The Wrong Shoes: an interview with Tom Percival

Tom Percival is well known for his Big Bright Feelings picture books, which gently but effectively expand children’s understanding of the world and counter their anxieties. He’s also responsible for the sparky Little Legends series, which cleverly creates new adventures for favourite fairy-tale characters. His new novel is quite different. Heartfelt, authentic, The Wrong Shoes tells the story of Will, a young boy whose family are finding it virtually impossible to make ends meet.  Will’s opening line is, ‘This is no fairy tale’. It’s just his life, he emphasises, nothing is guaranteed, and there’s definitely no certainty of a happy ending.

Tom was inspired to write the book after reading a white paper from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, We Can Solve Poverty, and was struck by the way it communicated so clearly what needs to happen to help children like Will. At first, he planned a short story anthology, with contributions from other authors, but for various reasons that proved impossible, then his editor Lucy Pearse suggested he work his story idea up into a full-length novel.

The story is particularly important to him; his own childhood was not unlike Will’s. He’s talked about this in interviews about his book The Invisible, but doesn’t want to add much now, as it upsets his mother. He will say that growing up without much money had a big impact on him. ‘It does change the way you look at the world. For example, there’s a certain level of bitterness that I felt as a kid – “My friends can do this, and I can’t”. I can empathise with Will’s position, but the book isn’t autobiographical.’ Will’s sense of bitterness and anger at the situation he’s in is one of the driving forces in the story and one that gives it such an authentic feel.

Will’s best friend is Cameron, a boy whose parents are very wealthy. The two fall out when Cameron offers Will a pair of his old trainers. It’s meant kindly but Will is furious. ‘Cameron comes from my childhood’ says Tom. ‘It’s to do with complicated feelings of resentment. You don’t want to be a charity case. Will isn’t cross with Cam for offering him the shoes, it’s the dance around it that he objects to. Cameron doesn’t understand that. That’s a truth I wanted to convey. Unless you’ve gone through that life, you can’t really experience it; you can imagine it, but you don’t really know what it’s like.’

Tom’s path to where he is today was through college, art and music, but today’s young people have things much harder, he feels. ‘There’s a real lack of provision now. Yes, there are music lessons at school but the only way to do music or art properly is if parents can pay for lessons, for extra classes. Even grammar schools test things that aren’t taught at school, so you have to be able to pay for tuition to stand a chance of getting in. It can lead to a feeling in children and young people that they have been cast aside and if you’re made to feel invalid, that you can’t contribute, it makes you feel rejected, and you’ll reject what’s around you.’

The Wrong Shoes is published in partnership with the National Literacy Trust with funds raised going to support their work in areas of socio-economic deprivation. Tom is working with them delivering events too and praises the NLT for their proactiveness, highlighting the Libraries in Primaries campaign, libraries being something else that helped him as a child.

Things get even bleaker for Will when he falls out with Cameron but, though there is no fairy tale ending, he finds a way to take control of his life and by the end, there is hope. Encounters with a huge owl which appears at moments when Will is particularly exposed and alone provide a visual image of this hope. The idea for the owl grew out of something in Tom’s own youth. ‘As a teenager growing up in Bishops Castle, I would walk home alone at night, and I really loved it. There were no cars, you could walk down the middle of the street – I felt like the night was mine – and sometimes I’d come across a large dog, wandering on its own. It would watch me, in fact I felt like it was watching over me. I saw it maybe seven times – we had this friendship going on and I wondered sometimes if the dog was real. I wanted Will to have that experience too.’ He adds, ‘The owl stands for anything you want it to stand for, but its essence is hope.’

The owl soars across the pages in Tom’s black and white illustrations, another memorable aspect of the book.  ‘The book has made me fall in love again with drawing’ he says. ‘I knew I wanted the images to feel loose, raw, quick and immediate so I didn’t do any roughs, I just went straight into it. I wanted a comic book feel to the illustrations, to make it as accessible as possible and I love the immediacy and the looseness of them.’

In other interviews, Tom has said that he wants everyone to see themselves in the books he writes. What does he want for The Wrong Shoes? ‘Realistically I wanted it to be a good story, a good journey, for people to feel transported. I want them to feel Will is real, that they’ve met him and understand him a bit. I want people like Will to feel seen, for people to make an effort to understand them even if they’ve misjudged them, and I want the Wills to feel that they’re right to be angry, that things aren’t fair and shouldn’t be like that.’

And finally, how hopeful is he that things will change? ‘I’m a pessimistic optimist’ he says, ‘I feel very bleak about the world, that’s why I write the books I write. I can see the problems with the world, but yes, I believe that things can change.’

Andrea Reece is Managing Editor of Books for Keeps.

The Wrong Shoes is published by Simon & Schuster, 978-1398527126, £12.99 hbk.