Kit's Wilderness (18 page)

G
randpa died in mid-January. The thaw was starting. Pools of water on the wilderness, snow turning to slush in the lanes, snowdrops peeking through in the gardens and beneath the hawthorn hedges. I was in school. Dobbs was on about the movements of the earth again. He said that if we could move forward a million years, everything we saw before us would have changed: no Stoneygate, no flowing river, no wilderness, no us.

“The earth endlessly reforms itself,” he said. “The continents shift, the surface cracks, fire bursts out from below. The hills are simply blown away. The sea swells and shrinks. The world tilts on its axis and brings us fiery heat or icy cold. Deserts or the ice cap creep across us. All we see and all we know is engulfed, swallowed up, regurgitated.”

He smiled.

“We are puny little things,” he said. “The beast called Time is our great predator, and there is no escape from it.” He smiled again. “However. That is not to say there is no need to do our homework.”

And he dished out sets of worksheets.

It was a little fifth-grader who came to the door.

“Please, sir,” she said shyly. “Christopher Watson is to go to the office, please.”

Mum was waiting there, and she didn’t need to say a word.

He was buried beside Grandma in St. Thomas’ churchyard. The place where the grave lies can be seen in my grandparents’ wedding photograph. The monument with my name on it is nearby. Many people came to his funeral: his remaining pit mates, the descendants of the old families. Allie stood beside me in red and green. John Askew stood further back with his mother and father. There were many tears, but afterward the house rang with laughter as the reminiscences and stories started.

That night I lay in the dark and listened to the silence through the wall.

“Good night, Grandpa,” I whispered.

I felt his hand in mine.

“Good night, son. Good night.”

J
ohn Askew comes to school again now. They allow him two afternoons a week, when there are art lessons. They’ve said he can be full-time again, if he can keep the lout in himself under control. He has done the drawings for Lak’s story, and they hang in the corridor with my words. They are beautifully detailed things: the family in the cave, the bear, the world of ice, Lak with the baby in the bearskin, Lak’s mother in her animal skins with her arms outstretched to welcome him. Burning Bush says how right I was to choose him as the artist.

“They’re wonderful,” she says. “It’s as if he really sees the things he draws. They match your words so beautifully. They’re like the heart and soul of the same story.”

“Yes,” I answer. “Like they’re joined in blood.”

“Yes,” she says.

Askew’s father has stopped drinking. We no longer see him reeling in the lane. He is stooped and shrunken but Askew’s been told that if he looks after himself he’ll become a new man. The house in the potholed cul-de-sac is orderly. The curtains are open at the window, the garden is clean. The baby toddles, holding her mother’s hand. She sits giggling on a blanket with her brother. Beyond her are the pit-riddled hills, reaching up toward the distant moors. Up there, they have cleaned out our drift mine. New pit props keep it safe. The tunnel floors are cleared of rubble. There are electric lights. There is a metal gate at the entrance. There are maps pinned there, and explanations of our history. Dobbs has begun to take classes up there. They put on helmets and giggle and bite their lips in fright. An old pitman opens the gate, leads them in, explains the wonders and dangers of the past. Sometimes he switches off the lights and the mine is filled with screaming.

I have brought Grandpa’s souvenirs into my room. I sit at my desk and hold them and feel the stories that wait inside them to be told. Often my friends come, and we walk out together into the wilderness, Allie, Askew and me. The wild dog Jax paces behind. Sometimes we hear children whispering that we are the ones who were thought to be dead. The wilderness around us is filled with children playing, with neighbors walking. When we narrow our eyes and squint we see that it is filled with those who have walked and played before. On the brightest days, when the sun pours down and dances on the river and the air begins to tremble, I see Grandpa and Grandma before me. I follow them. I walk beside the river with my friends. I know that as long as there are others to see us, we will walk here together forever.

A Michael L. Printz Award Winner

KIT’S WILDERNESS

David Almond

A Readers Guide

“A thrilling and spine-tingling ride . . . awe-inspiring.”

—
Publishers Weekly
, Starred

Reading Group
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

The questions that follow are intended to guide readers as they begin to analyze the larger emotional, sociological, and literary elements of this extraordinary novel.

1. When Kit and his friends play the game they call Death, they claim they can see the ghosts of children killed in the mine. Are the ghosts that Kit and his friends see real?

2. What do you think makes John Askew, Kit, and Kit’s grandfather able to see ghosts?

3. David Almond calls this book
Kit’s Wilderness
. Why? What would you say is Kit’s “wilderness”?

4. While studying the Ice Age in school, Kit and his classmates are asked to write a story about a young caveman called Lak. How is Kit’s own life similar to the story he writes about Lak? How is it different?

