How it all came about

I started telling myself stories at the age of four. I remember lying in bed in our old house in Catford on my fourth birthday and beginning what was ultimately to become the story of Yannya and Malcarious. Naturally it bore absolutely no resemblance to it at the time.

When I was six my family moved across the river to South Hornchurch and there I went to school and met Joy Chant. We may have hated each other on first sight. Certainly from the start there was an intense rivalry between us since we were the only two capable of reading out loud to the rest of the class or taking the lead in a nativity play.

Even at the age of six, although my story was a six year-old’s story, the basic elements were there. The central female (myself, of course) was surrounded by four men, who were a group, and another odd one. At that time they were from folklore, Merlin was one, Arthur another and Robin Hood and I think the others were Little John and Friar Tuck, although it may have been the Fat Controller from the Engine Books (now known as Thomas the Tank Engine). Railway engines figured very highly in my stories since at that age my ambition was to become an engine driver. I never did have much time for dolls, but I did have a train-set!

Then I discovered the Greek myths. I remember my teacher’s astonishment when I asked him how to spell Pygmalion to title a drawing. I was absorbed by the story of the woman who was brought to life. Suppose she did not like Pygmalion? However, I was not very impressed with the quarrelsome nature of the gods and heroes and I think the Lords Eldest were born then. By the time we were ten, Joy Chant and I were friends, after all, we had no one else to talk to about the things that mattered, like books.

A seminal event in the development of my fantasy was the radio serial Journey Into Space. Three of my heroes were instantly discarded in favour of the characters played by Guy Kingsley-Pointer, Alfie Bass and Andrew Faulds. (I never did like the Australian). In those days the entire family would sit round the radio, desperate to hear their next adventure, each Monday. The men I invented from the voices bore no resemblance, of course, to what they actually looked like, but the Dark Lord to this day, I am afraid, has a trace of Kingsley-Pointer’s American accent. My fantasy world now had a place to inhabit, Mars! I began to draw maps.

Chant (we always called each other by our surnames, Walland and Chant) and I both passed the scholarship and went to Romford County High School for girls. In the second or third year Chant began to write a soap opera which would have left Dallas standing. Each chapter of this juvenilia was anxiously awaited by the other girls who went to school with us on the same bus. Up to this point I had never thought of writing my stories down, but now I started, on pages stolen from the centre of school books and cheap notebooks. I discovered Jules Verne, Kipling, Rider Haggard, H.G.Wells, Arthur C. Clark, C.S. Lewis and Homer, and cheerfully stole and adapted those elements I fancied. (See Kipling’s poem on this subject) Then, in one year, I think it was the fifth form, I discovered Dante, Fritz Leiber, Gondal, Tolkien and the film The Ten Commandments. Fantasy was legitimate! Previously I had always believed it was something sinful I did instead of my homework. Other people had their own worlds! Mine went full colour wide screen and epic, cheerfully rolling ancient Egypt into Mars with hardly a seam showing. By now, Chant and I were showing each other bits we had written down and although Chart’s world contained considerably more horses and magic, and mine more science, we were both beginning to have proper form to the tales.

We left school, and after a year or so got a flat together. We mutually agreed to join our fantasy worlds. I gave up the science and my flying saucers and my heroes learned to fight with swords. Even now, in the mines under the mountains there is some science that looks like magic to the mortals.

The reason for joining our worlds was so we could try our heroes and heroines out in each other’s countries if we wanted to, it helped us establish customs and characters. Mentions of the other’s worlds are still to be found in the text. That is also why we have two moons, they came in with Mars.

Then Chant went off to do her diploma in librarianship and I toyed with teacher training college. Our lives drifted apart and likewise our fantasies. In some ways I am glad that mine was not published back in the eighties, because I had not solved some problems, which I have now managed to sort out and like Tolkien I would be having to rewrite.

I often wonder what would have happened if I had not met Chant, and what the chances were of two people with fantasy worlds growing up together. Yet we know all the Bronte children shared the same fantasy and went on to write about it. Tolkien called his fantasy the escape of the prisoner. As the oldest of seven children, whose parents had both left school at fourteen, who had gone through the privations at the end of the war and post war rationing, who only received books as birthday and Christmas presents (and then annuals and perhaps an Enid Blyton) I escaped my own prison into my own world. Some (my family) might say I have my own world because I am a control freak who likes to run everything. Writers, however, will know that once you invent characters, they take on a life of their own and the chances of controlling them are very remote. I remember inventing the Lords of the House of Abard when I was eighteen. Chant and I were sitting in my bedroom on the bed listening to the Shadows. “I’ve got this new bodyguard,” I said, “for Yannya. He’s got this sword, I think it’s a family heirloom.” And thus Kerin, the eleventh lord of Abard was born, whose ancestor Keré’us was the first. They never looked back and I have clung on desperately ever since.