One child, somewhere, hopefully

It is coming up to Easter. Where I am, roads, train stations and airports are getting busier as people leave to who knows where. I am aware that is not a significant time for everyone, and that is fine. But for those for whom it is, I hope it is a good break. And for those for whom it is not, I simply say this: whatever you believe in, and wherever you are in the world, enjoy your time. Get outside if you can. Curl up with someone or something you love and, if the mood takes you, curl up with a good book too. With everything going on in the world now, the things that connect us matter more than the things that divide us. Talking, understanding, and a little kindness go a long way.

Now. On to books.

There is a copy of The BFG on my shelf that has been read many times. Enough times that I stopped counting. Not for years, though, until now. I had forgotten how good it is. Not good in the way adults describe children's books when they are being polite, but genuinely, completely good. Unbelievably good. Funny and strange and sad in places. Roald Dahl understood something that very few writers for children ever fully grasp: that children are not waiting to be taught. They are waiting to feel something.

I read almost nothing but Dahl growing up. Danny the Champion of the World, The Witches, James and the Giant Peach. I read them until the spines cracked and the pages went soft at the corners. Not because they were good for me. Because I could not stop.

Coming back to The BFG now, as a parent and as someone who makes his own small books, I find myself thinking about what that meant. That somewhere in the 1980s, a man sat in a little hut in his garden and made something up, and that something ended up in the hands of a small boy in Scotland who needed it without knowing he needed it. I am looking forward to the day I can give my copy to my own children. I am not entirely sure how they will share it. That, I have decided, is a problem for another day…

That is the thing I keep coming back to when people ask me why I write children's books. People assume it's for the money. But the honest answer is that it costs more to make them than they make back. Much more. The slightly longer answer is that does not matter. What matters is the possibility that somewhere, at some point, a child picks up The Brown Dog of the Green Glen or The White Pet (out now in paperback) or one of the others, and something in it lands. A laugh. A moment of recognition. A feeling that the world is a little bigger and stranger and more worth exploring than it was before they opened the first page.

I am not Roald Dahl. I’ll never get close. And I’m fine with that. He was something else. But I grew up knowing the feeling of finding a book that felt like it had been written just for me. Looking back, I now know I grew up into someone who wanted, more than almost anything else, to try to do that for other children too.

If it is one child, that is enough. That has always been enough.