5. What is “the pit”? What do you think it represents?

6. The author sets the story in winter. How do the physical landscape and season reflect the characters’ emotional landscapes and states of mind?

7. Despite his fading memory, Kit’s grandfather is always able to recognize Allie. Why? What might she represent for him? What might she represent in the story?

8. When Kit’s grandfather gives him treasures from the mine—fossils from the ancient past—Kit slips the ammonite into his pocket and tells himself, “I’d keep it with me always now. A treasure from my grandfather. A gift from the deep, dark past.” What other “gifts” does his grandfather bestow upon Kit?

9. John Askew is perceived as a no-good troublemaker by the townspeople. Is he really as bad as everyone thinks he is? In what ways is he darker? In what ways is he lighter?

10. What is the role of storytelling in
Kit’s Wilderness
? How is storytelling used throughout the novel?

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

I grew up in a big family in a small steep town overlooking the River Tyne. It was a place of ancient coal mines, dark terraced streets, strange shops, new estates, and wild heather hills. Our lives were filled with mysterious and unexpected events, and the place and its people have given me many of my stories. I always wanted to be a writer, though I told very few people until I was “grown up.” I’ve published lots of fiction for adults, and I’ve won a number of prizes. I’ve been a postman, a brush salesman, an editor, and a teacher. I’ve lived by the North Sea, in inner Manchester, and in a Suffolk farmhouse, and I wrote my first stories in a remote and dilapidated Norfolk mansion.

Writing can be difficult, but sometimes it really does feel like a kind of magic. I think that stories are living things—among the most important things in the world.

—David Almond

Photo © Alex Telfer Photography

A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID ALMOND

Q. Have you always enjoyed writing? When did you know you wanted to become a writer?

A. Yes, I’ve always loved writing. As a boy I wrote stories and sometimes stitched them into little books. When I was a baby, my mother used to take me to my uncle’s printing works, and she told me that I used to laugh and point at the printed pages streaming off the rollers—so maybe when I was just a few months old I fell in love with print. I loved our little local library, and I dreamed of seeing my books on the shelves there one day. Like most English boys, I also dreamed of being a soccer player.

Q. What do you most enjoy about writing books?

A. Just about everything. Of course it’s wonderful to be able to work with the imagination, to explore language and narrative, to turn a few notions and images into a full-length story, but it’s also lovely just to be able to play with paper, pens, notebooks, paper clips, computers, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s wonderful to be able to make my living now from doing something that’s so engrossing.

Q. You probably enjoyed reading as a child. Tell us about that. What were your favorite books as a teen? What do you enjoy reading now?

A. I was a great library-goer, especially in my teens. I wasn’t particularly happy at school by then, and found most of my inspiration from the library. I loved myths and legends—especially the King Arthur stories as retold by Roger Lancelyn Green (a wonderful book that’s still in print). I enjoyed John Wyndham’s science fiction. T. Lobsang Rampa (a supposed Tibetan monk) wrote a series of books (beginning with
The Third Eye
) about his childhood in Tibet and I thought they were marvelous. Hemingway was a major discovery for me in my mid-teen years.

Q. You were a teacher for a number of years. Can you tell us about your teaching experience?

A. I became a teacher because I thought it must be the ideal job for a writer—i.e., long vacations, short days. Of course, once I began teaching I was simply so exhausted that I hardly wrote a word for three years or so. I also became fascinated by the job. I’ve taught all ages—primary, secondary, adult. For much of my career, I taught children (eleven–sixteen) with moderate learning difficulties. I wrote in the evenings, at weekends, during vacations. In 1990 I went part-time (three days per week), which was perfect: time to write and some salary to pay the mortgage. I left teaching and became a full-time writer in 1999, but I’m still involved in education—visiting schools, speaking at teachers’ conferences, working on educational panels. I suppose that my interest in education is apparent in my books.

Q. Is there a difference between the reactions of American readers and British readers to your books?

A. There seems to be very little difference, which is very heartening.

Q. Your work has been described as being infused with magic realism. How would you define that term? What does magic realism bring to your novels?

A. I’m often referred to as a magic realist, though like most writers I’m not too keen on being put into any particular category. I know I have been influenced by magic realists like Marquez, but I’m also influenced by apparently “nonmagical” writers like Raymond Carver. I don’t use magic realism in a deliberate manner. I suppose the style of my books naturally embodies the ways in which I think and the ways in which I view the world. I do think that the world itself is pretty magical, and that if there is a miraculous world, it’s this one. It could be that magic realism is characteristic of writing from Catholic cultures, so maybe my Catholic upbringing has had an effect on my style.

Q. The Printz Award is named for Michael L. Printz, the distinguished young adult librarian. In the first two years of the presentation of this award, how does it feel to have won this prestigious honor back-to-back, first with
Skellig
as an Honor Book and then with
Kit’s Wilderness
as the Medal winner?

