Interview: Sally Nicholls

Jonathan Doering talks to children’s author Sally Nicholls about her writing and her Quakerism

‘Kids love death and killing! They like the edges,’ says Sally Nicholls, the award-winning children’s author who is now based in Oxford. Born into a Quaker family in Stockton-on-Tees, she has been a lifelong storyteller. Her life connects the wider world with Quakerism: after Great Ayton School she attended a state sixth form college before spending six months working with the Japanese Red Cross. She then studied Literature and Philosophy at Warwick University before taking an MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University. The potentially precarious writer’s life was not entered into lightly: ‘I took the decision to a Quaker Meeting.’

She is drawn to major issues besetting young people as much as adults – issues from which they are disenfranchised, either through lack of language, or exclusion from significant decisions. Her multiple award-winning debut, Ways to Live Forever, introduced Sam, a boy dying of leukaemia. We accompany him as he works through his bucket list, walking the edge between jubilance and poignancy, living his life to the full even as it inexorably dwindles away.

That sense of exploring the extremes of experience and emotion runs through her other novels: Season of Secrets, a real-life playing out of the Green Man myth; All Fall Down, where a family is torn apart by – but ultimately survives – the Black Death; Close Your Pretty Eyes, where a disturbed child in care stumbles towards redemption; An Island of Our Own, where three orphaned siblings locate an aunt’s buried inheritance. Now, in her new novel about suffragettes, Things a Bright Girl Can Do, she seems to be weaving the strands of her life together even more tightly, exploring – and inspecting – the experiences of women within patriarchal society as well as the Quaker community during a time of tremendous social and cultural change We met in an East Oxford café to discuss links between Quaker spirituality and her writing, which so skilfully explores ‘the edges’.

Could you tell us a bit about your Quaker background?

I was brought up a Quaker and have been attending Meetings all my life. I decided to join after attending the World Gathering of Young Friends in 2005, and I’m now a member of Oxford Meeting, although I attend a little less regularly after having my son.

How does it feel when you’re writing?

It depends! Sometimes it’s very hard, like chipping away at granite. Sometimes it’s like pouring sand. I love it, but it’s always work, even when it’s fun. It’s a job, and I take it very seriously.

How would you say that your Quaker values inform your writing?

With Ways, it was pre-Fault in Our Stars, and many cancer stories about children were using the issue as a vehicle for the writers’ spiritual beliefs. I read a lot of non-fiction books about the subject and lots of children in those couldn’t talk to their parents about what was happening because their parents understandably found it so hard to discuss. So I wanted to give children the tools to think about and discuss these issues for themselves, which is a very Quakerly attitude… To give children the tools to let them decide what they believe, to respect a child’s spirituality and that [the choice they make] is their choice to make.

My Quaker values inform who I am and how I see the world, the stories I want to tell and how I tell them. It informs how I think about people and conflict. Olivia in Close [a disturbed child in care] is dreadful in many ways. She comes in and destroys things. In many books she would be the villain. For Quakers you would look for that of God in a child like that, and try to understand why she is behaving like that… I don’t tend to have villains (apart from the uncle in Island – and even he changes for the good). I find villains hard to write anyway – but it’s not an ‘I’m a Quaker, this is how I’m going to write stories’ thing, but it’s more about the kind of stories I want to tell. Being a writer is about empathy, and having a pantomime villain who ends up in a deepest, darkest dungeon wouldn’t be great writing… It is a Quaker thing to see the goodness in the world in terms of my optimism about people – bad things often happen, but I’m optimistic about people.

Death is prominent in your work. To what extent is this inspired by a Quaker experiential approach?

Possibly it inspired Ways, yes. That sense of you’re here and then you vanish, that sentience disappears. I’m not sure if I believe in a soul. I like it that Quakers acknowledge ignorance, that it’s okay not to always know the answer… but that asking the question can also still be valuable.

You use a ‘scrapbook technique’ in Ways to Live Forever, with different types of text brought together to tell the story, which is convincing – again, was that partly inspired by a Quaker openness to different aspects of the World and the Truth?

Not really! My new suffragette novel, Bright Girl, is more like that because there are three different women with different views of how to achieve their aims. I was struggling to complete the plot in my first book, and that was a nice way to develop it and say, ‘Let’s have a story with questions and different things like that.’ The more books I’ve written the more I’ve come to appreciate plot for the forward momentum it provides.

You have talked in other interviews about wanting to leave your readers free to draw their own conclusions about the morally extreme circumstances your characters face – but you also weave in ‘Quakerly’ messages, for example about humanity’s arrogant abuse of the natural world, about the importance of opportunity for all, regardless of race, gender and so on – to what extent are you offering a message, and to what extent are you purely presenting circumstances and characters for your readers’ interpretation?

With Sam in Ways, he needed to be a scientist; his logical approach suggested his interest in science. You don’t need a character moaning about death with so much death in it. I needed some humour and some space.

