I wrote Changeover in the mid-1960s, mostly to keep my sanity.
In—I think—1965,1 we moved into the coldest house in Oxfordshire. It was four hundred years old, it was large, and it had stone floors and three-foot-thick stone walls; and, after my help’s fiendish small daughter had carefully strung a metal chain between the terminals of our only heater and blown it up, the only way to get warm was to light a fire in one of the two grates in the house. In one grate, a fire simply would not burn. The other involved my squatting—in three sweaters and a dressing gown—doing careful Boy Scout work for an hour every morning. Changeover was set in Africa because Africa is warm. The name of the country, Nmkwami, derives from the Latin word “numquam,” meaning “never.” That is, Neverland.
We were only supposed to be in this house for a few months, until the new one being built for us was ready, but this extended itself to a year, and during this time, misfortunes multiplied. My husband caught jaundice and, besides being ill for a long time, required a special fat-free diet. My two-year-old started having febrile convulsions. My five-year-old so hated school that he regressed to wetting himself. My eldest became madly accident-prone and was liable to be found—after long, vain search—hanging in a tree by the seat of his trousers. My father-in-law died and my mother-in-law came to stay, hating everything in her grief. My sister turned up, so ill with the aftermath of flu that she couldn’t be left alone. A friend also arrived to stay with her baby daughter, fleeing the husband she was divorcing and hysterical with fear that he would find her living with us. In addition, we acquired a singularly bloodthirsty cat whose sole aim in life was to kill things. Finding half a baby rabbit underfoot became commonplace (although it was worse if the rabbit was alive). Fag ends of mice we took in our stride, but I never became acclimatized to having birds slain under our bed. Said cat crowned his achievements by falling into a pigsty one morning and turning up during (fat-free) lunch, dripping and reeking. In addition to all this, the Oxford college to which the house belonged kept trying to let the place over our heads, and would-be tenants kept turning up without notice and stumbling through the icy rooms among the half rabbits and bits of mice, crying out that the place was uninhabitable. My health began to deteriorate. My husband fell downstairs. . . .
This was the time when Britain was divesting itself of the last of its colonies. On the news, it seemed like every month we would hear that yet another small island or tiny country had been granted independence. It was as regular as the dead rabbits. Soon almost the only one left was Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and Britain, it seemed, wanted to hang on to that one. And did so, until Ian Smith, premier of Rhodesia, declared independence unilaterally. UDI,2 it was called, and it caused a great furore. Ministers were sent to plead and cajole, without success. Smith stuck to his purpose and staged his coup. By this time I was actually writing Changeover. I felt as if the book were coming true as I wrote it.
The book itself owes its origin to my thoughts on the independence of colonies. We were in bed, trying to get back to sleep after the cat had killed a starling under our bed, and I began thinking that I could envisage how colonies were before independence (British rule) and see how it would be after independence (the inhabitants ruling themselves), but that I couldn’t for the life of me visualize the actual process. How did they train people to take over? Where did they find the new politicians or the new civil servants? How did they get people to be sternly self-reliant? And so on. Out of these musings, I said to my husband, “How do they manage the change over?”
And he, already mostly asleep, said, “Who is Changeover?”
That did it, of course. I started writing the book the next morning. It was marvelous. I found I was oblivious to the half rabbits or the clouds of smoke from our one source of heat. I had something else to think of besides the next crisis. Thereafter, whenever a fresh crisis arose, Changeover was liable to acquire at least one more chapter. When we moved to the new house at last, the book was ready for typing.
A Conversation with Diana Wynne Jones
Diana Wynne Jones’s home is set in the middle of a terrace of Regency houses between the Clifton and Hotwells areas of Bristol, on a steep and inaccessible hill that leaves taxi drivers scratching their heads and two-dimensional maps badly creased. It is not a particularly large building but is tall and thin, the gradient enabling its modest frontage to hide an implausible number of stories. On a first visit one approaches with some apprehension: thick wooden wind chimes bong apotropaically at the front door and a white-eyed Moorish face stares in grim challenge from the knocker. This slightly forbidding aspect is contradicted by a handwritten invitation to KNOCK FIRMLY, however, and once inside one finds oneself in a welcoming and friendly home. Diana and her husband, the medievalist John Burrow, are ready with biscuits and excellent conversation, either in the kitchen-dining room or else on the floor above, where Diana’s “writing” armchair sits near a large plush Calcifer—one of many mementoes from the film of Howl’s Moving Castle.
This conversation takes place in the kitchen, on a quiet day in February (February 15, 2011). Through the front window I can see that the terrace’s communal lawn is deserted, but for a rabbit hutch belonging to one of the neighbors: at the back the view falls away toward Bristol’s harborside, and the hills of Somerset recumbent against the horizon. An antique grandfather clock keeps time in a corner of the room, occasionally startling us to silence with its chimes. Though very ill, Diana speaks easily and with her usual sharpness of mind. Her appetite for the wonderful, the mysterious, and the absurd is undiminished, as is the laughter with which she celebrates their curious pas de trois. Her eyes still gleam with their distinctive moon-silver. The coffee is very good.
