CHALLENGING: Sally Gardner's new book. Against the tense backdrop of the Second World War she explores families and what binds them, fathers and daughters, past histories, passions and cruelty, love and devastation

In less-enlightened times, Sally Gardner was thrown out of several schools as unteachable. Today, her books have been translated into more than 20 languages and have sold more than 1.5 million copies. 
Oh, and she’s dyslexic. STEVEN RUSSELL meets

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IT’S an other-worldly place, this austere ribbon of Suffolk coast: a no-man’s-land between the North Sea and terra firm-ish. Space for one’s imaginings to grow. Not everyone’s cup of tea – it can seem a bit eerie, silent and dark – but Sally Gardner’s fallen for it. Surprising on one hand – she’s a dyed-in-the-wool Londoner – but not so daft on the other: her novels have been described as idiosyncratic, and this spot is the perfect incubator for quirky and original thought.

Sally’s been renting a cottage at the seaside since March – a cocoon in which to think, plot, write and polish – and leaves at the end of this month. It’s not the first time the author has been to Suffolk, though, and it’s unlikely to be the last.

Next year she plans to rent again, from spring to autumn, and tap away at her Apple computer beneath our wide skies.

“If things go well, I’d buy out here, without any doubt,” she says. Perhaps not in quite so remote a spot – near Bawdsey – but certainly away from hustle and bustle.

“I just love the peace it gives you to think in a different way. London is very ‘flickering’; here, when you can get into it and it’s really quiet, you can just go with it. A lot of ideas for my next book have been inspired by being out here.”

Links with the county were forged many years ago, when her children (twin girls and a son) were young. The family initially stayed with friends at Reydon, just outside Southwold, and later rented in the area. “We came up every summer when they were younger. I’ve been coming since I was a grown-up, really.

“What I like about this is it’s got a reality to it. I love this bleak, rugged landscape. It’s a beautiful part of the world to think in. London’s great for having a satellite dish on your head and feeling ‘drrrrr’ [tuned in to the energy] but this is what I call really calm, contemplative, easy-to-write-in. I love this more than Southwold, which I find slightly too Hampstead-by-the-Sea.

“What I’ve loved about this is the rhythm of the year. I came in March and I didn’t even know those flowers would turn white, or the beach would become these amazing colours and it would have this extraordinary life – like tonight there’s mushrooms out on it. This is shingle and it’s just extraordinarily alive. It’s so peaceful and has a lovely rhythm you don’t get in London.”

In Suffolk, she writes at a desk with a view. “Someone said you’ve got to be careful looking out of the window, because all your energy goes out of it, but I actually think the sea gives you back so much energy. I love the evening, when the boats park up for the night. They look like little elements of dreams: where are they going and what are they doing?

“I’ve done a lot of work this year. Being out here has been really good for that. I’m moving back to London but I’m saying to people ‘How am I going to cope?’” she laughs, putting another log on the fire.

It helps banish the chill, for the cottage has been empty for 10 days. Sally and miniature, long-haired, black and tan dachshund Lottie have been back only an hour or so, after work-related trips to Dubai and Northern Ireland.

Fourth novel The Double Shadow, aimed at the 14-plus age group but rewarding and satisfying for adults too, was published about three weeks ago.

With the rumble of war on the horizon in 1930s Britain, Arnold Ruben makes a memory machine, where happy memories play over and over again. The idea is that he and his daughter can take refuge from the awful reality that’s approaching. But, as she turns 17, Amaryllis finds herself in a disturbing place. Something, it’s clear, has gone badly wrong.

For the author, one might have suspected that previous sales successes – along with a Smarties Children’s Book Prize and a shortlisting for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize – would have established something of a mental comfort zone. But no: the launch of a new book is always a queasy time.

“I feel almost sick to the pit of my stomach that everyone’s going to absolutely hate it. This has been the most personal book I’ve ever written, in a way – not that it’s autobiographical, but in the fact that because it’s for an older age group you can’t be emotionally untruthful. If you’re going to deal with something like memory, and how we perceive memory and how we are defined by memory, you can’t – as I call it – just snorkel it, because you’ll end up with an incredibly shallow book.

