An interview with debut author Olivia Wakeford
Olivia Wakeford writes a lot about grief, states the press release for My Dog, her debut novel, and it is a book inspired by grief. It’s also a book about love, about coping with change, and about the special relationship between a boy and his dog. Andrea Reece talked to Olivia for Books for Keeps.
It was while she was on the influential MA Course in Writing for Children at Bath Spa University that Olivia Wakeford began writing My Dog. She was writing before then, and indeed, had already completed one novel – unpublished – but felt that doing the MA would help her finish the new book she was planning. ‘I knew that I needed extra help with it,’ she says, ‘Because I knew it was going to be a hard one to write.’ Even so, she was still toying with another idea, when halfway through the course, her dad died: ‘I just thought if I’m going to write this book, now is the time to do it, when I’m dealing with all of these emotions myself.’
In My Dog, ten-year-old Rhys loses his mother. The trauma is made worse when he moves from his home in Wales to London to live with his father, stepmother and their new baby. His father does his best but has his own issues to manage, and it’s only the love and companionship of the big black labrador Rhys finds apparently lost under his mum’s hospital bed and names Worthington, that enables him to cope. Teenage Olivia went through something similar: her own mum died when she was a teenager, having been ill for a lot of Olivia’s childhood. Obviously, that affects her writing. ‘I think I’ve always been drawn to stories that have an element of sadness in them and the MA helped me tap into that, because it’s scary writing about those experiences.’
She feels that the MA also helped her find her voice which, to her surprise, is ‘much Welsher than I thought it would be.’ She spent all her childhood in Wales, only moving away in her twenties, and the book is set exactly where she grew up; Rhys home with his mother is her old house, Rhys goes to the school that she went to. With a background in screenwriting too, she feels she’s a very visual writer and believes that settings are almost characters in the book: ‘you have to know them in and out, and if it’s a place you’re really familiar with then it’s a lot easier.’ Exploring her childhood on the MA course really made her connect with her Welsh voice and she thinks that makes it authentic, ‘because it’s me writing from my heart.’
We talk about some of the books that describe grief for children, and Olivia’s determination that her book wouldn’t be too dark, which brings us on to Worthington. ‘You bring a dog in and that immediately brings lightness, doesn’t it?’ she says, ‘It’s a salve to the sadness. I hope that the presence of the dog creates the balance so that it’s not too depressing, that’s what I was conscious of when I was writing it, that it shouldn’t be too depressing’. She wanted a book that ‘would touch you emotionally and not completely devastate you. I like to think that it’s heartfelt rather than heartbreaking.’
Worthington is a presence from the first page, line two in fact: ‘a black labrador with conker eyes and ears like triangles of velvet.’ Rhys, who longs for a dog of his own and whose hero is TV vet Dr Jimmy Mackenzie of The Dog Rescuers, falls in love with him immediately, and surely all readers will too. With his mother gone, his father tired and tense, and far away from his beloved Nan and Bampy, Worthington is exactly what Rhys needs, a companion who is always pleased to see him, always ready to listen, warm, comforting, dependable. He’s based on Olivia’s own dog, Obi, also a labrador though a golden one.
When no-one comes forward to claim the lost dog he reports to the hospital, Rhys decides to keep Worthington, though in secret. He doesn’t tell his dad or anyone else, smuggling Worthington to London in the boot of his father’s car, hiding him in the garden shed. When things go horribly wrong at his new school, and Rhys decides to run away back to Wales, it’s his dog who goes with him, all the way from Blackheath to Paddington to Cardiff. For all his furry solidity though, in the book’s final chapters, Rhys admits that Worthington might not have been real. There have been hints throughout – no-one else sees Worthington, he doesn’t really eat anything, he’s unable to fetch a ball – but we are not really sure. Either way, readers will feel as closely connected to Worthington as Rhys does.
Maintaining that ambivalence is no easy thing to do, and there were various different incarnations before Olivia settled on Rhys being the only one (nearly) to see Worthington. ‘One idea I had was that everyone could see him and just kind of accepted that he was there. But then I realised that the thing is with Worthington, he’s so real in in Rhys’ mind that he doesn’t question it at all, because he needs Worthington to be real. He needs something to take away his pain, something to focus on that’s not that; he’s basically disassociating from reality, putting all his energy into this dog because it’s easier for him than to face what’s really happening.’
She hopes that young readers will decide for themselves just how real Worthington is, ‘you can take from it what you want.’ We can all be certain that Worthington helps Rhys come to terms with the changes in his life, the book as much about accepting change as it is with coping with grief, and the story ends on a positive note, with Rhys happier and more secure.
We talked about crying in public over the book – I’m not alone in this, it had the same effect on Nick Lake, HarperCollins publisher too. ‘Hopefully though, it’s happy tears at the end. I do hope that it leaves you feeling warm,’ says Olivia. They were and it does.
Andrea Reece is Managing Editor of Books for Keeps.
My Dog by Olivia Wakeford, illustrated by David Litchfield, is published by HarperCollins Children’s Books, 978-0008658588, £7.99 pbk.
