ABOUT ME
I grew up in a large family in Cambridge, and books have been central to my life ever since I learned to read. At the end of the school day, my big sister and I used to go to my father’s bookshop where we sat on the floor of the Children’s Section and read until he had finished work and could take us back home. My reluctance to stop in the middle of a story led me to read under the bedclothes with a torch when I was supposed to be going to sleep. I read for pleasure, I read for excitement, and I read to learn about other’s people’s lives. I absorbed ‘facts’ through fiction: unadorned facts held less attraction for me. And I told stories to my younger sisters about princesses, monsters, and magic, an apprenticeship from which I learned that you have to keep something happening if you want your audience to keep listening. Luckily they were too young to worry about credibility.
By the time I was eleven, I had two sisters and a brother, and my mother was pregnant again. What did my parents do: move to a bigger house? Not a bit of it: they bought a converted Admiral’s Pinnace that went by the name of DIMCYL. She was 17 metres long and 4 metres wide, and had three double cabins and one single one; and we were more squashed together than ever.
We had a permanent mooring at the end of an orchard in Chesterton, and every day I cycled three miles to Cambridge High School. Living on a boat was not as romantic as my school friends thought. What they didn’t realise - until they came to visit - was just how squeezed up we were. I had to share a double cabin with bunk beds and two square metres of floor space with my sister. Personal space was virtually nil, and neighbours non-existent as the boat was moored at the end of an orchard on the outskirts of Cambridge. Every day I had to get past three bad-tempered geese that were supposed to be cheap mowing machines, and I am still very nervous of geese!
In Hull, we had to evacuate ship in the middle of the night because the ship was hanging on to the quay by its mooring ropes; my parents had underestimated the tidal drop. Somewhere in the North Sea we got beached on a sandbank, and a Royal Navy Lifeboat hovered nearby to check that we floated off safely. In Belgium we ended up in dry dock for necessary repairs, and as a result, we were unable to get back for the start of term. We children learned useful skills like whipping ropes, pumping bilges, and tying knots that don’t fall apart. It was an adventurous childhood by most reckonings.
On the boat or on shore I was always reading. Reading was an escape into another world from a home in which the cramped conditions were taking their toll. Rats in a confined space fight, and my mother and father were no exception. Divorce was an inevitable outcome. The boat was sold, and it was back to the shore again. Eventually my mother and all five children moved to Oxford, where we shared a big house with an uncle and aunt and their three children. This unusually large household was often a source of envy to teenage friends, especially those confined in closely-knit families from which escape can be difficult.
In between these adventures and changes of environment, I was picking up an education. I resisted going to university because it was something that was expected of me. I had the qualifications but I didn’t have the confidence. It never occurred to me that I could be a writer. Then, in an Oxfam bookshop, I happened to get talking to a local councillor, and was recruited to work in a children’s home.
In that children’s home, I came across kids who had led very troubled lives. It was not hard to see how hurt they were. What had hurt them, and why? I began to realise that putting sticky plaster and bandages on gaping wounds wasn’t enough: you have to try and do something about the causes of the damage. But when you begin to see that poverty, racism and discrimination have all played a part, your heart sinks. How can you possibly do anything about things like that?
That was the start of a rich career working with troubled children in therapeutic education. And now I had a reason for studying. Eventually I took a degree in psychology, then in social policy. I became involved in training social workers, and I wrote articles which were published. For someone who had resisted going to university, the wheel had turned full cycle; but I was not satisfied with this. I wanted to reach people’s minds and hearts, I wanted a wider audience to whom I could speak about the things that mattered to me. So I decided to turn to another audience and another sort of fiction: I decided to write for children. And while I was learning how to write fiction, I did some part-time interpreting to earn some money, and this brought me into contact with asylum-seekers and the dark world of their stories. This is how Christophe's Story and Armel's Revenge came into being.
The threads that have run through my life run through my writing. Why is life so unfair? How can we learn to live with what is going on, and can anything be done about it? People have said to me, “Do you feel okay about writing about people from another culture?” I do and I don’t. I have a postcard which I treasure, which bears the message, “Poverty exists where there are people who can’t read; and other people write about them.” On balance I think it is best that these stories are told, even if the story teller is someone like me.
Nicki Cornwell
All content, including hand-drawn pictures, on this site is © Nicki Cornwell 2011