“I wanted to do something that not many people bother to do these days and start with a heroine you don’t like – but, by the end of it, I hope you’re in love with her.

“It was mooted that this was not a bright idea; that not many people manage to pull it off. Ever. People [in the publishing industry] want safety. They want Twilights and Potters and things they think are bankable; and if you look at those characters they’re very bland. They do not develop very much. Bella and Edward [the young couple in vampire and werewolf saga Twilight] develop hardly at all.”

Gosh.

“What? You think that’s a terribly radical and naughty thing to say? But lots of people like that, and in a way it’s a very fairy-tale way of writing: you have a princess, you have a prince, and you can put yourself emotionally into these bodies. I don’t want to do that. I don’t think many people would necessarily want to be in Amaryllis’s shoes, but I think a lot of people could identify with parts of Amaryllis, and they can take what they want from her.”

With The Double Shadow, “I knew that I didn’t want to do bland villains and pretty heroines. The mother, for instance, is plain awful – but you have to understand why she is awful.

“What Ruben does is monstrous, though his intentions are so honourable. He hasn’t thought it through; and I find that an interesting idea: of people who long to control things. Really, what he has built is something uncontrollable; and Amaryllis is a very big victim – not this cocky little girl.”

Sally is full of gratitude to Orion, which has published the novel through its imprint for older teens, for backing her vision. “They could have been hell on two sticks and cut it back, but they did allow me my wings and said ‘OK, if you want to go this way, we’ll follow you.’”

The novel, with its complexities, challenging notions and interwoven plot, reflects the author’s view that we shouldn’t patronise children. “I write for open minds. I don’t know what young adults are. I don’t write for people who have lots of full-stops in their brains. I don’t want to preach; I don’t want to teach; I want you to have a great story. If something clicks for you, on a deeper level, fabulous.”

But condescension is a no-no. “I was so severely dyslexic [that] I was patronised constantly. In a way I was really blessed, because one of the reasons I became so good at listening and understanding and telling stories was that grown-ups talked in front of me. They didn’t think I was going to understand. In a way, being ‘invisible’ was very good for me.”

Ah yes. Dyslexia: problems with the way the brain processes words and sequences.

The daughter of lawyers, Sally was born in Birmingham, near Cadbury’s chocolate factory, but grew up in Gray’s Inn, central London. Mum and dad separated when she was about five and later divorced.

She was badly bullied at school because she was different: had trouble tying shoelaces; had no idea that C-A-T spelled cat. Her brain was said to be a sieve.

Sally stayed in kindergarten longer than most, and was finally asked to leave: establishing something of a pattern to her education.

Eventually, she fetched up at a school for maladjusted children, as there was no other that would take her. “Unteachable” was the label she carried with her. In those days, no-one spoke of severe dyslexia – the kind that affected about 4% of the population.

Then, at the age of 14, she learned to read. “Not brilliantly, but it did involve comprehension and taking it in.” It’s something of a mystery why it should have been then, but perhaps it’s because there are periods in a dyslexic’s life when the brain changes and it is possible to decode.

She remembers the book – a big Bronte omnibus – and the precise story: Wuthering Heights.

“I used to like looking at words, just because they were the most beautiful things. So I’d often be very happy just to look at pages, and pop-art all the words that had fabulous shapes. I was thinking ‘I’m just going to do that’, because it was hell in the room [at the school for maladjusted children], and found I was reading.”

Sally’s mother said she could go to art school if she got five O-levels, which she did – subsequently leaving Central St Martin’s Art School with a first-class honours degree and then heading for Newcastle as a theatre designer.

After 15 years in that line she gave up working as a set designer because dyslexia was a problem when drawing up technical plans. Instead, Sally concentrated on costumes.

Her artistic skills led to the illustration of picture-books. Playtime Rhymes (still available) was published in the mid-1990s; then came a series of books about princesses – her own take on traditional stories.

