Inspiring Young Readers

posted on 16 Nov 2018

Where Shall We Run To: A memoir by Alan Garner

Alan Garner’s memoir of his childhood before secondary school is a remarkable piece of writing. One of Garner’s enduring strengths has been his ability to write with  an ease of accessibility – a readability if you prefer that term - that is disarmingly deceptive. Where Shall We Run To? takes that ability to draw the reader into his world to another level.

Garner is now 84 years old and you could be forgiven for thinking that he’s going to serve up a rheumy-eyed piece of nostalgia – an elderly titan of the writing world looks back and fondly remembers. I’m sure you know the kind of stuff I mean. But not at all. What he’s done is far more daring and difficult than that. Rather than looking back through the eyes of the adult Garner, he attempts (pretty successfully I think) to channel his story through the eyes and sensibility of the young boy he was.

Garner is on record as saying that although he’s usually meticulous with research, on this occasion he did none. The material was all there but he had to find the right way for it to be conveyed to the reader. There were, it seems, more drafts for this seemingly simple and comparatively brief book than for any other he’s written before but if he had to sweat this one out, it was entirely worth the effort.

So what we get is Garner immersing himself in his childhood, moving around in time as you do when you think back and managing not to impose an adult editorial on events. Garner was a sickly child and had more than one life-threatening illness and stay in hospital but, as a child would, he reports these as in some way unremarkable or as normal interruptions in his otherwise more interesting life. Where an adult writer might linger over the significance and the threat to his life, Garner doesn’t – his illnesses, including diphtheria and meningitis, are given a cursory mention and then it’s on to something else. In this way the reader is drawn into the narrative voice of the child and accepts the rambunctious style and the lack of explanation.

But what is clear throughout is that Garner is a very bright, curious, imaginative child. He figures out reading pretty much for himself, he gets interested in stamp collecting for the exoticism of the names of the countries and he does well in school – eventually sitting the Manchester Grammar school entrance exams. As a child during wartime he’s fascinated by the arrive of American soldiers in his small town, but most of all it is nature that really grabs his imagination and especially the landscape of Alderley Edge which will become a place of mystery and magic in the adult Garner’s later writing.

Garner is close to his mother and although the memories of his father seem sketchier it is an incident that involves his father and his uncle that has what we can see will be a lasting impact on Garner’s young mind. One day his father suggests a walk up onto The Edge to find a place called The Devil’s Gravestone which, the myth has it, will conjure-up the Devil if you run around it three times. Unknown to the young Alan his father and uncle have arranged a practical joke for the boy because they know he won’t be able to resist performing the ritual. But to his horror:

“a screech came out of the ground beneath my feet, and screams and groans and cackling and moaning, and pebbles flirted from under the stone, and out of the trench, and sand and bits of twig, and there was a stamping sound in the cave and more screeches”. 

Great hilarity is created at Alan’s expense but it is also clearly the lighting of an imaginative fuse that will have its culmination in the adult author.

I love this book and I think it would be a mistake to think of it as in some way a summative reminiscence. It is, in my opinion a vital companion piece for the later great novels and provides a backdrop to the creative mind of someone who can claim to be one of Britain’s foremost writers of fantasy that is rooted in the country’s traditional tales and landscapes.

 

Terry Potter

November 2018