THE SKYLARKS' WAR by Hilary McKay....a review by Adèle Geras and interview with the author.

When the proof of The Skylarks' War arrived in my house, I did what I always do with books: opened it at the first page and began to read. I was so overwhelmed that I photographed the page, put it up on Twitter and declared it to be an example of the perfect opening of a novel.  I'm still of that opinion, so I'm reproducing it here.

I hope very much that you can read it because it sets the tone for the rest of the book. To my mind, this is elegant and  succinct and also, most importantly, an invitation to turn the page.

Too often, a beautiful writing style can hide a dearth of plot, or a paucity of interesting and well-developed characters. Not so here. The Clarry whom we meet as she's being born on the first page carries the story through twenty years and more and so does her brother, Peter. We follow their lives, but just saying that is not enough. We see, through the prism of their stories, a whole social landscape which is changing almost before our eyes. Education is important in this book and its effect on both Clarry and Peter, in different ways, absolutely crucial.

We have small town suburban life complete with delicious domestic detail of the kind that I love finding in a book. We have school, both boarding and grammar. And we have a kind of paradise in Cornwall, where Clarry and Peter's grandparents live. It's here they meet the third main character in the book: the charismatic, gorgeous and delightful Rupert, who is, to anyone familiar with the literature of the Great War, the very embodiment of the young men, the flower of Europe, mown down in those years. He's the sort of person everyone falls in love with. This includes the reader, and also a fascinating and loveable  character called Simon, whose devotion to Rupert will be seen for the homosexual longing it is, at a time when being gay was punishable by imprisonment and a social disgrace. 

The War, when it comes, is treated in a slightly different way from what I've seen other writers do. Through Clarry, the Home Front is most important. Letters are important. What's happening in France and Belgium is only shown briefly, but Mckay has one chapter (Chapter 27) which tells us  about the War in three and a half pages...again, a model of economy and elegance. Anyone teaching this period would do well to read this chapter and use it with their classes. 

The other thing I love about this book is this: it's a family book, like  those of Noel Streatfeild or R F Delderfield. It's a book that you can all read: you, your mother, your children, your granny, your uncle, your brother...you can give to to a whole family for Christmas. Buy multiple copies and just distribute them. I find it hard to imagine anyone not enjoying it. You will smile, and you will cry. You will rejoice and mourn with Clarry. You will recognise yourself and your friends. I hope you don't recognise your own father because Clarry and Peter's surviving parent is a monster of a very particular kind. 

I'm going to finish with a passage which can stand, I think, for the whole book. 

"Simon thought that if the only way of being in contact with someone was by words written on paper, then those words must be both worth reading and true."

The words in The Skylarks' War are exactly that. 

Below, I've asked Hilary Mckay a few questions and I'm grateful to her for answering. The photos used in this piece are all from her and I thank her for letting me use them.

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1) You've written many books and different kinds of books too. This is a new departure it seems to me. Can you tell us a bit of how the idea first came to you.

The idea has been with me for a long time, five years at least, when I began to write a book called Binny in Secret (later reissued as Binny Keeps a Secret.) It was a story with a present-day plot - the Binny story - and a subplot which eventually enlightened the present-day plot...(gosh this is complicated. It was a much too complicated book) set one hundred years before. The characters in the sub-plot were the three main characters in The Skylarks' War. As soon as I began writing about Clarry, Peter and Rupert (after Rupert Brooke, who captured my fourteen-year-old heart by way of a book of poems from my mother and never quite let go of it, whatever I learned about him after that.) I knew that there was much more to them than the few thousand words I gave them. They were so alive to me. I wrote another book or two after Binny in Secret, but always the Skylarks were there, and gradually on my desk I acquired a 1911 sovereign, a book about stars and constellations, and an old Victorian key. (the photos, shown together below are Hilary's own.)


2) Did you have a certain kind of reader in mind when you began? Were you aiming it at children? It seems to me to be the epitome of a Family Book: one that all generations can read together

I wrote it for myself. Sometimes writers are advised to write for themselves, but as a children's writer, this is rarely completely possible. This was one for me, though, entirely, and for the generation who were lost and hurt a hundred years ago. The only thing childish about it is the length. Of course an intelligent child could read it but so I hope could an intelligent adult. [A bit of Hilary's text here is complimentary to me, but I'm afraid I'm including it. Adèle] You know what I mean, because your own young adult novels are just the same. I read Troy and Happy Ever After at the same time as my fourteen-year- old daughter and we both loved them equally.

