History Man: an interview with Tony Bradman

‘How do you write an exciting book? You just write a good story, and don’t put any boring bits in.’ That’s Tony Bradman’s advice and it’s an approach that’s stood him in good stead in a career that spans decades and covers all sorts of different books: picture books, young fiction, poetry collections, fiction and of course historical fiction, all alongside journalism and reviewing. Tony is a long-time friend of Books for Keeps, his first written piece appearing in issue number 6, and we were delighted to speak to him about his new book, Roman Boy, the latest in an extremely popular series which also includes Viking Boy and Anglo-Saxon Boy.

Tony’s enthusiasm for historical fiction is inspiring and no wonder, given that it played a huge part in turning him into a reader and later writer. A regular visitor to schools, he’s often asked by children how he got started and always gives the same answer. ‘The first book that I remember encountering was read to me by my teacher at primary school in what would now be Y6. Mr. Smith read us The Hobbit and it made me want to go and read Tolkien’s other books. We had a wonderful library opposite the flat where I lived with my mum and my sister, so I borrowed The Lord of the Rings and then I stumbled onto Henry Treece and his book Horned Helmet, which I loved; the pictures by Charles Keeping were amazing. So, clearly, I was interested in Tolkien and fantasy, but Tolkien was professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, an expert on the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings and The Hobbit, like all great fantasies, was infused with the sense of history.’

The other big influence was his parents, ‘They were both of the war generation, and they talked. They told us lots of stories about the Blitz and the war.’  Then, when this working-class South London boy won a place at grammar school, he started studying Latin and Greek (one of just five boys selected to do Greek) and this sparked something too. By then his parents had divorced, and his dad would take Tony out on Saturdays. ‘When my dad asked where I wanted to go I said the British Museum.’  He remembers the Roman gallery vividly: ‘It actually had a staircase and a little fountain, I loved it’. By the time he stumbled across Rosemary Sutcliff, the die was cast.

He read English at Cambridge, immersing himself in Shakespeare’s history plays but also their sources, such as Plutarch.  ‘All of that was part of my intellectual development as a writer, and the appeal for me has always been that they’re great stories. There’s lots of action and adventure, and then a good writer like Henry Treece or Rosemary Sutcliff can just insert a young character into these periods of enormous jeopardy and danger.’

He’s certainly very happy to see the current resurgence of interest in writing stories set in the past and, as editor of the Scholastic Voices series too, proud to have commissioned stories about diverse communities in Britain’s past from some of our top contemporary authors, including Bali Rai, Patrice Lawrence and Benjamin Zephaniah, and delighted that they are doing so well.

He got to interview Rosemary Sutcliffe when he was working as a journalist and remembers her saying how, as a writer of historical fiction, you’re influenced by your own time and the things you grew up with. Her influence was Rudyard Kipling, evident she felt in The Eagle of the Ninth, and in Frontier Wolf, which he thinks is a brilliant book and also draws on images of young subalterns on the North West frontier in the Raj. Writing Roman Boy he was determined to give young readers a sense of what it was actually like to live in Rome. ‘When you read historical fiction, you tend to imagine the people as the same as us. People think of Rome and imagine everyone in uniforms of the legions, or togas, but actually, Rome in the 1st century AD, according to one of the historians I read, was probably more like Kolkata than London, full of noise and colour, with crowds of people, animals, horses, temples full of clouds of incense….  I want to show kids that Rome was quite different, and also a place of enormous disparities of wealth and power, a slave society too.’ He’s keen to counter any fictional view of the Romans as bringing civilization to those they conquered: ‘The Celts for example were really civilised with established cultures, it’s just that the Romans were incredibly powerful. And the question that kids don’t get the answer to, is why were they so successful? The Roman Empire encompassed 60 million people, and ruled for 500 years, in fact the Eastern Roman Empire lasted till the mid-15th century. They were incredibly good at war because they were incredibly ruthless.’ If you accepted Roman rule, that was fine: ‘If not, they would slaughter everybody, burn down everything, then plant colonies. I wanted kids to get a feel for that, to understand what that meant’.

He admires Tanya Landman’s Roman story Beyond the Wall, which stars fifteen year old slave Cassia, and though he finds slavery in the Roman Empire interesting, and in particular the way slaves could regain their freedom, decided that Lucius, the central character in Roman Boy, would come from a wealthy background. ‘To give the concise view of what life was like in the Roman world, as I wanted, I decided it was best to do it from the top down.’ Lucius’ privileged background doesn’t help him much, however; his stepfather, jealous when Lucius catches the eye of the emperor Hadrian, sends him far away to Britannia in the care of his ex-slave Callistus. On arrival, Lucius overhears Callistus arranging his murder and just manages to escape, joining the army as a young recruit, and that way managing to find his way back to Rome.

Missing or failing fathers seem to be something of a theme in this series and it was Tony’s son who pointed out that many of his stories are about boys and their dads. His own father, he says, had a lot of problems. His childhood and early life was difficult, growing up in an orphanage before joining the navy just as World War II began. Divorced from Tony’s mother, he died in his early fifties from heart disease. Tony was determined that the dad in the next in the series, Greek Boy, would be quite nice, but it didn’t work out like that at all. ‘In fact, what he gets up to jeopardises his entire family. I am going to allow myself a chapter about two thirds of the way in where the boy gets to have a real go at him, “This is all your fault, Dad. You know I’m never going to forgive you”’ Cathartic we hope.

He talks very fondly of his old grammar school head teacher. Mr Raeburn, the man who taught him Greek and who was so influential in his development. They met up again years later, by which point Raeburn was living in Oxford and teaching at New College and Tony was able to tell him how much he felt he owed him. ‘His thing was drama. He used to put on plays at Bradfield College, near Reading, where they actually had a little Greek theatre in a glade with trees. He took us there one summer’s evening and we saw a play performed in Greek. I was fifteen, at the time we had no money, and a lot of problems, and being taught by this guy and getting to see these incredible things, changed me. That’s why I’m a believer in education. Not the relentless fact driven statistics, but things like that which change people. When you talk to people, if they’ve got a fond memory of school, it’ll be a teacher or a play or something special they did like that.’ It’s why he’s so angry at the cuts to arts in schools. David Raeburn died during the pandemic, and Roman Boy is dedicated to him: ‘Ave Atque Vale’.

This seems like a natural place to end, but we can expect lots more from Tony Bradman, both historical fiction and more contemporary adventures too for Barrington Stoke, whom Tony admires a great deal, and who published his recent book When Saturday Comes, another story in which a boy has a strained relationship with his dad. He’s hoping to write more poetry, would love to compile more anthologies, and dreams of a new verse retelling of Beowulf. Recently made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, all his ambitions are surely eminently achievable.

Andrea Reece is Managing Editor of Books for Keeps.

Books mentioned:

Roman Boy, Tony Bradman, illus Alessandro Valdrighi, Walker Books, 978-1529512748, £6.99pbk

Anglo-Saxon Boy, Tony Bradman, illus Sam Hart, 978-1406363777, Walker Books, £6.99 pbk

Viking Boy, Tony Bradman, illus Pierre-Denis Goux, Walker Books, 978-1406313833, £6.99pbk

When Saturday Comes, Tony Bradman, illus Tania Rex, Barrington Stoke, 978-1800903241, £7.99 pbk