With Island and the Makers’ Space [a community where technologically-inclined people can meet and work together], my husband Tom wanted to join the Oxford Makers’ Space and was talking to me about it and I had that writer’s magpie thing of pinching ideas from different places. The positive atmosphere of kids solving a mystery by using science and computer technology again led to the conclusion that the girl [Holly, the main character] would want to be a scientist when she grew up, so that wasn’t particularly about me being a Quaker.

So, is there a balance between Quaker messages and other messages you want to express?

Yes, I think so. There are clear parallels between Fall and global warming, an acknowledgement of how terrible it is but [some people still cling to] an idea that it won’t affect us – and thinking that was interesting. But also the hopefulness… The assumptions in dystopian apocalypse narratives are often that there will be a descent into hell – cults, gangs – but actually during the Black Death society continued to function. The dead were buried, etcetera…

Society was stretched to the limit, but it did survive. The society that emerges at the other end is a better one. The pre-plague situation is reversed: land is cheap and labour now expensive. If you’re a peasant, your life gets better. There are women doing men’s jobs after the Black Death because there aren’t always men to do them. There’s the expectation of looting and rioting, but actually more often than not people behave admirably and live pleasant lives.

In Quaker faith & practice 21.28, Caroline Graveson comments: ‘God is in all beauty’ – do you agree in your work?

I don’t think about it consciously… Your responsibility is to the book, really, to tell the story in the best way you can and beauty is a part of that… I write quite simple sentences. Yes, I think about how well written the language is, alongside the plot and so on.

Robin Tanner, in Quaker faith & practice 21.36, writes about ‘the powers of ordinary men and women’ – can we see this in your depiction of your characters?

Yes, I would say that. Most of my books are about terrible things happening to ordinary people. Complicated things can happen to settled families. Many children’s books are about the extraordinary intersecting with the ordinary… In practical terms, children don’t get much say in the big decisions in a family… In children’s literature more than adult literature, there is a real valuing of the ordinary… The Tiger Who Came to Tea begins with a tiger knocking on a door, which is extraordinary, but ends with walking down the road, eating sausages, which is the emotional climax of the book. That’s a clever book, that. It links with [something as modest as] the baby catalogue, celebrating ordinary life and nappies on the line.

Do you see yourself continuing your work ‘on the edges’ and if so are there any particular areas or themes which suggest themselves for this?

I’m going to continue to write the stories I want to write. I write all sorts of stuff, from silly stories to dark ones. I’ve just had a go at doing a picture book. I don’t really know what I’m going to do next.

Can you tell us a little bit about Things a Bright Girl Can Do?

It’s about three teenage girls and their involvement in the suffrage movement. It’s also about what happened to the suffragettes during the first world war.

Why do you feature Quakers in it?

It’s about various strands of suffragism and suffragettism. I wanted a character dedicated to getting the vote peacefully, and Quakers were also radical in terms of gender equality: they encouraged women to be elders and leaders when that was unusual. So, Quakers were involved in women’s suffrage, although there were also anti-suffrage Quakers; unsurprising to anybody who has tried to reach a consensus in a Quaker Meeting.

Many suffrage campaigners were pacifists; I also wanted to explore this, so a Quaker suffragist peace campaigner was a good fit.

Are there many parallels between Quaker protest then and now?

A lot! One book I read for Things was [HG] Wells’ Ann Veronica. His descriptions of people at suffrage meetings – vegetarian, Fabian, progressive, co-educational types – felt very much like the forebears of people supporting campaigns now. That’s not a bad thing at all, but it made me laugh!

Like modern Quakers, Edwardian Quakers tended to champion causes which didn’t get much media attention – such as the fate of German civilians living in Britain during the first world war. I wanted to talk about that, whilst acknowledging how frustrating this could be if you felt there were more important battles to fight.

Was there anything that struck you about how Quakers operated then?

One of the most interesting things was that Yearly Meeting never made an official statement condemning the war, Quaker opinion was so divided.

The usual narrative is of conscientious objectors, the Friends’ Ambulance Unit and so forth. But many young male Quakers not only accepted conscription, but volunteered. In 1914 it was absolutely seen as a just war. We had promised to protect Belgium, and not to do so would mean breaking our word, Belgium suffering for our convenience. To many Quakers that would have been oath-breaking. I’m not sure many people would see it like that nowadays, though!

Aside from writing, are there other forms of creative art which you are drawn to, to make yourself, to enjoy, or to be inspired by?

Besides being a parent, which is more creative than I realised, quite practical things like knitting… In terms of enjoying, I love theatre… I’ve never got on with film as much as TV or novels. Films always felt like a poor man’s version of a novel – there never seemed to be the space to develop characters and story, and novels have a more intimate space. I’d like to do more making of things, but for the moment all my spare time goes on books.

Sally Nicholls’ latest book, Things a Bright Girl Can Do, is published by Andersen Press.

This is the fifth interview in a series in which Jonathan Doering talks to Quakers working in the arts.

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