The poet and playwright Lemn Sissay has been elected Chancellor of The University of Manchester (UK). An article about his election, in the Guardian newspaper (here), quoted him speaking about wanting to inspire people. He cited a motto of his: I was moved to post a comment. (The obituary I refer to is here)
In 1965 Tony Bradman was 11 and in his last year at Junior school. He was living with his “mum and older sister in a rented flat in south London”. His parents had separated when he was five and got divorced a couple of years later, “which was unusual at the time”.
My dad was working abroad and I hadn’t seen him for several years. He had become a mythical figure, someone I longed for and resented because of his absence.
Then he came back, and soon Saturday mornings were taken up by Dad’s weekly “access visits|”. By then I was obsessed with history. At school we’d studied the Romans and the Saxons, and I was fascinated by it all. So I made my dad take me to the British Museum as often as possible….
Then one Saturday, probably on the way home from the British Museum, dad and I stopped at a WH Smith’s so I could spend my pocket money. I bought a Puffin book, attracted by the cover picture of Roman soldiers and the title: The Eagle of the Ninth. I remember being gripped by the story of a young Roman called Marcus, and his quest to find the Eagle standard of a legion that marched north of Hadrian’s wall and never returned. From then on I was a fan of Rosemary Sutcliff’s books.
I can give you lots of reasons why I think she’s a great writer. She’s a terrific storyteller, and could certainly teach Hollywood a thing or two about pace, suspense and cliffhangers. Her central characters are usually underdogs, children or young people with colossal problems to overcome – she herself suffered in childhood from Stills disease, a form of arthritis that left her permanently disabled. And then of course she writes so well, bringing her characters and the past brilliantly to life.
But it was only a few years ago that I realised why I’d been so drawn to The Eagle of the Ninth – the story is really about Marcus looking for his father, a centurion in the lost legion. Marcus wants to know what happened to his dad, and in some way to reclaim him. The shadow of not knowing hangs over Marcus, and I see now that I must have identified with another boy who missed his dad and resented his absence.
It was also then that I realised I had always wanted to write historical fiction. I’d written lots of other stuff, of course – poetry and picture books and Dilly the Dinosaur stories – but then I wrote a short novel about Spartacus, and loved the whole process. I haven’t looked back since – I even wrote a novel called Viking Boy, in which a boy goes looking for his missing father. …
So thanks, Rosemary – you really were an inspiration to that 11-year-old boy.
The BBC Genome project is a fascinating source of informatyion that is new to me about Rosemary Sutcliff’s contributions to BBC Radio and Television, and about versions of her books created for radio in particular.
In 1984 she was interviewed, for example, about “the lure of Roman and Celtic Britain for her and her readers”. Echoing points she recorded elsewhere on this site, of her youth she said: ‘I was brought up like a Spartan Youth; to take problems, troubles, pain lightly.’
I have always thought that The Eagle of the Ninth (published in 1954) was the first book of Rosemary Sutcliff’s to be turned into a serial on Children’s Hour on BBC Radio. But it wasn’t! It was Brother Dusty Feet (published in 1952) which was billed as ‘A Chronicle of the Road by Rosemary Sutcliff’ in the Radio Times. I learn this from a website I have come across which is new to me—the BBC Genome project, which contains the listings information which the BBC printed in Radio Times between 1923 and 2009. You can search the site for BBC programmes, people, dates and Radio Times editions.
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 