Charlie Butler (CB): It’s clear from Reflections that your childhood has had an important role not only in your life but in your writing. I wonder how you would summarize the relationship of your childhood experience to your work. Clearly it’s given you a lot of material.
DWJ: It’s given me a lot of material, but I’ve never been able to use it directly. I don’t know why, except that most of it was so extreme that most people wouldn’t believe it. My problem was with realizing later that this was not normal. At the time it was going on, I thought it was entirely what ordinary life was like.
CB: You had nothing to compare it with.
DWJ: Well, I had loads of friends and people in the village. I did, actually, have quite a bit to compare it with, but it always struck me that they were strange and we weren’t. That’s how it struck me when I saw the dead man. Have I told you about the dead man?
CB: Please do so.
DWJ: I was cycling to see a friend, who lived in Wimbish, which was all of four and a half miles away, I think.
CB: How old would you have been at this time?
DWJ: I think I was thirteen. Nobody bothered about what I did—it was the holidays—so I cycled off. I was on the main road, but it was really very ill traveled in those days, and there was a bend and I came round the bend, and there was this fellow, lying on his side on his bicycle, with brown, trickly blood having come out of his head, but that had stopped quite a while ago. And it seemed to me fairly evident that he was dead. What do you do when you’re thirteen, and on a bicycle and all alone? I had no idea. The only thing I could think of was to cycle madly to my friend’s house. Her parents were very nice, very ordinary people—theirs was an ordinary life in a way, if you like, except that they were market gardeners and had greenhouses, which made them unordinary. And I arrived there, and immediately the father phoned friends, leaped in his van, roared off, and I thought, “Oh good, somebody’s taking care of it.” But what I really couldn’t handle was my friend’s mother, who sat me down and gave me strong, sweet tea and generally fussed over me. I thought, “Nobody does this kind of thing!” And at home nobody would. I almost couldn’t handle it really: I thought, “What’s going on here?” Then the father came back alone, and was terribly reassuring. He said the man was all r
ight, he’d had fainting fits, he was perfectly well, he was alive—and I knew he was lying for my benefit. It was absolutely obvious that he was dead when I saw him. I said I’d better be going—I was still incredibly shaken—and I went cycling off, and inevitably passed this brown trickle on the road where the man no longer was, and wondered what they’d done with him, and got home. And I thought, well, this was a rather extraordinary thing to happen, I might tell my mother. So I went to tell my mother.
It seems to me nowadays that if one of my children came to me the color of cheese and shaking all over, saying, “Do you know what’s happened?” you would tend to want to listen. She said, “No, not got any time for this,” and walked away.
And that was really how our life was.
CB: And that was normality? It seems pretty strange.
DWJ: That was normality, yes.
CB: That’s an incident that I don’t think has turned up in any of your books.
DWJ: No, it hasn’t. It was really blindingly startling, actually.
CB: There was a huge cast of eccentrics in your village, as the pieces in this volume make clear. In a sense, when I said that your normality was strange, I was thinking not only of your family but of that wider community.
DWJ: Yes, there were indeed. Almost everyone was a lunatic in some peculiar way. Mostly it was a tendency to sing madrigals in curious places, or to dance in the street—those were just the apparently normal people. Lots of Cecil Sharp folk dancing and that sort of thing. But the madder ones were the people who threw pots and the people who hand wove. And there was a woman who kept setting up cafés all over the place, potentially for the tourists, except that because it was a time of austerity there weren’t any tourists, and besides they went away quite quickly when they realized there was no public lavatory in the place. She did all the cooking herself. We felt we ought to patronize this lady, because there she was with all these various handwoven cafés and nobody in them. So we went—and she served abominable coffee and rainbow cake, which was the same sort of consistency as ciabatta, which is not good for cake. It was dry and had a sort of tensile strength about it—very difficult to bite.
CB: Something that was bad coffee by 1950s standards must have been pretty awful.
DWJ: It was. I think she made it with real coffee, mind, because there were bits floating in it. And very weak, because of course she was hoping to make money.
CB: So, thinking about this amazing cast of characters: in some respects you’ve drawn on it, perhaps toning things down a bit, but I was also wondering (without wanting to get too psychoanalytical about it) whether in a wider sense your childhood has provided, as well as material for mining, part of the impulse behind your writing.
DWJ: Yes, I do agree, it has. It was quite clear that the world was mad, and that most adults were often entertainingly mad. You watched with wonder the man who thought he was a werewolf, the man who could polka sexily (I hadn’t until I was fifteen realized that it was possible to polka sexily—he had a very big paunch, and he used to rub it against you as he gently polka’d about). And then there were the various people who said they were, and probably were, witches. Then there was the incredible amount of illegitimacy and incest that went on, and one just took it as a matter of course, really. But you realized that life was not like it was represented in the average children’s book of the time. I rather yearned for the average children’s book where life was straightforward, and Daddy sent telegrams saying “Don’t be duffers” and things like that. My father would never have dreamed of sending telegrams saying “Don’t be duffers.” He would have rushed screaming at you and hit you, saying “You are a duffer!”
