Nubian Jaunts and Sailors’ Haunts: All in a Day’s Research

Discovering the ship's control room with Captain Hainaru Mircza

Verisimilitude. It’s one of my favourite words. I actually remember when I first encountered it: Mr Patterson’s class, Long Road Sixth Form College, during a discussion on Hollywood films. He explained that it means the appearance of reality, and it’s a fundamental component of all but the most surreal or postmodern fiction.

Children’s fantasy asks a lot of the reader. Come with me, it beckons, to a world of magical portals, sword-fighting knights and feline warlords. I have always maintained that the best fantasy is firmly rooted in reality. This may seem like a paradox. Fantasy is, after all, the very opposite of reality, exploding the grubby day-to-day in favour of flights of fancy. But to be persuasive – to be convincing – fantasy must be anchored in the familiar. Vitally, there are rules.

I am fascinated by the gateway between our own experiences and the magical space where the impossible is realised. In The Tygrine Cat, the fantasy comes from seeing our world from a new perspective, by entering the secret lives of ferals and following them into Fiåney, the feline ‘dream-wake.’ The ferals live on a market-place, loosely based on Camden Lock in north London, where I spent time wandering around the stalls and snapping photographs when planning the story. You can read an account of my market walkabout for a Write Away! Story Starter here.

In The Bloodstone Bird, an ordinary boy called Sash – the son of a Russian immigrant – discovers a portal to a mysterious paradise beneath an unassuming London street. Gully Lane is a far cry from Hobbiton or Narnia, housing a string of small shops with flats hidden behind them or above them off street level, including ‘a rug shop, a pawnbroker’s, a charity shop’ and ‘the place on the corner that sold fried chicken.’

Sash lives behind Stuff the World, a taxidermy shop where his father, Max, practises his mysterious trade. The geographical co-ordinates are vital to the veracity of the story because of a true feature of London that Sash discovers. While researching the book I spent time studying maps of London and trotting around key streets with a camera and notepad.

As Hampstead turned to Gospel Oak, detached Victorian houses gave way to terraces and council developments. Sash made his way down Highgate Road into Kentish Town. At the junction of Highgate Road and Fortess Road, four lanes of traffic funnelled into two. Armies of cyclists wove between grumbling cars. Gridlocked and impatient, the cars inched forward, their fumes lapping at Sash’s feet in murky gusts.

[from The Bloodstone Bird]

Max takes his craft seriously, believing that it’s possible to preserve life through taxidermy. In order to obtain a clearer idea of what was involved, I read manuals, signed up to various taxidermy chat rooms (trust me, they exist!) and attended the Guild of Taxidermists‘ annual conference. The conference was held in the heart of the Derbyshire countryside and naturally I lost my way there, arriving late and feeling more than a little out of place. I quickly got into the spirit, watching ‘live taxidermy’ – if you mind the pun – and chatting enthusiastically to Guild members. I was intrigued to hear the talks. One by an award-winning taxidermist addressed amateur errors, such as systematic over-grooming. Max himself makes a similar observation in The Bloodstone Bird:

The trick is not to over-preen. The taxidermist always wants the perfect specimen, but nature is imperfect. Fur is sometimes ruffled, twitching and shifting in response to muscle tension beneath the skin.

Most of all, the experience of meeting such a varied group of enthusiasts reminded me that it’s dangerous to make assumptions about people. It would be easy to consign the taxidermist to the role of storybook ogre. I was determined to avoid simplistic type-casting. Max would be a complicated, faintly melancholy character, a man who struggled with fatherhood and the pressures of a world that is alien to him.

A Nubian catling waits for scraps beneath a table in a cafe

In my current book, The Tygrine Cat: On the Run, Mati and his friends stow aboard a cargo ship bound for Suez to escape the menacing phantom cats. I visited Egypt in November, taking notes about Nubian ferals and absorbing the sounds and smells that a catling – a young cat – might experience. Were traders patient with their city’s feline co-habitants? Would the Nile look brown or green up close? Did papyrus reeds really line its banks? The answers to these questions would help me to set down the landscape of the story.

Closer to home, I have recently spent a delightful day at the Port of Felixstowe, where a chaplain from the Seafarers’ Society gave me a tour and arranged a visit aboard a massive cargo ship. Felixstowe is one of the largest ports in England and akin to a city of ships, containers and giant cranes. Without seeing it with my own eyes, I would have struggled to appreciate the scale of the dockyard or understood how a cat might climb the metal gangplanks. The ‘gangplank scene’ is pivotal in the story, and I knew that I had to get it right.

Much of the research for each book will never appear on a page. At Felixstowe, I filled reams of a notepad with numerous and random observations. None of this is lost – it all helps to contextualise the story in my mind, to set out the world of the book. It has energised me and allowed me to empathise with the characters. When Mati weaves between metal containers to discover the immense tarmac gangways, I understand what he sees. With him, I raise my eyes to the moon and shudder. Heart thumping, I know that the phantoms are close. In the nature reserve outside the borders of the dockyard, a shadow stirs.

The air grows hazy. A hiss catches the autumn wind. I spot the metal gangplank and realise it’s my only hope…

Next week – Chalk and Cheese? The Author and the Editor