Oddballs are the best

For you the dreamers

Overlooked at school

Never won prizes

You who will own tomorrow.

If you don’t do well at school, people quickly assume that you are unremarkable, perhaps a wierdo, and that your life will never amount to much. For a large majority of us, the experience of school meant sitting in the audience and clapping, while others went up on stage to receive prizes. Author Sally Gardner was one of those chair-warmers. Today, she is the author of nine and illustrator of several more children’s books, and has won the Costa Children’s Book award (2012) and the Carnegie Medal (2013) for Maggot Moon (Hot Keys Book), which tells of a less than perfect schoolboy. Maggot Moon is dedicated to those who the system sneered at, who went on and will go on to own tomorrow.

This young adult book takes the reader hostage and catapults him/her into a dystopian world of an orphaned boy who is looked after by his grandfather. Standish Treadwell is the boy with one blue and one green eye, who could never tie his laces and is always in a mess. When his best friend Hector vanishes, he and his grandfather rebel to defeat the leather-clad villains of the Motherland, even if it means risking limb and life. This book might turn savage in parts, it might appear outrageous, but through it all you want to shake hands with the protagonist and say, “I know you… I have known you all along.”

Way of seeing

Standish is not good at spelling or reading but he can “hear words”, he can “squeeze the essence out of them”. You see, like his creator, Sally Gardner, he is an “image thinker” or, in boring adult language, dyslexic. For Gardner dyslexia is a “way of seeing” rather than a learning disability. In a Skype interview, prior to her Bookaroo 2013 appearance, she says, “We (people with dyslexia) think in many many layers, that is why I am quite good at world building.”

When Gardner looks at alphabets on the page, she doesn’t see the building blocks of words, or bits and bobs of language. Instead she conjures up personalities with quirks. She finds ‘schizophrenia’ particularly beautiful. And is completely partial to ‘the’, “as it has a lovely box-like shape to it”. She doesn’t like words which crawl across the page, never stretching out an arm or a leg. ‘Because’ really gets her goat as does ‘Sarah’ — her birth name. She could never spell it, as it sprawled across the page like an unheeding slug. She could never figure where the ‘h’ went, “It just walked all over the place. And it seemed to have boots on. And it didn’t ever belong to me,” she laments. A friend suggested the name ‘Sally’ and she adopted it at once as it breathed with life. She says, “‘S’ is a snake and is a squiggle, the ‘ll’s have two long limbs and the ‘y’ is to catch it in.”

When alphabets can have such rich lives it is not surprising that Gardner’s books and characters have even denser interior lives. Maggot Moon is never muffled by a young-adult-reader mandate. If anything, it heaves with carmine violence, meted out by teachers on students, by students on fellow students. Gardner never humiliates her readers by talking down to them. The edition for young readers includes illustrations at the bottom of the page, which show the circle of life. Not through pretty whimsies, but through a rat sniffing its way to a bottle of poison, falling dead, a fly landing on its nose, a fly laying maggots in its mouth, the rat being consumed by the maggots and a fly finally breaking free from the maggot cocoon. The adult version of the book is devoid of these same illustrations, because “adults can’t cope” with them. Gardner explains, “Children have much more open minds. They have a more philosophical outlook on life and they are much more able to run with an idea. Adults tend to make conclusions and that shortens their lives or their imaginative lives. I love dealing with people whose imagination is very healthy and active.”

Imagination, Gardner believes, saved her. She says, “Imagination showed me a world that I had invented in my head. The possibility of doing much more than I ever thought I could do. It also gave me all my stories.” Stories that sheltered her from bullies and removed her from daily travails.

Gardner learned to read at 14. She attended a school for children with behavioural problems (long shut now) even though she had a learning disability. She remembers the day when the words on the page suddenly fell into place and sentences grew into stories. “I was in this funny little hut with a tin roof. It was raining very very hard. And there was one boy on the floor screaming. The noise level was beyond anything I could cope with. I just wanted to be gone. To be out of this place. I remember picking up this book (it was Wuthering Heights) and looking at it, and starting to read it with my finger on the words and suddenly realised that everything had gone quiet. I was on the moors, it was snowing, it was very frightening. And I was no longer in the school.”

If reading parachuted her out of the confines of school, her imagination also scared her bullies witless. One day, tired with the name-calling and backstabbing of the girls in her boarding school she told them a story. Not any old story. But that of a hand creeping up the stairs slowly, quietly and then throttling the bunch of them. Their cries woke the matron and they never dared bully Gardner again. Now that she is a famous author the old girls invited her back to their school as a chief guest. To which Gardner retorted, “I have no desire to be part of your old girl network.” When they wrote back saying, “we remember you fondly”, she replied “the past is a foreign land.”

While school might not have been a particularly happy time for Gardner, she never allowed it to define her and hopes that children reading her book will realise the same. She found peace, even inspiration, in theatre. Having worked as a set designer for 15 years, she believes the stage moulded her into the writer she is today. Theatre taught her timing, rhythm, speech, dialogue and the most important trade of all — how to ambush your audience and keep them coming back for more.

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