CB: This despite his Ransome fixation?
DWJ: Yes. Well, it wasn’t a fixation actually. It was just that he was so mean, and he found this set of Ransome books going cheap in Cambridge. It was minus two volumes: that’s why it was cut price. He knew we needed books, obviously—he’d been a schoolteacher—so he was going to give us books, one between the three of us every Christmas. And he did. Simple as that.
CB: Do you think in any sense that writing was therapy for you, a way of working through or coming to terms with your experience?
DWJ: I don’t know. It probably was, actually, because I remember quite recently my doctor asked me, “What do you do when you’re depressed?” and I said automatically, without thinking about it, “Write a book.” So I suppose it was, yes. Because in a funny way it was very depressing, all this weird fandango of stuff. Oh and yes, there was the man who looked like Mr. Punch, who did photography—or at least he didn’t do photography. He always hired a photographer, but he made very careful models to photograph, and these were sold as illustrations to books and for Christmas cards. He didn’t make a living because he never paid any bills. At least, I think he didn’t pay any bills because what living he did make he spent on drink. We knew his children very well, actually. They survived it, just as we were surviving our bit. But he once very much frightened my sister. She was in the Brownies, and he came in his van to collect the Brownies from some do, and he was terribly drunk, and he drove them into the middle of a cornfield and drove round and round in circles yelling and shouting and singing. And they were scared silly, actually. It wasn’t very nice for them.
I suppose it was very lucky that there was more than one of us, because we could tell one another. I don’t think I ever told my sisters about the dead man, oddly enough. That was too weird—my various reactions and people’s reactions to me. I told you that because that’s the sort of containing thing that seems to happen when I write, and why I don’t actually directly use this autobiographical material—because it whams its way between two points, as it were, my reaction and other people’s reactions to my reaction. And I don’t find it very easy to break out of that.
CB: You’ve got to refract it in some way?
DWJ: Yes, that’s right—or translate it, is what I think of it as, actually. I’ve got to take this particular incident or set of people or some kind of adventure, and say, “Yeah, but I can’t do it like that, and besides no one would believe it anyway, so I will translate it into some other incident or set of people which are basically the same, but in some ways quite, quite different.”
CB: If we take the therapy idea a little further, do you find that performing that translation helps stop things whamming in your mind between your reaction and other people’s reactions? Does it in any sense “lay” things that are otherwise troubling you?
DWJ: I don’t think it lays them; it makes me aware of them, which sometimes is good and sometimes bad. No, I think the therapeutic notion is a little easy: it doesn’t lay them. It means that I probably have an overlay—the translation—above the constant video that I’m playing of these various peculiar incidents.
CB: Given the fantastic (in one sense) nature of the environment you grew up in, it seems natural to turn to your choice of genre, or the genre that chose you. Actually, your very first book, Changeover, isn’t a fantasy, although some pretty bizarre things happen in it. I wonder how you came to write that—and, given that you didn’t go further down that road, how you came to move from writing that kind of comic novel for adults to writing fantasy for children.
DWJ: It was like two different halves of the brain at work, actually. I wrote Changeover, to start with, because we were living in the coldest house in Oxfordshire. It really was absolutely appallingly cold: its walls were stone and they were three feet thick. In its original state it would have been a big, open hall, but somebody had constructed a nest of tiny, stone-walled rooms inside this. Each one seemed to be a freezing chamber. In order to get warm at all you had to light a fire, there was no other form of heating, and I got quite good at lighting fires and dealing with chimneys that wouldn’t draw and so on, and also simply putting up with the cold. But when it got really cold I got fairly miserable. My kids were not at the time very happy, and the local school was not good. My youngest started having petit mals—like epi
lepsy except it isn’t. It was quite alarming and the whole thing started getting me down. Curious things happened, like John ringing me up from Oxford (we were some way outside Oxford at this point) and saying it was the day of some big ceremony—St. Frideswide’s1 or something, and he had to go and parade there. And he rang up sounding a bit desperate and saying, “I fell downstairs and I broke my—” and stopped. And I went through every bone in his body, before he said, “glasses.” Everything was a bit like that.
And I thought, well, let’s do something different. Then it was the time when Ian Smith decided on UDI2 for Rhodesia, which put Africa very much to the forefront of one’s mind, and I just wrote and wrote and wrote—and laughed. And it was a sort of counterblast, rather than therapy, I think. It was something to be getting on with that didn’t go wrong all the time and was in my control. Whereas with children’s books, that seemed to be like a whole parallel chain of thinking. It was partly examining my own children’s reactions to books, and finding that they obviously much more enjoyed fantasy. All the time, every book that they really, really liked turned out to be a fantasy, and I wondered what it did for them, and began to work it out. And I looked at the other books that were out there—there were loads around that were absolutely appalling—and considered what they were doing wrong, that the kids didn’t like them at all. And in the end I decided, “Yes, I shall write fantasy for children.” And I suppose one of the things was from childhood again, because both my parents were extremely opposed to the idea of fantasy, as I think I’ve mentioned in this book.
Reflections: On the Magic of Writing Page 29
