Sam Angus
About Author
Sam Angus was born in Italy and grew up in France and in Spain, in the final years of General Franco's dictatorship. She read English Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge and went on to study fashion at Central St Martin's College of Art before setting up her own sportswear label, Sam de Teran.
It was one of the most successful fashion brands of the 1990s, worn by VIPs and socialites and mentioned in the same breath as Anya Hindmarch, Kelly Hoppen, Amanda Wakely and Jenny Packham. Bond girl Sophie Marceau wore her ski suits in The World is not Enough and Carla Bruni modelled the swimwear range.
After having her first child Sam returned to her first love, literature. She now writes full-time and lives between Exmoor and London with her large family, dogs and horses. Sam's peripatetic childhood inspired a love of travelling and of history, and these continue to be the key themes in her novels.
Interview
SCHOOL FOR SKYLARKS
MACMILLAN CHILDREN'S BOOKS
JULY 2017
SCHOOL FOR SKYLARKS, SAM ANGUS's powerful, nostalgic story about love, childhood and friendship, is set at the outbreak of the second World War when children were being evacuated from British cities into the country.
In School for Skylarks, an entire school is moved from London to a country house - Furlongs - although the focus of the story is one girl, Lyla, and her desire to leave Furlongs and to return to her mother's home in London.
Gradually, the reader sees inconsistencies in Lyla's narrative about her past with a mother whom she adores, but she steadfastly refuses to acknowledge an alternative view suggested by her wonderfully-portrayed great aunt Ada and best friend Cat.
We spoke with author Sam Angus, who told us how School for Skylarks developed:
Q: Why did you decide to write about evacuation as a theme; the idea of children - and Lyla in particular - being taken from everything they know and love?
A: On a practical level for a novelist the circumstances of evacuation provide fertile grounds for stories. The child is separated from parents and from all he or she knows and everything is thrown into stark relief.
But in addition to this, I needed to have Lyla very much alone in order that she could, for such a long time, create a cocoon around herself in order to protect herself from the terrible truth about her Mother.
Q: Lyla is particularly at a loss at Furlongs, having never been to school. Why have you kept her so isolated from the world?
A: I kept Lyla isolated in order to illustrate how very alone and lost she feels in the world.
No child should ever have to know that they are not loved by a parent - I think this is probably the cruellest cut - and in the case of Lyla, she simply cannot believe that this should be the case, so she barricades herself against it, refusing to see or hear the truth.
If Lyla had remained at home she would have had to confront the truth much earlier than she does in this story.
Q: Did any real-world story inspire Lyla's story, about a child who feels abandoned by her parents?
A: It wasn't a particular family nor a particular child that inspired this story so much as the - still - rather shocking idea of a child not being loved by a parent. That idea is what I wanted to explore in this story.
Q: Is Lyla's great aunt, Ada, inspired by anyone in particular? Which of her wonderful idiosyncracies did you most enjoy writing about?
A: Ada made me giggle all the way through the book. She is the adult I would have loved to have had around me when I was young, the person who debunks all the rules and shibboleths, who puts the cruel or ridiculous aspects of school life into perspective.
I loved her youthfulness and spirit and ferocity, her wisdom and her tenderness. To me, she is the ideal teacher, someone who makes you look far ahead, beyond exams and tests, to dream what you might do in life.
Q: What was your favourite moment to write about in School for Skylarks?
A: I really enjoyed writing most of this book because the characters were very vivid to me, especially the headmistress who is based on a headmistress I once had, but most of all I probably enjoyed writing the scene in which Great Aunt Ada discovers that her beloved horse has been hidden.
Lyla watches, horrified, as the horse begins to whinny from a first floor window. Ada looks up from her roses and roars with laughter. She is tickled by the fact of the horse being in the house and it is part of her kindness to the child she knows is deeply troubled that she says only how clever it was of the horse to take herself in to the house given that there is a war on and horses are being recruited to the army.
Q: There is a menagerie of creatures in School for Skylarks - which would you have at home if you could?
A: I've never had a ferret and I think that could be lots of fun - they're clever and playful and you'd find them in all sorts of unexpected places like laundry cupboards, making havoc with the feather pillows.
Q: You often cover war time in your books. Why does it have such resonance for you?
A: War will always be interesting to me as a writer because the circumstances of war provide such great opportunities for the novelist.
When you're writing for the young, you are alway looking for a way of removing the adults so that the child can have experiences and adventures they wouldn't otherwise have unless you walk through a cupboard door or fall down a rabbit hole.
With war you don't have to escape into the realm of fantasy - everything is topsy turvy anyway - and almost anything can happen.
