Scottish Books

The Herald

"My debut novel, CloudWorld, is published by Faber and Faber on 2nd February. It’s an old-fashioned adventure story in which a sheltered young man – Marcus – sets out in search of his lost father. Menaced and imperilled in a variety of landscapes, he comes to a better understanding of himself and the world around him, rather like David Balfour in Kidnapped or Francis Osbaldistone in Rob Roy. The difference is that the world Marcus inhabits is an imagined one: a world divided by a permanent cloud layer. Mountain peaks rising out of the clouds have citadels built on them – walled city-states like those of Renaissance Italy, whose inhabitants travel in vessels similar to the notional flying machines sketched by Leonardo Da Vinci. Beneath the cloud layer lies a more ancient land: a permanently damp, overcast place inhabited by a Pictish race who compensate for their abbreviated height by being tirelessly brutal. The book is aimed primarily at a young adult readers – 10 years old and upwards – but, as you’ll probably have guessed, in my giddier moments I like to imagine that ‘upwards’ could denote any age from 18 to 80.

CloudWorld is my first published book, but the third one I’ve written. I grew up in Ayrshire, the son of a professional golfer. Dreamy and unprecocious, I harboured vague ambitions of being a writer, which might have remained unfocused had it not been for the turn my life took in my mid-teens. First my parents split up then my father died of cancer, my mother and I returning to nurse him. As heartless as it might sound, the emotional turmoil prompted by these events was soon eclipsed by serious financial problems. Self-employed, my father didn’t have a pension and my mother had left her job to look after him. The property market promptly crashed and we found ourselves living in a seafront flat – wind blown and sand scoured in the winter – which we couldn’t heat or maintain properly but couldn’t sell. Unable to afford to leave home, I worked split shifts as a waiter in a local hotel and commuted to University. For some time we survived on my mother’s unemployment benefit and my student grant. Feeling responsible for everything and struggling to get back into work, my mother was admitted to hospital at one point suffering from bronchial pneumonia and pernicious anaemia.

All this went on for years. Anyone who has been through a series of calamities in their life – each one seeming to engender and add momentum to the next – knows how it affects you. Stupefied, you shut down emotionally in stages, like a ship with a breached hull, sealing off compartments to avoid taking on any more water. Being stuck at home, however, I perhaps had fewer distractions than my contemporaries living at University and got down to some serious writing. From the very beginning I produced two types of fiction: realistic, autobiographical short stories and longer, more purely imaginative stuff. Gradually I began to realise that I was writing partly to make sense of current circumstances and partly to escape from them.

At last things improved. One of my stories was accepted by the London Magazine. By a complete fluke I got funding to do a postgraduate degree in Scottish literature. I left home at last and started to have some fun – clumsy and incautious fun to start with, but fun none the less. My mother completed a PGCE and found a job as a Special Needs teacher. A few more of my stories were published or broadcast. Two fantasy novels – The Enchanted Ocean and Mightier Than The Sword – accumulated nothing but rejections in the mid- to late-90s, but they were at least encouraging rejections. I worked in a bookstore and did some freelance reviewing. Then, having failed for five years to find that chimerical ‘arts related’ job in Scotland, I took an administrative post at Bath University. It was bone dry, but it gave me the chance to work four days a week and write more.

It was in Bath that I finally started CloudWorld, which had existed in various rough forms for more than a decade. When it was half finished, I got it read at Faber, thanks to a friend from bookselling now worked there. Buoyed by Faber’s interest, I returned to Glasgow, stayed in another friend’s spare room, eked out a Scottish Arts Council bursary, and finished it. I received a modest advance and lived on that while I completed rewrites.

None of the foregoing is an appeal for sympathy: so tortuous a road to publication isn’t as unusual as you might think. No one gets any more out of life than they put in, and many people get far less. But when I leafed through a proof copy of CloudWorld on the day it arrived and came upon the phrase ‘first time author’ – with all its associations of dewy freshness – I couldn’t help but smile, just a bit."

