep later." Does being agony
aunt come as part of the job? "For me, I think it does. Because of my
subject matter, people expect me to have an interest in children going
through a difficult time. And it's the least I can do, having done very
nicely, thank you, out of writing about them."
In June she retires as laureate, to continue her daunting publishing schedule,
her tours and her mobbings. The only thing you find yourself wishing for her
is a good man. She says she will never marry again, and with her daughter,
her book group in Teddington and her bookseller friends she isn't lonely,
but one feels she deserves a handsome protector. At the palace party she was
shepherded by a "gorgeous" policeman. "Life is very unfair —
I was married for many years to a policeman and didn't go a bundle on any I
met. But here was this charming, sweet, funny guy and you think, 'Oh, why
didn't I meet you?'"
She works hard, writing in marbled notebooks on trains and in cars, to publish
twice a year. Though she would like to travel, she wouldn't want to assist
her rivals by taking a year off. Her October title is Kiss, a story of
first, unrequited love, followed in April 2008 by a book about sisters from
a tough background who get the chance to go to a private school. "I'm
so bloody lucky!" she says, sipping a glass of white wine over dinner.
We have been talking about her favourite book, The Bell Jar, by Sylvia
Plath, a writer whose talent and sadness have touched her, but whose
depression never will. "Most of my friends are retired or being elbowed
out of their jobs. And if they are divorced, they're left strapped for cash
and a bit bitter. Whereas my last 10 years have been extraordinary. Just
when nobody looks at you in the street any more, to be treated like some
ageing rock star, with kids all shouting, "Look! It's her!" It's
wonderful.
Wilson's autobiography, Jacky Daydream (Doubleday, £12.99), is out on March
1. It is available for £11.69 (including p&p) from BooksFirst, tel:
0870 165 8585
HOW THE CAMERA LIED
In her new autobiography, Jacky Daydream, Wilson recalls how her mother,
Biddy, made the family put on a happy face for a photographer
"We went to Clacton year after year. We had a lovely time. Or did we? I
always got overexcited and had a bilious attack, throwing up throughout the
day and half the night. Biddy would sigh at me as if I was being sick on
purpose, but Harry would be surprisingly kind and gentle, and mop me up
afterwards. It's so strange, because when I was bright and bouncy he'd
frequently snap at me, saying something so cruel the words can still make me
wince. I was tense when he was around. I think Biddy was scared of him too.
She used to cry a lot, but then she learnt to shout back.
There was always at least one major row on holiday. They'd hiss terrifying
insults at each other in our bedroom and not speak at the breakfast table.
My tummy would clench and I'd worry I might be sick again. I'd see other
families laughing and joking, and wish we were like that. But perhaps if I'd
looked at us another day, Biddy and Harry laughing, reading me a cartoon
story out of the paper, I'd have thought we were that happy family.
There are two very similar photos taken the Clacton holiday I was six — but
they're so very different if you look closely. The first caught us unawares.
My father looks ominously sulky in his white windcheater, glaring through
his glasses. My mother has her plastic raincoat over her arm and she's
clutching me by the wrist in case I dart away. I'm looking solemn in my
playsuit and my ugly rubber overshoes for playing in the sand. I do not look
a prepossessing child.
Biddy berated Harry and me for spoiling that photograph and insisted we pose
properly the next day. The sun is out in the second photograph and we look
in a sunny mood. Harry's whipped off his severe glasses and is in immaculate
tennis whites. Biddy's combed her perm and liberally applied her dark-red
lipstick. I'm wearing my favourite pink flowery frock and dazzlingly white
sandals. I've just been bought a new pixie colouring book so I look very
pleased. Biddy is holding my hand fondly. Harry has his arm round her. We
look the happiest of families."
