About Sarah
It’s a warm summer afternoon, sometime in the late 1970s. An adolescent girl with badly cut reddish blonde hair is lying in the grass on the very edge of a West London school sports field on her own, while the rest of her class is engaged in a rowdy game of rounders. She likes being outdoors, but she doesn’t like team sports. She was born less than ten miles from here but spent half her childhood in Canada, and no-one has ever explained the rules of rounders to her. But since no-one picked her for their team anyway, she is happy when the teacher designates her an ‘outfielder’. This means she’s only obliged to make an attempt to catch a ball if it gets accidentally hit in her direction, which none will be because she’s removed herself as far away from the game as it’s possible to get.
She would far rather take a book and sit reading in the sunshine than have to pretend to ‘fit in’ . Her school reports glow in subjects like English, History, and Geography, but they all say she needs to participate more in class. People don’t give her enough time to work out exactly what she wants to say when it comes to speaking, so she finds her voice through writing instead. She is clever, but some days she can’t work out how to tie her shoelaces. She has Asperger’s and ADHD, but we don’t have words for those yet.
So she sits on the edge of the field and makes up stories in her head. She’s been watching Children of the Stones and Blake’s 7 on TV, listening to John Peel on the radio, playing Dungeons & Dragons and reading books she’s borrowed without asking from her parents’ collection. Her dad loves science fiction, her mum reads supernatural fantasy. They don’t mind what she reads, just so long as she’s reading. On the weekends when other kids go to play parks or petting zoos, her parents take them to stone circles, old churches, and museums. They tell each other jokes and make up funny stories about the places they go and the people they meet, and the thing they like best in the world is to make one another laugh.
After school she will walk home through the overgrown woodland beside the river that she is absolutely not allowed to go in on her own, where the old gunpowder works used to be, and dare herself to peek inside the derelict shot tower to see if the Ghosts are there today. She knows every track and trail through these woods; knows where the ancient cracked millstones hide entrances to The Otherworld, which trees are inhabited by Dryads, and where to find birds’ nests and wildflowers. And she knows the other kids think she’s weird and crazy, but they still gather round her in the playground to hear her stories and jokes and tall tales, which the teacher dismisses as lies that they mustn’t believe. And of course no- one really believes them – even she doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean they’re not true.
I spent many many years being this Outfielder; seeing the magic that lies beneath the Ordinary and the Everyday, and observing so much that is bizarre and hilarious in the world. I loved to write, and I tried very hard to be the kind of writer I thought I ought to be; to not tell lies and be clever and serious and do all the things that Proper Writers, academics, and the publishing industry seemed to require of me. And I didn’t have a huge amount of fun.
It took me until my 50s to rediscover the kind of story-telling that came so naturally to me when I was young. That sense of wonder and humour has found its way back into my work again, inspiring me to write about the peripheral people and places and events that although you know are only fiction, you also recognise nonetheless to be true.