Q: Were you keen on history and perhaps visiting old places as a child, even if you weren't interested in the subject at school?
A: I didn't really enjoy history at school until I started reading the poetry of the first and second world wars - when I was sixteen or so I came across the poetry of the period and that was my door into the subject.
I would have enjoyed history more if we'd spent more time on modern history and less on things like Vikings and Ancient Britons. Hence Lyla's comment in the story about there being no point at all in spending a whole term studying the Iron Age.
I don't have a favourite historical site but I do find any of those simple stone memorials that you see on village greens across the country - the memorials to the men of the village that gave their today so we might have our tomorrow - intensely moving, that villages so small and remote should have lost so many of their young men.
Q: You often write about war and its affect on those left behind. Where did you go to research how WWII impacted on women and children in the UK?
A: I found school magazines of the time. It is the small things you find out from those - the lack of paper to draw on for example - how brown packing paper was used for art classes and how you couldn't get tennis balls or rounders balls and the staff had to improvise. So the surprises for me, this time around in writing about the war, was the sheer difficulty of trying to run a school in those circumstances.
That and the fact of the courage and the sacrifice of the teachers - we all talk about the children who were evacuated - but so many teachers went with them and they, after all, just like the children, had left their homes to spend the entirety of the war far from home in order that those children might be educated.
Q: Did you research particularly into evacuation and, as in your story, were whole schools evacuated from the cities?
A: I read a lot about schools that had been moved from London to the countryside and I visited some of the great houses that were used as schools - such as Chatsworth and Longleat.
I read through all the school magazines that I could get hold of for the years the schools were stationed at those houses and it was the articles in the school magazines that I found gave the most flavour and texture and sense of what it was to have been living in a great country house; how the kitchen coped with providing food, what sort of beds were used, how hot water was rationed out etc.
I also listened to recordings of women, now in their nineties, reminiscing about those years. All of the recordings I listened to spoke with great nostalgia about those days at Longleat and there was often a sense that nothing in life had ever been quite so vivid or wonderful to them since.
School days can be like that - whether you loved or hated them - they remain clear right to the end of your life and I think that is even more the case for those children who were sent away in war time into the rather beautiful and extraordinary circumstance of a great English Country House.
Q: How much research did you need to do into 1930's / 40's Britain to understand the technology, furniture, clothes etc for your setting, and is Furlongs based on a real place?
A: A lot. Real historical details are very helpful to a novelist and so Furlongs is based, in fact, not on one house but on a combination of houses, part Chatsworth, part Longleat, part a smaller West Country house I know a bit that was also used as a school.
The uniform and school timetable and the meals were taken from the school magazine of the school that was based at Longleat during the war and the feel of the house was in part, at least, inspired by audio recordings I listened to of old girls reminiscing about their time at Longleat. The cold, the mice, the ice in the water jugs, the lack of hot water, the lack of plumbing - all these things came up again and again, but always with fondness and affection.
Q: How did you develop the flavour of the period - how people spoke, their jokes and expressions etc, without making it too alien and distanced?
A: As with things like local dialect, with the language of the past, your story only needs a few expressions or turns of phrase in order to convey the flavour of the time - too much and the text becomes unnecessarily difficult to access.
To find the expressions school girls of the day might have used, I found that the novels of the day were actually the most useful source - in particular I turned to Angela Brazil who was a great writer of girls boarding school stories in the 40's.
Q: What would your top tips be for writing about war, or creating settings for historical fiction?
It is hard to place yourself in the past, to imagine a time and a place you have never known but the important thing for me at least is to remember that though circumstances change and times change, the human heart is always the same i.e. the things that motivate a child today - loneliness, fear, jealousy etc - are the same things that would have motivated a child then. The human heart is always the proper subject of fiction.
When I'm looking for historical context, I look for small details: like the kind of programme that would have been broadcast then, the popular songs of the day or the brand of chocolate bar or milk or cereal.
Food is always particularly useful, especially in a novel which is set almost entirely within the four walls of one house. News comes only from outside, from letters or newspapers, so the real markers of historical context in this story are probably just the increasing scarcity of everything - the rounders balls or the art paper, the lack of men about the place to get things done and so on.
Increasingly when I write now, I tend to put these things in afterwards so that I am not always stopping to look things up - that can be very distracting and, often in my case, a bit of an excuse not to write.
Q: Where do you do your writing and what are you writing now?
A: I do my writing wherever I am. All I need is silence and isolation. There was a time when all my children were small when the only place I could find that was the car so I would lock myself into it and write there and no one could get at me.