3) Many books about the Great War deal either with actual fighting or the home front. You do both. Was there any editorial pressure on you to beef up the fighting in any way? If there was, how did you resist it.
There was no editorial pressure on me at all, not for any part of the book. The editing was so light. It was mostly to do with chronology actually, because it covered such a long time span. I had a huge spread sheet with everyone's ages, historical events, etc running through the twenty odd years that the story covers.

4) The emotional battlefields are as devastating in their way as the real ones. In particular the father of the Penrose family is....I have no words for him....and I'm struck by how little he is condemned in the novel either by his children or by you? Do you have a particular reason to let him off the hook a bit?

Did I let him off the hook? I didn't mean to. He was an awful man. My characters knew that and so did I. I found him frightening: the thought of Clarry living with him, his utter coldness. They diminished him in the end with pity and laughter, but he was never redeemed. He remained what he was from the start. Devoid of love. Not off the hook at all!

5) 1918 was a moment when women were more and more coming to the fore in education and suffrage and so forth. Your novel seems to be a clarion call ( Clarry-on!) for education, kindness and understanding. Would you be upset or pleased if your readers took it as an 'issue' novel?

I would be delighted if readers took it as a Clarion Call...I like Clarry-on call! I am all for the girls. I found such a brilliant second-hand book when I was researching the novel, called "Somerville for Women." When I looked inside, I found it had been signed by a group of Somerville friends. One of them, Jill Brook (Lewis) says: "It can't be 40 years!" There are eight or nine signatures. So moving. We had a similar 'Eight' at St Andrew's and now at our own nearly forty years later, we say to each other: "Are you coming? I've got five of the eight...." etc.

6) Is there going to be a sequel? I feel there could be a few...a series!

I don't know. I wish I did. Maybe I could follow one of the next generation into WW2.

A brief autobiography:


I grew up in Boston, Lincolnshire, the eldest of four sisters in a very small house. My entire family read books like starving wolves eat their dinners, reading was my first great escape. The second was St Andrew's University. After a variety of jobs I settled down in Derbyshire to write books, which has just about kept the show on the bumpy road these last twenty five years or so.

The Case of the Disappearing Victorian and the New History Curriculum: by Penny Dolan

 Queen Victoria would not be amused.  I’m fairly sure the many small regional museums won’t be, not one bit.  


Something is going on right now, here in schools in England, that makes me angry. Not huge humanitarian disaster angry, but angry all the same.

Here’s how my worry began. (Do go and get a cup of coffee first. You might need it.)  

In May, at Llanberis Slate Museum, just below Snowdon, I watched a jovial Welsh ex-quarryman give a slate-splitting demonstration, aiming his talk and jokes at a large class of London school children. Then he called out one of the teachers to split a slate with him.  However, the man was doing this as both a thank you and farewell to the teacher.  It was their last show.

The teacher had organised annual visits to the Slate Museum as part of a study trip to North Wales for several years. However, this was a final visit. Although the school would send the pupils from the same school year to Wales, but changes to their curriculum meant that the students wouldn’t be “doing the Victorians” any more.  So no more visits to the Slate Museum.

I began pondering: if a lot of schools stopped their visits, the museum would suffer cuts in both income and funding, not to mention the impact on local employment around the attraction. That worry sat in my mind.

I remembered the worry again, about two weeks ago, when I visited Cannon’s Hall Museum, near Barnsley, to discuss a possible project.  After looking round the fine rooms above stairs, I was taken below stairs. 

I entered a large, fully-equipped Victorian kitchen with a cast iron range, sinks and scrubbed wooden tables. Here, dressed in costume, primary children from schools as far away as Manchester experience life as a servant in a big house during Victorian times. 

Under guidance from "the Housekeeper" and her staff, the pupils work, prepare, cook and then eat the meal in the servant’s dining room, using appropriate manners at all times. The visit is a very popular "Victorian" experience.  My concern grew stronger.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen various comments on the revised History Curriculum, with its intention of showing "coherent chronological progression", even though I have yet to visit a primary school without some sort of historic time-line displayed somewhere.

