Julia Jarman has written over 80 books for children. She lives near Bedford with her husband and has three grown-up children. She has been a schoolteacher and journalist but she now devotes a lot of time to school and library visits to talk to children about writing.

In this interview she talks to Nikki Gamble about War, Peace and the practice of Peace Weaving.

You were a teacher before you became a full time writer. Did the teaching in anyway feed the writing?

Oh, I think so in that I feel a great urge to tell children things! I probably talk too much and I probably talked too much as a teacher. And I enjoy the company of children, they spark me off. I think children are interested in the big questions, life and death, when adults have long stopped thinking about them.

Peace Weavers is an unusual book in that it focuses on the peace making process, rather than war and conflict. David McKee’s The Conquerors is another example but there are not many, are there?

No. It’s a problem that I’m very aware of because I’ve been asked to compile a list of books about peace-making, for Carousel. There are a few but interestingly mainly picture books. The Conquerors raises a lot of questions. The invading army walks in, like the Nazis walked into Austria and are welcomed as friends. They convert the conquerors to their joyful way of life. It’s not passive resistance; there is no resistance. Is capitulation the route for peace? Why is collaboration a dirty word?

A fascinating adult novel that asks these questions is Dream of Scipio by Ian Pears. Set in Provence in three different periods: Roman, Medieval and World War II, it shows people resisting invasion and others accepting it and collaborating with the invaders. I think of the French Resistance as heroes but in this book they are shown as doing more harm than good. Like The Conquerors, the novel seems to suggest that what’s good in a civilisation will survive even when that civilisation is taken over, and that the people who resist with violence cause more destruction.

Doesn’t it depend on who’s doing the conquering and what their intentions are? If you put up no resistance then you create conditions where bullies can thrive.

Yes, the no-resistance view is simplistic, and it encourages bullies as I’ve shown in Hangman. But it challenges the military ethos and I think it’s important for us to think about the alternatives, especially today when modern weapons cause such widespread destruction.

When I read Peace-Weavers and Shield-Maidens Women in Early English Society and discovered the concept of peace-weaving, it made me stop and consider why I hadn’t heard about peace weaving before. Why isn’t it mentioned in all the history books? I think it’s partly because history is written by the victors of war and men in the main, but also because it’s written and writers and readers in the main like conflict. So history’s bound to be about conflict, rather than the bits in between.

Are there other books about peace that you recommend?

 I have a small collection - see my article in the spring edition (2008) of Carousel - and I’m always looking for new books to add. Nikolai Popov’s Why? is an interesting wordless book that makes the ideas accessible to young children. Michael Foreman’s War and Peas is well known.

Do you know the story of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes? It’s based on a true story about a young girl dying of radiation poisoning after Hiroshima. She’s determined to fold a thousand paper cranes, the symbol of peace; because she thinks she can save herself by doing this. Of course she can’t but the story has acquired a symbolic meaning of its own and has inspired thousands of people to fight for peace.

 Is it easier to write about war than peace?

Yes, certainly. Stories need tension, so the tendency is to hype up the conflict between people. And of course children love horrible history, the more horrible the better. Historical fiction tends to emphasise the gore and the horror, sometimes making it funny sometimes not, but nearly always making it palatable. Books about peace are very sparse and are often not as gripping or entertaining as books about war.

 I plead guilty to hyping up the gore myself, in a title certainly. The Time Travelling Cat and the Aztec Sacrifice, was originally going to be called The Time Travelling Cat and the Aztec Gold but I knew it would be more likely to catch children’s attention with sacrifice in the title. I have tried to show the appalling inhumanity of both the Spanish and the Aztecs - but without traumatising my readers. Again, is this the right thing to do? Do writers - especially for children - fail to show the real horror of war? Does war still come across as an exciting adventure? My hero, Topher, is sickened by the violence. He sees that in some ways the Spanish acted in ways that were far more inhuman than the Aztecs. They were supposed to be Christians but were driven completely by their lust for gold.

A writer is essentially an entertainer – you may want to do other things as well but if you are not entertaining your readers, you may as well not bother.

 If writing about war is easier than writing about peace, did the writing of Peace Weavers present any particular problems? Was it hard to find the story?

Yes, I think it was. I only had a fragment of history to base it on - though that in a way gave me more scope - and I started to write a straight historical novel, with many doubts about my ability to do this. Then the build up to the war with Iraq started intruding. I wondered - how could someone be a peace-weaver today? I started to think of a completely different story and then realised that the brooch and archaeology could link the two.

 As you know my book had two strands, a story set in the sixth century and a parallel story set in the twenty-first. Where and when and how to end it was the biggest problem. I do wonder how different the book would have been, if the war had ended in the three weeks anticipated by Tony Blair. If a democratic Government had been imposed, would that have been a justification for war? Tragically, events played into my hands. That war was surely a mistake?

But the peacemaking process is only necessary if there is conflict, so there is potentially always a story. In Peace Weavers it is the reneging on a marriage contract that provides the conflict and the mystery supplies tension as well.

Yes, and to be true to the historic fragment, Maethilde, a woman scorned, was prepared to fight with weapons to get her way. She took an army with her.

In Peace Weavers you explicitly deal with the peace making process but is it a theme that is present in your earlier books as well?

 I like to think that my interest in peace making has influenced my writing. For instance, when I was writing about the Aztecs, I was delighted to discover a brilliant character, a real man called Bartolome de las Casas. He was a Dominican monk who wrote a book about the destruction of the West Indies, He took his case to the Pope because he was appalled by the genocide on a vast scale of the indigenous population. I managed to get him into the plot of my Aztec book.