When I have the choice, I like to write inside the house at my desk, which is very large and which I keep completely clear so I am not distracted.
Just at the moment, I am not writing, but planning. That means waiting, researching, reading, note-taking and finally, wrangling my material and all my loose notes into a plot.
THE HOUSE ON HUMMINGBIRD ISLAND
MACMILLAN CHILDREN'S BOOKS
JUNE 2016
THE HOUSE ON HUMMINGBIRD ISLAND takes us back to the turn of the last century following Idie Grace as she is sent away from the only home she has ever known in the UK to the lush setting of a West Indies island and the house she has inherited.
There, Idie grows up peacefully, isolated in a house filled with animals and plants but eventually the outside world invades. As World War I begins, the islanders enlist and leave but tragedy awaits on the battlefields. Now almost grown up, Idie has to uncover the family secrets that the house has hidden and begin to right the wrongs of the past and her present.
We spoke to author SAM ANGUS, author of Soldier Dog and A Horse Called Hero, about her latest novel and asked her the following questions:
Q: You come from a background in fashion, so when did you decide that you wanted to be a writer?
A: I was always going to write and it was always going to be children's books, but it took me a long time to move into writing. I worked in fashion developing sports wear and I loved it but it's not somewhere I ever felt completely at home. It was very pacey while children's books is slower and gentler, it just feels like a nicer world to be in.
Q: Your children's novels draw on historical events and settings, have you always enjoyed history?
A: I didn't enjoy it at school, it felt like a dry and dusty subject and it was full of men and men who were dead. My way of looking at history is to explore its underbelly, that's what I'm interested in - not the big strategies and philosophies that have caused wars. I'm interested in the social history side of war, how it impacted on people's lives, and the quirkier side of it, for example how we were able to transport so many people across the desert using 70,000 camels.
Q: Many of your books are set around World War 1, why does that period draw you as a writer?
A: I think because it was such a global war and there was barely a corner of the world that it didn't touch, it was fought on so many fronts, and it continues to fascinate us.
For a writer, war provides opportunities, it makes things happen to the people you're writing about and to your child protagonist that wouldn't otherwise occur; in a way war means children enter the adult world, they can lose parents and be alone. So you can stay on this side of reality but in a changed world.
One of the reasons writers return again and again to war is because of the extraordinary circumstances it provides to throw things at a child while remaining true to the possible.
Q: Why have you set The House on Hummingbird Island in the West Indies?
A: The West Indies is very new to me, I had never been there until recently but my family has a long standing relationship with the islands and when I travelled there, I fell in love with them. I thought there was almost no history to the West Indies and it wasn't somewhere that interested me but it's just a different kind of history and once I'd visited, I became really interested in the effect that the British had on the West Indies, especially during World War 1.
Q: Was that your starting point for the novel?
A: Actually, I remember when my editor asked me what I'd be writing next and I knew it would be about a girl in a boat and that there would be a horse with her. I had this very powerful visual image that hung around but it took a long time to work out why this girl was on a ship. I only knew that it was heading south towards the Tropics because she wasn't wearing a hat or stockings.
So that was the starting point. The story slowly unravelled itself from that image and once I started writing, it was one of the quickest books I have written. That was partly because I knew my characters so well but also because the research was a lot lighter; with Soldier Dog, I had researched the lives of messanger dogs for two years before I could begin writing that book. For this book I did some research into the period around World War I, but more into the flora and fauna of the islands.
Q: How do you use that background research in the novel?
A: I used the flora and fauna in the story to help create the atmosphere of the novel. The West Indies is a glorious world and its mass of new and old growth can feel free and exotic or very menacing. The climate can turn on you with sudden, violent showers, so it's also a very changeable world and I wanted to get some of that across in the novel.
As a child, Idie is free from self-consciousness and she doesn't see the menacing side of the island fully until she reaches adolesence; she fights against growing up until she is simply forced to face it. I remember, as a child, that feeling of not wanting to grow up. Idie senses that once she does, there are things in her world that she will have to confront, she will have to find out why people whisper about her.
This is also reflected in the structure of the novel, which covers her younger life in the earlier part and then her life as an adolescent. The shadows begin to close in as she gets older and life becomes more complex and fearful; so we become more self conscious as we move into adolesence.
Q: Idie brings a menagerie of creatures into the house with her - what gave you that idea?
