Authorgraph No.87: K M Peyton
Kathleen Peyton’s Essex home is not unlike those inhabited by some of her characters: two farm cottages knocked into one, with an informal garden behind and views over open fields. Immediately inside the back door is evidence of an active country life – walking boots, waxed coats, and, not surprisingly to readers of K M Peyton, a saddle and bridle. Four horses, including Kathleen’s own grey mare, graze in a field behind the house.
Horses appear frequently in Kathleen Peyton’s books. Her knowledge and under standing of them, the excitement of riding and the hopes and disappointments of competing, are wonderfully conveyed in her writing, whether the setting is the modest Pony Club event of some of the younger novels, or the training-stable and race-track in books for teenagers and adults. The reader feels the surge of energy and smells the sweat: ‘Jonathan never saw the tape at all, only the bank-of horseflesh bounding forward, tight frightened ears pricked to the sky, the gaudy colours jerked into motion. He felt the immense strength of his own horse lift him, heard the sudden thrilling pounding of hooves. His right leg was crushed against another momentarily; stirrups clinked, a curse, the straining of girth and leather and the tremendous pulling of Dogwood against his sweaty hands, almost more than he could contain …’ (The Last Ditch)
Against the glamour and thrill of top-class racing, Kathleen Peyton sets the sordid under-side of the horse world. In The Sound of Distant Cheering, stable-girl Rosie’s favourite horse is sold to an unscrupulous owner when he develops an injury. ‘”Oh, Jesus, ” Jeremy, the trainer, thinks; “who would be in the racing game! It was so magnificent at its best, seedy – to put it kindly – at the bottom. Human greed ruined it; the exploitation of one of the kindest, gamest animals on earth for money…”’
Even when dreams do come true, real life gets in the way; in Darkling, where an impulse-bought colt turns out to be a winner, Jenny is faced with a tough decision: she can spend a year racing in the USA with her boyfriend Goddard, or stay at home to support her ailing and eccentric grandfather through a terminal illness. To be single-mindedly in pursuit of success, like Goddard, means being selfish as well.
As Kathleen Herald, K M Peyton had her first book published when she was at school. She still has exercise books with her juvenile stories, one of which was read by a teacher who encouraged her to submit it for publication. Unusual as this early success was, it didn’t immediately suggest to Kathleen that her future career would be as a writer; she intended to be a painter, and trained at art school. The writing started up again when she and her husband, Mike, needed money and wrote thrillers for serialisation. ‘Mike supplied the cliff-hanger endings for each episode: I did the actual writing.’ Several of these adventure stories were later published; soon she wanted to do a ‘proper book’, on her own, and wrote Windfall. This, like her next few novels, was shortlisted for the Carnegie Award, which she won in 1969 with The Edge of the Cloud, the second part of the Flambards trilogy.
In Flambards, which must surely be regarded as a modern classic, Christina arrives at the decrepit Essex house as a 12-year-old orphan. Maturing, she becomes aware of the social inequalities of Edwardian life and of the very different brands of bravery demonstrated by her two cousins: Mark in the hunting field, Will in defying his tyrannical father. The end of this novel sees Christina leaving Flambards with Will; the story continues immediately in The Edge of the Cloud, where Will is trying to establish himself as a pioneer aviator. Fighting her terror, Christina joins him in a cross-Channel flight.
Kathleen Peyton demands a lot from her characters in terms of physical courage, I suggest. She agrees: ‘I suppose I’ve had quite a physically challenging life, and we are quite tough in our family.’ (Besides the horse-riding, the Peytons are keen sailors; one of their daughters has crewed across the Atlantic.) Did Kathleen have the chance to fly in an early aircraft while researching the book? ‘No, but I based it on plenty of times when I’ve been terrified. I’ve often thought I was going to die – more often at sea than anywhere else.’