When her marriage fell apart, Sally looked for ways of earning money for the family. She’d been writing, quietly, a book called The Strongest Girl in the World (eight-year-old Josie Jenkins suddenly discovers she can lift a double-decker bus). Her publisher said “We’d better see what’s in your bottom drawer”, that tale passed muster, and so began The Magical Children series.

First novel I, Coriander was set in 17th Century London. The daughter of a silk merchant, left with her stepmother, is shut in a chest and left to die, but emerges in the fairy world. This historical fiction story for young adults won the Smarties Children’s Book Prize in 2005.

The Red Necklace and The Silver Blade were set in revolutionary Paris, featuring a gypsy boy with magical powers. It was the sequel, The Silver Blade, that was shortlisted for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize in 2009.

An amazing six years or so, then . . .

Back in her theatre days, one of the first shows with which she was involved was Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Woman of Szechuan, which transferred to the Royal Court Theatre. Sally worked with actress Janet Suzman.

“At that time my writing was like a five-year-old’s. I could hardly spell my own name. I used to come out in a sweat if anyone asked me to spell anything. Janet Suzman later recorded The Red Necklace. She said to me, when we were having a coffee, ‘Sally, I think you were 21 or 22 when I met you; did you ever think that one day I would be recording your book!’”

Not surprisingly, the newsy angle of “severe dyslexic becomes successful author” captured people’s imaginations – something she initially found cringle-making. Then came a change of tack.

“I just thought ‘Look; there are a lot of kids out there who have got this trouble, and instead of feeling shy and keeping your head down, stand up proud. We haven’t got a problem, and we’ve got great imaginations, thank you very much!’

“I thought ‘Yeah, I’m going to become a bit more militant, rather than sitting around apologising for being dyslexic.’”

Which brings us to another thorn in the side. Educationally, all we seem to value in this country is academic achievement, feels Sally. There are other skills, such as visual intelligence and emotional intelligence, but we appear hell-bent on pushing children through a mincing machine and labelling so many of them as duds.

“We fail children constantly on gifts we should be celebrating, encouraging, and which we need. I feel very strongly.”

Children today show great mental and creative dexterity in using the technology at their disposal, she argues – smartphones, iPads, computer games and so on.

“It’s amazing to be able to take information in as they can, on all these levels. What do we do at school? We get them to sit and look at a whiteboard or a blackboard, and then when they don’t sit still we put them on Ritalin [a drug used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder]. And yet, outside in the world, no-one is learning like that.

“Maybe we need to think a bit about how we educate our children. Instead of failing them, perhaps we should start failing the education system – and the politicians that tell us how we should learn. More than anybody else, I think politicians should get out of it!”

Today, with her own writing, there are good days and really bad days; on the latter, she can hardly get anything comprehensible on the page. “I fall between two stools, completely. People who are not dyslexic don’t believe I am dyslexic – because I’m a writer. The dyslexic world doesn’t believe I’m dyslexic – because I’m a writer. There’s this incredible misconception about the whole thing.”

It’s a case of plugging away, honing, and re-ordering her sentences and paragraphs. Typing with big spaces between the lines seems to help.

It’s fair to say that most of Sally’s stories involve underdogs who are badly let down by people who ought to be helping, discover a talent no-one had spotted, and then triumph. Much like her own story . . .

“You have to write about what you know, but you don’t have to be autobiographical. I have not written about my life, though people like to think I have, in coded terms, but I know perfectly well my psychological life, and I’ve used that. It’s the emotions.

“I think it’s what lots of adults and young people feel: will I ever be seen as who I really think I am? It’s not a question that’s just child-orientated. A lot of men who hit mid-life crises ask it, and there is no answer. So they do silly things like go and buy very fast cars, grow their hair long and leave their families . . . and regret it all desperately, afterwards!”

People often ask where she got her imagination. “Truth is, I lived in my head. I tried my damndest not to hear what people were telling me.”

Escapism? “Totally. The only way to survive.”

n Web link: www.sallygardner.net