The changes matter because a school visit is not an idle, unconnected, out-of-any-context day out. Schools link such visits into the needs of their curriculum. However, glancing through the document, the popular and accessible Victorians seem to diminish as a subject for this age group. And so, I fear, will a significant number of the visits to those places that – horrible expression! -  “offer the Victorians.” 

What does the new curriculum include instead? 

For this post, I'm ignoring KS1 & KS3. 

Children in Key Stage Two ( 7 to 11 year olds) can study the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, the impact of the Roman Empire on Britain,  Britain’s settlement by Anglo-Saxons and Scots, and the Viking and Anglo-Saxon struggle for the Kingdom of England up to Edward the Confessor, stopping at 1066.


The curriculum does win praise from some because the Victorians can be included through a local history study or "theme that extends their knowledge beyond 1066", and the Ancient Egyptians may  fit into "studying the achievements of the earliest civilizations, Ancient Greece, or a non-European society."

But what might the new requirements do to the primary school history visit? I'm still thinking it over. 

Schools could tramp Hadrian’s Wall or visit Sutton Hoo or shout at the Scots from the walls of Berwick on Tweed – only joking! – or join the long queue for overcrowded Jorvik. Or - surprise! - look at interactive whiteboard displays. Surely, the further you go back, the harder it is for many modern children to imagine that era of history and the fewer settings there are where that time can be brought to life, given our climate? It’s quite a sad situation. So many primary children seem to be interested in history now and I’d like that to continue. 

Over the last decade, history has been made interesting through tv programmes, through children’s books, through good teaching - including art and drama -  and also through “historic experiences” such as visits and re-enactments that are often the gathering together of learning. I feel that primary children learn from the accessible, the hands-on and the imaginable before they understand distant or abstract facts.   That is how they can be enccouraged to ask the history questions – what and why and when and who?

As far as I can see it, this revised new history curriculum will badly affect many places and people involved in making our history matter.

It might not matter so much at the heavyweight sites such as Beamish or Ironbridge, but may seriously damage the many smaller local museums that have created good learning experiences for children.

How will such places carry on their work when they are getting less income from school visits? And at a time when they are also facing “austerity” funding from national and local organisations and bodies, often based on visitor numbers. I’m not convinced that the quantity of visits from free schools and academies, with their self-chosen curriculum, will make up the fall in funds quickly enough.

I really do hope that representations are being made by various historical groups and other interested parties in time for the 8th August response date. I also hope that there’s not any silence imposed from above on museum staff as there was and is in the library closure debate. Consider the historic rise and fall of that system . . .

Obviously, the primary school curriculum isn’t there to support the national museum & heritage industry. However, shouldn’t someone be thinking through the wider impact of all these changes and choices? After all, isn’t “and the consequences were” one of the history’s important lessons? Doesn’t that thought conclude one story and start another?

Talking further of stories, what will be the effect on books and novels for children of these changes? Will the revised history curriculum develop a pleasure in historical fact and fiction, whether at primary, secondary, teen or young adult level?  Will writers, publishers and booksellers carry on being interested in the writing of history beyond lithe royal beddings for the grownups? 
While writers of Viking stories may be comforted (well done, Bradman & Son) does Caroline Lawrence’s excellent Roman Mystery stories focus enough on the Invasion of Britain to be included. ("Pompeii? That's not England!) I do hope so!

WWI & WWII are not emphasised in this new KS2 curriculum, which may be bad luck for all those places offering Evacuee visitor experiences, as well as for any fiction set in such times. 

Maybe there will be no mention of “War Horse” or “Private Peaceful” or the other Morpurgo novels, except around the "national festivals" such as Remembrance Day?

I can't help feeling worried about the consequences of these changes. Without the popular events and educational experiences that bring in the money, museums and galleries may not be able to support their other exhibits and exhibitions - and we will all be the poorer for their decline.

As a child, I loved visiting museums and historic places. I’d wander round, as I do now, waiting for the tingle that comes with discovering an interesting object or a curious artefact or an intriguing fact that mattered to me personally. Such places made me into a writer, made history come alive for me.  I want museums and galleries to be there, to give children such moments.

