Rising star Julia Golding talks about The Diamond of Drury Lane and Secrets of the Sirens, the first books in her new series

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JULIA GOLDING interviewed by ROWENA SEABROOK

Julia Golding grew up on the edge of Epping Forest. After reading English at Cambridge, she joined the Foreign Office and served in Poland. Her work as a diplomat took her from the high point of town twinning in the Tatra Mountains to the On leaving Poland, she exchanged diplomacy for academia and took a doctorate in the literature of the English Romantic Period at Oxford. She then joined Oxfam as a lobbyist on conflict issues, campaigning at the United Nations and with governments to lessen the impact of war on civilians living in war zones. She now works as a freelance writer. Married with children, she lives in Oxford.

The Diamond of Drury is a novel that is steeped in pleasure – I can feel the enjoyment of the character living her life, the enjoyment of you living her life and exploring the setting. It felt very much like ‘let me share this with you because I am excited about it’ rather than ‘let me tell you about 18th Century London and the theatre.’

In a weird way the historical setting is almost an accident. I didn’t set out to write something that illustrates the National Curriculum, which by the end of reading it you have to have a full grasp of Georgian culture. It was more that I wanted to live there myself. Hopefully, it doesn’t feel too designing. Obviously when you are writing a historical book on a period that is not really on the beaten track for children, you have to have a way of naturally telling enough detail so that children feel that they can follow the journey. The way that I have got round that is to have Cat telling her story to her contemporaries. That kind of narrative presence is very germane to the period.

Cat is a subversive character who is capable of commenting on the boys in the street or on the monarchy….

In order to be a really fun narrator she has to be a character who has a certain amount of social mobility, which is why the Theatre is such a good place for her. I did a dry run of the story from another, older point of view, when I thought it was going to be an adult book. I found that by having an adult woman suddenly all sorts of issues came in and she was far more constricted. If she was socially mobile in that period I would have to deal with issues about her morality and so having a child on the cusp of adulthood, was quite empowering in the sense that she could go everywhere. She can go to the Duke’s house and she can go to the Rookeries – there are no gates anywhere. Had she been in the schoolroom like Lady Elizabeth it would not have been possible to write the story.

Is it liberating to go back in time or to create a fantasy, in terms of the dangers and trials you can put your characters through.?

One of my friends read it and said, ‘It’s actually quite violent' - but when you think about fairytales, they are far more violent. I think you have to give children a space imaginatively to work out their fears and their nightmares. You don’t get adventure if the story is about a child who goes out picks a bunch of flowers and takes them home. Rather you have a story where a child goes and picks a bunch of flowers and then a big bad wolf comes along and eats her and her grandmother – that’s the story.

You have to have some kind of graphic limits in terms of what you’re describing and I think you have to be careful and responsible. But I don’t want to pull all the punches. One of the bits I read out when I do school trips is the boxing match and bare-knuckle boxing is obviously bone and flesh and blood and the kids all love it. I sometimes look at the teachers and think ‘I hope they don’t mind!’

In Secret of the Sirens, there are two kinds of threat. One is the more prosaic, daily threat like getting involved in some kind of criticism which results in one of the characters’ father being sacked. But that’s not really exciting whereas the threat from the mythical side is much more elemental -that’s where the drama is.

I was struck by how young both Cat (The Diamond of Drury Lane) and Connie (Secret of the Sirens) are. I think a lot of writers would have had those independent spirited young women older.

They don’t know girls of that age if they think they aren’t independent. I would say that the reason they are both like that is because they are both, in many ways, outsiders. Obviously, people grew up extremely quickly in Georgian times because they had to. Life expectancy was 25 or something drastically short for someone in Cat’s class. People could were sometimes married at twelve. We are talking about a completely different mindset and that has been quite tricky in some senses because some of the themes that she would have been fully au fait with, in terms of adult material, I don’t put in. You have to, with an adult knowledge, be aware that she knows how life works, from the underside.

I think Connie is younger and would like to be more dependent if she had a reliable adult around her. She has a variety of adult friends in the book but stories come from the moments that children have to make their own decisions. In a sense the story needs her to be independent. I think the other thing that makes her independent is that she stands out on her own because of the gift that I have given her. In the school setting she is the third: There’s Anneena and Jane and she is the little hanger on – so she doesn’t always seem independent but there are occasions when she has to be on her own.

 I didn’t want to isolate either child to the extent that they are no longer part of their society and their community. In both books there are structures around them, even if they are not typical, familial structures – they have either the Society for the Protection of Mythical Creatures or the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Of course, I wanted to give them space to grow up as well. They are very different places to go in my imagination and the other thing is of course, stylistically it feels very different writing. In the third person narrative you’ve got other perspectives, I’m not always Connie, I’m looking at her from the perspectives of others, like Col. Doing a first person narrative is huge fun because you become that person, and particularly a person who can be so rude and misbehave in her own way – I really enjoy that.

Thank you Julia Golding for talking to Write Away