A: Idie finds herself living almost alone at Hummingbird, without much adult supervision, and she responds by surrounding herself with animals. She brings her horse into the hallway of the house and I remember having breakfast at home once and one of my sons brought his pony into the kitchen and it very peacefully and carefully picked its way to the table where they had laid it a place and then explored the kitchen, so I had an image of a horse in a house. Idie also has a small deer in the house; I found out that Frida Kahlo used to keep a deer in the house and I've seen a picture of Audrey Hepburn with her deer, Pippen, at the supermarket. That's consoling as a writer - I have never kept a deer in the house but it's nice to know that someone has. Because I'm making a serious point in the novel about the treatment of West Indian men during the war, I didn't want the novel to become too fantastical.
Q: Idie's isolation ends with the coming of World War 1 and you explore the impact that the war, whilst far away, had on those left behind in the West Indies. How did you research that?
A: There was very information about the impact the war had on this small corner of the world but I wanted to cover the war in a quieter way, off the battle field, and that's a more natural way for me to do it: I'm a woman who stays at home and writes. So Idie has to read letters and finds out how those far away events impact on those around her at home. Those stories can be just as touching and moving as the 'bigger' stories. Idie has to understand that her own family has caused a terrible loss to her West Indian family and she has to find ways to address it.
Q: There is also a sense of old and new worlds colliding in the novel, how have you developed that?
A: I wanted to explore where we have come from, what inheritence really means, both our genetic inheritence and our possessions. Idie inherits a sugar plantation so her inheritence has a dark heart; her grandmother, Honey, would have been a slave. So there is a sense of responsibility that Idie has to these people that she slowly comes to realise and to help them.
Her two worlds, her British family and her family from the West Indies, collide during the war on the battlefield in a terrible way. This collision also represents the death of what Britain did to the West Indies; many fortunes here were built on their sugar, we plundered the islands and yet they fought for us during the world war. After the war, that collapsed. Britain was impoverished and many fortunes were lost; the great houses fell into a terrible state. The Duke of Westminster's income at one point was enough to pay the salary of one butler.
By the end of the novel, Idie has to decide whether she will remain with the 'old world' or step into a different, new world. She has to decide what will be her way forward.
Q: Was the shocking treatment of West Indian soldiers by British officers, which leads to a terrible tragedy in the novel, something that you came across in your research?
A: I found that the English were very nervous of the West Indian soldiers at that stage. The men in the war office knew we needed numbers, cannon fodder, but they didn't know how to deal with the recruits they got. All the different colours confounded the recruitement officers and they decided they didn't want single regiments to be comprised of only black soldiers, so they were all put into different groups. Some of these had good officers and some didn't.
We didn't trust black soldiers enough to give them their own guns and we didn't pay them the same as white soldiers, and this led to protests. There was simply an absence of understanding or knowledge. Soldiers' accounts talk of them coming off their ships in dock and people trying to touch them; many had just never seen black people before. Your average man on the street didn't even know that the West Indies was part of the British Empire which was ironic as children growing up there would have been taught British history and sung the national anthem; Britain would have felt very close to them.
On the whole, the West Indians were uncomplaining and tolerant of how they were treated; sadly, it was probably not that much different from how they were treated at home. They were good natured until they were tested beyond endurance by the matter of the guns; they had gone out to fight but were only on a couple of occasions given the guns to do so, the rest of the time they were used as labour. Guns then had a firing line of up to 18 miles so there was no 'back line' where they could be safe without one.
Q: Colour forms part of the conflict in your story, including Idie's multicultural inheritance, but this is only suggested through the story. Why haven't you brought it more 'centre stage'?
A: I didn't want to make colour a central part of the story. Idie simply isn't interested in what other people think about and I wanted her problems to be about more than colour. Other women refer to her hair, but what Idie is concerned about is the suggestion that she may have inherited a form of genetic madness from her mother; that is the shadow hanging over Idie and it's a dark place for a young woman to be.
I have also avoided putting the issue of colour centre stage because I am not a writer of colour. There's a terrible lack of diversity in writing in this country, especially in children's literature, and I think it's partly the result of political correctness and our anxiety as writers not to say or do something wrong. Publishers are looking for racial diversity in stories but it's probably not going to come from a white writer.
Q: What are you writing now?
A: I find you need a little space between books for the characters to leave your head, otherwise you realise you're writing the same characters. I am, though, now working on a new book where the heroine comes to discover that her mother doesn't love her. It is set in a big house that is requisitioned during the war as a girls' boarding school; it's based on a house near us that was actually used as a boarding school for girls during the war. So it takes place during the war, in a stately home, where the girls can run amok.
Q: What do you do to escape writing?
A: I garden and I ride. I have four sons and because I don't play rugby or cricket I wanted to find something we could do together and so they all tolerate riding with me!
School for Skylarks
The House on Hummingbird Island