 

Roald Dahl

Nearly 30 years ago I had dinner with Roald Dahl in the West Indies. It sounds like an exotic event, but it wasn’t exactly an epic meeting of the intellects. For one thing, he was 6 foot 6 inches tall and the author of numerous short stories and children’s books, as well as a James Bond movie. I was 4 foot tall and the author of nothing other than various mishaps, which included falling out of coconut trees and getting bitten by a pariah dog that I’d tried to adopt. He was in Tobago with his wife, the actress Patricia Neal, to try out the Mount Irvine Bay Hotel’s golf course. The course had been landscaped from a former coconut plantation, while the hotel itself was a converted sugar-mill. I was there because my father was the winter golf pro at the hotel.

Having received a golf lesson from my father, Dahl invited him and my mother to dinner. They declined at first, being unable to find a babysitter for me, but he waved this aside and invited me along too. That was how I found myself installed on a chair built up with cushions, gazing across the table at Mr and Mrs Dahl. We dined on the garden terrace of the Sugar Mill restaurant. Blood orange bougainvillaea and ginger lilies luxuriated in the warm air. At dusk, the croak of tree frogs was punctuated by the occasional distant thud of a falling coconut. Dahl looked gauntly sardonic, while his wife was handsome rather than pretty, her slightly askew smile the only sign of the stroke she had endured some years previously.

Dahl’s method of dealing with a child was to both intimidate and flatter you by speaking to you as if you were an adult, in a clipped, inquisitorial tone. Getting straight to the point, he enquired about my recent misadventures and seemed genuinely delighted to hear that I had, only the other week, electrocuted myself by plunging a rusted knitting needle into a faulty light socket. At no point during the meal did I cease to feel overawed by him, but nor did I feel patronised. Patricia Neal was much more conventionally indulgent and did most of the talking for both of them. She described in particular how he had ‘bullied’ her back to health. My mother recalls that Dahl was rather self-consciously dismissive of his role in her recovery. Much of the rest of the conversation went over my head, but I do remember him describing how he wrote in a potting shed at the bottom of the garden – a disclosure which made him seem an even more strange and shamanic figure than he already did.

My father’s job at Mount Irvine Bay ended not long after. During my provincial Scottish upbringing I read Dahl’s children’s books voraciously. As an adolescent, I graduated to his adult short stories, which, with their intimations of the kinky and macabre, allied to a lingering schoolboy-ish gusto, were like a bridge thrown across towards more mature reading matter. And there was Tales of the Unexpected on television, its credit sequence featuring a Bond-style silhouetted dancer, swaying to a strange hurdy-gurdy theme tune.

My parents separated when I was in my mid-teens and my father died soon after. We put the family home on sale and for ten years my mother and I couldn’t afford to travel outside Scotland. But it was a consolation, in the midst of long winters, to recall a more exotic life – of which my brief encounter with Dahl had been part.

I greeted the news of his death, in 1990, with resigned sadness. A few years later I started writing seriously myself. From the beginning I produced both adult short stories and longer, more imaginative fiction aimed at younger readers. The tone of my output may have been very different from Dahl’s, but the division of labour was the same. Eventually some of the stories appeared in literary magazines and were broadcast on the radio. This year my debut children’s novel, CloudWorld, was published by Faber and Faber. It’s the first volume of a two-part imaginative adventure story, set on a planet where a pair of civilisations – one reminiscent of Classical Rome, the other Pictish – are divided by a permanent cloud layer. Paying a tremulous visit to WH Smith’s to see it on sale for the first time, I was surprised then dazedly pleased to note that, due to the spelling of my surname, CloudWorld was shelved right beside Dahl’s many more famous titles. This sight offered an immediate balm of continuity. Whatever else had been lost, I was still the same person who had been indulged by that glamorous couple in Tobago so many years ago. Now all I have to do is find a way to make a pilgrimage back.

May 2006