A. Awards matter. They bring particular books and genres into public view and they stimulate reading and debate. It’s great that there is this new award for writing for young adults—a field in which so many fine books are being written.

It’s marvelous for me, of course. It was a great thrill to get a phone call from across the Atlantic telling me that I’d won the honor with
Skellig
, then just a year later to get another call telling me I’d won the medal for
Kit
! And it’s a particular honor because I’m not even American. I do think that the award isn’t just for me as I am now, but it’s for the boy I was in my local library, and for the people I grew up with who gave me my language and my stories.

Q. Kit lives in Stoneygate, an old coal-mining town, and your descriptions of the area are very vivid. Is that the kind of area you grew up in?

A. I grew up in Felling-on-Tyne, a town that has a rich coal-mining past. By the time I was a boy, all the pits had closed down. As in the book, though, their evidence is everywhere. The local churchyard contains a monument to the Felling pit disaster of 1812, in which ninety-seven boys and men died. The monument simply lists their names and ages.

The landscape of the book is very like the old coal-mining areas of County Durham and Northumberland. In less than a generation, these areas have utterly changed: pit shafts blocked up, pit wheels hauled down, pit heaps landscaped. And of course men no longer go deep into the dangerous darkness to dig out coal. But it will be many generations before the physical and psychic remnants disappear.

Q. The themes of death and salvation, and how young people are affected by and deal with life, are threads that run through your works. These are key in
Kit’s Wilderness
. Can you talk a little about them in the novel? And how your own life might have influenced your writing?

A. I come from a large family where children and adults of all ages were integrated. We even talked about those who had died as if they were still with us, or still thought of us and prayed for us. So it was always apparent that we’re linked closely with the people who have lived before and with the people who will come after us. I was also a Catholic, and so the themes of imminent death and the need for salvation were not simply problems to be worked out intellectually, but had a dreadful and fascinating emotional/physical/spiritual weight. So this personal background obviously has a bearing on my work.

But also, writing for children just seems to involve dealing with timeless human dilemmas and finding stories or myths that help us to explore and to come to terms with them. In each of my books, children are exposed to terrible dangers, but they work together, often in darkness, to conquer their fears and to rescue each other and to bring each other back into the light.

Q. Kit’s grandfather’s stories have such an impact on him. Was family storytelling part of your growing up? Do you have a favorite story or a special relative you can tell us about?

A. There was always lots of gossiping. We had family parties with lots of songs and jokes and tales. I remember as a boy being both bored and fascinated by the chatter. My uncle Amos had a little printing works where he printed the local newspaper, and he wrote poems and an unpublished book.

We weren’t a literary family, but there were, I realize now, powerful poetic and storytelling rhythms in the way that people spoke. I had aunts (especially the identical twins, Jan and Mona) who could talk and tell tales and jokes for hours at a time, and who had a gift for entertaining and for making people laugh. My grandfather (my mother’s father, who was a bookmaker, i.e., he took bets on horse racing) was quite the opposite: a quiet and rather stern man. I spent a lot of time with him in his garden and greenhouse, and I loved being with him. I think his silence allowed me the time and space to think and wonder and listen to the world.

Q. The ammonite fossil that Kit’s grandfather gives him holds special meaning. Do you have any special treasures from your childhood? Have you ever found a fossil and wondered about its origin?

A. As for most of us, my best treasures are the family photographs. I always carry a little prayer card that belonged to my mother. I once found a fossilized pigeon in a chimney I had to clear out: black as coal and hard as stone. It was beneath a heap of soot and beneath a number of other dead birds.

Q. How would you describe your writing of
Kit’s Wilderness
? Was the book an easy one to write, as
Skellig
was, or a difficult one?

A.
Skellig
came with great fluency right from the start, and at times it really seemed to write itself. This is an experience that will happen once in my life!
Kit’s Wilderness
was much more difficult. The sources of the story were very varied and I wanted to write a book with a broader perspective. So it was always going to be a longer and more complex undertaking.

I wrote the first third of the book several times. At first it was called
Quiet Michael
and
The Wilderness
, because it had a major (I thought!) character called Quiet Michael. The book really began to take on its own life and momentum when Burning Bush gave the class the beginning of Lak’s story. Each time I came to a new section of this story, it really was as if Kit was writing it, and I just had to transcribe his words. The book moved quickly through the central section. As I wrote the sections about Kit’s journey to the mine and his night underground with Askew, I had a real sense of peril and was extremely scared. I didn’t know if Kit would ever come out again. I wrote the final “Spring” section with a feeling of great relief. After finishing the book, I was exhausted.