Dreams and Wishes

I spotted Susan Cooper's Dreams and Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children in a second hand bookshop. It's inscribed on the flyleaf: To Mary -- Write, write, write!!! -- but not signed. I'm wondering now if that inscription could possibly have been written by the author? And I wonder who Mary was?

This collection has been put together from various articles and speeches that Cooper gave in the 1980s and 90s. There are some interesting stories about how her famous series, The Dark is Rising, come to be; the first volume, Over Sea, Under Stone, started life as an entry in a competition for a family adventure book, and the magical elements only crept in during the writing. Cooper was also very concerned (some things never change) about a drop in children's reading for pleasure, and the fact that some children spent three or four hours a day watching television, passive in front of a screen. As I read this, I couldn't help thinking, oh boy, Susan, you don't have any idea what's coming down the line...

I hadn't realised that this seemingly most British of writers has actually spent almost her whole adult life in the US -- perhaps that's what gives her descriptions of Wales and Buckinghamshire their potency. She agrees with a thesis I have heard before, that the writers of the so-called Golden Age of children's literature in the UK were shaped by growing up during the Second World War, when the battle between Good and Evil was played out literally above their heads and all around them. It's a persuasive argument. Susan Cooper is still with us, she is ninety, almost exactly the same age as my mum, and I am the same age as her children. The Dark is Rising was a formative text for me, as I'm sure it was for many fantasy, and other, writers -- long live Susan Cooper.