The Big City

My partner Carol is a governor at a local primary school. As part of the school’s literacy programme she’s been trying to get local authors to come and talk to the children to get them fired-up about writing and story-telling. So she started putting out feelers and phoning local people who might be interested.

The first writer Carol spoke to was a successful children’s author who writes books as well as stories for the BBC channel CBeebies. She was very positive and full of ideas about what she could do with the kids to get them excited about writing stories. She made a lot of suggestions and arranged a date.

The second person Carol spoke to was a publisher whose son works in the local bookshop. They were really eager to send someone to talk to the kids about how a book gets printed and made. They’re about to publish a book about dinosaurs and they said they could bring in the giant models they’ve had made to promote the book. They asked whether it would be OK for them to have a separate stand with the new book available to parents to look at but they quite understood it if that wasn’t acceptable.

The third person Carol called was a local black writer. He asked how much the fee was. He was angry that ethnic writers were expected to go into local schools for free. He couldn’t see that it might benefit him to talk about his books, they should already have his books in the school. He wasn’t interested and wished she hadn’t phoned him.

The best reader in my daughter’s class is black, in fact the school generally doesn’t seem to have the problems that many schools in the UK have with failing black kids, particularly boys. Even so, black children don’t get to see as many positive role models as their white colleagues. A clever, glamorous black author would be a great thing for them to meet. Apart from anything else, as a writer I would have imagined that the more children get interested in books the more books you’ll sell, it’s not rocket science.