To Sir, With Gratitude
When I was fourteen, a history teacher changed my life
When I was fourteen a history teacher changed my life. I bet you’d believe me straight away if I could remember his name, but I can’t. It was a selective state school in London, single-faith and multicultural, in the 1980s. This teacher wore his love for the subject on the sleeves of home-made jumpers, often green. He taught us the history of Ireland up to and including the revolutionary period, followed by the history of medicine. Then he got us started on the ways, means and consequences of colonialism. I remember his voice, sincerity, and nose for historical injustice. He gave me a profound sense that I was finally finding out the truth.
This teacher was especially good at introducing the concept of reframing narratives and the limitations of a distorted lens. The fact that I’ve forgotten his name is like forgetting the date of the invention of the wheel while appreciating its significance. It’s fitting: he taught me that history was about more than rattling off dates and monarchs, as per my primary school education. It was about understanding humankind by reflecting on what we’ve done, survived, invented or destroyed. (Still, I am sorry, Sir, for forgetting.) I credit him to a large degree with why several of my books have a historical element – but more importantly with the way that history, and historical fiction, continue to feed my soul.
It had been carefully shaped into stories that were intimate enough to comprehend
and could tell me well-founded secrets about why things were so.
Recently I was asked in an interview why I thought children would be interested in historical storylines. When I visit schools to talk about writing, I check on which books are making an impression. Although historical fiction rarely gets the commercial attention of other genres, it is persistent in these regular conversations with students. Many children are simply awed by the past.
In Australian schools you can bet on Morris Gleitzman’s Once series being mentioned, along with Jackie French and series such as My Australian Girl. More recently Katrina Nannestad’s war fiction, We Are Wolves for instance, has been a hit. Historical stories like these remain in children’s minds long after many have paused recreational reading in their teenage years – even if they can’t remember the name of the author. (Again, sorry Sir.)
While nature reminds us of our place in the physical universe,
history does the same with time.
I was very young when I first heard my grandfather’s war stories of parachuting into the Seine as a teenager when his plane was shot down, and my mother’s tales of 1950s boarding-school hi-jinks, including locking nuns in a store cupboard. Having a brilliant history teacher later on made the desire to understand the past wider and hungrier. As an anxious soul, looking back nourished me. It wasn’t that what I was reading was sweetly innocent, far from it, but that it had been carefully shaped into stories that were intimate enough to comprehend and could tell me well-founded secrets about why things were so.
Stories where children play the main part show young readers the largeness of life through someone they can richly identify with: navigating stand-out events, surviving, suffering, excelling, or simply witnessing. This is a largeness similar to being in a vast forest or standing on a cliff top. While nature reminds us of our place in the physical universe, history does the same with time.
It’s imperative that the view is not impeded, or rather, why we need to see more historical fiction written by diverse people, and telling that one of the biggest selling Australian children’s books of last year was Wylah, the Koorie Warrior by Richard Pritchard and Jordan Gould, an adventure set 40,000 years ago on the lands of the Peek Whurrong in south-west Victoria.
In ’20 and ’21, living in one of the world’s longest lockdown cities, I was writing a work of narrative non-fiction that begins in post-war Berlin. I was also editing a feminist novel set in Sydney in the early 1900s. And I was researching the 1918 Great Influenza epidemic, or Spanish Flu. Each day I slipped through time to experience the largeness of life. While our worlds were reduced to walls and windows, history gave me a sense of proportion, much the same way that being out in nature did.
Slipping through time is one of the powerful journeys I recommend
when what’s ahead has withdrawn into uncertainty
During 2022, in Australian children’s fiction, readers have been able to travel back to the little known history of women’s football via Felice Arena’s The Unstoppable Flying Flanagan; to 1850s Melbourne through the eyes of a young Irish immigrant in Claire Saxby’s The Wearing of the Green; to 1901 Adelaide with Tilda, who lives in an orphanage; to France in 1783 in David Metzenthen’s Augustin and the Hot Air Balloon, and France again in 1665 in Maggie Jankuloska’s The Rat-Catcher’s Apprentice; to 1920s New York in Nicki Greenberg’s The Detective’s Guide to New York City; and to a 1914 intern camp in New South Wales in Pamela Rushby’s Interned.
Alongside the more realistic stories have been some popular historical fantasies, including The Bookseller’s Apprentice by Amelia Mellor, Evie and Rhino by Neridah McMullin, When Souls Tear by Karen Ginnane, and Honor Among Ghosts by Sean Williams. My own, The Goodbye Year, is a modern pandemic tale containing a young soldier ghost who died in Gallipoli and a mystery around the 1918 influenza that is estimated to have claimed over 50 million lives.
It seems we keep reaching the end of a difficult year and hoping out loud that the next will be easier on us all – I wonder and worry about what this particular time feels like for younger generations. Historical fiction always works its magic on me when I’m worrying about the future. Thanks to many writers, film-makers – and to a huge extent my enlightening, nameless history teacher – slipping through time is one of the powerful journeys I recommend when what’s ahead has withdrawn into uncertainty.
Inside a well-told tale inspired by history, we can be tiny and insignificant in a positive way, like being on a mountain-top, awestruck by the view.