Jacqueline Wilson clearly remembers the day in 1962 when she first heard the F-word: “I was 17 and going up to Dundee for my first job as a very junior journalist. I arrived at the railway station and was astonished by the impenetrability of the Dundee accent. The only thing which was unmistakeable was this extraordinary word which I’d never heard spoken aloud.”
The youth of today, observes the newly appointed Children’s Laureate, are less easily shocked: “It would be a rare child now who hadn’t heard a few effs and blinds and God-knows-what just walking down the street.” The remark is made without censure. Wilson, best-selling children’s author, whose book Midnight — just one of her 80 titles — has now been adapted for the stage, at the Peacock Theatre in London, believes in calling a spade a spade.
It’s 13 years since Tracy Beaker, the lippy eponymous heroine of her “breakthrough” book first burst on to the pre-teen consciousness. As an only daughter, and the mother of an only daughter, girls are Wilson’s natural constituency. Since then, some 20 million copies of Wilson’s books have been passed from hand to hand like contraband among 8 to 14-year-old girls desperate for their latest fix of “real life”.
Death, divorce, homelessness, abuse — it’s a long way from Narnia, but it is this willingness to engage with (rather than simply to deplore) contemporary culture that arguably makes Wilson the most influential voice in children’s fiction.
“There is so much innuendo on television and elsewhere that swearing is just part of every child’s life. It must be difficult to be a child now because you have got to deal not only with all the children’s stuff, but adult stuff as well.” It’s an argument rehearsed at school gates the length and breadth of the country. Ditto Wilson’s concern for broken families/absent fathers/pre-schoolers dressed like tiny pole dancers.
Adults, however, are by no means the enemy in Wilson’s universe. She writes as feelingly for parents as she does for children but is repeatedly taken aback when readers assume that her stories are autobiographical: “There’s one story, The Illustrated Mum, in which Marigold, the suicidally depressed mother, goes out drinking and has unsuitable boyfriends and so on. A lot of children have asked if Marigold was based on me. I may not have been the most exemplary of people,” Wilson laughs, “but I wasn’t that bad. I had my daughter when I was quite young (21) so I was good at playing imaginary games and reading and that kind of thing but I wasn’t always brilliant at getting the right nutritious meal on the table at the right time. My daughter Emma (a lecturer in French and film at Cambridge) is the love of my life, but I will never truly know what she thought of me as a mum. She’s so good to me but you can never really know what they’re thinking.”
Wilson knows about the pain of divorce first-hand. At 59, she has been living alone since her husband walked out on her eight years ago. But she still has a wise-fairy twinkle in her eye. The trademark spiky coiffeur and heavy metal rings that look like they were fashioned by goblins complete the elfin look, while her faintly breathless manner is well attuned to young fans. All her books are written in the first person, a device that further invites complicity with her readers: “If I’m writing about a ten-year-old who is so miserable at home that she decides to run away, then, as an adult, I have to make it subtly plain that this is not a good idea, but because I’m speaking through the child it doesn’t, I hope, sound too doctrinaire. If I were to write in the third person, then the adult view would always be leaking in.”
In Wilson’s fiction, parents are often fallible, sometimes hopeless, but almost always loved: “Children are so ultra-forgiving of parents or parent figures who let them down,” says Wilson, “and sometimes, adults reading my books are made to feel uncomfortable by that. But I like to feel that in every book there will be some rock-solid adult the child can trust.”
Often, security and good sense come in the shape of a grandmother. Wilson was particularly close to her maternal grandmother and “gives great gran” in her stories — feisty, capable women who often as not go line dancing (a personal passion of Wilson’s) and have interesting boyfriends: “It’s so easy to think of ‘Gran’ as a little old lady sitting doing knitting, like the grans of my youth. But, of course, I’m a gran now, and it ’s not all like that. It’s nice to show that even grandmas want a bit of fun.”
“If ever I’m going through a bad situation, I don’t want to read a self-help book. What I want is to find a novel where someone is going through something similar. It gives you a sense of comfort and that you are not alone.” But she says for femmes d’un certain age, fictional role models are hard to find: “I must admit there are far fewer novels about women in their 50s. It’s kind of sad. I read widely and love reading books about young characters. But sometimes, when you’ve got some angst-ridden twentysomething protagonist, you do think, ‘Get a grip, girl, this is the best it gets’.”
Certainly there was no obvious blueprint to follow eight years ago when Wilson’s husband, a retired policeman, walked out after 32 years of marriage (she now lives, with 15,000 books, in Kingston upon Thames). Failed by fiction for the first time in her life, Wilson “had a go” at counselling: “We went to Relate, at my husband’s instigation, and we saw this wonderful woman, who I really did like — and I know they do fantastic work — but it didn ’t work for me. I don’t want to make myself sound too pathetic, but I’m the kind of person who knows how to get people to feel very sympathetic to me. And that is not always helpful. I would have the most enormous respect for someone who could see straight through me.”
Nor did traditional psychotherapy appeal to Wilson: “What I feel about the type of therapy that suggests you look backwards is that, unless you are tremendously blocked by some really inhibiting thing, it’s a waste of time. Whatever happened to you in childhood, you’re an adult now. Get over it or learn to live with it.”
Relief did come, however, through the traditional therapy of sobbing on friends’ shoulders (“for about a week”) and the less traditional method of aromatherapy: “One of the things I missed most when my marriage ended was being touched by another human being. So I thought, “What can I do?”. Massage seemed too hands-on and heavy. So I went, rather nervously, to an aromatherapy session and it was lovely. Whether it’s anything to do with the scented oils or not I don’t know, but it felt wonderful. Because apart from when you are a baby or when you’re having sex you never really have anyone paying that kind of attention to your body, certainly not for a whole hour.”
Something did the trick because Wilson now looks back on this troubled time without rancour. Like her child characters, she is big on forgiveness. And if she doesn’t quite believe in the happy ever after, the happy mostly after will do: “I don’t want any child to close a book and feel terminally depressed,” she says. “On the other hand, particularly when you are dealing with issues like parental divorce, it is unfair to raise expectations that probably can ’t be fulfilled in real life. But there is always, I hope, a sense of resolution. It may not be the traditional happy ending but it will be a reasonable ending. Sometimes that is enough.”
She is delighted if her books are a manual to children in stressful situations — from the “my best friend doesn’t like me any more” end of the spectrum to real, call-in-the-social-worker trauma, but it was never, she stresses, her intention: “Since I was tiny, I made up imaginary people in my head, and as soon as I could write I wrote them down. So the books express me and what I wanted to say. But if it does occasionally chime with children’s needs, that’s a huge bonus. I don’t set out to write in a didactic way, but because my books tend to be issue-led, people sometimes think I sit down and think, ‘Right, let’s write a book about how to help a child through divorce’, whereas it starts with the character. I simply try to see things from the child character’s point of view.”
The stage adaptation of Midnight, by Jacqueline Wilson, is at the Peacock Theatre, London, August 10 to 27. For tickets: 0870 7370337
