Tag: disability

Hallucinations of Rosemary Sutcliff

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Sandra Garside-Neville has written an insightful appreciation of Rosemary Sutcliff. She notes that as a child Rosemary Sutcliff had Still’s Disease, a form of juvenile arthritis, and spent much of her youth in hospital for painful operations. Drawing on Rosemary’s own autobiography, she also notes that as a very young girl, the arsenic in Rosemary’s medicine caused her to hallucinate: she saw a panther, wolves and snakes despite not knowing what they were. Years later, she came across them in Kipling’s books.

Another effect of illness that Garside-Neville draws attention to was that Rosemary Sutcliff spent much time sitting still looking, rather than moving around and investigating which meant that she developed an acute eye for observation. In fact, again as Garside-Neville points out, author Alan Garner has commented that children’s authors often have two things in common – they were deprived of the usual primary schooling, and they were ill and left to their own company. Certainly true of Sutcliff.

Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-92) and potential paralympian Henry Pickering (1999-now) transcend disabilities

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Yesterday I met an engaging and inspiring young teenager, Henry Pickering, packing purchases for customers at the farm shop in Market Harborough, as part of a fund raising initiative for CP Sport. He has cerebral palsy, but I discovered in conversation that he is a dedicated, ambitious, swimmer. I suspect he is as talented as he was modest. I asked him if he was any good, and learned that he aims to compete in the paralympics in eight or even possibly four years time. An adult from CP Sport endorsed how realistic at least the eight year aim was. Henry made it very easy and very enjoyable to put some money in the collecting bucket. But he also set me thinking about transcending ‘disability’, and thus of course about Rosemary Sutcliff. She would have urged Henry on, although I got the strong feeling that he needed no urging!

I recall that she wrote in the catalogue for an exhibition some  thirty years ago: “Dear (Able-Bodied) Reader, if ever in Athens or Tooting or Timbuktu, you find yourself about to take refuge in the ‘does he take sugar’ approach to someone disabled, do think again”.

Career-wise, I’m one of the lucky ones. My job, as a writer of books, is one of the few in which physical disability presents hardly any problems. I would claim that it presents no problems at all but my kind of book needs research, and research is more difficult for a disabled person. Read More »

The non-pareil of historical fiction is Rosemary Sutcliff

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Imogen Russell Williams wrote last year that “for me the nonpareil of children’s historical fiction remains Rosemary Sutcliff”:

Historical fiction for adults ranges in stature from the Booker-winning to the bodice-ripping – scholarly rambles or gleeful romps through a past animated, elucidated, or (at worst) knocked together into an unconvincing stage set by the writer’s imagination. The label carries its own baggage, however; like “crime”, or “fantasy”, sticking “historical” before “fiction” might, for some snobbish and deluded readers, require an “only” to complete the description.

It’s my feeling that historical fiction for children suffers less from the snootiness sometimes attracted by grown-up writing in the genre, perhaps because the educational cachet outweighs the sense that a “made-up” book is less worthwhile than a collection of primary sources. Certainly the best historical fiction of my childhood has remained with me, Read More »

The enchantments of The Witch’s Brat by Rosemary Sutcliff

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Lovel, the crippled hero of Rosemary Sutcliff‘s The Witch’s Brat, is driven from his village in a shower of stones after his grandmother’s death. (The) novel (is) … crammed with careful period detail and research, the painstaking catalogues of herb-lore brought grippingly to life by the characters to whom they bring such danger.

via The enchantments of witch fiction | guardian.co.uk.

Author Penelope Lively remembers Rosemary Sutcliff

Anthony LawtonLeave a comment

Writing in The Independent (UK newspaper) just after Rosemary Sutcliff‘s death in July 1992, English writer Penelope Lively commented on its obituary . She recalled a visit in the early 1970s to Rosemary’s house, Swallowshaw, in Sussex 27 July .

We sat in her study, she in her wheelchair behind the desk, the rest of us uneasily perched, (my) children – as they then were – awed into total silence. A housekeeper brought tea on a trolley: cucumber sandwiches and dainty little cakes. Two chihuahuas snarled from a cushion and occasionally shot out to snap at our ankles (on subsequent visits I learned how to deal them a surreptitious kick).Read More »