I need a 'I Survived World Book Day' badge March 2013 Teaching around 150 x 12 year olds between myself and writer Beverley Birch at the very well run Catholic School in Harlesden. Trying to get kids to come up with stories in the time allotted is hard. Not because the kids can't do it, clearly some have great imagination, but the sudden 'freedom' to write in the school curriculum is rather like a bunny frozen in the headlights moment for some. You have permission to imagine for one double period and that's it kids. Shows over. But one thing did occur to me, history and the concept of 'period' is a tad lost on 12 year olds. One can make it fun and I do try to get them to step in the poo of the past, as it were, but trying to take thirty kids at once back in time and smell the air and imagine the past is quite a challenge. Question: It's the great fire of London (1666). You have five minutes before the fire will arrive and burn everything. What will you save? Answer: Blank looks pretty universal. Finally... My phone. The TV. Writer sighs. Remedy? I think kids need a much more solid immersion in the past to help appreciate the present and that means discussing uncomfortable things too. Attitudes, laws, race, religion. OK you say, hey they're only 12 or 13. But to be honest I think history (along with a study of the local area in depth) could be a much bigger part of the curriculum (and that doesn't mean Royal Family and learning dates by rote). Knowing how commerce and need drove the economy and how immigration or starvation, or war, changes society should be a big part of the knowledge bank, rather than the afterthought it is now. I was lucky I grew up in a time when history was taught well and they tried to relate it to our own lives and surroundings. A visit to the nearby Castle to discuss why it was built this way, how it withstood sieges, how they ate, preserved food, lived in the main without privacy and entertained themselves brought it all to life. In the end the only way kids are going to know about history is if they read historical fiction - and yet publishers keep saying there is no demand. Kids want to know, they really do, but are just not being taken there at school often enough.

Writing stories has always been my thing. From early beginnings as a kid concocting adventures in Spain as I listened to my big sisters classical music - Manuel de Falla and Rodrigo mostly. I had never been to Spain so they must have been quite strange stories. All I remember was dusty streets and strange wistful girls dressed in black, longing to be somewhere else. On an exchange trip from Canada to an English school I recall we were taken all the way to France to visit to a kipper factory. How weird was that! We also went to Versailles Palace of course, but it was the damn kipper factory that stuck in my mind.

My family moved around a lot and we went to Africa for awhile and then back to Canada. Each time it meant saying goodbye to friends and then having to make new ones. Maybe that's how one becomes a writer - the need to invent new friends who'll come with you wherever you go. That and the dog, of course. There's Koko, still waiting for the stick to move. A boy should have a dog. Helps you learn to care about someone else and as long as you keep throwing that stick they'll love you forever. I guess that's why there's often a dog in my stories. After careers that involved travel and photography, (add a smattering of gold prospecting in B. C.) teaching at University, (Masters Programmes at Falmouth & Portsmouth), plus writing radio drama in Africa, I finally committed to writing for kids.

I enjoy meeting people and collecting their stories.  I'm a great believer in belonging to the city I happen to be living in, that way you get to meet the people who shape it.  But my heart belongs to Vancouver, no matter where I am at any present time. It is a city that is changing so fast the past is disappearing almost before it even happens. Living in Vancouver you belong to the 21st Century – whether you like it or not.  The shift of historical gravity has already moved to the Pacific rim because of the growth of China and Vancouver is one of the lucky cities that reflects that huge change in the buildings and people that flock to live there.  This is one of the places where the future is visible and I love to set my adventures there. 

The Repossession is set in the mountain town of Spurlake. Spurlake must have been pretty exciting place to live in around 1890. A couple of years before that no one lived there at all.  It was a barren, lonely mountainside facing onto a lake.  Once gold was found a whole city grew in just months.  People came from all over the world to get rich or more often die poor.  B.C. has a number of towns like this  - overnight cities that flourished until the gold ran out and then slowly began to die as people drifted away.  Read Chapter One here

I'm fascinated not only by the future but these ghost towns of the past.  Modern China is our equivalent of the gold rush. Everyone is going in there to make a fortune and everything will be transformed. Little of their past will remain.

Science fascinates me too. ‘If we look back to the turn of the last century everything really exciting happened right near the beginning.  Electricity, the petrol engine, (the electric and diesel engines too), the record player, radio, x-rays, even antibiotics and eventually one important pill – the aspirin, followed by the jet engine.  Some things happened really quickly to change the way people lived – others such as the jet or radar or atomic fission developed with the demands of war.  Right now we live in a time when everything one could be sure off twenty years ago is no longer certain.  Science is changing the way we eat; live (think social media); or even die (in the west we all live fifty percent longer than one hundred years ago. 1 in 6 of us will live to be a hundred). 

The nature of work is changing, no longer can someone have just one career, but several, retirement might be impossible for children born today. In fact a child born today, if they are lucky and live in a prosperous country, may live for 150 years, replacing body parts as they wear out.  Imaging going for career advice at 100! This is why I love writing for kids. Everything is changing and their futures with it. It may not be perfect and there might be a lot of confusion and even pain on the way as we cope with 8 Billion people all needing to eat and drink safe water.

 Of course given the ubiquity of social media, people will wonder what it was like to live in a time when no one knew your business. Privacy will be the great casualty of the future, secrets will be impossible and we shall miss them I think.

Find More Background to The Repossession research and character profiles here. Search and you'll find some extra stories about the main characters.

* if you write me on old fashioned email, I do check it most days and will write back as soon as - OK?

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