But, speaking personally, with all the new changes and restrictions in the history curriculum, for how long will that be possible?

Penny Dolan
www.pennydolan.com
A BOY CALLED M.O.U.S.E (Bloomsbury)

History - an endangered subject?

By Eve Edwards

Sitting on the train from Edinburgh coming back from the International Book festival I had time to read the

Observer from cover to cover. As we flicked by the historic towns of Berwick, Durham, York, I came across an article by the MP Tristram Hunt. He noted the fall in percentage of State School children taking History at GCSE (now only 30%) and wondered if this would end up in a generation who did not know where they had come from.

His suggestion chimes with a book I have been reading over the summer - Future Minds by Richard Watson (very highly recommended). Full of fascinating observations about the digital age, he quotes in support of his argument the telling phrase that we are raising children who are 'mentally agile but culturally ignorant' (Bauerkin). For a writer of historical fiction this poses both a threat and an opportunity.

The threat is obvious. My kind of writing will fall out of fashion and the contracts dry up! It has been something of a Cinderella genre for a while. When one of my books (under another pen name) won a couple of major prizes in 2006, I remember there being much discussion in the literary magazines if it was time for fantasy to move over and let in another genre. Well, reader, I'm afraid fantasy has stayed put. Wizards and vampires continue to trump in sales all historical children's fiction. History is respectable but has not yet shaken the marketing departments to the core with their franchise possibilities.

On the other hand, the lack of historically minded young people browsing the shelves is not mirrored in the adult fiction market where most recent winners of the literary prizes, and many of the most successful books in terms of sales, have been historical: Wolf Hall, The Lacuna, The Tiger's Wife, to name but a few recent winners. Why the difference?

Perhaps history is too difficult, requiring too much context and thought? I would reply that if so, let us make sure we all read that which is difficult, and challenge youngsters to do so too, because otherwise real life is going to be a massive shock to the system. We don't want to let our minds become nothing but fantasy filled fluff. (I should note I write fantasy too - and love it! But too much of a good thing...)

Another possibility for the decline is that maybe as a teenager, many of us do not think there is much to learn from the past. The future is now and is our generation. They (meaning anyone over 25) have made all the mistakes; we are different. We are the Children of the revolution (*breaks into song....*) Ah-hem. Sorry about that. Back to my thesis. Then you get past 25 and realise that you are making the mistakes, or caught up helpless in a system that is going wrong, and suddenly the wisdom of other generations begins to look worth exploring, even if just to know you are not alone in your flawed nature. Fiction about the past takes us to meet our ancestors and see life from their view point, particularly those parts of history that have been hidden until a writer lifts the lid for us on the unfamiliar or unexplored.

(Hands on history teaching in our family!)

Of course, not all of us are or were like that imagined teenage rebel disengaged from the past. In fact, I expect everyone reading this blog to have been in the 30% who would opt for History simply because they want to find out what happened. And a third is still a relatively healthy number, Mr Hunt. The reason for decline in numbers is probably more to do with the wider question of the state of 14-16 education but that's another blog.

This brings me to the opportunity. From what I have seen of my daughter's syllabus, the GCSE is actually much more interesting than the one I did as an O level. One major paper is devoted to the history of medicine, for example, a fascinating cross-cutting theme that gets away from rich/noble white man's history that was the staple of most teaching when I was at school. I think this shows a creativity in teaching that matches the kind of books we historical novelists aspire to write. And if the classroom influence on historical knowledge is flagging, we are needed now more than ever. It may be that historical novels will be the only source a young person will read about a particular era so it is up to us to help carry on the historical knowledge to the next generation. Without a preparation through reading about the past, how can we hope to understand the future?

Albert Szent Gyorgyi said about his field, Biochemistry, 'Discovery is an accident meeting a prepared mind.' I think that is true of all discoveries, in life as well as literature. Keep on reading and writing about history, my friends, because it is the best preparation a mind can have.

Interested in writing for young adults? Then join Eve (wearing her Julia Golding hat) and poet Valerie Bloom at the Arvon writing course this September (26th to 1st October), Totleigh Barton, Devon.

Eve Edwards' Lacey Chronicles are out now in the UK and the US. Visit her website here.