In an earlier book, Georgie and the Dragon, Georgie the computer ace, wins by changing the programme from KILL to KISS the dragon. She uses her wits to avoid conflict throughout the story. I’d like to think that the mantra ‘Make love not war’ influences my fiction and my life.

 If it’s easier to write about war than peace, is it easier to write about villains rather than heroes?

Yes, much better writers than me have found it hard to make virtue look attractive rather than wet. It’s always helps if the character has a flaw and it is easier to make villains interesting. It’s the classical idea about the vigour of vice. And I think it was easier in the past to make heroes attractive because they were able to do what we now think are appalling acts and still be admired for it.

The Time Travelling Cat and the Tudor Treasure features Sir Francis Drake, who we now regard as a complete villain. In the book, Ellie and her parents and Topher visit an exhibition that Peter and I went to at the National Maritime Museum, the theme of which was Francis Drake: hero or villain? It presented a very negative portrait of Francis Drake. I had been immersed in Sir Francis’s background, so I could understand that perspective, but I also saw him and show him through the eyes of a sixteenth century boy.

 In truth there are probably few outright goodies and few outright baddies in history but how do we present that to children? I remember reading Ladybird history books when I was at about eight. There were two in particular that I kept returning to, Oliver Cromwell and Charles the II. Both presented portraits of these characters as forces for good and I recall thinking that they couldn’t both be right; that what was being presented in these stories from history was contradictory. I think that’s when I first became aware of history being written from a point of view

.I’ve just written another book about Francis Drake called Stowaway. My character, Dickon witnesses a beheading on deck but the editors didn’t want me to include that - too traumatic - and I must admit I caved in. Perhaps it’s okay to show Sir Francis Drake as a hero when children are seven and then let them discover that he wasn’t such a hero when they’re eleven: to see different views, at different times.

All this raises the question ‘What is a hero?’ That’s something that Topher considers and I think children should be encouraged to reflect on that, particularly in this age of celebrity when you don’t ever do anything to be a hero, other than appear on television.

You are interested in the way the past rubs up against the present choosing time-slip as a means of writing about history rather than straight historical fiction. Can you tell us something about that?

I think in the early days, it was simply because my children were not switched onto historical fiction. I was a Parent Governor at my children’s school and I made it my business to inspect the school library, because my middle daughter, Josie, who was an avid reader, said, “Oh, there’s nothing in the library”. In fact it was very inadequate. I was buying her books and going to the public library 12 miles away because she couldn’t find anything that suited her taste. Anyway, I found a shelf of super historical fiction, Rosemary Sutcliff, Henry Treece and Geoffrey Trease but when I opened them to see when they had last been taken out I discovered that they hadn’t, not for years. They simply didn’t look inviting in their grey linen covers.

My children insisted that the past was boring. So I felt I had to trick them into discovering that the past was interesting and that’s the reason I started my stories in the present. It was Josie who suggested that cats are time travelling. My time travelling cat was my way of making the past exciting to children.

 It raises another question about why they didn’t find history interesting, doesn’t it? For me history was one of the most exciting school subjects because of the way it was presented to us.

Yes, indeed. I remember I’d say, “What have you done at school today?” and they’d say, “The Vikings again!” They did tend to do the same bits over and over again. I do not think there was a golden age of education before the National Curriculum. I actually think the National Curriculum has broadened children’s encounters with history.

 Like you I loved history when I was younger. When I was ten, I loved The Children of the New Forest but I don’t think my children had the stories of history in the seventies. They learnt from artefacts and bitty history books showing pictures of weapons or domestic artefacts but these things were not connected by story.

I suppose what can be missing from an evidence approach is people and that’s what fiction does well because you are exploring history through character. Historians like Simon Schama emphasise the stories of history and I think that captures the popular imagination.

 Yes, I remember buying my children People in History which started I think, with Alban of, St Alban’s and they liked that. And I did read overcome some resistance by reading them Sutcliffe, Trease and Treece.

 Archaeology is a subject in several of your books, notably The Crow Haunting and Peace Weavers, where does your interest in archaeology stem from?

 I think it just arises from my interest in the past. The background for The Crow Haunting is our local Tesco store in Bedford. When I wrote the book the store was very new. I went in one day and there was an exhibition of photographs showing what they’d found when they started building. There were the skeletons of two Stone Age children cuddled up together.

Your Time Travelling Cat series covers National Curriculum topics. Is that a conscious decision on your part or the publisher, perhaps?

Well, I wrote the first one because it seemed obvious that a time travelling cat would go to Ancient Egypt. I saw it as a one off and certainly didn’t plan a whole series. Anyway, the book did really well and stayed in print for ages. When I asked why it was so successful the answer was that it was about the Egyptians, even though the book at the time was just called Topher and the Time Travelling Cat. It was later on that it became Time Travelling Cat and the Egyptian Goddess. When I realised that the Egyptians were on the Curriculum, I opportunistically chose Tudors because it’s on the Curriculum and the Tudors are really fascinating. Then the Romans and Aztecs, and The Time Travelling Cat and the Viking Terror is out in March.

We were in China in 2005, and did all the sights and I’d love to do one set in the Forbidden Palace and about Marco Polo.

That would be exciting…. to tie in with the Beijing Olympics, perhaps?

I’d better get started.

Now there is something of a Renaissance in historical writing for young people. Do you still want to maintain a connection with the present in your writing?

 I have a bit of a yen to write straight historical fiction actually. I have found a fascinating character, King Alfred’s daughter, Ethelfleda, who was known as the warrior queen, though, if what I’ve learnt about peace weaving is accurate, she would have been brought up as a peace weaver. I think she must have made a peace weaving marriage to the King of Mercia but he was very soon an invalid, so she really ruled for him - and fought lots of battles. So I might write her story, one day.

Thank you Julia Jarman for talking to Write Away.