Another kind of physical action is featured in a new teenage novel, Snowfall, with which Kathleen Peyton is justifiably pleased. She refers to it as ‘a Mills and Boon’, although of course Peyton fans will expect, and get, a good deal more than a formula story. Set in Victorian times, it’s the story of vicar’s daughter Charlotte, who breaks away from her sage background and the expectation of a dull marriage to join her brother and his friends on a climbing expedition in Switzerland. As well as showing the exhilaration of climbing, Kathleen depicts the beauties of the scenery with a painterly eye: ‘The valley sank into dusk as the sun’s fiery disc slipped away behind the ridge between the Weisshorn and the Zinal Rothorn. For a few minutes the upper snow slopes were bathed in the unearthly glow of sunset. The sky flared, faded; the crimson snow dissolved softly into grey light. The valley smelt of cold earth and glacier water…‘
A prolific writer with more than 30 books to her name, made me wonder if the task of writing comes easily to Kathleen Peyton? ‘I don’t write very quickly and don’t do much at a time, not like these people who sit and work at it all day long. Two pages would be quite a good day.’ She works straight onto a word processor and hardly ever revises. Her books are now published by Transworld and Scholastic. ‘You want support and encouragement from an editor. You want to feel that they’re really interested in how your book’s coming along, almost as if you’re their only writer. David Fickling at Scholastic makes you feel that; so does Philippa Dickinson at Transworld. A lot of editors don’t understand what it’s like, working in a vacuum. The literary world doesn’t come out to meet you.’
Her work first came to prominence during the ‘golden age’ of children’s publishing in the late sixties and early seventies, and she’s been credited with being one of the first to establish the teenage novel. ‘When I started, by pure coincidence a lot of others started to write for the same age group – Leon Garfield, Alan Garner, John Rowe Townsend. At that time Mabel George was at the Oxford University Press, an editor of colossal intelligence and integrity, and she built up a list of novels for teenage readership.’ It was around that time that Kathleen won both the Carnegie and Guardian awards – the latter for the whole Flambards trilogy. ‘It was tremendously gratifying, but it makes you worried that you’ve reached your peak. I went straight off and wrote Pennington’s Seventeenth Summer and was convinced no one would read it.’ She needn’t have worried. She receives more letters about Pennington than about any other character, and Scholastic have justed re-issued Seventeenth Summer, as it’s now titled.
The ‘teenage/almost grown-up’ novel is her favourite, but she’s branched out in both directions from there. Four adult novels, including Dear Fred and The Sound of Distant Cheering, were a new challenge: ‘I wanted to see if I could do it. I got a lot out of it, even if only to learn that it’s not really my cup of tea. But I enjoyed the freedom; I could be far more self-indulgent than I usually am. I’m much more severe with myself when working on my younger books.’ At this other end of the age-range, she’s written for the ‘Cartwheels’ first-reader series, illustrating two titles with her own water-colours, which provide a perfect match for the stories.
Kathleen Peyton makes light of her outstanding talent and achievements. Asked what she wants readers to get from her books, she replies: ‘I just want them to enjoy reading, and keep turning the pages. I write to entertain; I don’t want to harrow my readers, or preach to them. I’ve never set out to write a serious book to tell children something they ought to know, but of course your own views on life come out in your books.’
Are there more books to come? Yes – a book under way, two or three more waiting to be written, and good news for her admirers of all ages: ‘When I stop having ideas I shall stop writing, but at the moment I still keep having ideas.’
Some of K M Peyton’s books:
Darkling, Doubleday, 0 385 26963 3, £8.99; Corgi, 0 552 52594 4, £2.99 pbk
Flambards, Puffin, 0 14 034153 6, £3.50 pbk
The Edge of the Cloud, Puffin, 0 14 030905 5, £3.99 pbk
Flambards in Summer, Puffin, 0 14 034154 4, £3.50 pbk
Flambards Divided, Puffin, 0 14 034701 1, £2.99 pbk
Fly-By-Night, Red Fox, 0 09 926390 4, £2.99 pbk
Thunder in the Sky, Red Fox, 0 09 975150 X, £2.99 pbk
The Wild Boy and Queen Moon, Doubleday, 0 385 40310 0, £8.99
Snowfall, Scholastic, 0 590 54153 6, £6.99
Seventeenth Summer, Scholastic, 0 590 55443 3, £2.99 pbk
The ‘Cartwheels’ mentioned are Plain Jack, 0 241 12146 9, and Apple Won’t Jump, 0 241 13111 1, published by Hamish Hamilton at £5.50 each.
Her adult novel, The Sound of Distant Cheering, is published by Bodley Head, 0 370 30700 3, £9.95.
The Last Ditch and Windfall are sadly now out of print.
