sutcliff_space | Speaking for Ourselves (1990)

A brief life from Speaking for Ourselves: Autobiographical Sketches by Notable Authors of Books for Young Adults edited by Donald R. Gallo, a volume intended as a resource for schoolchildren writing book reports.

Like her 1983 memoir Blue Remembered Hills, this potted autobiography concludes at the beginning of her writing career. An implied "happily ever after"? But I'd still like to read the sequel.

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SPEAKING FOR OURSELVES: ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF

I was born only a few years after the end of the First World War, and during my first nine years my mother and I trailed round after my father, who was a naval officer: Malta when I was two, Sheerness Dockyard when I was five, two years lodging on the bleak North Kent coast while my father was in South Africa, Chatham Dockyard. . . .

Partly as a result of all this globe-trotting, partly because I contracted juvenile arthritis when I was three, I never went to school during that time, but my mother, in her own splendidly unorthodox fashion, taught me at home, chiefly by reading to me. King Arthur and Robin Hood, myths and legends of the classical world, The Wind in the Willows, The Tailor of Gloucester, Treasure Island, Nicholas Nickleby, Kim, Puck of Pook’s Hill, and Little Women, all at more or less the same time. The result was that at the age of nine I was happily at home with a rich and somewhat indigestible stirabout of literature, but was not yet able to read to myself. Why, after all, read to yourself when you can get somebody else to read to you?

When I was ten, my father retired from the navy and we went to live near his boyhood home in Devon; and I, having at last learned to read, went to Proper School for the first time. I stuck it out for four years, during which I learned virtually nothing; and at the end of that time my parents, with wisdom beyond their years, allowed me to leave, which you could do at fourteen in those days, and go to art school.

I finished my art student years just as World War II broke out. I had taken the three-year general art course and done quite well, but when decision time came, my tutors and parents told me that I would never be able to handle a big canvas and had better take up miniature painting. I did not think at the time to point out that the Mona Lisa is only around thirteen inches square. I took up miniature painting.

I was reasonably good at it, and several works of mine were hung at the Royal Academy, but I always felt cramped by the smallness of the work, and finally, chiefly as a means of gaining wing-spreading space, I started writing, gradually giving up painting altogether as the books took over. My first book, The Queen Elizabeth Story, was published in 1950.

Given the kind of books my mother had filled me with in my earliest years, it is not surprising that historical novels seemed to me the natural and obvious books to write; and with my very special love for Rudyard Kipling’s three wonderful Romano British stories in Puck of Pook’s Hill, it is not surprising that once my first tentative efforts were over, I turned to Roman and Dark Ages Britain for many of my stories. I am writing another of them at the moment, with the working title of The Shining Company.

Why I should write almost entirely for children and young adults, I have not the least idea; it just happens that way, by no conscious choice of mine.