Gloriana

I've completed a first rough draft of my story for children. I did this mainly by cutting several episodes that didn't advance the story. It reads like a textbook or technical manual in many places, and it has a touch of Alice's complaint about the book her sister was reading (just before Alice saw the White Rabbit): lack of conversation. There's a little, but not nearly enough. I have a few months more of revising and rewriting before I'll be satisfied.

This story is based on one I made up in 1962 to tell two toddlers who were bored after too many re-readings of Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web and The Magic Pudding. We were on a cargo ship carrying 12 passengers, in the Indian Ocean about halfway between the Red Sea and the Western Australian coast. I couldn’t pop out to a book shop to get more reading matter for small children.  They asked me to make up a story and tell it to them.

I thank those two toddlers, Rebecca and David Last, for provoking me into making up the precursor to this story, and I thank my beloved late wife Wendy for recording details of that sea voyage in her diary for 1962.  When I read her diary for the first time in 2014, several years after she died, I was reminded of the story I made up and I began to write it down for the first time. The characters came to life in my head and took over their story. Gloriana is the result.

The story is set in Australia in the early 1930s and is based partly on my memories of the country and its people at that time. The characters in the story, however, do not resemble any real people, living or dead. I have taken some liberties with the facts. Rosella parrots can live a long time, but not 300 years and do not have Gloriana’s conversational abilities. Bon-Bon station was on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain in South Australia, not in Northern New South Wales. I don't think it exists now. The land was expropriated by the government in the 1950s, and became a rocket range and I think a nuclear weapons testing ground. 

I need to show more behaviours that will tell readers about the characters. There's a bit now but more is needed. One of the leading characters, the most important character in many ways, is Gloriana, a 300 year old Rosella parrot. Despite living with pirates for 200 of those years, she is a monarchist, perhaps because she spent the first three years of her life in Queen Elizabeth's court. She does exhibit some behaviour and says a few things indicative of her devotion to Good Queen Bess but I need to do more about her. I need to do more about other characters too, the 9-10 year old twins who are the other heroes, and the three villains.  I've picked up a few clues about how to do this from classic literature.  Jane Austen does characters brilliantly: think of Elizabeth Bennet, Wickham, Emma and many of her other unforgettable characters. Charles Dickens succeeds too in showing what manner of people populate his stories. Scrooge comes to life in Dickens's words, so do Mr Pickwick, Fagan and many others among the vast cast in his novels. Not many contemporary writers are as skillful. John Updike's characters are almost all cardboard cutouts. Ian MacEwan is sometimes more successful. Hilary Mantel brings Thomas Cromwell to multidimensional life, but many of her other characters - Henry VIII, Anne Bolyn, Woolsey et al - are closer to caricature than character. Recently I reread Kent Haruf's wonderful little novel Plainsong. This is a wonderful novel for several reasons, including the way Haruf displays how his characters behave, and the social nuances of the town of Holt, Colorado, in a few telling phrases scattered here and there through the novel.  I don't have the literary skills to come anywhere even close to this level of literary craftsmanship, but it will be fun to try in the coming months.